Issue 3: HAUNT

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

Arriving at this issue’s theme, “Haunt”, was more twisty a journey than we’d expected. One fear, especially, was that we risked retreading the hallways of our previous issue, “Vanishing”. Indeed, a haunting is what remains after the traces of something (or someone) have seemingly faded away.

Guest editor Wen-yi has curated a suitably macabre prose selection, where intimate friends and lost selves linger amidst the specters of raids and angels and the ghost towns of oceans. Most of these hauntings are not of the supernatural sort. They contain a violence promised, loss and blood whose arrival you increasingly anticipate.

The poetry contains a similarly broad-ranging series of interpretations, from the veteran Theophilus Kwek’s airy angels skimming over “the current of our own lives”, to Elizabeth Deng’s Devil, “a hitchhiker … sitting in the back.” We looked especially for vigor and dynamism — spectral light at the end of a long corridor — and also found it in the voices of younger poets making their debut in this issue.

The question stands: what lingers in the aftermath of an event, be it dramatic calamity or the ordinary detritus of life? Hopefully this selection contains some answers.

Anurak Saelaow, Laura Jane Lee, Theodorus Ng, and Wen-yi Lee (Guest Editor)

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