Letter from the Editor
It’s a Sunday. I’m writing to you from a small blue stool, sinking softly into semi-wet mud. Next to me is the jasmine bush I planted many monsoons ago—in bloom, again. Lately, a stray cat from the street has been spending its afternoons beneath it. This morning, I saw two kittens lying beside her, one black, the other grey. As I’ve been editing this Volume of Sontag Mag, my last before I step down as associate editor, I’ve been thinking about this idea, attributed to Camus, that the misery and greatness of this world is that it offers no truth, only objects for love.
The poets in this Volume have found many such objects. Spring flowers, aging fathers, lakes that hold echoes, wands, hands, children. Reading about the solitary and pure cry of an ugly bird, I can almost hear it in my own garden, and I think how fortunate we are for these reminders that something other than ourselves is real. Murdoch got there before me, of course: “Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”
So, with these poems, I invite you to look at what is before you. What are your duties toward it?
Thank you for reading with me these past volumes. It has been the object of my love, and I leave it now in your hands.
Aiman Tahir Khan is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan, and the inaugural Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate in English. Her work appears in Nimrod International Journal, Harpur Palate, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, Nashville Review, and elsewhere.