Guest Edited and Introduced by Kate Bolton Bonnici
What does it mean to write with? To compose so that the subjects/objects of our work—people and places and ideas, what we love and fear and want—become co-creators, co-conspirators, full collaborators? How can we conjure communion so that the work becomes a compound body, its authors plural?
These are the questions to which this folio’s contributors attend. As writers, photographers, musicians, and scholars, they explore plural spaces and bodies and voices, images and soundscapes and histories, all while experimenting with illusion, embodiment, affect, grief, and love through capacious creative praxes.
Meg Day’s “associative ekphrastics” thread intuition and communion into poetic form via a selection of photographs from Kristin V. Rehder’s Tremor series.
In response to the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, Fred D’Aguiar sparks the multiplicities of writing with through a series of linked poems that name, curse, respect, and give shape to the devastating poetics of fire.
Vickie Vértiz writes into our gaps and presences with multilingual poems that navigate access, desire, beauty, violence, resistance, and joy.
Moheb Soliman translates a “conceptual lit object” (parts poetry, installation, and varied media) from physical, incomplete, as-is CD-ROM to imagined recovery through art-historical fabulation.
Cherene Sherrard’s polyvocal poems speak memory and counter-memory such that lyric becomes the medium for birthing a “witness / [to] what we were, what we shall be.”
Alice Dailey and Adam Dailey stage modes of collective art making, questioning how a body (textual, maternal, chemical, or deceased) might receive and hold another, with courage and with care.
These texts, images, and music ask us to collaborate as readers, listeners, viewers—that is, to imagine and so to make alive on the page.
– Kate Bolton Bonnici
Originally from Alabama, Kate Bolton Bonnici now lives in California with her family and is an Associate Professor of English at Pepperdine University. Her first book, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her second book, A True & Just Record, was published in 2023 by Beyond Criticism Editions at Boiler House Press. Blood or Other: Compositions will be published in 2027 by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point). Kate’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Philosophy & Rhetoric, The Georgia Review, The Maine Review, Image, Tupelo Quarterly, Best of Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Arts & Letters, Exemplaria, and elsewhere. Find her at kateboltonbonnici.com.