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05.27.2024
BLOG: Slow Orbit Roundup
A look back on the pieces we’ve published in Slow Orbit so far.
When we first launched Slow Orbit as a publication space, we knew that we wanted to stray beyond the regular conventions of work divorced from context and the author’s life. Rather, we wanted to pursue contributors and comrades that inspire us to keep believing that writing and art still matter; I think we are extraordinarily lucky to have gotten so many positive responses from often beleaguered workshop members and writing community peers.
While Slow Orbit is a publicly open call, the vast majority of our contributors were solicited. I believe in solicitation as an indispensable tool for shaping a space, and our writing workshop has maintained coherence through our shared commitments to struggle against imperialism, to dream and imagine and live for something that extends beyond the stillness and silence and prevarications of empire. I joked that one of the driving qualifications for my solicitations was “not being a coward about genocide”—an extraordinarily low bar that I am embittered to even need to consider. How can one live a life of words and not say anything about the genocide of Palestinians? I have little interest in words that have been sanitized of the world itself.
I appreciate our Slow Orbit contributors for not only the richness of the work but their continued efforts to figure out what it means to be in meaningful relation to others. They are writers that I admire with a kind of tender ferocity. Looking back on our contributors so far, it seems so apropos for SYZYGY that they are characterized by queerness, madness, tenderness, playfulness.
Our first contributor, lae astra, has been such a joy to have in our workshop. I often characterize myself as a roach writer (get squished, keep moving anyways) but lae is an Artist: a painter, photographer, poet, voice actor (when I first heard them read a poem, I instantly wanted everything to be read in their voice), and overall joy to be around. Their Slow Orbit piece, “Rabbit Girl Leaps Up,” choreographs dense, rich imagery into a graceful, surreal smoothness, where even indeterminacy can be experienced as an expansive sweetness: “Both neither rabbit / nor human, just somewhere / in the infinite meadow of it all.” I experience this poem as a firework—a controlled explosion of color.
jonah wu is, of course, the other Slow Orbit editor and our webmaster extraordinaire. The entire website would not exist without his know-how and Design Brain. jonah’s been such a pillar of support for our workshop and really helps carry our momentum as we move forward on our scattered hopes and dreams. I love his writing, which cured my absolute loathing for prose after reading so much work where language is merely a transparent vehicle of information to be transmitted to an ignorant, docile reader defined by vaguely contemptuous boredom. jonah’s writing, on the other hand, is full of sophisticated moments of interiority offset by beautiful lyricism. When he writes stories of, plot-wise, a character thinking to themselves, there is such a dynamism of thought—and its expansive implications on personhood, memory, and futurity—that personal involutions are always unfolding on greater horizons. In “A Total Obfuscation of Gender,” a reflection on his piece “Yao” written for The Seventh Wave, jonah writes with his distinctive intellectual and emotional complexity on his reckoning with gender. There are just so many moments of moving reflection: “He is my past, my present, and my future. I created him, so that I [could one day] embody him.”
Adrian Dallas Frandle is an amazing poet; I loved their piece “Concrete Nocturne” in Five South and his recent work in atmospheric quarterly. His poems have—not to be vulgar—a chewiness to them (I am not just saying this because of his toothsome poems in Book of Extraction); a substantive quality that is always satisfying to work through and over. For me, Adrian is a staple of poetry Twitter; from his thoughts on Elden Ring lore to his garden harvest, I’m always glad to see him in my social media feed. His Slow Orbit piece, “Questions for Poison,” feels like it is tailored to the exact dimensions of my mind. I laughed with delight at “A defining feature of my favorite games is an intentional immersion in a challenging bog.” I really valued Adrian’s remarks as a record of the poem’s evolution, from its very specific Miyazaki-level-design-masochism origins to a poem that ranges more amongst the stars.
grime_ninja has been such a pillar of support for both Heung Coalition and our writing workshop that developed out of it. He’s one of the real ones, and I really look up to his presence as truly exemplifying community care and activism. I was so happy to have him contribute his collage piece, “Pandamic,” which is just an epitomizing manifestation of his overall energy: “I think the ground that underlies the collages I do, besides the overt political ones, is based on a ‘heh heh’ standard.” We are lucky to be in orbit with him.
Mordecai Martin is a thoughtfully engaged writer; I always enjoy how he parses thoughts and difficult subjects with a depth and intensity free from abstracted obfuscations or intellectualized distance. I appreciate Mordecai for his difficult, emotional—yet systemically grounded—insights into madness, anti-Zionist Jewishness, fatherhood, and translation. His piece, “Early Days,” is an intimate look at fatherhood as not the domain of sovereignty but community: “What a joy to refer to myself as the three of us, maybe because it means I am more than the three of us, I am her mother and my mother and our fathers and sisters and all the people who will help raise this child.” “Early Days” is a loving exhortation to continue holding onto the tiny things that hold everything in place, a reminder that I desperately need to emerge in front of me over and over again.
Joshua Zeitler writes with a gracefully crafted vulnerability that is simply stunning. My first encounter with their work was their micro submission to Identity Theory, “Sunset.” I was so pleased when they submitted their piece “The Prophet allays all doubt.” to Slow Orbit, an outstanding poem that is elevated by their remarks: “I am drawn to what society would call madness. I am mad. I take medication, I go to therapy, I iron words as if they were clothes, and then leave them in a pile outside my bedroom door. I am lucky to have a bedroom. A delusion is not a demon, but a formal bliss. An alignment. A belief.” Their pains, their concerns, their contested and unsteady place in the world exists not as a distant abstraction that orients a phrase or two, but dwells fully within their poem.
Kris Shin, as we all say in workshop, never misses. I laughed aloud at the opening sentence of their remarks: “I must admit I am not the most…prolific writer around.” When Kris shared this piece with us a while ago (a couple years?!), their language immediately stuck in my head. Several weeks later, I messaged Kris, telling her that, out of all the short stories I had read in the interim (I was reading 10+ short fiction submissions a week for a magazine), her story still stood out in my mind. “Rituals” continued to exist in my mind, and when we decided to launch our website, I knew I had to beg them for this story. In addition to drawing out some of the context that has led me to foam at the mouth for this story, I also wanted to take the time to say how Kris has been That Guy for Heung Coalition and SYZYGY. Without her, we would simply not exist as we do today. It’s been such a pleasure to have Kris as writing peer, comrade, and friend—and I’m so glad that more people will be able to encounter their words. If you need your spirit rejuvenated, go read Kris’s triptych.
Writing this roundup has made me realize how much these writers and their work has indelibly affected my own writing practice and life. Often, writing and publishing can feel lonely and disjointed, but being in orbit with our contributors is steadying reminder that our lives are connected, and can seek greater connection, in all kinds of ways. I hope you catch up on our Slow Orbit pieces so far, and look forward to more from our little space.
Justin Aoba is a writer and editor based in NYC. His work appears in the Oakland Review, Black Stone / White Stone, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is Deputy Poetry Editor at Identity Theory and a member of Heung Coalition.