Statement of Record
As she attempts to trace the increasingly portentous-seeming name in her grandfather’s WWI journal chronicling his time digging trenches in France, the narrator of Forgotten Night is haunted by the absence of Jewish life in the villages she travels through, by the desolation of the scattered traces remaining.
I studied the explanations of astronomical quadrants and astrolabes and the armilla equinoziale, the armillary sphere of Santa Maria Novella, made up of two conjoined iron rings mounted on the façade that told the time of day and year based on the position of their elliptical shadow, when all at once it occurred to me that I’d wanted to write about something else altogether, about a...
We at StatORec are proud to welcome Jordan A. Rothacker to our editorial team in the position of Books Editor. Rothacker brings with him over twenty years in magazine editorial experience and a deep commitment to honoring the word in all its forms and expressions. Along with a background in journalism, in 2016 Rothacker completed a PhD in Comparative Literature with a dissertation...
After watching the impeachment proceedings and following the Impeachment Managers’ line of reasoning: I believe that 50% less melodramatics would have been more effective—including less of the “our hallowed chambers” rhetoric and particularly some of the dramatically inflected voices and tears—but all in all, the Impeachment Managers presented a strong case and the...
The invisible enemy hit Italy just as I was preparing to leave Florence; containment measures had begun a week prior to my departure. At first the “red zones” of Codogno and other municipalities in Lodi were subject to quarantine, then the whole of Lombardy together with provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont, and Marche. And then, on...
Like cans with expired shelf lives, stored away at the bottom of a box of old books, I happened upon my father’s journals after moving to a smaller apartment with my son. I took them into my hands, hesitated, then placed them gently aside. The next morning I began to leaf through this strange shorthand of lived life written in a “Top Scholar” composition...
There’s a kind of music that
plays when the warm water
runs down her hair
I know the tidal pull of the blood; that a mere glance can send plumes of fire curling through the nerves. After J. arrived: the sudden, mind-controlling molecular saturation of pheromones in the air, a maddening inability to concentrate, to think of anything at all. Intoxication, situational insanity, delusion. An attraction so fierce it made...
partly because love
travels through much
of these lines
ears & glyphs follow
something like a rash move
& various kinds
of self-denial
İskender has written frank, brutally honest, and sometimes shocking poems that push the limits of social norms. He has created profoundly philosophical poems with a unique literary style. He is a poet who deserves to be translated to many world languages and read widely. What Pink Floyd meant for world music is similar to what İskender means...
Nevertheless, something like a baleful pollen in the air—a ghost pollen, impalpable rot, enveloping decay—suddenly became active with mysterious design, opening what was closed, closing what was open, upsetting calculations, contradicting specific gravity, making guarantees worthless.
Statement of Record