Issue One - our Inaugural feast
Featuring work by: Raynen Bajette O’Keefe, Alexander Baky Tran, Derek Beaulieu, F. L. Eulo, Joshua Klarica, Richard Kostelanetz, Josephine Mead, Guido Melo, Rosalind Moran, Tanner Muller, Roger Patulny, Hana Pera Aoake, Nicholas Perkins, Lauren Rae, Henry Chase Richards, Ariel Riveros, Leni Shilton, Svetlana Sterlin, Melissa Swann, Munira Tabassum Ahmed, Grace Tucker, Sean West.
Mantissa’s first issue is a hot conglomeration of mindscapes, deviations, visual poetry, prose and verse. A collection of writing that stretches the genre in a variety of forms.
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From the Editorial:
‘Of course the whole genre is in a mess’
MANTISSA, JOHN FOWLES. 1982
Muteness. Voicing. Hesitation. Threads of sentences without punctuation. Moon-spooled type with no words. Letters unchartered by syntax. Purely phonological compositions – actually, no – the poem, quiet and alone, as the image. Discretion. Demand. Direction. Dot, dot (comma) dot. The process of writing and rewriting. The gentle static of your brain as you make ink of something, a fleeting thing, a tender thing, a very real and fearsome thing.
Allow me to begin again.
Of all that is traceable, malleable, real and delicious in writing, poetry is the ‘Vodka Aunt’ of literature. It is at once traditional and unpredictable, obeys and dissents, feeds then swallows. Of course, the whole genre is, by contrary, open to interpretation, and Mantissa Poetry Review was conceived in an effort to create a safe space for the exploration of this genre, pushing boundaries and making mud of all that is wonderful and wicked.
‘Mantissa’, by definition, is the fractional part of a floating point. It is the addition of comparatively small importance, giving voice to all that simply ‘is’, to observation, to words left unsaid. Poet Rebecca Lindenberg, challenges the misconception that people write poetry because they have something to say: ‘I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull’ that cannot be said. ‘Unsayable’ things that find their voice after bumping
around and into each other on the screen or page. In creating Mantissa, I wanted to give voice to these echoes, a publication that brought together a collection of poems that showcased their uniqueness and independence of each other, giving space to each writer’s ‘mantissa’ or floating ‘unsayable’.
In essence, the platform is simple, create a publication for Poetry, embracing the genre in all of its mess. The collection that follows is a conglomeration of deviations, mindscapes, visual poetry, prose and verse, and I’m so delighted to have been involved with each and every piece, in all of their quirks and quips; thankful that each found their way to Mantissa.
It is to this, reader, that I invite you to Mantissa Poetry Review’s inaugural issue.
I hope you enjoy these messes as much as I have.
— Erin Lyon, Founding Editor