Jalina Mhyana, a Pushcart nominee, was a finalist in both Pudding House Collection’s 2006 Chapbook contest and Perigee’s 2004 Poetry Contest. Mhyana’s first chapbook Spikeseed was published by Bad Moon Books in 2004, and her second chapbook The Wishing Bones was published by Pudding House Collections in 2007. Mhyana has been an expatriate for a decade, living in rural Japan and Germany, and is currently an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at Bennington College.

In answer to our question of why she writes, Jalina responded:

“Sartre wrote that when he was a child, 'the Universe would rise in tiers at [his] feet and all things would humbly beg for a name; to name the thing was both to create and take it.' Each thing has many names in many languages, a lingual layering, the rose the rose the rose plucked petal by petal, name by name, sweetest, most vulnerable when unadorned, languageless. My rose, my darling, my sweet, my angel. We wrap the beloved in words—for warmth, protection, fortification, fornication. Interlocking words, tongues, crossword puzzling ourselves onto the blank page that rises, begging to be named. I hieroglyph the world with aperture, metaphor; lenses between myself and the begging; the expectation and the spectator.”

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