The idea of a critical constellation itself came from one of the community visioning sessions this past May held by Reorienting Reads, a collective dedicated to highlighting trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive Asian diasporic literary voices founded late summer of 2023. In those visioning sessions, the collective organizers, myself included at the time, asked the attendees about their dreams of how Reorienting Reads could run internally and engage with its community. On the collaborative board that served as our notes, a virtual sticky, “online symposium format: critical constellations,” appears, the only fragment of a wider topic prompted by one of the writers in the space, who asked why there wasn’t more criticism by and for our community’s work. It’s not clear in my memory who says what from this point, but these things are said: that we all know each other and deserve to be read better by those who understand what we may be trying to convey; that we deserve the kind (and kinder) of criticisms that help us make better art—art, in this case, that dots along the travels of lives similarly dreamed, grieved, and hoped for; art as altars of conversation and doors of exegesis.

By the time I brought the critical constellation to Dilettante Army as a guest editor for the issue before you, it had subtly changed. Aside from lifting out of this session for and by one community, I was thinking of criticality beyond an academic context of literature review, thesis, and supporting evidence. It was also far from the criticality of faultfinding, the censorious meant to injure. It was larger, though included, the critic-at-large, writing deftly on any art as the visioning attendees might have imagined that day. By the critical, I wanted more possibilities for how reasoned appreciation and interpretation could be deployed in writing. Perhaps the world as it was already contained the world as it could be. Did the critical live in letters and text messages, in interviews and bar conversations? Could we capture these forms outside of commerce that invited more than laudatory descriptions and marketing derivatives? I was thinking of the critical as crisis, or crucial; the point upon which history turns, the point demarcating before and after. And that is always more than one history going on at a time: official history; the people’s history, but also secret histories; personal histories.

Just as important as what critical could mean was the idea of the constellation. Again, this term came from somewhere else, wafting in from the theme of the 2024 Asian American Literature Festival: Cosmic Kinship. In early April, around the same time I received the editorial invitation from Dilettante Army, a small group of festival organizers met separately to find a theme that could describe a journey of false starts, institutional failures, and a new independence forged in uncertain and hostile circumstances since the last festival in 2019. The stars came to symbolize a community held together beyond space and time, and then beyond it—the festival, after five years of wait and struggle, is happening the same week this issue is being published, almost a full year after the genocide in Gaza began, a near-year in which some people have been more afraid to name a genocide as it unfolds than the genocide itself. But far greater, it seems, have been beacon-to-beacons of protests, news, and poems. In making, repeating, and interpreting, survivors, activists, and witnesses have made new kinds of constellations in crisis, far apart as we seem.

In calling for pitches for critical constellations, I thought I merely wanted new forms for critical thinking on creative work. I thought I wanted the kinds of writing we found more often in private than in a commercial public; writing that was made especially for the artists in conversation, on a third work or a common theme, whether the interlocutors were longtime friends or lovers; teachers or students; past or future self. This issue does indeed contain these forms. Yet, it also contains, time and again, that other layer of the “critical:” the constellation formed at the turning point, critical because it grows not out of the ego’s judgment, but out of significance and need. A need for guideposts, maps, and permanent company—company in solitude, be it time or space.

Friendship, then, became a strong secondary theme of the issue before you. Madison Mae Parker, in “Belief,” traces over ten years in the literary world through first and ongoing encounters with friends and students, encountering younger versions of herself along the way. These experiences distill into both the Friendship Zines that Parker excerpts and the growing understanding of friendship, and art, as renewing resources.

Whereas friendship is the focal point of Parker’s “Belief,” Aria Pahari and Dure Ahmed’s “Light Years” started as a place to follow Fred Moten in “undoing mastery” by making a “syllabus that goes on forever.” Created as part of an assignment in graduate school, the syllabus annotations and the conversation that follows them surprisingly become a place not only to show intellectual changes, but also emotional ones: an opportunity for the authors to express the then-hidden conditions of their lives in a now-longer friendship that might be the real forever-syllabus.

“Light Years” fanned out from critical texts found in a classroom, where a friendship was formed. Kiril Bolotnikov and Scout Faller’s “Reading Into It: Poets on Each Other’s Influences,” on the other hand, the shared texts were not assigned, but offered like bids of intimacy. In “Reading Into It,” Bolotnikov and Faller criss-cross upon each other’s Top Ten lists of favorite poems, the culmination of a casual practice of sharing favorite poems one at a time. They read each other’s poems next to one of their co-author’s top ten poems, tracing influences as they influence each other. The resulting analyses are enhanced by attention to details that only friends would have the context for, such as the inclusion of a column in a spreadsheet, or a practice of copying down loved poems by hand.

