2023 hurtled us into a strange, new-old world: a series of post-lockdown New Normals, old normals, reversions, and subversions of the way life used to be. What do we do with this? Like layers of paint drying and contracting at different rates, cracks appear, revealing split lines previously invisible. For our 12.1 issue, P R ( I ) S E, we were interested in tracing the thin, web-like fissures between adjacent ideas—artistic, socio-cultural, and/or personal—using the launching pad of prose (what’s that?) and beyond.

 

Issue 12.1, P R (I) S E contains the wildness that’s customary of our zoo community: a recollection of an art exhibition, reclaimed Orientalist texts, deconstructed and generative poetry alike, a family genealogy. There are spiders, tigers, magpies, fireflies, lizards, androids. A-level literature paraphernalia, unsigned letters, court documents, Google searches, grocery lists. Poets pay homage while playing fast and loose with their peers’ original material, generating prose from poetry, investigating line breaks and speech patterns. Other genre-gaps prised include ( visual art | poetry ), ( poetry | code ), ( performance | poetry ). In various ways, we see text stretched and re-formed to bridge gaps between time, memory, and communities.

 

Many pieces in this issue look, read, and feel like they could have come from one of our previous issues over the past decade—Archival Paper; C . O . D . E .; Riff, Steal, Collaborate; T O G E T H E R APART; The Art of the Review; R O U G H M A T E R I A L. Maybe these comforting overlaps suggest that, despite it all, we’re tuned in more or less to the same frequencies, whichever radio station is currently playing. When we first designed the theme for issue 12.1, we said to each other, “Let’s feature prose this time (but, of course, we still want pieces that are not-prose, anti-prose).” We think we’ve mostly succeeded. (Twist & spoiler: are there any proper “prose” pieces in this issue?)

 

We continue to be so pleasantly surprised by the generous works our contributors have shared in the previous and following pages. Thank you for always opening up and expanding the way we write, read, and make art.

 

Until next time, we remain faithfully,

The Zookeepers

 

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