What a fierce and unrelenting psychic age we find ourselves in. The compromises made for continued sanity feel increasingly more concessional. As if it were not enough work to contest one’s own demons and endure, we are hourly now confronted by those of jingoistic stupidity, preventable tragedy, systemic injustice and militarism, all the while being flashed by an ever-quickening strobe of products meant to make us forget them. To watch television or read online one would think Jesus Christ had risen again in the form of the iPhone 8 and that OIC (Opioid-Induced Constipation) were a threat equivalent to the plague. It's all quite insane. Perhaps it always has been...

So, what to do but keep writing and making art, creating with a ferocity in measure to the forces that oppose it? Such ferocity can be found here in the poems of Bruce Smith and Jeffrey Schultz, in the imagined future haunting Jeremy Gluck’s art, in Chard deNiord’s urgent analysis of reading in America, and in the point-blank earnestness of The Executive Function’s new song, “This Town”. There is a lot of good here. May it provide you with some armor in these times, and serve to remind you how many fear our world’s trajectory and remain working, through art and empathy, to correct it.

One love,

Ben Evans
Editor, Fogged Clarity