Letter from the Editors

Temptation of Saint Anthony, Hieronymous Bosch, 1501

Dear Readers,

As Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “challenging social norms involves having a different affective relation to those norms, partly by ‘feeling’ their costs as a collective loss” (196). In our third issue of Love & Theft, we invite you to experience the tug and pull between tradition and taboo, between inhibition and indulgence. Our contributors ask what it means to resist temptation, what it means to give in, finding new language for the hidden and unsaid.

For the musician Rhiannon Rueda, a.k.a. kid named rhi, breaking norms is a way to access feeling within music. Rueda blends bossa nova with sugary indie pop, defying expectations in both genres. In the song “Sike!!” influences new (Laufey) and old (Antônio Carlos Jobim) echo behind melodic runs filled with surprising twists and turns. Through music, Rueda asks what it would mean to break free of one's outer shell, to "find in the sound" a truer, more authentic self. As Rueda explains. "If I'm able to say [how I'm feeling] in another way, and almost slyly kind of tell people about it, I find a lot more fulfillment from that."

In “The Woman Who Loved a Tree,” writer Emily Mitchell invites readers to confront the eccentricities and mysteriousness of love. She absorbs the structural beats of a fairy tale to explore an uncanny attraction, an interspecies affair that favors ambiguity over allegorical finger-wagging. In the accompanying interview, Mitchell asks, “Why would you want human beings to be less complex and differentiated, or for our desires to come in a narrower range of possibilities?” By cross-pollinating a fairy tale with science fiction and the fantastic, Mitchell accesses that “hidden order…haunting the present,” allowing for a vision of the world at once inviting and unnerving, “outside our daily consensus reality.”   

Poet, musician, and activist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski touches on a different kind of taboo across his work. Through verbatim translations of first-hand accounts from Nazi-occupied Gdańsk, he gives voice to cultural reckoning, revisiting collective tragedies steeped in silence. Kwiatkowski draws from family stories as well, situating personal trauma within public, communal histories. In our conversation, he explains that he is “deeply immersed in this kind of probing into a wound, in this way of looking beneath the surface of reality.” Whether crafting archival poems or composing for psychedelic punk band Trupa Trupa, Kwiatkowski juxtaposes old voices with new traditions to help his readers confront lasting injuries. He embodies Ahmed’s call to “respond to injustice in a way that shows rather than erases the complexity of the relation between violence, power and emotion” (196).

Thank you for spending time with us at Love & Theft. We invite questions, queries, comments, or conversations at loveandtheftjournal@gmail.com. 

Warmly, 

Edward Helfers & Chloe Irwin