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Welcome to [light study].
Recently, I’ve heard many poets express the sentiment that it’s been hard to maintain a belief or faith in poems. I’m no stranger to this feeling. It’s one of the doubts I return to and wrestle with most often in my life. For me, I think this feeling stems from a disbelief in the world. Living in Minneapolis at the start of 2026, I found it especially difficult to believe in the world and in poetry when the reality was that every day someone else was being detained by ICE. I didn’t know if on any given morning someone else would be killed. I stayed inside, fearing deportation, despite the green card I carry everywhere. The reality was that I didn’t want to exist. What use existence. What use poetry. What use all this. I live(d) in fear. Poetry can feel stupid and useless amidst the genocide of the Palestinians, war in Iran and bombing of civilians, deportations (ethnic cleansing), the continued development of detention centers (camps), the continual degradation of society and the planet by those who can maintain a distance from their cruelty.
Despite this all—and more—resistance is ongoing. Mutual aid efforts in Minneapolis existed and keep existing. Strangers, friends, loved ones continue the good work of living and acting in solidarity. Every day people are destroying or deterring the apparatuses of empire—boycotting literary institutions such as PEN America, taking down Flock cameras, protesting the development of new data centers, helping unhoused neighbors relocate after encampments are torn down. What little hope I’ve been able to hold onto has been due to these moments of collective resistance and continued existence.
I’m not naive enough to believe another literary journal will be the way to prevent or reverse any of these conditions. I do however, on a good day, believe in poetry the same way I believe in the world. Like the world, I don’t know of poetry’s utility or purpose, or if there is one at all. I want to think that poetry and the world has no utility—it just is. And what it is can be changed or defined and up to us to make it. My hope is that [light study] can be an extension of this thought — a place where the daily, sometimes unnoticed (little read, sometimes hated) refusals, actions, thoughts (poems) that make the world bearable can exist without needing to prove to anyone why they should.
This inaugural issue opens with Alex Tretbar and Tyler Barton, who both incorporate other texts to critique violent, brutal systems. Tretbar uses his own prison notebooks in excerpts from Noria to critique the prison system, while Barton utilizes the gaps found between texts in literary magazines to create his collages and poems surrounding money, housing and military violence. Their poems are jarring and literally cutting, finding the gaps between what is stated and what is. In conversation with them is Joan Tate’s “Hapax Legomenon”, a meditation which interrogates language’s relationship to violence—hear the sounds carried between “papyrus” and “empire”.
Jake Phillips and Elise Thi Tran both forage the forest. Phillips’ “When the Dog Finds a Small Spine in the Woods” engages in rich description to draw a line between spirituality, change, nature, and the self. Tran guides us aurally in “Sound Form Time”, then visually through the forest in “Rite” and “There, There”, making connections between the body & flora, between eating & eaten. Yoann Thommerel is translated by Conor Bracken in excerpts from lean times cuisine, showcasing an ethnographic, community-driven and urgently prescient work that explores how people manage to survive in an economy that continually denies them.
Jessie Petrow-Cohen, Daniela Prado, and Alaíde Foppa bring us poems uniquely attuned to the body. Petrow-Cohen’s “Splitting” is a haunting elegy for a mother in which logic, worn away by grief, lends itself to creating striking images recounting the illogic of death. Alaíde Foppa, a poet “presumably assassinated by Guatemala in 1980”, is translated by Dana Delibovi in “The Breath”, an ode to both the breath and the self. Daniela Prado is translated by Lizzie Fox and Jeannine M. Pitas in “In This Climate of Decline”, bringing us a short yet jolting treatise on how to survive, and what can still be lost in survival.
Sebastián Gómez Matus is translated by Ian U Lockaby in three playful and surreal poems that create surprise at every line break and wrestle with meaning: “running through them a sense of irreality /undefining them as if they were / wrong”. Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev is translated by Venya Gushchin in the fast, word-combining and linguistically inventive “[there’s no returning after all to that]”, which leaves as quickly as it arrived.
Jack Bachmann, Mary Sauer, and Brooke Mitchell find kinship through their engagement with sonics and a deep looking at the world. Bachmann’s syntactically dense poems study light and shadows, their looking oscillating fluidly between transparency and opacity. Sauer’s Swatch Poems engage with fiber art, reading like letters or instructions on how to (un)tangle the relationship between the self and how the self is made. Mitchell’s “The Spring After” and “Hear the Morning Doors” are intensely imagistic poems whose language creates a lush world where even abstract concepts take on physical qualities: “questions fester”, time is plucked, “noon is just the place”.
Tobi Kassim closes out the issue with “Compound Dispersed” and “Wind body problem”, first mining family history, then the interior self, for a stability that seems both impossible and, perhaps, unwanted. Kassim closes us out in uncertainty, on an image that lingers on two ungraspables: the mind and the wind or, the self and the world.
A deep thank you to all the writers and translators who contributed to this first issue. And to you, for reading.
Yours,
José Felipe Ozuna, Editor