Featuring nearly thirty authors, our next issue takes a slomo plunge into the ocean in search of lost cities, cephalopods and that selkie we made friends with in ’93. The issue features poetry, fiction and essaying around themes of alien drift, andromeda, billionaire hubris, despairing jacuzzis and more.
From my editor’s introduction:
Our title, BERMUDA ▲ SADCORE, embodies the vibe theory of oceanic feeling. The word sad, in its Germanic origin, connotes ‘weighty, dense’, eventually replaced in Middle English with the sense of ‘steadfast, firm’ — later ‘sorrowful’. The ocean is at once weighty, dense and everchanging, temperamental. We love the doleful, consonant insistence of the ‘d’ in ‘sad’ and ‘bermuda’. In recent years, the ocean has been toxified by microplastics, literally set on fire, forced to house massive, heat-generating data centres and scraped for rare earth minerals. If anyone has the right to be sad, it’s the ocean. And the ocean, historically feminised as sailors did with their boats, might herself be the Anthropocenic siren in the night everafter. Our original home and eventual disaster. Stop me if this sounds like an emo lyric.
What would it mean to be sad forever? Or to be steadfast in sadness, like the great eighteenth-century poet Charlotte Smith: who would wander the cliffs of Beachy Head and later write her Elegiac Sonnets from a debtor’s prison. To be sad forever is to forever be facing the sea. The vibrant imaginaries of the poems, essays and fiction contained herein will transport you to bodies of water whose sumptuous power to surprise, query and upend our bodies of knowledge is remarkable. The only way in is through surrender. In the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022), the rich are punished for their attempts to control, own and influence everything. With virtuosic abjection, we are witness to them literally vomiting the poisoned fruit of the ocean.
The issue features the following contributors:
Adam Fraser
Al Anderson
Al Crow
Alex Grafen
Ali Graham
Amy Grandvoinet
Andrew Hykel Mears
Carolyn Hashimoto
Dan Power
Daniel Ridley
Fynn Kǒster
Grace Marshall
Iain Morrison
India Bucknall
James Andrews
J.R. Carpenter
John McCutcheon
Kim Crowder
Lauren Kalita
Lizzy Yarwood
Matt Pollock
Mattea Gernentz
Matthew Kinlin
Rahul Santhanam
Rose du Charme
Ruby Eleftheriotis
Sam Francis
Victoria Brooks
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You can read the whole thing for free here or download a pdf here.
Thanks as ever to Douglas Pattison for co-editing, curating and designing the cover art.
mariaology 