Good poetry is never arbitrary; it’s active and intentional, like an argument.

I wanted to focus on language alone and its sheer force, uncontained by formal, philosophical, and empirical systems and thought.

Rather than a victim of history, Lucho is drawn as a stand-in for it — voicing an optimism of national possibility fueled by the hyperbole of propaganda.

The Woman Dies circumvented my critical brain: it made me laugh, shocked me, revealed my tastes to be safe rather than incisive.

Good poetry is never arbitrary; it’s active and intentional, like an argument.

Rather than a victim of history, Lucho is drawn as a stand-in for it — voicing an optimism of national possibility fueled by the hyperbole of propaganda.

The Woman Dies circumvented my critical brain: it made me laugh, shocked me, revealed my tastes to be safe rather than incisive.

Children do depend on adults, but dependence need not entail domination.

I wanted to focus on language alone and its sheer force, uncontained by formal, philosophical, and empirical systems and thought.

Instead of a few more excellent but redundant versions of Dead Souls or Crime and Punishment, why couldn’t the same people give us the first translations of Pisemsky’s Troubled Seas, Khvoshchinskaya’s In Hope of Something Better, or Leskov’s “Episcopal Justice”?

Writing to make sense of things feels both prophylactic (I will process an event, a thought in a safe space) and at times a little dangerous (Is it safe? what will happen as I bore further and further down?)

We are presenting a version of truth that perhaps no one will ever present in the same way we have. I am, we are, the scar, the proof, a testimony. How lucky we are to have language to help leave our marks on this world.

It would be tempting, if you were a theoretical physicist working on the first atomic bomb, to imagine yourself as a demiurge. To frame the process as spiritual longing for God’s wrath . . .

Our history is in the bodies they tried to straighten, the stories they would not write, the lives they refused to archive.

We were kids together. And now we are not.

An oral history is a unique form of nonfiction where, from the beginning, we are given no promise of truth and the editors make no claims toward a clear, ideologically-specific thesis about their subjects.

The following playlist is humbly submitted for your listening pleasure from Full Stop, your full service literary journal. In

This special issue of the FULL STOP QUARTERLY will aim to hold folklore as a prism through which to view connection, the self, and the future. . . . It will explore folklore in and as literature, as process, and as performance.

In times like ours, times of fracture, depravity and upheaval—times which are really not that different than any other time on earth, except for the speed and scale at which violence is exercised—what is the value of art?

Read the introduction to our latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.”