Occasions for close reading may come from coincidence of age and artistic lineage, too. Gauri Awasthi and Jack Vanchiere’s “Two Poets Looking: ‘At Twenty Eight’” takes mutual mentor Amy Fleury’s poem, “At Twenty Eight,” as the first beacon in a series of illuminations about looking back upon life at twenty-eight. Sharing the sign of the astrological Saturn return and the words of Giorgio Agamben in their parallel essays, Awasthi and Vanchiere offer both different angles not only of their own movements through time but also distinct angles of understanding, or applying, Fleury’s poem in their lives.

Although many of the pieces in “Critical Constellations” twine and wind around two people at once, in “Wayward Taxonomies,” the artists Simone Zapata, Sarah Yanni, and Christine Imperial, speak as a braid of three voices. In the piece, this year’s Zapata starts and ends with curatorial remarks and reflections on the group show that featured Yanni and Imperial’s artworks. Sandwiched in between are excerpts unpublished interviews from 2022 that Zapata had with Yanni and Imperial individually, while the present-day third author’s voice interjects with further observations, creating a triple-headed form that pushes the possibilities of multi-tiered conversations.

Visual art comes to the fore again in H.L. Kim’s treatment of Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory collages through Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory. Kim argues for Chang’s collages as sites of reparation and collaboration with absent family members to piece together a fragmented history. To do this, Kim transforms the ostensible violence of cutting through old family photos themselves into a visual arts practice supported by her Chang’s community and shared with her late mother, silence filling with not answers, but commemoration.

Kim’s piece ends with a quoted reference from Chang on the writer’s “self-made chisel” from Jeanette Winterson, a lesbian adoptee writer who features prominently in Andie Sheridan’s “The Flap.” In this poem-essay, Sheridan’s speaker attempts to forge their own chisel with the words of other adoptee writers—Winterson, Sarah Audsley, and Tiana Nobile—while also describing their own sense of dislocation in travel and the impossibility of finding an “I” already lost. In doing so, Sheridan’s speaker comes upon not a way to be cured from sorrow, but to name it for themself and other adoptees.

To put words down requires, even in the same language, a measure of translation. In the field of translation, the poles of sound or sense tend to conflict with each other: neither can be optimized while the other is still considered. Neta Kleine’s essay, “Stevie Smith, Maria Stepanova, and the Poetics of Miscommunication,” asks what possibilities lie in translation when faithfulness to the original text is not the point? How loudly might the “grain of the translator” sound as Stevie Smith’s English turns into Maria Stepanova’s Russian? Kleine, herself translating Stepanova’s Russian into English, picks out for us the shifts in language that makes these poems Smith-Stepanova and Stepanova-Smith.

The final piece in this issue is Eunsong Kim’s “With Lunar Calendars: On Pat Parker & Merle Woo.” Kim, whose research into Pat Parker’s archives turned up flyers of the performance group Unbound Feet, prompting a search for its former members. Their limited presences online has the reader following Kim on a more old-fashioned trail: asking around to those alive. What results is the constellation of that trail: an interview with Nellie Wong next to details on the lifelong activist and writer Merle Woo’s work and campus activism, juxtaposed with images from Pat Parker’s archive.

Kim named her essay “With Lunar Calendars,” and today marks the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is also Chuseok, Tsukimi, and Tết Trung Thu. I will be among many others looking up toward one of our closest celestial luminaries, and though the moon’s cultural significances are vast and myriad, when I see it and it shines on me, I think of my own memories underneath other full moons, a constellation that swerves deeply into the space of times past.

All these pieces, including this letter you’re reading right now, have been meticulously and dangerously illustrated by the artist Rhea Iyer, who we chose for her vibrant visions that feel plucked out of waking dreams both hopeful and surreal. For each piece, Iyer has created images of fruiting and flowering bodies and a haunting cover for this issue that I can’t stop watching back. I especially appreciate her use of stippling to create the illusion of forms and shadows through the presence of individual dots.

From the pieces before you, the “critical” has transformed because it was placed next to “constellation.” A text, object, or person might be considered “critical” now for new reasons. Critical, retrieved from meaning only academic rigor, orbited around junctures and turning points in understanding these writers’ places in history and the purposes of their artmaking. Texts became critical because they were tables upon which these writers could meet each other; see each other in new light.

While all of the critical constellations in this issue deal with the critical as appreciation and interpretation, I find that their diversity and strength lies in how they have each chosen to reach other: as lights observed, once crucial, then fixed by choice; as permanence made by returning, which inevitably transforms the refrain.