Perspective

https://youtu.be/uIh0Kv2CSiM?si=U3HI9jXccWxQb3sk

Let’s talk about noise.

Not just the good kind—music, laughter, a voice you

love saying your name—but the constant, low-grade

everywhere-ness of noise. News, content, opinions,

updates. A never-ending scroll. Everything meaning

something and nothing. We’re living in a kind of

permanent surround sound.

We have always been listening.

Before we wrote anything down, we passed it mouth to mouth, breath

to breath. Story as survival. Warning. Prayer. Song. The word has

never belonged only to the page—it lived in the throat, in the air, in the

echo between us.

So, for this issue, we made something unruly. An issue that doesn’t just

sit still in your hands. An issue that insists on a second sense. This is

our first audio issue.

With Poetry Month here again, it felt right to return

to this: language as music, as pulse, as something alive in the body.

Each piece extends beyond the page. So read the pieces.

Follow the thread. Listen. Let the work arrive. Let it carry you.

Let it vibrate. Because often sound does something the eye

cannot. It bypasses your neat, editorial brain. It goes lower.

Or deeper. It finds the soft place inside you and says: feel this.

Listen. Notice what shifts. Notice what sharpens.

This is our offer to the noise.

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Allison Bothley is a writer and recovering MFA (The New School) who lives in Orangeville, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The White Wall Review, Sad Girl Diaries, The Literary Review of Canada and others. She is the creator and publisher of Bangs Zine, an independent space hot for big feelings, emerging writers, and lazy Sunday readers.

IG: @allisonbothleywrites

Website: www.allisonbothley.com