Fifteen pieces on history and the past
This list is part of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of The Margins, which highlights portions of the magazine’s archive organized around a theme.
What if the stanzas of a sestina, the passage of a novella, or the body of an essay can put the living in touch with the dead, can let the present and the past meet at the place where a blackened word strikes on white space? Over the past ten years on The Margins many of our writers have sought language to relate to the past, whether it be histories of war and colonialism or the personal archive. Emerging from their work are ghosts that linger today. Just as these writers trace historical memory and family history, many also outline where memory is absent, patchy, or unreliable.
Read the full list below.
Pieces from top to bottom, left to right:
- “Tending the Speculative: Poems from the Asian American Adoptee Diaspora”
edited by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs with poems by Kevin Minh Allen, Sun Yung Shin, Lisa Marie Rollins, Katie Hae Leo, Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut, Bryan Thao Worra, Molly Gaudry, and Lee Herrick (2013) - “The Ghosts They Carried”
by Kitana Ananda (2014) - “Ghost Forest”
by Pik-Shuen Fung (2016) - “AAWW TV: Archive Seance”
with M NourbeSe Philip and Phinder Dulai (2016) - “Pacita”
by Melissa R. Sipin (2016) - “Our War Is in the Mind”
by Sokunthary Svay (2017) - “Memory of Figment a Merely: Four Poems by Zaina Alsous”
by Zaina Alsous (2017) - “KonMarimasu: A Japanese American Incarceration Roadtrip”
by Karen Tei Yamashita (2017) - “Three Poems from The Year of Blue Water”
by Yanyi (2017) - “Old Goats, New Villages”
by ZH Liew (2017) - “AAWW TV: The Poetics of Haunting”
with Jane Wong, Carlina Duan, Christine Shan Shan Hou, and Muriel Leung (2018) - “To Be Close Again to Meena and to Learn More from Her Poetry, I Compose a Cento”
by Kimiko Hahn (2019) - “The Period of Summoning Relatives”
by Brandon Shimoda (2019) - “Voices in the Archive: An Interview with Monique Truong”
by benedict nguyễn (2019) - “Abecedarian for American Assimilation”
by Serrina Zou (2021)
