Takashi Arai, May 21, 2012. Annular Eclipse at 7:42 AM, Onahama, Fukushima No.1, 2012, daguerreotype, 10 × 7.5 inches. Images courtesy of the artist.
Takashi Arai, February 25, 2012. A pine tree survived tsunami, Rikuzentakada, 2012, daguerreotype, 6.5 × 4.25 inches.
Jacob Kirkegaard, Microscopies of death (cardiogenic shock), 2019, micro-photograph. Images courtesy of Fridmann Gallery, New York.
Jacob Kirkegaard, Dandora landfill in Nairobi, Kenya, photograph for Testimonium (audio-visual composition with recordings from the Dandora landfill, as well as recycling and wastewater facilities in Denmark and Latvia), 2019.
Takashi Arai, Neoto Falls, Tono, 2013, daguerreotype, 6.5 × 4.25 inches.
Takashi Arai, March 23, 2014. The sun at the apparent altitude of 570m in WNW, Hijiyama Park, Hiroshima, 2014, daguerreotype, 7.5 × 10 inches.
Jacob Kirkegaard, Dandora landfill in Nairobi, Kenya, still from Testimonium, 2019.
Jacob Kirkegaard, Microscopies of death (colorectal cancer), 2019, micro-photograph.
Takashi Arai, January 17, 2012. Kashima, Minamisoma, Fukushima, 2012, daguerreotype, 7.5 × 10 inches.
Takashi Arai is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Kawasaki and Tono, Japan. Major photography projects include Here and There—Tomorrow’s Islands, Exposed in a Hundred Suns, and Tomorrow’s History. Since 2017, Arai has worked as a researcher for interdisciplinary studies at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, and the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University.
Jacob Kirkegaard is a sound artist and founding member of the sound art collective freq_out and the nonprofit TOPOS. This year, he released the record We like We & Jacob Kirkegaard: Time is Local on Sonic Pieces, Berlin.
Cultural hybridity and displacement between East and West.
Bernadette Mayer’s Memory was never meant to be a book.
Designing public rituals to commemorate the North Star’s eventual transition.
Originally published in
For our 150th issue, we have redesigned our flagship print magazine. This design reaffirms our mandate to deliver the artist’s voice, supporting the vital discourse that appears in BOMB with vivid imagery and innovative juxtapositions that encourage dialogue across the arts—from conversations between artists, writers, and performers to exciting literature. We present exchanges in their formative state: revelatory, fluid, and iconoclastic.
This issue features interviews with Bruce Pearson, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jacolby Satterwhite, Cathy Park Hong, Christiane Jatahy, and Seth Price, as well as fiction from Amelia Gray, Deb Olin Unferth, and Jenny Wu, and poetry from Sawako Nakayasu, Andrei Monastyrski, and Bob Holman.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
