Hi everyone,
This is Marco, your friendly neighborhood poet and journal editor, writing to you from the exhibit floor at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Our managing editor, Niki Gjoni, lives in the area and has been to a few of these before, so we decided to meet up and get a table.
This place is huge—I don’t know how many thousands of square feet, all partitioned into rows and avenues with many, many booths displaying all manner of, well, books and book industry paraphernalia. So much to see! And countless talks and sessions and readings to check out. I’m looking forward to taking it all in.
Yesterday evening, we went out for drinks and an indie press authors’ reading, which went well, I thought. For me, partly, it’s just good to be out in a new city, surrounded by bookish people. Everyone here is friendly so far, though the weather (in more than one way) is overcast. I’m excited to be talking about our journal and books and co-op, to learn what others are up to, and to have some great conversations.
If you happen to be at AWP, come find us at table T122—we have books and freebies from Untimely Books, and a special offer for writers interested in submitting to Metapsychosis. Everyone else, here’s what’s new in the journal.
Reading Delany
Our Samuel R. Delany reading group, led by senior editor and SF novelist Gennifrey Edwards, has just completed its discussion of The Ballad of Beta-2 and will be moving into Empire Star and Babel-17 in the coming weeks. These are short, crystalline, world-bending novels—perfect entry points if you’re new to Delany, and revelatory revisits if you’re not. The group welcomes new readers at any point, and your first session is free. After that, continuing as a Metapsychosis Patron or Cosmos Co-op Supporting Member keeps the door open—and no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Where Observation Collapses
Our Acousmatic Crossings series continues its patient expansion of the ear. The latest installment, “Where Observation Collapses”, brings together two artists working at the scintillating edges of what counts as music.
Bucharest-based sound artist Rumore offers two field recordings—one from an aging industrial elevator in the House of the Free Press, another from his grandparents’ old refrigerator straining through last summer’s heat—in which the mundane emits something close to speech. These are not sounds about something; they are something, extracted from the continuum of daily acoustic life and reframed as interior weather.
Then DJ Renigade (Robert Milton Stringer) enters with What Lies Below [In A VirusState Drone Mix], a slow-burn piece in which time loosens and the listener stops observing—and starts inhabiting. As curator Michael Eisenberg writes: “To listen in a virus state is to accept a transformation. Something crosses the threshold. Something migrates.”
Headphones on. The film is rolling.
Listen: Where Observation Collapses →
Alchemizing Exile: A Cut-up Collaboration
One of the most ambitious works we’ve published in recent memory is the ongoing series Alchemizing Exile, a collaboration between visual artist Alexandra (Alya) Rozenman and poet-essayist Brian George—now three installments in, with two more to come.
Rozenman—born in Moscow, trained in the Soviet underground, transplanted to America as a political refugee—inserts herself into the studios and domestic spaces of canonical painters. Her paintings are quiet provocations: de Chirico’s harbor, Malevich’s void, Matisse’s Mediterranean light—with Alexandra quietly present, having primed the canvas, waiting. “Who are you?” the artist might ask. “I am your friend and confidant. You were just about to say?”
George constructs prose-poems from the artists’ own words—cut, retranslated, spark-gapped—so that each leap generates what Robert Bly called, of Basho’s haiku, a small explosion. “I don’t want to pay tribute,” George writes. “I want to probe the artist’s psyche.”
Part One lays out the stakes: Rozenman’s account of exile and artistic identity, George’s meditation on creative wounds as openings. Part Two—published in December—channels de Chirico and Malevich with eerie force. “I have transformed myself in the Zero and have gone beyond the unlawful domain of limits.” You feel it. Part Three, just published, brings Picasso and Matisse—George’s cut-up method continuing, Rozenman’s paintings holding the silent other half. “It takes a long time to become young.” “A certain blue enters the soul.” Between those two lines, something ignites.
Parts Four and Five are still to come—which is to say, this is a series worth starting now, while the fire is still being built.
This Is How the Goddess Weaves the World
Karen Shearer Voorhees (@ksv here) begins with a morning walk past the shaggy gardens of North Berkeley—and ends with a question that quietly reframes everything: is Gaia growing herself a brain through all of us? What on earth is she dreaming?
In between, the poem moves with unhurried attention through chloroplasts and mitochondria, ATM cards and potato pancakes, wet laundry and forty-two years of marriage—tracing the same logic of complexity at every scale of existence. The cosmic and the domestic turn out to be made of the same stuff, woven by the same hand. It’s a rare poem: scientifically fluent, spiritually awake, and utterly at home in ordinary life.
Read: This Is How the Goddess Weaves the World →
All of this—the journal, the reading groups, the community—depends on readers who care enough to support it. No ads, no paywalls; just the work, and the people who make it possible. For $7/month, you can become a patron of Metapsychosis and gain access to our private forum Infinite Conversations, reading and writing groups, and exclusive author events.
Now back to the floor.
Cosmically yours,
Marco V Morelli
Editor-in-Chief, Metapsychosis journal
Co-Creator, Cosmos Co-op