Image: The Wheel of Mother Nature: This is Her Image by unknown artist and Revolution Essentielle screen print

We planned this issue with summer in mind, with a desire to tap into a hot regenerative spirit, and a hankering to transform anger into a property of change. In this fifth issue of Wild Garlic we received a range of work that exhibited a mix of the ambient and personal, the painful, and righteous. Within its etymology, revolution ties together the past, the present, and the future: that which is becoming. If evolution is a process of transformation, revolution is the process of change relative to the past. The past is never separate in a revolution. The divine connection between opposites constantly reminds us that what is here will come again, what is below will be above, what is dead will be resurrected. 

A couple of the authors in this issue foreground characters channeling their anger to reach a point of seismic shift, and tap into a dissenting voice that might be the wrench that breaks the system enough to reimagine a new way of being. 

Works in this issue also focus on potentials of location, as if looking at the same place through different lenses. In these meditations on place, the land itself does not change, but time and perception do, reminding us of the social connotations in the term “revolution”.

Because while revolution is a physical phenomenon, it is too powerful a term to exist only within a tangible framework. Revolutions remind us that no break is definite, nor is it made in a vacuum. Change is constant, and always rolling around on itself, until all at once we realize everything has flipped.

Two Roads – Grace Holcomb

Second Skin – Sarah Goff

Cog in the Machine – Maureen Seel

A Good Bra Is Hard to Find – Nika Dark