Co-editing the thing these past months, Anna was rooted in Portland, OR while Andrew hopped about western and central Europe, communicating via email, Skype, and Facebook. Submissions were read from the Vienna State Opera, Prague Castle, and the flatlands of Holland. As the issue began to take form, we celebrated Deputy Editor Hayden Bennett’s acceptance to MFA programs and founding designer Michael Segel crafted us an elegant cover from a camera obscura photograph by Issue 3 contributor Abelardo Morell.
This slightly-slimmer issue delivers the goods in the form of heavy-hitter contributors like Morell and Carl Phillips while introducing a number of up-and-comers to a wider audience. There are essays on camp culture, fashion, and environmental catastrophe. Poems about Google Earth and Robert Rauschenberg. And at the center of it all is the free quarterly mixtape, a collection of tracks by Houston hip-hop legend Fat Tony hand-picked by the rapper himself.
The future, too, is bright, with the impending release of Inevitable Papers by Cooper Edens (long out of print, soon to be republished by Nat. Brut Books) and a fat summer issue in the works. So this is what we are: southern hip-hop, camera obscura, and numerous pairs of poems. Things, we think, could be much, much worse.
