Natalie Eilbert

Natalie Eilbert’s highly anticipated third collection, Overland, invokes elegy and psalm to speak to assault on the bodies of women and our planet. In a collection that is part warning, part rumination, Eilbert snapshots violence — the scorch marks on California lumber, the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the crescent moons on skin photographed by a forensic nurse. A chronicling of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and death cycles of the Great Barrier Reef, Overland maps an industry-scarred landscape that travels from coast to coast only to pause on the Congress floor where we are made to recognize: “Disappearance is active loss.” 

Whether collective or private, environmental or familial, in Overland no loss is overlooked as sestinas and sonnets are interspersed with weary reportage on the power and limits of witness. Here, language is mined—Latin roots are unearthed, ripped apart, and reproduced into anthimeria to describe an industry-obsessed society that is “plasticing”—all while words like “intercourse” and “consent” are named and reclaimed. From the longform associative verse of “The Lake” series, to the two lines of “Gunmetal Gray,” Eilbert proves her poetic versatility and stamina, writing in sonic lines as dynamic as the emotions she evokes. We emerge from these poems changed, having learned the truth of the words, “We lose / the world with deliberate focus.”

Overland

Swan feast

Kate Zambreno

Lauren Aimee Curtis

Emily Bitto

Luc Sante

Travis Jeppesen

Wayne Koestenbaum

Brigitta B. Wagner

Annabel Brady-Brown

Leo Goldsmith

Madeleine Martiniello

Max Nelson

Matthew Porterfield

Agnès Godard

Elena Gomez

Claudia La Rocco

James Lattimer

Justin Wolfers

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Lauren Carroll Harris

Fireflies Issue #5 pairs a living legend of French cinema with an artist yet to receive due recognition outside of her native Germany, despite being one of the country's pre-eminent cineastes. The issue discusses, dismantles, reinterprets and creatively plays with their cinema, featuring insightful longform interviews with both directors, alongside 29 responses from critics, novelists, poets, filmmakers and visual artists who work with video, sound, photography and sculpture.

Agnès Varda

Fireflies #5

Poetry. Women's Studies. INDICTUS re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. INDICTUS is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.

Indictus

Natalie Eilbert

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