How Souls Travel
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In this issue, Joe Tobias merges a surgeon’s knowledge with the instincts of poetry in three poems beginning with “Repair.”
Karen Salyer McElmurray recalls pivotal moments of grief as she plans her father’s memorial at the beginning of the pandemic in “How Souls Travel.”
And Benjamin Anastas explores Japanese jetlag porn and the verb tenses of a man’s life at age 47 in the short story “Going Underneath.”
The images in this issue are intricate depictions of the moon captured over a century ago by James Nasmyth, an ingenious and wholly land-based Scottish astronomer, peering through a self-made telescope.
At first glance these intricate depictions of the moon might seem like photographs from the Apollo space program of 1961–75. In fact they were captured a century earlier by an ingenious and wholly land-based Scottish astronomer. Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modeling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted. From the Public Domain Review
