“Is there no way to puncture the agonizing film keeping us all corralled here?” — Sandra Simonds, epigraph to “Puncture —> Burst”
This October, Guernica gathers writers who press against that film—the membranes of socio-political violence, mortality, inherited shame, and family silences keeping us stuck within our separate ‘heres’—with words as their points of puncture.
In fiction, Zhu Yue’s Running (translated from the Chinese by Jianan Qian and Alyssa Asquith, from Masters of Sleep and Other Stories, forthcoming Accent Edition, 2026) turns a child’s “funny running” into a lifetime of uneasy movement through Beijing’s schools and hierarchies—a body learning to keep moving under the gaze that confines it. A.J. Rodriguez’s short story Inocentes unfolds over a long Albuquerque night, as two cousins drink through the loss of their grandmother and stumble into the buried violence of their family’s past.
In nonfiction, Puncture —> Burst begins with a broken egg in a Denver kitchen and expands outward, revisiting 2020’s twin crises of the pandemic and state violence, and the collective impulse to break out of one’s shell. In conversation, Things as It Is: An Interview with Chase Twichell explores how Zen and poetry meet in the practice of seeing clearly—and why “great poetry can’t be paraphrased.”
Our Global Spotlights feature Kaisa Rillorta Aquino’s First Love Never Dies, set in Santiago City, Philippines, where love and disillusionment share the same air, and a nation’s squandered hopes mirror the ache of what might have been.
Finally, Anthony Joseph, the Trinidad-born poet and musician whose Sonnets for Albert won the T. S. Eliot Prize, offers Peter and Gordon Grant, poems that move between Port of Spain and London, charting the crossings between togetherness and loss; French poet James Sacré, this year’s Prix Goncourt laureate for poetry, contributes I will not be afraid, a brief and luminous piece that names death—and poetry itself—as “silence and enigma.”
Featuring—courtesy of the artists—striking original art by Clemente Vergara, Melba Arellano, Jianan Qian, Kriston Banfield, and Sarah D’Ambrosio.
Welcome to the October issue!
–Youmna M. Chamieh, Editor-in-chief