Prologue 2: Without a Face

The website isn’t the magazine. The magazine is a quarterly PDF—a finished object released four times a year. Each issue is designed, sequenced, and assembled as a single piece of editorial sculpture.

The website is something else. Eventually I imagine it becoming a conversation. A collage. A feature wall where ideas, fragments, and arguments accumulate over time. Writers and readers circling the work together, pushing it sideways, extending it into strange directions. But architecture comes before crowds. Right now the site is still in its early phase: experiments, fragments, and the occasional successful accident.

Which brings us to the Prologue. Originally I thought of the Prologue as a trailer. Not a polite preview, but something closer to a film trailer—an artifact in its own right. In cinema the trailer isn’t simply a miniature version of the movie. Sometimes the best moments are built specifically for it. Sometimes the scenes never appear in the final cut at all.

That idea stuck. In Issue 1, the Prologue partly behaved this way. Some pieces offered glimpses of the issue to come. Others existed only in that early space. A few of the strongest poems submitted ended up living exclusively in the Prologue—which was the plan at that moment.

For Issue 2, I leaned into the chaos. I accepted more work than could comfortably fit inside the final issue, knowing that some of it would live in the Prologue instead. Not because the pieces were lesser, but because I like the flexibility of having two modes of publication.

Over the course of our first year we’ll keep experimenting with the relationship between the website and the magazine—and with whatever the Prologue decides to become. For now, we’re just enjoying the sandbox.

Below are the authors and pieces contained in the Prologue for Issue 2 — Without a Face. The full issue drops April 15.

FICTION
Night Work — J.S. Apsley
Soul of a Nation — Daniel Brunbridge
A Modest Ambition — Isabel Fontes

POETRY
IYÁ ALÁYỌ̀ (Mother of Joy) — Anselm Eme
ỌFỌ — Anselm Eme

Information Theory — Bradley E. Hoge
Schrödinger’s Equation — Bradley E. Hoge

Free the Ether 5 — Heikki Huotari
Free the Ether 6 — Heikki Huotari

When Measurement Fails — Tamara Karabetsos
Within the Middle — Tamara Karabetsos

INTERVIEW
Without Record — Tamara Karabetsos