/library/oar/handle/123456789/1046 2025-12-26T04:21:15Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/141317 Title: Once I forget : poems Abstract: Once I Forget is a bilingual poetry collection (originally in Maltese, translated into English by Aaron Aquilina and John Martin) that explores themes of exile, memory, loss, and the indelible bond with the village of Ħad-Dingli, Malta. Divided into two sections — “Once a Village” and “Forgetting Everything” — the poems trace the poet’s departure from his childhood home, the erosion of memory with age, and the persistent pull of place and identity. Through vivid imagery of cliffs, swallows, village pumps, and red fields, Portelli navigates the tension between forgetting and remembrance, culminating in a meditative acceptance of transience. The preface by Prof. Norbert Bugeja frames the work as an epilogic awakening to memory’s fragility, positioning it within a lineage of exile poetry from Neruda to Walcott. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/141026 Title: Camp on campus : love’s labour’s lost’s queer scholar Authors: Aquilina, Aaron Abstract: This article reconsiders Love’s Labour’s Lost in view of contemporary antagonisms between experts and nonexperts. The link is both thought-provoking and illuminating. The first section explores this tension as it emerges through Shakespeare’s inchoate figure of ‘the scholar’, at once upheld and undermined. Here, the scholar-figure hovers between common and elite, erudite and buffoonish, utterly refined and hopelessly base. ‘He’ is also distinctively set apart from ‘she’: the women of the play who prove themselves much more worldly than their wordy counterparts. The second section furthers this particularly gendered portrayal and follows Berowne’s peculiar navigation of this dichotomy, noting his camp queerness as an ironic paradox that functions beyond binary dualisms and which points, through queer failure, to a possible method of dismantling today’s corrosive political rhetoric. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/141007 Title: The eloquence of salt : notes on poetry and poetic voice in the Mediterranean Abstract: The atmosphere at the Biennale was pregnant with the momentum that each of us, as budding practitioners, had already ramped up over the very first years of the new century. But the conversations on Bari's lungomare, the city's distinctive waterfront, were also heaving with the concerns we were trying to respond to: the spike in the arrivals of thousands of migrants who had set out from North Africa's politically simmering shores, the blockade of the Gaza Strip a year earlier and the tensions that were rising towards war and bloodshed in December of that year, the growing impact of climate change across our shores. With fellow poets from Cyprus, Palestine, Italy, Greece, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia and Egypt, I remember talking about the issues coming my way as I grappled with a new poetic idiom in the Maltese language, just as my island-home was living through the first years of its European Union membership: as a community of young writers back then, we were trying out and exchanging new ways of voicing the islands' rapidly shifting cultural, political and demographic landscape. [excerpt] 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/140545 Title: Antae : A Journal of Creative Writing, Vol. 9(1) Authors: Aquilina, Aaron; Borg, Benedicta; Cassar, Emma; Ersezen, Ulaş; Mangion, Katya; Zammit, Nikolai Abstract: 1. On “Relatability” by Jonathan Taylor; 2. Caged Bird by Katie Beswick; 3. Grief Song by Katie Beswick; 4. Wifedom by Katie Beswick; 5. Ledge by J. W. Wood; 6. Orientation by Lisa Kouroupis; 7. Afternoon Moon by Lisa Kouroupis; 8. My First Song by Matthew Ellis; 9. Ap-a-ta-pa-tit by Ħaley Xuereb; 10. Helpline/Hold Music by Oz Hardwick; 11. Snowfall by Mark Keane; 12. Sacred Glade by Craig Murray; 13. Dual Doubles by Ivar Balkits; 14. Twenty Years Since... by Jacob R. Moses; 15. such a strange day by Allen Seward; 16. the field-dressing of a deer by Allen Seward; 17. When they were small by Fotoula Reynolds; 18. Flâneuse by Susana H. Case; 19. Fashion by Susana H. Case; 20. The Poor Are Always Crossing The Sahara by Mickey Corrigan; 21. Trouble Means You’re Alone by Mickey Corrigan; 22. Ex Cathedra by Sheila E. Murphy; 23. The Fireman’s Wife by Jonathan Vidgop, trans. Leo Shtutin; 24. Inheritance by Leslie Benigni; 25. Coping Mechanisms by Leslie Benigni; 26. Beauty Marred My Own Little Cargo Cult by Eamonn Stewart; 27. The Apocryphal Anglerfish by Marie C. Lecrivain; 28. Pacific Palisades by Marie C. Lecrivain; 29. Guāi 乖 by Annie ZH Sun; 30. The Mountain-Drifter by Douglas Thornton; 31. New Morning by John Grey; 32. Shedding by Martina G. Mifsud; 33. Multilingual by Dustin P. Brown; 34. Transplant by Dustin P. Brown; 35. our end by Nathaniel Lechenmeyer; 36. Ekphrastic Goodwill by Nathaniel Lechenmeyer; 37. Your Excellencies by Abdullahi Buba; 38. A Bloom of Jellyfish by Danila Botha; 39. April 2024 in New York with a Line from Moonstruck by Anthony Lioi; 40. Jennifer versus Climate Change by Anthony Lioi; 41. Notes on Contributors 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z