Sudden Wealth with Roy Claire Potter

Guest edited by artist Helen Marten and literary agent Harriet Moore with Matthew Stuart, this volume of the journal considers what it means for a publication to be an allegorical container. A simple box in which to gather multiple things, an economical set of permutations — rational in one sense, yet defiantly flexible to move. Contributors were approached with an open invitation; some explored the multiplicities of containing or containers, while others filled the printed vessel with their own ongoing preoccupations. The following pages perform as envelope, bag, shell, net, fold, alarm, letter and instruction. There are holes to disappear within; smoke to knot and wind; shadows to unfold — a context that takes in and binds, finding new kinships from unforeseen proximities.

THE FIRE FLOWERS AND THE FLOWER LIGHTS UP –
Lucy Mercer
(spine)

WE SHALL GREET THE MOON AGAIN
Walter Price
(front cover)

BACK PAGES OF ALGIERS DIARIES 2018
Lydia Ourahmane
(inside front & inside back cover)

AN INTRODUCTION TO / NOTES ON / INSTRUCTION FOR THE FRONT NOVEL
Eliza Barry Callahan
(pp.1–16)

SATURDAY MORNING
Kathryn Scanlan
(pp.25–29)

KILLDEER
Jason Schwartz
(pp.33–38)

ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS
Rosmarie Waldrop
(pp.45–61)

"THE BATHROOM"
Najwa Barakat
(pp.67–76)

ARMY ROLLS, A CIRCUMSCRIPTION
Roy Claire Potter
(pp.81–91)

CONCHOMANIA
Felix Bernstein
(pp.95–109)

O-POEM
Line-Gry Hørup
(pp.113–129)

THIS MUSCLE
Cally Spooner
(pp.133–153)

STERLING PARK IN THE DARK
Susan Howe
(pp.159–179)

COCONUTTERY
Mathelinda Nabugodi
(pp.183–193)

YOUR SELF CONFIDENT BABY
Aurelia Guo
(pp.197–206)

BIOGRAPHY OF A NET: HOLDING A VOLUME
Daisy Hildyard
(pp.211–225)

A GUIDE TO THE POETRY OF LI HO
Eliot Weinberger
(pp.229–235)

WOMEN SMOKING
Charline von Heyl
(throughout & p.239)

INFRATHIN
Marcel Duchamp
(throughout & p.239)

THE MAZED WORLD
Rachael Allen
(bookmark insert)

UNTITLED
Helen Marten
(back cover)

The playful, inventive, and lyrically quick poems comprising The Grimace of Eden, Now orbit the strange space halfway between Tennyson and the Metaverse, veering between the natural world and a sci-fi universe, between inner feelings and outward observations, with questions of divinity alongside domestic life, spiders, dishes, and spaceships. The roving eye of these poems wanders through spacetime carrying irreverent theologies and exploring what it could mean to be living, sensate, and awake in this weird moment in time, exposing a mixture half of awe and half of madness. 

Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat Books, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018), and BEAST FEAST (Ahsahta Press, 2014), as well as several chapbooks (Fonograf Editions, flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). Occasionally a visiting poetry professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, they live in the Arkansas Ozarks alongside three loyal, sentient pets, and the continuous void.

Sahar Khraibani’s ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST contends with desire, grief, and language as sites of injury and release. Written over a period of three days—amid ongoing genocide, land seizure, and displacement—the long poem counters logics of possession with those of relation. Khraibani’s all-caps, first-person address impels the poem forward, centering intertextuality as a force through which spectral presences shine.

Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has been presented with Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergic among others. Sahar is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Arts Writers Grant, a fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, a 2024 residency at Mass MoCA, and is an alumni of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and is the author of Anatomy of A Refusal (1080PRESS, 2025). 

ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST lays bare the “SENSELESS DECAY” potentiated by empire’s relentless categorization, containment, and calculated death delivery. Khraibani’s debut chapbook collapses the imposed and perceived distance written by borders, disrupts anticipated colonial language logics, and bursts “INTO THE MADNESS OF THE ORGY” with queer interference reverberating in all directions. From the soil, from the graveyard, from the dancefloor, from their favorite spot on the eroding waterfront, Sahar broadcasts, IN ALL CAPS, “THE UNNAMEABLE TRUTH.”
— Andrea Abi-Karam

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This third issue presents texts by : Lila Maria de Coninck, Gabriel Gauthier, Marjolein Guldentops & Ahmed Saleh.

Ahmed Saleh (born 1998) is a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza. He studied business administration and political science and is currently living  in Brussels. Ahmed writes articles in Arabic and English, several of which have been published on various platforms. 

Marjolein Guldentops (Belgium, 1994) is a visual artist, author, and performer. Her artistic practice spans various mediums, including text, video and performance. Rooted in the concept of worlding, her work explores the urban rhythms, flows, and semantics that shape perceptions of space and language in both physical and metaphysical senses.

Gabriel Gauthier is a graduate of the Beaux-arts in Paris. He writes books, performs and makes music. He has published Simurgh & Simorgh and Contra at Théâtre Typographique (2016, 2024) and Speed at Vies Parallèles (2020). He has designed pieces at the border of dance and visual arts (Cover, Rien que pour vos yeux). Space, his first novel, was published by Corti.

Lila Maria de Coninck (2004) is a Belgian creator living in The Hague. She makes music, theatre and writes poetry. The guiding principle in her works is the use of multilingualism and miscommunication to promote creativity in her mother tongue, Dutch.

Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski's poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Published April 2019

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.