Lit Mag Takes Bold Look at The Marginalized and Avant-Garde

I imagine the call for submissions for Issue 60 of Hayden’s Ferry Review was something like this: “Accepting any form from any person who has something to say about being snubbed. Quality must be so good that we ache you did not send us more.” A bit of a long title for a theme, which is perhaps why editor Dustin Pearson chose “Marginalized and the Avant-Garde” for the cover instead.

It seems almost counterintuitive to generalize the writing and art in HFR  Issue 60 since it is devoted to giving voice to particular thoughts about particular experiences. And as Poorna Swami writes in her multi-part poem “Assimilation”: “Countries can be big.” Lit mags can be too. But if there is one thing that can be said about HFR Issue 60, it is this: the writing and art feels both timeless and absolutely of the moment.

Here’s how: HFR Issue 60 features work from the 11th–12th century Chinese poet Li Qingzhao and the 19th–20th century Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. It features mixed-form poems about Twitter, Yelp, and email from Oscar Mancinas, Soeun Seo, Shen Haobo, and more. It includes eight images of word-paintings by Ben Miller and Dale Williams that will frighten and amuse you. There is a five-line poem by Canese Jarboe consisting entirely of the dots and dashes of Mors code, and its message is worth the time of plugging the code into an online translator. There are translations of poems and prose from Chinese, Spanish, and Mauritanian Creole. There are words and phrases left untranslated in Korean, Hindi and Navajo. There is work from the undertranslated, underpublished, and the banned. And there is a space where so many disparate parts come together.

I have read Oscar Mancinas’s poem in Issue 60, “1 Star Yelp Reviews of the Grand Canyon,” many times and every time it hits me in the same place: “So much potential, yet/ offers so little to the vast majority…” There is such power, such emotion in what is left unsaid; Mancinas shows this power again and again. The Chinese poet Shen Haobo does too. He faces the Chinese government’s censorship head on (as he is forced to face the stars that replace censored words in online forums). HFR Issue 60 is poetry-heavy, about five times as many poems than prose pieces, but these two poets’ work should not be overlooked.

Neither should the translator notes and artists statements that precede many of the works in this issue. Though works in translation are not new to lit mags, translator notes seem more unique—though no less telling, especially in an issue aimed at bringing the marginalized into the center’s folds. Shen Haobo is nicknamed “the poet with ‘a great evil in his heart’” and also “one of the most controversial” among contemporary Chinese poets. Li Qingzhao is “one of the greatest female poets in Chinese history.” Amal Sewtohul’s short story, “Story of Ashok and Other Characters of Lesser Importance” was published as an appendix to his novel Histoire d’Ashok. What a thing to do to push such life into an appendix!

Raymond Luczak’s “Gusts” seems to do the opposite, bringing the larger-than-life life of Paul Bunyan to the center of his short story, but through the voice of the wind. Sakinah Holfer’s entire poem “To My Former Mentors…September 12th, 2001” seems like an aside, but one that is far from mumbled. It is an aside that is shouted without fear of being heard.

Many other pieces in HFR Issue 60 are just as bold. Taneum Bambrick’s sparse poem “Landscape, Comparison” and Charlie Bondhus’s choose-your-own-adventure poem “2003” hit hard.  

And if you’re looking to be hit hard, no look at Issue 60 is complete without a long, slow look at the cover and interior art of Gary Louis, who also signs his paintings and pastels Askilchii, the Navajo pet-name his grandmother gave him for his childhood red hair. When spread, the covers show one image of two Navajo women, one looking back, the other looking forward—a feeling that resonates throughout the issue, and perhaps throughout any conversation about the marginalized and the avant-garde.

In the last line of the editor’s note, Dustin Pearson quietly mentions this is his last issue as editor. Considering that, along with the seeming impossibility of topping the mix of talent and emotion in Issue 60 as well as the ever-unknown of upcoming writers HFR aims to publish, what will the next issue hold? At this time, general submissions are closed, but there is an open call for long-form poetry for Issue 62. One can only imagine what this issue will look like considering the first-place winner of HFR’s poetry contest was Don Hogie’s “Unabashed Love Poem with String Beans.” I can only say I’m looking forward to finding out.