INTRODUCTION

MARINA BLITSHTEYN

It's been an honor curating this section and spending some time with the work of these inventive women writers. We are all tasked with inventing our own English and personal cosmologies but these women have taken up the task with such generosity, and I'm so grateful to them and to Pocket Samovar for the time and space to showcase just some of their efforts here. I can't say what unites these pieces, what develops as a theme or thread to guide our understanding of these loosely connected histories and affinities. If one emerges for me it's the fact of sitting down with/in English and putting these fractures down, in whatever form. I've been thinking a lot about exile, like trauma, as a fragmentation, but we can also just as generally think of it as a plurality. I've been thinking of exile in spatial terms, from a place you know or were told is your home, but we can also think of it in temporal terms. Where you go, where you're forced to go, another self shoots off at the root, another timeline from the tree of your life, another language set to contend with. In these terms what unites us here is this tongue we happen to find ourselves in, this space, however it is, for us to talk about what happened to us, what happened to our families. I email Sahar, from another quarantine in my parents' house, an exile within an exile: "i'm alright, no baby so i'm writing, i'm raising these little english seeds, i'm baking these little english breads." She offers me a poem: "Language as an anchor in the white water, in the cascade." Like Hajar I've been 'prescribed' English, so I make do with it. And it's a connective tissue to those other selves who stayed or never left, or got taken to another porous border, it shares a DNA with another life in another text. "the greed then / of speech" as Genya puts it, that network of language that wills toward language. Like Julia I've chanted "god / my god my bog my bod my body / goddamn roots" and it's eerie how closely I feel my own language in that, my English, muddied up with those other roots, those others. Could our related experiences have shaped our relationship to word and sound in similar ways? Is there then someone who knows what I mean, and how I mean? It's what Tanya and I pored over since grad school, our shared heritage, our mothers, our politics, our art. It's what I recognize in Olga's language play, taking a typo and making it mean. You have to make things mean, I learned too early. Meaning is an art, like everything else, and we do it exceptionally well. We've had to make it feel real. Has that been the thread then—language acquisition. Mastery through poetry, showing we belong in English. If our vast geographies bind us then good, it's an honor to be connected to these women, these truth-tellers, soothsayers, alchemists, spinning something old and stiff into gold, into English as fine as hope. It's not their burden to correct the mistakes of those who came before them, at the mercy of men with power and little choices that force whole peoples to sweep the earth. But here they are doing it, making meaning, making a life, and sharing it with you.

Marina Blitshsteyn (contributing editor) is a poet, writer and educator born in the Soviet Union. Blitshteyn and her family fled to the US in 1991 as refugees. She studied English at SUNY Buffalo, where she edited the longstanding annual Name poetry journal, and Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she also served as a University Writing Fellow and consultant. She is the author of Two Hunters, her first full-length collection, to be published by Argos Books in 2018 with a CLMP Face-Out grant. Her work has been anthologized in the new Brooklyn Poets Anthology, The &Now Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, Why I Am Not a Painter, and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She teaches Composition and Rhetoric and experimental non-fiction and runs The Loose Literary Canons, a feminist reading group in NYC.