The Sevdah issue shines best in its sideways revelations, exposing what we’ve always wanted in the shape of its absence.

“We are so filled with feeling, even the gods must relent.” (Angela Sucich on Sevdah)

Psyche’s desperate desire for Cupid evokes sevdah, the human condition humming like a sad organ across a mythopoetic soundscape.

Literature, History, MusicGuestJuly 7, 2025Zanin Berbić, Damir Imamovic, Lucius Apuleius, Hippocrates, Ovid, Homer

“Why do we want or need to have our hearts wrenched again and again?” (Kathleen A. Wakefield on Sevdah)

The work of poetry is a perishing, hauntingly apprehended in the songs of sevdah.

Music, Literature, Personal EssayGuestJune 26, 2025Kathleen A. Wakefield, Ennis Cehic

“Memory and music are as inseparable as they are elusive.” (Natalie Marino on Sevdah)

To be young is fleeting. Love and life pass like the ungraspable wind, never to return again.

Music, Literature, Selections, Personal Essay, HistoryGuestJune 18, 2025Hippocrates, John Keats, James Joyce, Lucille Clifton

Announcing Half Mystic’s Nominees for the 2025 Pushcart Prize

Each of these pieces pulls us into sharp-eyed focus, reminds us why we’re here & who we’re becoming. Best of luck to our nominees. Here’s to possibility.

“It’s the dancer’s leap on the downbeat that gives the illusion of flight.” (Will Cordeiro on Presto)

Bang, the universe began—and ended. A cosmos is reduced to an epigram. Narrative allows us to dash through eternity as quick as a quantum leap.

“It is an alchemical process, making something new from bits and pieces.” (An Interview With Morphic Rooms)

I wanted to create a visual language in my art practice that reflected the way these musical cut-ups and abrasions sounded to me—transmuted, rejoined.

“Hope, no matter how unlikely, is still worth singing for. There has to be magic in that.” (Maggie Warren on Presto)

For me, these realities of nature reveal a sense of presto: an inherent poetry to this life, a chance to find meaning and magic in a world we share with such strange creatures.

Literature, Music, Personal Essay, PoliticsGuestJuly 7, 2024Maggie Warren

From the Editor: The Presto Issue

I’m inclined to think life or thoughts or ideas aren’t a blur of movement so much as a collage of image and voice: layered, constant, revved, and singing.

The Presto Letters

In an older sense of the word, to understand means “to stand among.” When I need to understand anything, I often stand among songs.