A literary journal, like a writer, has its own voice, one developed over years of immersion in style, aesthetic, and honing one’s subjectivities. Recently, a friend and I tried to discern what gives a literary journal its character. Appraising a recent issue of New England Review, the friend noted, “Well, the logo on the cover, it’s sans serif, and that’s important.”

Our logo does eschew serifs—or tails and feet in the nomenclature of font. What does this lack of appendages mean, and what shifted when our redesign team chose to swap out our very much serifed logo in 2021? Why did our new logo feel so apt to the present moment and to our ongoing mission to feature what we consider to be the very best of the writing that crosses our desks—work by new and established voices from around the world, across genres, and from diverse communities? Did it have something to do with no longer running, as feet do, or no longer embracing our animal essence, as tails might signify? 

Surely, not. We still aspire to quickness of mind, to embodiment. Rather, sans serif fonts denote simplicity, legibility, minimalism. Perhaps this did characterize our literary journal’s engagement with our time, our hope that we can understand and embrace changes in the culture, enter a dialogue with them, divorce ourselves from recidivisms and rigidities and back-in-the-day-isms. 

Still, even the idea of a logo gives me pause. Logo—a word just right given the commodification of seemingly everything down to the air—from logos, meaning word, a paradoxical etymology for something so shorthand, so corporatized. A literary journal, especially one committed to the materiality of print, asks a reader to slow down. I often wonder, awe-filled, at a writer’s ability to select exactly that right word—logos—one that doesn’t feel like a stretch but at the same time accomplishes an aversion to the obvious. The well chosen word is at once offhand and deeply considered, effortfully effortless. 

And yet what of AI, which purports to do that work in a split second? AI’s job is to speed things up, loss of nuance be damned. By 2026, its energy demands will equal the annual energy consumption of Sweden and Germany combined, according to a recent article in the Verge, and already those demands have required the recommissioning of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which melted down in 1979 and is expected to go back online in 2028. The word meltdown, equated with children acting like children or adults acting like children, derives from this unstable time, and yet today we stand on the precipice of another. 

Have I slowed down sufficiently to meet it? In the northeastern United States, light diminishes each day, taking with it warmth. Gone are months when an evening walk with the dog accompanied an easy transition from indoors to out. Now it is more of a startling reminder that we are changing states, chill air bringing memories of darkest, coldest winter. During that restless election season now just behind us—so many news articles read, so much ephemera now uselessly in the past—had I savored the timelessness of literature, that tactile joy of ink on page? Perhaps not. Just now, my computer is harnessed at its charging station for the night—like the dog seeking attention, demanding it has not had enough today. I ignore the laptop and turn to the warm light beside the sofa and that palpable, beloved object, the literary journal. I put muscle memory to work in that most physical act of reading. My senses cue in, the breath held all day releases, and the weight of the journal on my palm reminds me to be present, reflect, consider. 

In the pages of 45.4, we see the natural world in so many of its habits—all the tails and feet of it. Perhaps our writers, also, felt the need to slow down and take stock. Whatever the cause, issue 45.4 is an utterly fitting accompaniment to this moment of hibernation. In Burnside Soleil’s poetry, we see a coyote, deer, and, fleetingly, a hawk, while in the short stories of Jang Eun-jin (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton) and Roy Kesey, we see our protagonists’ empathy for their furry companions reach apotheoses of shared consciousness. In Jessica Tanck’s poetry we see ambiguous “creatures” torn apart in the sketchbooks of a character who “vivisected with ink.” Meanwhile the human takes on its own animal qualities in works such as Kathleen Wheaton’s “Beautiful Bob’s House Museum,” in which a character flings himself into a riptide as if to seek the bracing awakeness of remembering one’s body. In Dan Musgrave’s memoir “Limb from Limb,” two brothers gleefully dissect and reassemble G.I. Joe dolls. In Gabeba Baderoon’s nonfiction meditation “Adjacency,” a concussion becomes associated with the malaise of acknowledging South Africa’s history of slavery.

In the Chungking Express at 30 feature, curated by contributing editor J. M. Tyree, we see the urban landscape of Hong Kong—rendered in Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 cinematic breakthrough—reenvisioned through the lenses of nostalgia, memory, and most of all disappointment at the shattered hopes of Hong Kong’s handover from the UK to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. What changed with the return to authoritarian rule, what surprised us, what messages can we inhabit for today? 

In so many ways, our writers invite us to meditate upon this moment of change, peril, and government influence. We invite the reader to partake, perhaps in an armchair before the enduring light of reverie and contemplation. 

—Elizabeth Kadetsky, nonfiction editor

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