Issue forty six of The Attention Span Newsletter was published on 18 February 2026.
Every month, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.
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If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I lost my grandmother back in September 2022. The grief I have experienced has been like no other, an immense loss not just of a person I love deeply, but of my refuge, the existence rooting me even as I have always been finding myself in movement…
“[T]he majestic expanse of the Pacific seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me.” Czesław Miłosz writes in “Facing Too Large an Expanse”, one of the many short essays I’ve been devouring from Visions from San Francisco Bay (translated by Richard Lourie).
I wanted to write a lengthy essay about the recent SAIL event in Amsterdam—[…] about the wounds woven into all our histories, and about how we search for beauty in a broken world—how violence and beauty coexist in that fragile space.
But then summertime sadness arrived, carried by shifting winds: warmth fading into chill. We’ve reached that moment when you wrap a scarf around your neck yet still insist on one last ice cream of the season, holding onto the hope of one more outdoor swim before it all disappears. For me, it always brings a deep melancholy. The essay on decolonising SAIL will have to wait…
I have always loved the ocean; wide, wild, an endless dreamscape of possible escape. Filled with beauty, violence and mystery, the ocean has been carrying humanity’s fears and hopes for millennia. Yet, we know so little about it. Scientists still make discoveries about its habitat. Our Western societies have yet to truly face their own history of crossings in the name of God and Gold. There is always the greater narrative and the personal stories. Both are entwined. …
I had been working for more than a year on this collage.
I made it meticulously with beautiful materials: Pink and gold Japanese paper. A pressed flower I had gathered years ago from a poet’s garden. Fragile materials. I used special glue to bring them together. Archival, naturally, promising to last a lifetime.
I had also applied gold leaf, forming little islands across the layers of paper. A process that demands care and patience. Care, I do have a lot of. Patience, not so much.
My piece was spectacular. Ready to be framed. Perfection.
I destroyed it. That one morning, I felt the need to undo it.
