Hoda Afshar
DIFFICULT Editorial: Holly Isemonger and Oscar Schwartz
Artwork:
11 Works by Hoda Afshar
11 Works by Paola Balla
Essays:
The Unaugmented Reality of Transgender Discrimination: ‘Do more, do better’ by Rae White and Keira Edwards-Huolohan
Sonic Twin? A Poetics of Poetic Radio by Prithvi Varatharajan
Punk Calligraphy: A Primer on Asemic Writing and Scribbles by Tim Gaze
Experimental Confessionalism: The Personal Turn in American Post-conceptual Poetry by Hazel Smith
What the Repetitions of Poetry Might Help Us Remember about Home, Belonging and the Self by Lynn Davidson
Scholarly:
Why Reading Sharon Olds Makes You a Better Person by Jeremy Page
Translations:
Two Translated Marcos Konder Reis Poems by Stuart Cooke
Four Translated Vasile Baghiu Poems by Cristina Savin
Interviews:
An Unwitting Pariah: Kathryn Hummel in Conversation with Kaiser Haq
When people say ‘difficult’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence they are usually referring to the experience of reading a certain type of poem.
Jones’s superb collection reinvigorates poetry as a quality of illumination amidst all kinds of opacity, sparking affective and rhythmic conversations between literature, politics, ecology and cosmology. Her poetry engages and enacts what T S Eliot called the ‘auditory imagination’, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and f eeling’.
At the close of his poem ‘Autumn Fragment’, Kaiser Haq asks: ‘Can one write / Verse that is free of ambiguity?’ A more pointed consideration for contemporary writers hailing from Bangladesh is whether perhaps one should.
Yet, as literary theory in the intervening decades has shown, no individual can speak for the collective per se, bound as they are by the confines of their culture, gender, race, class, as well as the inherently constructed nature of that self that defines lyric poetry (which, as Maria Takolander has recently argued, is in turn bound by the technology that writes it).
