For AL&C’s twenty-first issue we searched our submissions for texts and images that evoke Terra Incognita. Not works that simply transport the reader/viewer to another place, but ones that become places in and of themselves—unknown regions of poetic exploration, visual mappings of the unconscious, uncharted terrains of language. Where better to begin a journey through previously undocumented lands than with Rikki Ducornet’s drawings for Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Uqbar is a quintessential terra incognita, discovered at the “conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia,” and Rikki’s images call forth that world’s eerie beauty. From there, we tour Gretchen E. Henderson’s “Galerie de Difformité,” traverse Justin Petropoulos’ cityscape of automobile traffic and box kites, float (whale-like?) through the visual assemblages of Amy England’s dreamscapes, then wander the weird world that is Jerry McGuire’s sonorously surreal poems in conversation with Jesse Poimboeuf’s equally surreal collages. Finally, we enter strange landscapes with Lily Brown and Dan Beachy-Quick, and arrive at the uncanny near future where resides Randi Faust’s “Slogan Joe.” While the special feature ostensibly ends there, like most borders, this one is mutable, and so the journey continues. Many of the texts that follow take readers into unknown regions, not least Johanna Drucker’s “Embedment,” which invites us to engage typographical maps, not to mention Caroline Sulzer’s “Foreclosure,”
which sings an elegy for our own once uncharted and uncolonized world.

With this issue, we also announce that since our last issue, AL&C has itself moved into uncharted territory with the publication of Frank Rogaczewski’s The Fate of Humanity in Verse, our first-ever book publication. Frank’s poems have appeared in our pages several times, and we hope this publication will help bring his work the attention it so deserves. It’s been a gratifying journey, and we look forward to publishing more books in the future.

—Catherine Kasper and David Ray Vance