More often than motivational speakers are ready to concede, the assertion “it can’t be done” is true. Just how far can the body of the athlete, the mind of the student, or the drive of the entrepreneur go? To ask the motivational speaker this question is to invite tons of cliched sentences and quotes that push the narrative of the uber-human. But every day, we meet brick walls, doors that won’t open, boulders that won’t shift; limits.
In 2018, we published our maiden issue, X, which has now been downloaded over a thousand times. It featured works by, amongst others, Kola Tubosun, Toni Kan, Tade Ipadeola, Tunji Olalere, Logan February, Romeo Oriogun, Jekein Lato-Unah, and Niyi Okeowo. For the 2019 issue of Agbowó, which will be published in July, we are calling for works of visual art, photographs, short stories, essays and poetry that explore the theme “Limits”. We are after stories that dance gracefully on the limits between dream and reality, poems that chant at the errant that without consent the body is off-limits, personal essays about when we have been pushed to the very limits of our patience or skill and photographs of the street hauler, though ripped as hell, breaking.
We, however, are not limiting our call to thematic interpretations of “Limits”. We also seek interpretations in form; the poem that goes on for pages, the painting or sculpture in never before used media.
Submissions should be sent, as MS Word attachments or high-resolution images, accompanied by a short bio to prose.agbowo@gmail.com, essays.agbowo@gmail.com, poetry.agbowo@gmail.com, and visualarts.agbowo@gmail.com for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and visual arts/photography submissions respectively. The subject line of the email should read “Submission for Limits”.
Please submit no more than 5 poems, 1 short-story or essay, or 5 photographs.
The deadline for submissions is the 30th of April, 2019.