Editor’s Note
I am writing to you from my childhood bedroom, from a townhouse in the suburbs of Minneapolis. As I note every time I fly back home from Boston, everything is familiar and everything has changed. It’s a well-worn thought, but one that seems more and more true every flight. Some things—people I went to school with, restaurants I used to frequent—are gone entirely, and what remains is just off-center from how I remember it. The wooden steps leading to the front door have been replaced with concrete, my friends are moving into another neighborhood, a new high-rise across the street blocks out the sun.
Minneapolis has been through such grief since I moved away over half a decade ago. As state-sanctioned violence devastates our streets and echoes in the world beyond, the idea of a homecoming is as fraught as it has ever been. Where are we safe; where were we ever safe? Adroit’s Issue 57 grapples with this sense of constant change and loss. “Grief had dulled my love into a heavy, blunt object,” Courtney Bill writes in her fiction piece, “Kimberlite.” How often we find ourselves strangers to the things we hold dear, finding violence where we thought we put love. As Tayari Jones and Leslie-Ann Murray discuss in our Enlightenments section, “Can you come back to your hometown and be the gentrifier?”
In Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey’s “The Itch,” this displacement goes beyond place: even the body itself is unfamiliar. What we are supposed to own is really up for grabs. “Their insides have become public real estate, something like that.” And as Kwame Dawes details in “Blemish,” our own flesh can be so separate from us, an opponent. “It is hard / to consider beauty in this, when the body / softens with sweat, and the sweet / sourness of this knowledge of decay / and renewal is repeated in the armpits / and crotches. It should be clear that / I am desperate for joy, but my body / is leery of such anticipations.”
But this issue finds room for possibility. The work here looks into an alien world and charts futures within it. From Choi Joengrye’s “Uppsala Dog,” translated by Sue Hyon Bae and Mattho Mandersloot: “Even darkness ages and suffers. Darkness grows fat and swallows itself and disappears into a bigger darkness. The soul quietly goes ahead.” Voids within voids wherever we look, and yet a strange hope carries on. The only way is deeper in.
Todd Robinson’s nonfiction pieces turn remembrance into a kind of discovery. Childhood is rendered with overwhelming detail, nostalgia made immediate. “We were we were tornadoes, we were muscle cars painted in primer, we were cracked windshield glass.” In “For Karimeh Abbud,” Priscilla Washington also makes remembering something active. She performs her own version of a homecoming as she captures a life before the intrusion of violence. “Nothing held still but your finger choosing / where to freeze the hour: 1919 Palestine / a silver life. Yes, we were acrobats / standing on a bottle-propped chair, / shy young mothers of peach / -cheeked babes with fine thread / along our hips.”
So I hope you’ll enjoy Issue 57, which includes our 2026 Djanikian Scholars in Poetry and
Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction. I hope these pieces remind you, as they did me, that writing itself is an act of travel. It returns us to places that no longer exist, and it clarifies possible futures. In “Philadelphia Notebook,” D. Frederick Thomas records a voice message to themself in a moment of solitude, noting patterns, details, and generational habits that come to them all at once. How wonderful it is that we have a way of being in multiple places at the same time, of taking the ephemeral and making it, in some way, permanent.
“But tonight,” Thomas writes, “I am the only one waiting, speaking poetry into the early autumn air.”
Andrew Zhou
Prose Editor
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