Editor’s Note
What does it mean to inhabit a place? Or indeed, for a place to become a home? These questions hum beneath the surface of so many of the texts gathered here. That habitation and habit are false cognates seems irrelevant; unsurprisingly, given recent months, many of the pieces in this issue confront landscapes more familiar than ever, the places we return to and inhabit ever anew.
Esther Kim and Amani Al-Kidwa both take us between home and dislocation; Surya Milner, Lu-Hai Liang, and Charlene Wang make vivid the ways we lose ourselves in mirror-worlds, of kitschy landscape paintings, of virtual worlds, and backyard trees, respectively. Birds, bicycles, bodies, and bananas are seen afresh. In Wendy Gan’s attentive account of banyans in Hong Kong, the distance between plant and political worlds diminishes. Asim Khan closes the issue, aptly, movingly, on love.
This issue, as ever, would not have been possible without the support of our readers: most notably, with thanks to Robert Macfarlane and the many others who contributed so that we could make this issue twice the usual size. Thank you to Dasom Yang, Isabel Galleymore, and Nicole Jashapara, the editors and readers who make this process a pleasure. And thanks are due to those who submitted to this issue: we received more than three hundred submissions, a first for us as a journal. We are ever grateful for your trust in us as readers. These sixteen pieces encompass not only this strange year in many of our lives; they invite us to inhabit our world with generosity and newness.
Lastly, in an effort to ensure that poetry on the site retains the intended structure across desktop and mobile platforms while also remaining accessible to screen readers, we’ve opted to display poems as text in our layout. They’re best viewed with the browser in full screen. For readers on mobile browsers, we’ve also provided a link to a static image of the poem. If you’re reading on your phone or tablet, please do click through to read the poems as the authors intended them to be structured. We’re always open to hearing what works best for readers, though, so if you have any suggestions on how we can improve accessibility or readability on the site, we’re more than happy for feedback.
Thanks for reading. Welcome to Issue Three: Habitation.
With warm wishes,
Jessica J. Lee