Things bear world, World grants things.
Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger¹

Things stabilise the human condition as they are relatively impervious to change, unlike human experience, which has a processual existence and is always in a state of flux. They create the ground that the lifeworlds inhabit, but as we descend into the hyper-industrial world, they become intangible and ghost-like. We are moving past the world where one indulges in handwork and into the era of the digital. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger associates thinking with handwork, suggesting that we think using our hands and count using our fingers. The digital human counts, transforming the world into something quantifiable. Emotions, affection, and validation are conveyed through the number of likes. Things that used to be the calm centres of life now spy on us. They are now obligated to entertain without interruption, and their automaticity has made us more consumers than creators.

This issue seeks to return to the things themselves, a way of gazing at the world through them, by being attentive to how the inorganic and the organic show themselves. Thing-Poetry is first and foremost a poetics that creates not from things, but through them. They go beyond their status as passive materials, acting instead as active participants that unveil a sense of wonder in the world. The artist, moving beyond simple rationalisation or calculation, assumes the role of a mediator, who participates in the constant reshaping of the earth that it inhabits by treating itself as one species among many. In other words, Thing-Poetry asks for an epistemological modesty that receives the world as a gift, and builds it while the artist treats itself as a mediator. This poetics finds an echo in Paul Cézanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter, who described the landscape as thinking itself through him, with him being its consciousness. His poetics foreshadows Thing-Poetry, where things function as téchē that reveals and constructs our way of being in the world, rather than just being treated as tools to be exploited. Thing-Poetry is an act of building the world through active engagement but with an emphasis on passive receptivity, emptying themselves to be mindfully present, allowing the world and its things to speak by themselves.

Thing-Poetry is an invitation to linger and delve into the lives of things, and to confront their apparent silence to unearth the hidden worlds they conceal: the journey of an ant across a wall, the gradual dissolution of a bar of soap, the rust spreading across an abandoned lot, or the dust gathering on untouched books. To reflect on the nocturnal glow beneath a streetlamp, the history etched into broken teacups, the forgotten cassettes inside a shelf, or a watch that comes to us as an inheritance. Thing-Poetry seeks to establish a narrativity of the thingness² of things. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that ‘[e]xpressing what exists is an endless task,’³ and this poetics of things engages in the infinite play of hermeneutics, but only through them—gazing and crafting our world not through appropriation or manipulation but with a passive receptivity and an active engagement.

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¹ Heidegger, M. (2001). Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper Perennial. (p. 199)
² The way a thing emerges and becomes present to us through our engagement with it.
³ Merleau-Ponty, M. (2007). Cézanne’s doubt. In T. Toadvine & L. Lawlor (Eds.), The Merleau-Ponty reader. Northwestern University Press. (p. 75)


Submissions may include:

1. Poetry
2. Short Stories
3. Flash Fiction
4. Creative Essays/Non-Fiction
5. Painting
6. Visual Arts and Photograph


To be considered for publication, please submit by November 30th, 2025:

All written submissions should be in the form of Microsoft Office or Google documents. Format your document in Times New Roman font, size 12, and double-spaced.

Please email your submissions to shiuli.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line "Submission: Thing-Poetry."

Include your name, contact information, and a brief bio in the body of the email.

You may submit multiple pieces across different categories, but please send them as separate attachments.