Imaginary Maps | Numéro Cinq’s April Issue Preview

“We were in a boat and we were in love and we maybe made you in the blackest moments of this sea.” —Imaginary map by Nance Van Winckel

I thought I’d call this simply THE REALLY BIG issue because, hard as I try to beat back the tide, the issues keep getting  bigger, and this one, well, this one is out there in the stratosphere of issue bigness. But then I saw Susan Aizenberg’s interview with Nance Van Winckel with Nance’s inventive hybrid visual works and I realized that what we are doing here is creating imaginary maps. Everyone who contributes fills in a little personal section of the territory. So I’m calling it the IMAGINARY MAPS issue.

We have this month some truly amazing work. I hope you all read and dwell on these gems. In particular we have gorgeous essays: Warren Motte on the late Harry Mathews, Jeremy Brunger on Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” and what it means to be a bug, the London-based Italian writer Daniela Cascella on reading Isak Dinesen’s story “The Blank Page,” and a lyric essay by Abby Frucht. We also have performance art by Quintan Ana Wikswo, poetry by Michelle Boisseau and Patrick O’Reilly, new fiction by Russell Working and Tatiana Ryckman, and a My First Job essay by Roberta Levine. As I mentioned, our poetry editor Susan Aizenberg interviews Nance Van Winckel. And from Ireland in our Uimhir a Cúig series, we have poems by the inimitable Afric McGlinchey. From Russia, we have poems by the great Marina Tsvetaeva translated by Mary Jane White. Julie Larios reviews Make Yourself Happy, a new poetry collection by Eleni Sikelianos (we also have an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author). Newcomer Michael Carson reviews the new novel Spoils by Brian Van Reet, Joseph Schreiber reviews the novel Frontier by the Chinese experimental writer Can Xue, and Ben Woodard reviews the long-awaited novel Blue Fields by Elise Levine.