Collision Literary Magazine

JordanRiver Michaels’s Bleeding Fruit won our 2020 cover prize! This experimental work of art inverts traditional depictions of gender and still life while capturing the tone and mood of our 2020 annual issue. According to Michaels, "'Bleeding Fruit' is a piece from a collection of photographs named 'Psychological Portraits'... [which play] on the ideas of mental illness used in the Bible. Playing with strong concepts and unsettling topics, [I hope] to create conversation a...nd new understanding of life and the Bible [for my] viewers." You can find the full image, and others by this artist, in our 2020 annual magazine. This post is part of a series featuring work from previous Collision contributors, paying special homage to our prizewinners. Every week until August 17, we will be sharing some of the best content we’ve received to inspire you to submit to Collision. Submissions open August 19!

John Messer’s short story I’ll Keep Checking won first place in our 2020 writing contest! Our staff was enthralled by the experimental form of the story, which unfolds in transmissions, as well as the skillful world-building and complexity of the AI main character. According to Messer, this short story was inspired by the AIs in Joseph Staten's ‘Contact Harvest,’ as well as the gradual growth towards sentience seen in some of Isaac Asimov's work (also WALL-E). I've always ...liked Sad Robot stories, in how they explore strange yet relatable problems that are only able to be experienced by strange yet relatable characters. Being able to identify and emphasize with a character despite them not having a face, a body and or even a name is, to me, magical. At the end of the day, what makes us care about a character is if we can understand them, and I hope through reading their messages-turned-prayers, you'll come to understand and care about my Sad Robot, too. You can find the rest of I'll Keep Checking online in our 2020 annual magazine, starting on page 13. The art in this post, Longing, was created by Lief Liechty. View the full image on page 43 of our 2020 annual issue. This post is part of a series featuring work from previous Collision contributors, paying special homage to our prizewinners. Every week until August 17, we will be sharing some of the best content we’ve received to inspire you to submit to Collision. Submissions open August 19!

Leyla Çolpan’s experimental poem Milo won second place in Collision’s 2020 writing contest. Our staff was drawn in by the many layers of this poem, from the incisive feminist tone to the wide-ranging cultural and artistic allusions used to represent patterns of violence against the female body and soul. According to Çolpan,‘Milo’ is a reimagining of a much earlier piece of mine, and it tries to grapple with the reproduction of female trauma in art. In the poem, that line ...of thought starts in 1820 with the unearthing of the Venus de Milo, a classical ideal of female beauty curated, really, in ruinsa hell of a paradoxand widely reproduced in that state, a theme I spend some more time with in the text of my chapbook with the artist Sasha Barile, What Passes & What Passes Through. It then jumps forward a few years to l’Inconnue de la Seine, a young woman whose putative suicide ‘inspired,’ if you can call it that, widespread recasting of her face as an art object, a wall hanging and cultural fixture of Romanticism. Notablywhere the poem leaves offher face was also used for the first resuscitation dummies and for that reason gets referred to as the most kissed face in historywhose history? Did she ask for this? The poem also thinks about recasting in the sense of mediumflesh, marble, plaster, plastic, siliconeand loops this back to Galateathe original ‘fabricated’ or ‘made’ woman in Greek mythology and, in my thinking, a sort of transgender figure in that sensewith its numeration, maybe, serving as a gesture toward artistic ‘iterations’ on the female body and female death. Maybe it’s also fitting, then, that ‘Milo’ is itself a revisionand I’m wondering now about its own place in that history. You can find the rest of this piece online in our 2020 annual magazine, starting on page 28. Leyla Çolpan is a poet and translator based in Pittsburgh, PA. An inaugural Creative Arts Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, ze was awarded the 2019 Academy of American Poets Undergraduate Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 Frontier Open for hir work on multiethnicity, bilinguality, and the Turkish-American diaspora. Ze is the winner of the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry, judged by Kazim Ali, and hir poetry has recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, Homology, and Recenter Press Poetry Journal. What Passes & What Passes Through, hir collaborative chapbook with artist Sasha Barile, is now available from Ghost City Press. The art in this post, Tapped Out, was created by Brianna Howard. You can view the full image on page 89 of our 2020 annual issue. This post is the third in a new series featuring work from previous Collision contributors, paying special homage to our prizewinners. Every week until August 17, 2020, we will be sharing some of the best content we’ve received to inspire your creativity and encourage you to submit to Collision! Submissions open on Wednesday, August 19 for the 2021 issue. We hope to review your work!

Alazne Cameron’s creative nonfiction piece Recipes won third place in our 2020 writing contest. This flavorful personal essay impressed our staff with its rich imagery, nostalgic tone, and clever use of food and culinary language to recount memories of home and highlight the differences between Jamaican and American culture. Hungry for more of the story? Read the rest of this piece online in our 2020 annual magazine, starting on page 33. The art in this post, In My Element..., was created by Kiara Florez. You can view the full image on page 82 of our 2020 annual issue. This post is the second in a new series featuring work from previous Collision contributors, paying special homage to our prizewinners. Every Monday until August 17, 2020, we will be sharing some of the best content we’ve received to inspire your creativity and encourage you to submit to Collision! Submissions open on Wednesday, August 19 for the 2021 issue. We hope to review your work!

Muskan Aggarwal’s experimental short story Awakening is infused with subtle sci-fi elements, stunning language, and powerful representations of female agency. It is for these reasons our staff selected Awakening to receive Honorable Mention in our 2020 contest. The perspective of the women featured in Awakening is underrepresented in the general media and incredibly important in the fight for gender equality. You can find the rest of this short story on page 36 of our 2...020 annual magazine on our website (link in the bio). The art in this post, The Human Condition, was created by Tiffany Burke. You can view the full image on page 96 of our 2020 annual issue. This post marks the first in a new series featuring work from previous Collision contributors, paying special homage to our prizewinners. Every Monday until August 17, 2020, we will be sharing some of the best content we’ve received to inspire your creativity and encourage you to submit to Collision! Submissions open on Wednesday, August 19 for the 2021 issue. We hope to review your work!

It’s finally here, Mangoers!! Collision’s 2020 issue is out now on our website! We are so immensely pleased and excited to publish the incredible writing and art we have received this year. Art now has a renewed importance to escape and express for ourselves and those we love. We hope that readers and writers/artists alike can appreciate the care and attention that these works have accomplished. We also want to thank everyone for their continued work and support that it took to make this publication come to life. Congratulations all round!