More than half a decade after the onset of the European sovereign debt crisis, whose lingering effects are still acutely felt across the continent, there seems to have emerged a general sense that precariousness has – quite paradoxically – become a perennial component of the European experience. ‘In strange, mutilated times, [...] the only available register is one of defeat’ write the Galician poets María do Cebreiro and Daniel Salgado in one of their sharply meditative poems which open this new issue of Absinthe. As it painstakingly recovers – or not – from the crisis, is Europe really doomed to only produce a literature of mourning?

Precarious Europe: Writing in Uncertain Times makes no attempt at offering an exhaustive survey of the hypothetical genre of the literature of the crisis – or even at claiming that such a homogenous category does, in fact, truly exist. For their first issue, the new editors of Absinthe wanted to bring together a number of contemporary voices, all speaking to and from this current stage of uncertainty, either in Europe’s ‘center’ or at its ‘margins’. Together, these singular perspectives compose the fragmentary and often somber picture of a continent in turmoil.

In the work of Greek author and photographer Christos Chryssopoulos, who keeps track of his nightly ramblings through a desolate Athens, the old figure of the flâneur is reactivated and assigned the task of documenting human survival among ruins old and new.

In a short story by Gonçalo M. Tavares, one of the most important figures in contemporary Portuguese literature, the malaise driven by widespread unemployment is reinforced by the brutal irruption of absurd and macabre elements in familiar middle-class settings.

Five pieces from the recent Spanish flash fiction anthology Desahuciados: Crónicas de la Crisis highlight the importance of collective creative responses to the crisis, as well as the ways in which the feeling of urgency that characterizes the times can be conveyed in short-form prose.

Sonic and visual experimentation are at the core of poet and performer Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s pieces, translated by the author from the original Icelandic. Written in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Iceland’s economy, the poems gathered here envision the crisis as an almost literal explosion from which can only emerge a poetics of stuttering, a new broken language violently humorous and hallucinatory.

Turning the sanitized language of global communication into a playful and deceptive poetic idiom, German poet Katharina Schultens invokes ancient and modern myths in her exploration of contemporary job insecurity.

In his short story, Bruce Bégout adopts the perspective of a modern pariah, the undocumented immigrant, whose soliloquy reveals with the driest irony the gloomy underside of the French city.

Staging with an almost Beckettian tone the gradual disintegration of his central character, Croatian author Marko Pogačar returns to Absinthe with a brilliantly dark short story which seems to be set among the debris of a world annihilated by an unnamed crisis.

Finally, we close with a melancholy dispatch from Europe’s contest border, in the work of Taras Fedirko who keeps a poetic journal of Ukraine’s troubled present.

‘We are brought to this that is / here to the eye of the storm, to the sodden ash / of history, to life, / its imperfect places’ write María do Cebreiro and Daniel Salgado. Although Absinthe has moved to the best of homes in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, a lot of the editorial work for this issue – as well as the entire redesign of the magazine’s visual identity – took place in the city of Detroit, a space where the verses of the two Galician poets seem to find a particularly strong echo. Throughout the curatorial process, as we were reading and collecting texts about the crisis from all over Europe, it became difficult to not hear a lot of them vibrantly resonate with the urban landscape that surrounded us. In this space, just like in the texts gathered here, we read at once all the tensions and all the possibilities borne out of uncertainty and precariousness.