The Bombay Gin

Started in 1974, Bombay Gin is the literary journal of The Jack  Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics—co-founded by Allen Ginsberg and  Anne Waldman—at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Edited by students and department faculty, Bombay Gin publishes  innovative poetry, prose and hybrid texts as well as art, translations, interviews, and online multimedia content. Emerging from the Outrider or left-hand lineage, which  operates outside the cultural mainstream, Bombay Gin honors a  heritage of powerful scholarship and counter-poetics through the  publication of work that challenges the boundaries of language, form,  and genre.

Bombay Gin #46: Visionary Hauntology

***Submissions that explore and engage in the call will be most likely to be accepted for publication***

Visionary Hauntology 

Where do when faced with renewal, reconstruction, and apocalypse? 

In Derrida’s concept of Hauntology, contemporary culture is seemingly riddled by a constant state of longing - a nostalgia for “lost futures”. Humans feel the need to return to what is familiar; womb-like, in order to mollify the fear of unknown fates. The realities that haunt us have been threaded throughout human history, perhaps more notably in Norse mythology. Ragnarök is a series of events, including a great battle foretold to lead to the death of a number of great figures (including the Gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr and Loki), natural disasters and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, myth has it that the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors. 

The poem Völuspá describes the aftermath of events. In the poem, a völva (a female seer) recites:

It sates itself on the life-blood   of fated men,

paints red the powers' homes   with crimson gore.

Black become the sun's beams   in the summers that follow,

weathers all treacherous.   Do you still seek to know? And what?

We are interested in how the act of writing and creating art might explore ideas regarding temporal disjunction, the act of ‘seeing’, and cultural memory. Send us your anger, your posthumanism, your divinity and sanctuaries where life is renewed, redefined, and invigorated. 

\\\\ What do you think? 

General submission guidelines:

For our print issue, we welcome submissions of prose, poetry, and cross-genre work, interviews and non-fiction, and two-dimensional visual art in black-and-white and color. Poetry submissions should be comprised of 3-5 poems; prose, cross-genre, interviews, and non-fiction submissions should generally consist of no more than 10 pages; art, music, and video submissions should be limited to 5 pieces. 

Please include a 100 word bio, email, and mailing address with your submission. 

We read following the submission deadline and won't have a response for your work until after then, but general inquiries can be sent to bgin@naropa.edu, and more information can be found on our website.

We have an editor who is also open to working with translations of French, German, and Russian. Please feel welcome to send us work originally published in these languages.

*Simultaneous submissions are welcome, however, if your piece is accepted by another publication before ours, please let us know so we can withdraw it from our consideration.

*Rights to your piece remain your own. If your piece subsequently published, we ask that you note that its original publication was in Bombay Gin.

*Contributors will receive a complimentary copy of a magazine. We're not able to offer monetary rewards at this time.