An authoritarian regime constructs its reality on the level of words. In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” all words related to freedom and revolution are excluded from the newspeak. In Alain Domasio’s novel “Les furtifs,” the corporations that bought out the cities call them ‘liberated’. Russian propaganda operates in the same logic of language destruction. The special military operation goes on and its goal is ‘peace,’ while in reality cities are being destroyed and people are dying. In the same way, in Orwell’s novel, the Ministry of Peace was engaged in starting wars.

Words with a distorted meaning, repeated many times on screens, lose touch with reality, and the people who use them can neither understand what is going on nor how they feel about it. Losing touch with reality leads to an inability to act in it, and often to mental disorders.

The purpose of poetry (literature and language arts) is to be a laboratory of the most accurate, most necessary speech. The texts we have collected reveal the symptoms of the disintegration of language and point out ways out of it.

We invite you to publish:

poetic texts (audio, video, generative poetry, etc.)
autofiction
philosophical and critical essays

Deadline for submission of texts:

April 1, 2023