A Literary Journal Review from Tampered Press

The title itself is a plea, a lamentation, a bucket of memories tired of the cycle. A question. An anger. An act of giving up and letting go.

This journal is about returning to ourselves.

It is about sitting beneath our skin and listening. Really listening to the flow of blood, the soft throbbing of veins, the quiet moulding of the body into who we are. What makes us. This is an ode to memory. To infrastructure. To the oil that keeps us moving, even when we feel still.

I couldn’t stop reading these stories. I wanted more. And every time that hunger rose, I return to the line in the editor’s note that read “stories rarely arrive finished” and I swallow the wanting and sit with what was given. I am learning, through this journal, how to sit with incompleteness.

This literary journal opens with Denoo Edinam’s How Many Times Person Go Dey Beg God, ushering us into the world of unfinished stories. The title itself is a plea, a lamentation, a bucket of memories tired of the cycle. A question. An anger. An act of giving up and letting go. A bucket of emotion begging for anything- answers- anything. This title is a sum total of everything in this book.

Longing sits beneath every piece here.

Memory is such an interesting thing. It clings to smell, to taste, to the texture of air. Sometimes memory lives in the way someone walks, in the colour of food, in a ribbon, in a bowl.

An asanka.

I had never thought of the asanka as a vessel of memory, a kind of living archive, until now. This journal changed that for me. I especially love it so much, traveling from 1990 to present day. So much history and memory hidden in time and clay.

Every story in here, every poem feels deliberate. Careful. Deep. The language, the structure, the arrangement it all feels held, like nothing here is accidental, yet incomplete.

I love this. I love this. I love this.

I am sitting with poems that give language to feelings I could not name. With stories that remind me of all my bones have carried, all my skin has concealed.

This is an ode to memory.
An ode to the self.
An ode to returning.
An ode to becoming.