By Celina Tran, James Taylor & Emily Smyth
Issue III: Hunger is our first print issue and is available both online and in print format now.
Founder and EiC Celina Tran on 'hunger' as a theme
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Issue III comes at a time when hunger is rippling through society. Every day, there’s a new headline about some foreign conflict or a successful climate conference, photos of starving children next to a review of a brand new, exclusive restaurant with a 3-year-long waitlist. Our social media pages are stuffed with infographics, engagement rings, summer bodies that cause gut-churning envy, and pasta recipes we'll save, but never make. One could argue that these things are all the creation of one inescapable sin: hunger.
Be it hunger for the flesh, success, money, love, or something more, I believe humans are incapable of abandoning the sensation. We eat our bellies full then reach for the fork mere hours later. We crave love and devotion from our soulmates but still yearn for the admiration of others. We tell ourselves not to fall victim to sins, yet many of us do nothing but lust and greed for the approval of someone, something, bigger. The gut eats away at the world, never content, but hunger needn’t always be a bad thing. It also sparks a need for purpose, art, and beauty. It is the mother of lust, but also love, and the primal source of the joining of souls, of creation.
I hope you’ve worked up an appetite because these pages contain more than enough to satisfy the rumbling in your belly, or soul. And as always, regardless of your meaning of hunger, I hope it makes you feel alive.
Love,
Celina
Executive Poetry Editor James Taylor on Issue III: Hunger
Hunger is desire’s more deadly double. Some might argue that hunger is simply synonymous with desirous or humoral feeling, but it suggests something more primal, inescapable, a collapse between the boundaries of body and mind that desire so skillfully tightropes. When consumed by hunger, the mind and body become one harmonious,amalgamated entity, united in attaining the object of its want. It’s been fascinating to read such astute, surprising, and shocking work on the subject - far from singling out the traditional needs of the gut, hunger for this issue’s writers manifests in everything that might suggest ‘selfless subjectivity,’ which, perhaps contradictory, often means being the object of another’s hunger rather than hunger’s subject.
Thus, these are works dedicated to expressing how it feels to be chewed up and spat out by capitalism, consumerism, fleshly landscapes and oblique questions that hunger for easy answers. With this issue’s submission diet, I was surprised by the amount of work dedicated to religion - the need for an almighty purpose or plan, a metaphysical investment that would answer why we perhaps feel such hunger in the first place. Perhaps creative and imaginative works are one way of filling that gap, letting the body speak as the mind, or simulating satisfaction for an appetite that can never be appeased.
To that end, I hope these exemplary poems, stories and artworks are one way of appeasing whatever it might be that you hunger after.
James x
Executive Prose Editor Emily Smyth on Issue III: Hunger
Citrus season is upon us; words are neatly delivered like a box of clementines. Peel away the tough covers and eat the meat of poetry, sweet and bursting with potential.Squeeze out its meaning and let blood orange rivulets cascade down your hands. I hope this edition of Erato tastes to you like a clementine, savour it, hunger for it.
Emily
Note:
A special thanks to all the all people who submitted their wonderful work to issue III, the contributors, and Erato Magazine's team - it would not be possible without you. The Erato team consists of Celina Tran, James Taylor, Emily Smyth, Ana Bogdanova, Tiffani Ngo Le, and Snehil Srivastava.
All profit from the print issue goes towards the costs of printing, upkeep of the website, and licenses. We hope that the print issue can assist in our journey towards more accessible art, culture, and literature, while also promoting new and existing creatives.