Issue 06

Issue 06 of Apogee offers many prisms of insight, each destabilizing and distorting the status quo. The essays take us through histories and across borders. We’re on the eve of a total solar eclipse in Zimbabwe in Chido Muchemwa’s “The Rotting of the Sun,” contemplating the lasting effects of Rhodesian colonial power on Zimbabwean identity. We journey to Tobago with Victoria Brown to negotiate the ambivalence of a Caribbean-American visiting home, torn between disdain for American race politics and Tobagonian sexual politics. The fiction in this issue, likewise, presents tensions between identities and contexts. In Kiik Aragi Kawaguchi’s poetic and atmospheric short story, “a wig,” we are fenced in with a couple in a Japanese internment camp, plotting escape. The poetry represents tensions and transmutations––formally, as in Walter Ancarrow’s “Fermented Fruit Poem,” a sound poem that riffs on the repetition of a single line while playing with sexual representation; thematically, in Michelle Lin’s “Portrait of the Mother as Mystique from X-Men;” and linguistically, in Soyini Forde’s “Soon mus come,” written in hybrid diction and Jennifer Tamayo’s “Guaravita, La Dorada,” whose voice is an android “trying to be closer to nature.”

Also featuring Jerald Walker, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Cathy Linh Che, and more. With cover art by Xaviera Simmons.

Victoria Brown’s “Nice Girl and Small Man” and Jerald Walker’s “The Heritage Room” were selected as Notable Essays of 2015 by Best American Essays!

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