Selves are slippery reptiles, replicating in the muck of conversation, the algorithm, the swampy morass of a mind. Sweating through the summer heat, shedding sunburnt skin, we might emerge in August anew, refreshed; or scarred, cynical, jaded, yet still sparkling––or perhaps stumble into fall as someone else entirely. Stuck in our heads or escaping into the streets, we don’t become ourselves alone. My self, on the days I can glimpse her, bears traces of too many to name: mothers, friends, fakes, sisters, kindred souls, immediate nemeses, crushes, teachers, writers, lovers, liars. Lying is entangled with self-fashioning, fake-outs fade into epiphanies, people change us. I’ve been so many girls, I can’t recall all of them. Some of them hated themselves, others were witty, most were often scared, a few flirted impulsively and cried easily, the one I am now hopes the others are ok, and she’s sorry she was so cruel to them. My favorite people used to be strangers, not just to me but to themselves. We became ourselves by holding hands and playing games, talking too loudly and writing some of it down. 

On paper, we can appear in grayscale, caged in by straight lines and white lies. We can seem solidified, but those selves––lacking our leaky membranes, sweat, scabs, blisters, blood––aren’t human, by which I mean bruised, stooped, strange, stilted, yearning, still trying. Honest, incisive writing about the self finds us not frozen but writhing in flypaper, trapped perhaps, but not immobile. The right sentence might just be able to slice through the sticky part, open a portal and let us slip into the hollow hiding just beneath the double bind of subjecthood in our era, of attempting to speak the ephemeral self into something formed.  

This issue of Triangle House Review is themed ‘Self’: we wanted writing towards, about, around, behind, beneath ourselves, writing that revealed the faulty premise of selfhood and writing that rebuilt it, writing that read true, pulled something taut, spat acid as often as spun sugar, saw other people in the mirror. 

Alissa Bennett recalls a lover who resembled her, a reflection across gender’s trick mirror, and she remembers the way their shared appearance unsettled straightforward notions of self, “the pleasure people expressed when they encountered us, a set of pale and long limbed doppelgangers echoing off of one another in infinite regression.” 

She spent years in front of the camera as a model, and all those lenses eventually lent her a revelation: “there will always be something satisfying about the idea of being reduced to the realm of the spectral.” Reduction, reconstruction, running liquid language through a sieve, removing the silt, rending apart, burying meaning alive only to attempt a resurrection: these are just a few modes of translation illuminated in Anthony Parks’ essay on literary translation, and its relation to the translation of self that occurs every time we speak. Inevitably, “truth” is “watered down by the tongue’s saliva the moment it leaves the mouth.” Translating from one language to another enacts a ritualistic cleaving: “one abstract meaning or physical thing becomes two. The empty tomb might be filled, but the ghosts have to go somewhere.” Ghostly silhouettes sliver through a sauna in Rob Franklin’s Labyrinth, where a man works nights among drenched flesh, dark rooms, men, money, devastation and desire. Haunted by his own past, he finds, if not transcendence, the something like purpose in bringing his body into communion with one that allures, terrifies, and ultimately touches him. “Close enough now to feel heat bounding off his waiting body and to submit to what I’m not sure I’d call sex, something that obliterates and makes you new. Into what I’m not sure – a tool.” 

Lexi Kent-Monning explores feminine utilitarianism of a sort in an excerpt from her novel The Burden of Joy, asking when selflessness tilts into self-serving, when a maternal instinct masks a maw of need. She finds “selfishness in my selflessness, my mothering. The only way to be indispensable, valued, validated, is to be needed by others, to provide a service.” Two poems excerpted from Matt Starr’s forthcoming debut Mouthful situate the self in sexual, erotic relation to others, nature, technology, and astrological bodies: he charges his ass in the sun and drinks what was once lemonade from his lover. In this issue’s roundtable, a chorus elegizes David Burr Gerard, an incomparable friend and mentor to so many. As Monika Woods writes, “people loved David because he had depth. He was someone you wanted to think highly of you, he elicited your funniest stories, got you to admit to your unpopular opinions, he made you laugh, but you would laugh together.” 

When I spoke to the inimitable Kate Zambreno for this issue’s interview, we considered the self as a communal being, and spoke of service, care, “how to write the cacophony of voices, the liveliness of them” as they cross-pollinate, germinate, and even contaminate each other. Alice Martin, in a critical meditation on Sheila Heti’s oeuvre, elucidates this “cyclical nature of the self and others co-constructing,” identities, imagining writing as, “like the self…an act of mediating the accumulation” of voices, ventriloquizing a chorus. Kate and I also wondered about less often valorized, if no less generative, motivations to employ a first-person mode, how to “philosophize anger and ugly feelings.” Obscuring the self from prying eyes, taking pride in opacity, is a form of rebellion; in an exploration of Yiyun Li’s life and literary oeuvre, Na Zhong notes that Li “doesn’t mind being misunderstood by people. Rather, she takes delight in her duplicity.” Kate also noted that writing from the often maligned first-person perspective, while insisting on its connection to a communal ‘we,’ can be rooted in an impulse towards taking “revenge” on a stifling, censorious, capitalist and individualist culture. Batool Abu Akleen’s poetry, written from Palestine amid Israel’s genocidal war and published here in both Arabic and English translation, promises elegy as revenge, rendering grief a recipe, a meal to be shared with those who survive in honor of those who have been lost, feeding love to the dead and melting moist hope in a pot for those who remain. Her words insist on a future where her community will be nourished, and in doing so create one, contesting individualistic notions of self by emphasizing her resemblance and relation to those who are gone, giving primacy to kinship over individual survival: “I fill rusted sardine tins with the smell of sorrow/Mothers’ glances cling tightly to their eyes/But I snatch them swiftly, because I resemble their children/In a copper pot/I boil what I stole.”  

This issue of THR was the first I was lucky enough to work on, joining the magazine’s longtime stewards Monika Woods and Becca Schuh. In our next issue, we will welcome more brilliant writers and editors to our editorial board: Mariah Stovall, Milo Walls, Rob Franklin, and Lexi Kent-Monning. I hope the prose, poetry, and interviews in this installment spark daydreams and digressive conversations; I hope you find your self speaking about these pieces with a friend, shedding shame and slipping into someone new. It’s hot out there, and if you let yourself sweat, you might find that fetid scent has a secret, if you let someone smell you.