Editor’s Note
My father died in a hospital bed talking
about helicopters & home
The opening lines of Mikaela Hoover’s poem “Semi-Speculative Elegy” about their father’s death returned me to my own. My father died on New Year’s Eve, and since 2021 January has become a month in which endings feel inseparable from beginnings—a time when memory presses insistently against the present and the inevitable future.
The central tension of Adroit’s Issue 56 emerges from this pressure: what happens when we encounter something we don’t yet know how to read or name—a body, a language, a history, a person—and proceed anyway. The issue began with my reading of two short stories rooted in foreign language learning. In Evgeniya Dame’s “Mother, Tongue,” Russian speakers move through English grammar in the wake of the post-Soviet period, while Sui Wang’s “A Piano Lost in a Forest, Fox Are Out” follows multiple speakers navigating Japanese in contemporary Japan. One of the Japanese language learners even thinks: “Language was a hallway he kept entering from the wrong end.” In both stories, language is less a tool for clarity than a site of friction, intimacy, and misrecognition.
K-Ming Chang’s “Female Dog” pushes this logic into the absurd, where a child’s punishment becomes a generative, unruly act: “The teacher locked her in the timeout closet, but she just impregnates the contents…” The story literalizes how containment fails. Cherline Bereza’s “The Love of Your Life is the Love of Your Life,” by contrast, turns to social performance, tracing how a woman’s fabricated pregnancy reveals the hunger—for attention, meaning, affirmation—that structures her relationships.
On the nonfiction side of the issue, narrators similarly contend with being seen, classified, and reshaped by others. In “Large Bodies & Spaceships,” Tania Perez Osuna writes about unfolding as a response to her uncle’s bullying, while Claire Y. Guo’s self-referential “The types of Chinese you meet on vacation” examines the impulse to sort people into legible types, even as those categories inevitably fail.
Poetry and translation extend these concerns into lyric and relational space where meaning is shaped through proximity. In Séamus Isaac Fey’s poem “My Therapist Graduated Me,” memory takes on architectural form: “Every kitchen takes on the shape / of your mother’s sometimes.” And in an excerpt from Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated by Lucy Rand, a friendship unfolds through projection, as one woman admits her friend “wanted to work on me like on a broken mirror… so that I could better reflect her image back to her.”
Across the issue, bodies are misread, histories misunderstood, and narratives improvised in the absence of certainty. Yet these encounters are not failures so much as attempts—sometimes tender, sometimes violent—to make contact. My hope is that Issue 56 offers readers not resolution, but a set of openings: ways to remain present with what resists easy naming as we move into the new year.
Cherry Lou Sy
Senior Editor
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