Tongue


Vision / Press

Tongue is a biannual literary magazine of original poetry, essays, and images that aspires to challenge comfortable gestures and distinctions. It embraces translations, polyphonic exchanges across all conceivable borders—those of imagination, of language, and our inherited and enacted worlds of joy, repression, solitude, and violence.

Originally published as an autonomous project of the Pirogue Collective—the arts and culture expression of the Gorée InstituteTongue celebrates an expansive, poetic dialogue among communities of thought.

For more on our vision for the journal and how we construct each issue, please read this interview with the Poetry Society of America for their Site Visits project: “The Editors on Tongue.”

 

Praise for Tongue in the Press

Tongue is saturated with beautiful images and ideas, poems that delightfully use language to create insight.
— Kirsten McIlvenna, NewPages.com/Screen Reading

 
In Your Guide to Artistic and Literary Tumblrs, Nick Moran of The Millions lists Marginalia as essential to the vibrant literary community blossoming on Tumblr.

 
Reading through the new poetry e-journal Tongue, my mind went repeatedly to the exciting avenues the internet is opening up for the interaction of disparate artistic voices and the forming of interesting connections…push[ing] my hunger to read more – scattering me in all directions in my hyperlink-hopping. In this way the journal can be viewed as a broad cross-section of scattered voices working like a springboard for further exploration on the part of the reader. Three voices continued to echo in my head, and as a result I went on to find out more about these poets, read more of their work, and felt I could come back to the poems in Tongue and read them with new eyes…there is something unsettling about opening yourself up to be taken on journeys through unfamiliar lands and cultures…[but] it’s this meeting of horizons that immediately turns one’s reading into a kind of adventure.
— Bernard van der Merwe, Stellenboch Literary Project