Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, Jane Wong’s tender and fierce debut memoir, uses poetic lyricism and humor to create a living archive of her family history and a love letter to the mother who raised her and the communities that sustain her.
Dear Apogee readers… Welcome to Issue 18. In these words and works, we invite you to bear witness to a myriad of existences. We dream of a lingua franca rising up, an undying link between our respective dystopias. Draw strength from us, from our mission, from our writers and their work, and explore our latest issue today.
Iya Chinyere was having a bad year. Her business was not doing well, her daughter’s school fees were past due, and her husband had finally left her for a mama-put owner on the next street. It had been bad enough when he had simply been sleeping with one of the maids of the rich family next door; she had resented that woman’s superior tone when she told Nneoma that she needed to “control her husband,” as if she handpicked his affairs.
I met Jade Song in 2020 through a writing group, not long after they’d started writing their debut novel, Chlorine. In alternating accounts between Ren, a competitive high school swimmer, and Cathy, her best friend, the novel puts the dark horrors of adolescence into sharp focus – with freedom only made possible through a life in the water. Imaginative, bold, and defiant, Chlorine is as mythical as it is unapologetically honest.
A hologram is an illusion. You think you’re looking at something three-dimensional and lifelike, but what you see is only an image, a reconstruction of reality rather than reality itself. What could be a more fitting image to encapsulate the illusoriness, isolation and distance that pervade collective life in this post-truth, post-Covid era—one in which facts are subsumed by beliefs and a screen avatar can stand in for a physical body? In her most recent collection of poems, The Vanguards of Holography, Annie Christain creates a pervasive sense of disconnection and disembodiment.
Love brings death closer. The collapsing space between is the setting of Irene Silt's My Pleasure (Deluge Books, 2022). Silt’s poems occupy the protracted time of wanting and waiting, elaborating the delay between desire and arrival—consummation of love or death. Illuminations strobe over a shadow world where oppositions melt inside one another:
She would make a portrait of her mother shrouded in darkness, holding a clay oil lamp. When Chaya closed her eyes she could see the full image, the jellyfish-like light patterning the space around her mother’s head, her free arm reaching out, as if to Chaya beyond the frame. In her vision, her mother’s hand covered Chaya’s face, blocking any sound from coming out.
Teeter, Alidio's fourth full-length poetry book, marks the apex of a language poet’s work, where making occurs alongside documenting but does not extract from it and in which hearing surrounds language but does not acquire, master, or own it... meandering through or remixing affect and archive, never stagnating or calcifying into that which is mappable.
When my mother was 13, she used to wake up at sunrise every day and carry him on her back to queue for rationed rice. Later, while he and the five siblings would slurp the steamy rice diluted with hot water to fill up the bowls, my mother would fan the charcoal stove with one hand, the other holding down the growling of her belly.