Loneliness is as much a socio-political condition as an existential one; it is the feeling of being cast adrift, untethered—from both others and society at large. Very few poems capture this feeling for me as powerfully and poignantly as Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Beverly Hills, Chicago” from her 1949 collection, Annie Allen (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950). In this poem, the narrator and her companion (or companions) drive through a white, wealthy neighborhood in Chicago. It is not a coincidence that the speaker is isolated in a car at the dawn of postwar, segregated suburban America. The poem ends:

On what grounds do we allow ourselves to be policed? The presumed relationship between police and civilians is one of safety. In general, we do not allow people to hold us against our will or to assault us, and we make an exception for the police on the condition that their right to violence will lead to a safer community. We understand it as a controlled violence to prevent uncontrollable violence. Political scientists refer to the legal use of violence by government agents as the “state monopoly on violence.” It is a term that, whether intentional or not, reflects a capitalist worldview. What, then, happens when police violence itself becomes uncontrollable? What happens when the monopoly on violence, much like any other monopoly, becomes an unfettered source of public harm? What happens when it becomes clear to the public that you cannot regulate a monopoly?

I always took pride in never writing in bed. My rule was that I could only write once I was dressed, out of the apartment, and sipping coffee somewhere (preferably by a window), next to a stranger whose presence held me accountable for putting words on the page.

I remember the first time I did it: it was an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, after class. By the end of my seven years in LA, I was so good at shoplifting clothes that the maiden voyage story didn’t mean much. I had the hands for shoplifting—delicate, dexterous and soft—comrades would say. My face at the time, which was young and distinctly sharp (but not exaggeratedly so,) was not out of place in global retail havens either.

As a general rule, a single person should not live with a couple – it is a recipe for heartbreak – but back in those days, the three architecture students did not know that. They found a cavernous apartment near the university and moved in together. Back in those days, rents in Cambridge were low, but this place was ridiculously cheap, eight hundred dollars a month. It was a dump. A fourth-floor walk-up, barely any heat, horsehair insulation in the walls, but the windows faced north, flooding the apartment with golden light.

Columbia Journal hosted a virtual panel of industry experts to discuss the intricacies of writing, editing and publishing. The two-hour conversation sought to provide answers to the big question of the day: how do editors choose what to publish?

Author’s Note:
On a damp, wintry day in Paris, I had just closed the shutters when I heard the beating of the wings of a bird springing into flight outside. In that instance, I thought of Pierre Soulages’ abstract paintings created by covering the canvas with textured black paint. In both circumstances, I could not identify pictorial information through vision, but experienced, sensorily, a sentiment even more refined and beautiful. This process of being denied one way of interpretation and given an alternative also struck me as a moment of hope and unexpected delight.

We grow up thinking love is effortless, or at least I did – that you find someone, you just “know,” and then you trail off towards a sunset that is the rest of your life. We see it in movies, in perfectly arced stories with happy endings, but out here, in the real world, love is rarely a straight shot to paradise. In fact, what is most ironic about the Happy Ending trope is how the story cuts off before we see the bumpy, nauseating cycle of push and pull that so often exists after two people have decided they love each other.

knowledge of all things (when well organized)
fits in the tight space of a
cranial

Over the weekend, I was combing through articles, pushing beyond my boundaries for social media consumption, and frantically scribbling notes, scrambling to find a way to channel my grief, anger, and frustration. I wanted to construct the perfect essay with a perfect argument, supported by so much irrefutable evidence that anyone who read it could, and would not be distracted by anything else. They would have to face the fact that there is racism in this country, often excused and overlooked, that comes in deadly forms. Then I asked myself, “why?” Why must I use rhetoric and go above and beyond in order to convince someone of my humanity; to prove that black people should be treated as equals and not be discriminated against due to the color of our skin? My life is not a research paper. My life is not an intellectual exercise and when I navigate the world I cannot treat it as such.

I was half asleep when Ma whispered into my ear that it was time to go. The sun had not yet risen, but light crept into the room from the half-opened window. I pulled off the chadar—the thin blanket we use in the warm summer months in Palakkad—an extra layer of skin that embraces us even when we don’t need its coarse cover.

