"Naked Athena" leads off Theodore Van Alst Jr.'s 2020 Portland Protest Portfolio in this 2021 volume of Gobshite Quarterly.
This issue also contains: An essay by Catalunyan Cristina Álvarez Lopez & a hybrid memoir/poem by PDXer Leanne Grabel.
Poems by Croatian poets Tomislav Marijan Bilosnic & Croatian Marija Dejanovic & Monika Herceg, New Yorker poet J. Randall Brett, Greek poets Phoebe Giannisi & Thanos Gogos & Vasileia Oilonomou, Lithuanian poets Ausra Kaziliūnaite & Rimas Uzgiris; Estonian poet Triin Paja, & Washingtonian poet Armin Tolentino.
Stories by Slovenian & Russian & Oregon writers Andrej Blatnik & Andrej Sen-Senkov & Joy McDowell.
Graphix & Comics by Lithuanian artist Migle Anusauskaite (profiled in the Dec. 23, 2019 New Yorker Talk of the Town), Melbournian artist Michael Fikaris, two pieces by multimedia PDXer Leanne Grabel, Rotterdam/Rio artist Tânia Cardoso, Croatian artist Miroslav Nemeth.
Parallel text languages in this issue include English, Bulgarian, Spanish, Croatian, Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Swiss German, Tagalog.
Grabel, Leanne: - Leanne Grabel, writer, illustrator, performance poet, teacher & co-founder of Portland's legendary pome-performance space, Café Lena, also teaches performance poetry classes for teens thru var. PDX lit. outreach orgs. Grabel has just completed Tainted Illustrated, an illustrated stretched memoir, which is being serialized in THE OPIATE. Her illustrated flash memoirs will soon be published monthly for a year by Another Chicago Magazine. In love with mixing genres, Grabel has written and produced such spoken-word multi-media shows as "The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression"; and "Anger: The Musical." Her collection of graphic pomes, Gold Shoes, was excerpted in GobQ #27. She returns with another of her illustrated sui generis histories of feminist icons (which in past have included Dorothy Parker & Sylvia Plath, also featured in GobQ), presented trilingually in English, Icelandic, and Spanish: Anne Sexton: She Was a Sexpot/ Anne Sexton hún var kynlífsspottur/ Anne Sexton: ella era una cachonda.
Herceg, Monika: - Monika Herceg (born in Sisak, Croatia, 1990) won the 2017 Goran Award for Young Poets for her debut manuscript, Početne koordinate/Initial Coordinates, which was published in 2018 and receiving several awards, including the Kvirin Award (for young poets), the Slavic Award for the best debut, & the international Bridges of Struga Award. Her next books were Lovostaj/The Closed Season (also winning awards) (2019), & Cile tous tension (selected pomes), pub. in France (2019). In late 2020 she won a dramatic competition and had a play premiered in Zagreb during December, 2020. She is also a coeditor of the Croatian literary magazine Tema. She makes her GobQ debut with several poems published in parallel text, in Croatian, English, Spanish, Lithaunian, Russian, Finnish, Portuguese, and Tagalog: zmijske smrti/snake deaths/Gyvačių mirtys/смерти змеи/käärmeiden kuolemat/morte de cobra/muertes de serpientes/Ahas ng kamatayan; nasljedne bolesti/ hereditary diseases/enfermedades hereditarias /arfgengir sjúkdómar/ doenças hereditárias/perinnölliset sairaudet; sitne smrti/tiny deaths/маленькие смерти/muertes diminutas; Lisica/fox/Refur/zorro; zečje smrti/rabbit deaths muertes del conejo/Kamatayan ng mga kuneho
Tolentino, Armin: - Armin Tolentino, orig. from NJ, went to Rutgers (along w/ another GobQ contributor, Rimas Uzgiris, also in this issue.) Armin resides in Vancouver, WA, with his wife and their three chinchillas, and is working on making the Guiness Record for World's Loudest Clap. Also, he's an avid fisherman. His pomes have been in Hyphen mag., Arsenic Lobster, The Ravin Chronicles, and Pontoon Poetry. His first collection, We Meant to Bring it Home Alive, was published by Alternating Current Press in 2019. He makes his GobQ debut with three poems (presented in parallel text, in English, Croatian, Spanish, Icelandic, Russian and Tagalog): A Letter that Spaceboy Never Received [ii.]/Pismo koje svemirski kauboj nikad nije primio [ii.]/Una carta Spaceboy nunca recibido [ii.]/Письмо, которое космический мальчик так и не получил [ii.]/Bréf sem Geimstrákur fékk aldrei [ii.]/Isang Liham na Hindi na Natanggap ni Saceboy [ii.]; A Letter that Spaceboy Never Received [iii.]/Isang Liham na Hindi na Natanggap ni Saceboy [iii.]/Una carta Spaceboy nunca recibido [iii.]/ Bréf sem Geimstrákur fékk aldrei [iii.]; A Letter that Spaceboy Never Received [v.]/Bréf sem Geimstrákur fékk aldrei [v.]/Pismo koje svemirski kauboj nikad nije primio [v.]/Письмо, не полученное космическим мальчиком [v.] We shall be featuring more of his work in future issues.
