Lyrical writing provides a kind of alchemical prolonging of life to its subject, as wine provides to fruit or grain. Both act as living vessels of the history, memory, and care that their makers put in, and that we, as readers and drinkers, simultaneously filter through our own personal histories and sense memories. The body and the bottle—we siphon off substances and place them inside, hopefully to compound and synthesize, with the intention of pouring them out on a later date, on a night marked by safety and communion when what has long been stored, growing luxurious or cloudy or wild, is reintroduced to the bald truth of oxygen.
Intoxication, with its dangers and allure, is magnetic—how it can alter our perceptions about ourselves, our relationships, our values and worth, and its propensity therein to reveal the structures of power at play. In this special notebook on the theme of Wine, thirteen writers add remarkable texture to the lyric landscape of perception.
—Madeleine Mori, Guest Editor
Stars, trees, lasers, lights, everything locking into nothing, everything together yet apart.
I was struck by the world I tasted—woods, Baja California granite, the winter of the grapes’ growth.
I needed the concoctions F poured to quiet the things that grated and grew wilder each year—the confusion of being part white in an Arab country, part Arab in an expat world.
These writers elegize and scrutinize the liminal spaces between taste, smell, and image, between individual truth and collective meaning-making
She ambushes the sky, burns a brand on its hip
Translated from Hanja (Old Korean) to Hangul (modern Korean) and then English
There is a waxing // for every waning.
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W 27th Street, Suite 600
New York, NY 10001