Letter from the Managing Editor on Fissured Tongue Volume Two

“Certainty I" by Lisa Berley. Mixed Media, 22" x 30", 2013.

Welcome to Fissured Tongue Volume Two! It's been a long time coming. We, the Inverted Syntax Editors, accepted some of these pieces over a year ago, and we all know how much change in perspective 2020 brought, macro and micro, personal and political. As Managing Editor of the Fissured Tongue series, I want to personally thank every contributor who patiently waited and worked with us through times of overwhelming change and unknown circumstances.


​If you’re not familiar with Fissured Tongue, it's now our primary online publishing presence where we share some of the stunning work we receive during our submission windows but cannot fit into our annual print issue. With Fissured Tongue, we seek new voices, new encounters, shifting perspectives. It was therefore a pleasure and honor to discover that several of the pieces we published in Fissured Tongue Volume Two are the first publication for their authors. The Inverted Syntax editorial board reads blind, so we did not know that we'd selected so many first pubs until the publication coordination began.

With the exception of our occasional blog posts and Art of the Postcard series, the new Fissured Tongue volumes will be a sub-label or imprint of Inverted Syntax Press LLC and our only formal online publication. In support, all pieces previously, serially published in Fissured Tongue (2019- 2020) have been compiled into Volume One. You can also download a PDF of the new Fissured Tongue Volume Two​.

Going forward, we may continue to switch between intermittent Fissured publications and dropping a full volume, like this one you're about to read. If I've learned anything in the last year it's that we need to stay open to change, flexible enough to adapt to whatever feels necessary or urgent in the moment, even if sometimes that's taking a step back to breathe and collect.

So we invite you to spend some time with Fissured Tongue Volume Two. Take a look around, linger in the spaces of what our brilliant contributors have to say. It contains themes of justice and loss, memory and embodiment, attempts to respect and understand the past as we move into an updated future, even if some days it's hard to see beyond tomorrow.

Join us in being ready for surprise, staying open to change, aware of the possibilities that surround us.

With love,
Jesica Davis
Fissured Tongue Managing Editor
Inverted Syntax Associate Editor ​​​


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​About the Cover Artist
Lisa Berley began her career in San Francisco as an art director in CGI and animation after receiving her BFA. She integrated painting, photography and CGI in digital work. Returning to NY for two decades Berley exhibited abstract mixed media works on paper. She moved to Colorado in 2016 continuing to work from deconstructed found images and recently combining it with erasure poetry after the accidental death of her younger son. 

Artist Statement
"My work involves a process of exploring the deconstruction of found words and images. Fragments of appropriated newsprint images are deconstructed and then reconstructed to make new images and in some cases erasure poems. Through this method the visual and text information is transformed."

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