We “took” walks. I think, because, caesurae are things we drink. At least, like medicine. Their application requires we swallow. The Schuylkill incorporates the Wissahickon near where Manayunk East Falls. Rivers, primordial techniques. How we put things in their place. Water, repeated Information. Solomon’s plume or Solomon’s seal? Forgotten identity questions. Where the river demarcates Mt. Airy, high-altitude drama, we call it gorge. Frequently, you break trod of my footfall. “I know this one,” you say. How we reach for accurate speciation. Differences contingent on what is pendulous v. what flowers in racemes.

The global conversation around data privacy and the surveillance state has exploded in the past three years – keeping pace with dramatic developments in current facial recognition technologies. But in her recent novel, Little Eyes, triple Booker nominee Samanta Schweblin moves away from state-level conversations, instead examining our complicated relationship with surveillance on a personal level. Set in the very near future, she presents an opt-in surveillance community where little eyes are not only watching you, you’re fully aware and pay $279 for them to do so. Welcome to the latest global fad: the kentuki.

It’s true, Covid-19 affected every facet of our existence, but we’re also all shaken up by the depth of systemic abuse in the United States. The editors at Columbia Journal share some of essential readings that are getting us through this difficult time.

It feels almost serendipitous that Olivia Laing’s essay collection Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency has been published during a global pandemic. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, another painful reminder of persisting police brutality against Black lives, an outpouring of collective rage and grief has led to protests across the country. These protests are happening against the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-related deaths, a failing federal government and economic collapse.

Ander Monson is not like most writers. While others strive to have one book out in the world at a time, Monson has made it a habit of publishing twin volumes simultaneously. His short story collection, The Gnome Stories (Gray Wolf Press, 2020) is partnered with a book of essays titled I Will Take The Answer.

Some Trick: Thirteen Stories is Helen DeWitt’s third book in nearly two decades. It begins with a two-page mock-epigraph called “Here Is Somewhere.” The section riffs off “We’re Off to See the Wizard” from The Wizard of Oz, except the rhyme scheme is interrupted by gainsay ideology, because because because:

Anne Enright’s latest novel Actress begins with a question: “What was she like?”. The she in question is Katherine O’Dell, famous actress of the stage and screen, an Irish icon and, most importantly, the mother of our narrator, Norah. It’s a question that sounds simple and it’s one that Norah is asked frequently enough to anticipate its patterns: she knows that whoever is asking will search her face for resemblances with “a growing wonder, as though recognizing an old flame after many years”. She knows that sometimes they want to know what Katherine was like as a mother, or as a “normal person […] in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade”. And she knows that usually they are asking what Katherine was like before her infamous mental breakdown, “as if their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge”. But this deceptively simple question continually haunts the novel: what was she like? Not who was she, really? Or, what did you think of her? But what was she like? The phrasing here is important because Enright is, from the very offset of her novel, insinuating that we are remarkably satisfied with just that: what things are “like”, how things seem. And by doing that, she is setting us up for the questions that inevitably follow: if this is just how things seem, then when will we know how they really are?

UPDATE: Submissions for this special issue are now closed. We look forward to reaching out to our winners in the near future. Keep checking our site for upcoming special issue and contest submission opportunities (and for daily content, of course), or submit for regular publication at any time to our open categories, which are updated in the Submit section at the top right of our homepage or viewable in our Submittable portal.

“The Mormons Are Coming” opens Dayna Patterson’s recent poetry collection, If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, Winter 2020). The Mormons come with “cheese-and-potato casserole” and “a package of diapers” and “glowing faces with shiny hope.” Then, before a reader gets too comfortable in the lulling repetitions and list of endearing cultural images, the poem swivels: “My daughters ask Why do only boys pass the sacrament?” Then, “My daughters ask Why are all the statues of men?” By the poem’s end, we learn the speaker has “agonize[d] for half a decade’s doubt before deciding to leave.”