We’re happy to announce that the next issue of LR is going to be a particularly special one. For the first time, we’ve decided to put together a themed issue! The theme that we’ve settled on for Issue 5 is “Hybridity” (to be interpreted critically, aesthetically, or otherwise), and in order to help provide you with some context around which to shape your submissions, we’ve come up with the following call for submissions:
For its fifth issue, Lantern Review seeks poems, visual art, multimedia, and mixed genre poetic works that engage with the critical notion of “hybridity,” whether in language, form, aesthetic or subject matter. How can the act of poetic “collage” mimic, transform, and otherwise help us to negotiate the boundaries of ethnic and cultural distinctions? In what ways can experimenting with the mixing (and re-mixing) of narratives, forms, source material, and genres be used to enact the condition of hybridity (geographically, generationally, biologically, and otherwise)?
Some potentially generative terms might include: collage; assemblage; montage; inter-; trans-; multi-; blending; mixology; mash-up; mixtape; recombination; border-crossing; crossing; heteroglossia; hypertext; blending; hyphenation; interlingual; intertext; collecting; curation; multivocality; meiosis; overlay; juxtaposition; patchwork; cut-and-paste
On the heels of the guest posts we’ve seen this May—particularly Luisa Igloria’s collage-inspired prompt (in which she encourages us to try using textual and historical fragments as a critical “speculum” by which to re-imagine narratives from the legacies of diaspora), Tarfia Faizullah’s process profile (which, in its own terminology, “braids” together the memories of two narratives that happened years apart) —we feel that the topic of “hybridity” is particularly prescient. Other potentially helpful sources of online inspiration might include Craig Santos Perez’s AWP paper in which he observes the dearth of poets of color in Norton’s American Hybrid anthology, Kenji C. Liu’s recent post on geography, diaspora, and being of “mixed” poetic lineage on The Best American Poetry Blog (which serves as his introduction to the APIA Month guest series that he is curating there this week), and also Margaret Rhee’s Artist’s Statement from her mixed-media, multi-vocal poem “Materials,” which we published in Issue 4.
The reading period for LR 5: The Hybridity Issue will close on July 15, 2012. To submit your work, please visit the revised guidelines that we’ve posted on our Submissions Page.
We look forward to seeing how you will respond!
Many thanks as always,
Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Board