Glaring

Rodrigo Quijano’s An Inherent Tear assembles a suite of poems first published in Lima in 1998 as Una procesión entera va por dentro and his 2014 essay “A Terrace in Valparaiso,” translated into English for the first time by Judah Rubin. Written during the Fujimori years of the 1990s—a period characterized by the end of the conflict between the Maoist Sendero Luminoso insurgency, the Peruvian army, and the Marxist-Leninist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—Quijano’s bracingly mournful and incisively wry poems insist that we not turn away from the unburied dead. Shifting between neo-baroque hermeticism and a poetics of the conversational, his work destabilizes lyric subjectivity, testing the limits of the structure of metaphor to relay the impasses of the present. Reflecting almost twenty years later from the “city of wildfires,” Quijano’s essay charts the continued landscape of state violence that carries with it the “payroll of bones” Cesar Vallejo evoked nearly a century earlier. In this new, searing collection, Quijano searches amid the smoke and the ashes for “A place to spend the night, / or a language to speak in, / walking through the desert, or drilling into our / insubstantial dreams.” 

About the author
Rodrigo Quijano is a poet and art researcher. He has worked on contemporary art exhibitions in Lima, São Paulo, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

About the translator
Judah Rubin is the author, most recently, of Antiquarian Historiography (Oxeye Press, 2020). Recent translations can be found in the anthology The Beauty Salons/Salones de la Belleza (Aeromoto/Gato Negro/UNAM, 2021), the journals Firmament and Jacket2, and elsewhere. He is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum and lives in Queens, New York.

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.

Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.

Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They hold a degree in Comparative Literature from Reed College.

Drama, careers, sabotage, compromises... The first issue of Suckcess Magazine begins with a selection of poems by the flamboyant Rene Ricard, edited with the help of Editions Lutanie, and continues with contributions from Miriam Laura Leonardi, Fabienne Audéoud, Camille Aleña, Gabi Losoncy, David Lieske, Sylvie Fanchon, Won Jin Choi, Estelle Hoy, and Bunny Rogers. Cartoons and tennis players are also on the program.

Chris Mann is an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in compositional linguistics. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments, and Chris Mann and The Use. Mann currently teaches in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School.

In ‘Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings’ a compilation of texts from the critical discourse surrounding his work, written by various authors between 2016 and 2023, serves as source material for a series of erasures.

Through retro- and introspectively reading into the works and the practice at large from poetic angles, these poems investigate the relation between art and its discourse, the words used, and their edges.