WELCOME TO ISSUE 7 . E R O S  /  A N A T O M Y . FEATURING.

CLAYTON T. MICHAELS
DUSAN ČOLOVIĆ
HILLARY KEEL
J. ROSE
J/J HASTAIN
JANE LEWTY
JOSEPH COOPER
KELLY BOYKER
MOLLY LYNCH
SARA LEFSYK
SARAH LEVINE

Even in this I have tried to hum mud and feathers and sit peacefully in this foliage of bones and rain.
- Dionne Brand, No Language is Neutral

Helkiah Crooke, early anatomist and physician, published Microcosmographia in 1615, subtitled A description of the body of man: together with the controversies thereto belonging. In it, Crooke was amongst the first to probe the inner depths of the human anatomy, a controversial undertaking for his time. The skin: “an unseamed garment covering the whole body” was to Crooke “one of the greatest beauties that nature hath given to the body of man,” its epidermis running "upon the surface of the true skinne as if it were a flowring or creamy production.” It didn't stop at the surface. Crooke went on to give an early description of the clitoris, illustrated literally as a kind of heart-shaped penis found "hidden under the Nymphes and hard to be felt with curiosity, yet sometimes... growth to such a length that it hangeth without the cleft like a mans member." Saying as much about the conceptions of his era as about his proclaimed subject matter (when is that not the case), Crooke was yet bold to mix beauty and viscera, to thread the physiological with the prosodic, to bring eros and anatomy into a mutual, sensual dissection, one which seems these days either farcically outdated or, somehow, refreshing.

Issue 7 of Dear Sir, reaches towards Crooke and his Microcosmographia, as writers such as Michaels and Lefsyk tackle (and here I'm going to be reductivist) the pathological body, Lewty and Lynch the erotic, Keel and Levine the depth of the body's memory, experience, Cooper and Boyker the at-times taboo, absurd or disturbing body and Rose the saccarine, the body of the love poem that always speaks too much. In hastain's "a lax dress," we find perhaps a modern metonym to Crooke's "unseamed garment," the skin; we are reminded by all writers throughout that while a body can be portrayed in uncountable words, the words themselves are never unaccountable, ever presenting a changing portrait, a fashionable garment, the imperfect I, a sentiment condensed perhaps in Čolović's "Difference" and backed by Dionne Brand's once-upon-the-90s seminal prose poem, No Language is Neutral.

To Crooke, he was presenting nothing less than the real, the anatomically correct. Yet Mikrocosmographia stands to demonstrate not only the biases of dissection but the biases inherent in the writing of that dissection. The bias being, maybe, the most beautifully flawed or, let's say, one of writing's hottest features.