Hello, and welcome to the second iteration of rivulet: "volcano at work."

In the span of time since publishing issue 1, we have put forth an anthology of work from killing fields journal, traveled through and fled various American states, relocated, and by-and-by worked at untangling our relationships to love, labor, loneliness, agency, and collective memory. We have wandered through swaths of spatial-temporal relation, perhaps stretching the fabric via moments of kinship, doubt, rigorous attention, silence, and rest; the context, from our end, seems charged, and in this we have sought with honesty to tune-in to all that spills.

This spectrum of breaking and unfolding has us wondering, as Anne Carson wonders in her essay "The Gender of Sound," whether the concept of self-control, dissociation of inside and outside, really is an "answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility," or whether indeed there might be another human essence than self. We arrive with rivulet 2.

The pieces in issue 2 all dwell within and restlessly explore a certain space in-between. A process of translation is at work, here, that defies easy classification. Rather than moving between languages, these poems, essays, and hybrid works all seem to move somehow between themselves, as though uncomfortable resting in any kind of givenness. They stir and continue to develop within the interstices of their own forms, creating a vernacular of movement, flattening the artificial space between media and elongating the negative space of the unsaid.

We have, here, a collection of transmissions, dispatches, echoes.
We have:

      an evocation of water carved via sonic erasure;
      a yearning transmission from a podcast without organs;
      a Möbius strip as formed by
           a video review cum durational art piece of a poet’s new book and
           a review (in verse) by said poet of said video;
      serial vignettes — in image and prose — counting down to some benumbed end;
      photographs from the other planets that make up the American West;
      sutured poems, with audio, modeled after the plastic of 3D printers.

The political dimension of this work seems, to us at this moment, perfectly clear. Beyond an offering of radically weird art, rivulet 2 constitutes a means of reading that decentralizes and destabilizes itself, frustrating reactionary thought in reactionary time.

We believe, as ever in the goals posited in rivulet 1:

• to foster dialogue in which the interstitial spaces between artworks and artists speak and are granted room to develop
• to resist oppression in all forms and actively combat the atrophying of language
• to foreground voices of the dispossessed, with an eye to unspoken/undershared histories
• to publish work that pays deference to its ontology and somatic expression, or is still somehow in progress/process

As we continue to advance our idea of the interstitial (and varieties of translation) as aesthetic vernacular, we encourage all to contact us and/or submit to rivulet 3.

Thank you for reading.

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Apfel, Alana. Birth Work as Care Work.
Boyer, Anne. Garments Against Women.
Carson, Anne. “The Gender of Sound.”
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet.
Christensen, Inger. it.
Curan, Oisín. Mopus.
Ehrenrich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives & Nurses.
Fisher, M. F. K. How to Cook A Wolf.
Kapil, Bhanu. Incubation.
Namjoshi, Suniti. The Conversations of Cow.
Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty.
Notley, Alice. Certain Magical Acts.
Ohle, David. Motorman.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen.
Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing.
Weinberger, Eliot. Karmic Traces.