When I heard the call for the Community Anthologies program, I thought long and hard for a theme that was meaningful to me, yet was open enough for other people to connect to. Prayer appeared before me once I reminded myself of my own poetry, which is the most authentic form of prayer I know. Within this anthology, “prayer” transcends spiritual awakenings and religious structures; it’s a word that reflects the sacrifices of having something to pray for and the intimacies of finding something to pray to.
When I started planning this anthology, I wanted to curate diverse forms of art that would represent different sides to prayer. The artists in this anthology portray their reasons for prayer in their own terms: some grapple with costs of faith and family, some with changes in homelands and languages, some with the communities they advocate for. During the months of reading, discussing, and speaking with these artists, I realized that it is the particularities of our lives that lead to shared causes of prayer.
While I can never give an ultimate definition to prayer, I hope that this anthology of poetry, personal essays, photography, drawings, and dance shows readers other realities and possibilities for journeys, protests, and ways of connection. As breathing and living humans, we all have gained something or somewhere or somebody to pray for; in this instance, let’s do it together.
Table of Contents
What’s inside “On Prayer”? Editor-in-Chief Para Vadhahong describes each piece in their anthology below:
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- April Lim navigates grief, funerary rituals, and national memory in four meditative poems.
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- In four poems dedicated to Bangkok, Max Pasakorn flirts with language in translation and reclaims the memory of a flawed yet lovable city.
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- Lillian Morton finds prayer within the confined and mundane spaces of her girlhood inside two powerful poems.
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- In a fragmentary essay, Susan Nguyen reflects on the legacy of St. Agatha in relation to her past experiences as a Vietnamese-American girl in the Catholic church.
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- Tanya Ng Cheong weaves together many memories–including witnessing the Pope–in an expansive yet place-focused essay that balances faith with familial and personal histories.
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- Terrence Ho’s drawings capture the moving undercurrents of prayer in everyday human interactions.
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- Yuri Yamamoto gestures to different emotions of prayer in an improvisational dance that feels exquisitely inevitable.
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- Julie Lee’s photographs frame Christian figures in a new light, asking the viewer to honor liberation in the same space as worship.
"On Prayer," call for submissions
This is the call for submissions, which is what the published contributors submitted work toward:
To whom do you pray for nourishment and justice in the face of oppression? What kind of faith do you carve out for yourself? What private, public, communal, mythical, or cultural rituals do you draw your own sense of devotion from?
A prayer can be a litany of desires; a call to action; an upholding of the self and the beloved; a life-giving elegy. A prayer can transcend organized structures of religion, connecting the devotee to recipients of their devotion regardless of time and distance. In the midst of genocide in Gaza, I am moved to consider the role of prayer as a force of protest and healing. Prayers are a testament to endurance: the devotee’s test of mettle in the wake of grief and loss.
This open-call anthology invites any creative expression—poems, narratives, music, photographs, songs, and art—about ancestors and spirits, gods and ghosts, beloveds and other entities. What scripture, if any, do you derive value or deviate from? Are there prayers in your writing and art-making practice? I invite you to send irreverent work that pushes boundaries of prayer, that reclaims godhood for themselves in the search for day-to-day meaning.
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