The Odds of Tokyo Odd Frequencies
Odd, unique, different, strange, weird.&nbsp; Has anyone ever met an impactful artist who was perfectly plain and fit in the mainstream?&nbsp; Not fitting in is a shared experience&nbsp; of the members of this art collective.&nbsp; Perfection is overrated, anyway.&nbsp; We are the odd ones out and&nbsp; we are comfortable in standing out.&nbsp; Facing the odds of moving to live in a city of 30 million people and coming together by mere chance in chaos, perhaps against all odds.&nbsp;
This is the Odds (of Tokyo) art collective. Everyone&rsquo;s here for an odd amount of time,&nbsp; we make the best of it.
 The Odds (of Tokyo) art collective was co-founded by&nbsp; Zoria Petkoska K. and Simon Kalajdjiev 
ZORIA PETKOSKA K. Editor in chief
SIMON KALAJDJIEV Art direction, asemic writing and drawing
ROSS VERIK Drawings, sound design
JEF QUIN Digital collage
Darryl Friemann, @opaquefilm Photos and frequency
HIRO KANO - Apriori.Art Soundwave origami
Zine by the Odds of Tokyo art collective First issue, first printing Tokyo 2025

What are the Odds? 

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

&Ouml;lpest is an experimental writing project I started in 2022, and the name is borrowed from the German word for &ldquo;oil spil.&rdquo; I was inspired by the meditative nature of &nbsp;slathering tar on a metal plate for etching, as well as traditional Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. It&rsquo;s akin freewriting techniques, letting the artist&rsquo;s mind wander through creation. Working on &Ouml;lpest seems to cleanse the mind of ambiguous anxiety, washing the darkness away. In fact, I later found out that art therapists say that using black ink on paper is the most therapeutic of all artistic expressions.
&Ouml;lpest lets me explore the power of the calligraphic black stroke &mdash; not used for the letters but for the background, freeing it from the constrains of predefined structure otherwise dictated by conventional text. &Ouml;lpest is also a script free of meaning, reading and pronunciation. It&rsquo;s asemic writing, a type of visual poetry, solely an aesthetic expression that plays with type, calligraphy, layout and rhythm. The artbook is B5 size and has 60 pages

Ölpest - Experimental calligraphy art book

Ölpest 

Tokyo is both the inspiration and the studio for both Simon's glitch art and Zoria's cyber[punk] poetry. They create on the move, oftentimes on the commute, with the excitement, immediacy and restlessness that only Tokyo can stir up, and because the nature of the city also limits time and space for creativity. It's a utopian/dystopian cocktail you can taste in the art and poetry of this book, both tackling themes including futurism, euphoria, belonging, hypercapitalism, alienation, devices and internet addiction.​
The glitch art looks the way Tokyo sometimes feels. It's shifting, chaotic, exciting and it's unfathomable. While the glitchy language, punctuation liberties and imagined linguistic shifts create a semi-fictional neo-Babel. A DYSTOKYO made of present and future (un)realities.&nbsp;

Cyber[punk] poetry & Glitch art

DYSTOKYO

Explores the many relationships between ecologies and poetries. 
Guest edited by Suga Keijiro.
Editor in Chief: Jeffrey Johnson
Editorial board: Zoria Petkoska K., Marcellus Nealy, Silje Ree, Barbara Summerhawk, Jordan Smith
Copy editors: Jow Waller, Biankah Bailey, Morgan Schulz
Features poetry by: Asra Ran Bjort. Astra Papacristopolou, Yumi Fuzuki, Emi Nakamura, Yaxkin Melchy Ramos-Yupari, Hiroshi Hasebe, Julia Monk, Aki Nagasaka, Adrian Munoz, Naoko Kasama, Satomi Miura, Yuki Masami, Katsumi Okuno, Joaquin Ivars, Barbara Summerhawk. Morgan X. Schulz, Marcellus Nealy, Jeffrey Johnson, Keijiro Suga, Zoria Petkoska K.
Features art by: Erica Ward, Alejandro Nunez, Daisuke Nakajima (including cover art)

ToPoJo Vol.16: EcoPoetry

A foray, nay&ndash;&ndash;many forays&ndash;&ndash;into the relations between Japanese and Spanish-language poetry around the world. Editorially spearheaded and masterminded by Jeffrey Johnson. Cryptic title explained in the volume's introduction...
Poetry and translations&nbsp;by&nbsp;Aurelio Asiain, Abul Kalam Azad, Mat&iacute;as Chiappe Ippolito, Juan Antonio Ib&aacute;&ntilde;ez Jim&eacute;nez, Luisa Futoransky, Juan Gelman, Michelle Har Kim, Jeffrey Johnson, Toshiya Kamei, Yannis Livadas,Federico Garc&iacute;a Lorca, Iain Maloney, Fernando Mill&aacute;n, Doris Moromisato, &Aacute;mbar Past, Octavio Paz, Ana Prundaru, Jordan A. Y. Smith, and Jos&eacute; Watanabe.&nbsp;
Essays/interviews by&nbsp;Aurelio Asiain, Mat&iacute;as Chiappe Ippolito,&nbsp;Yaxkin Melchy Ramos, and&nbsp;Jordan A. Y. Smith
Photography&nbsp;by Naemi Ueta
Art&nbsp;by Yasumasa Toshima

ToPoJo Vol.7: Yamato-Sepharad Constellations

Poetry which expertly shares the Beat impulse. Sexy as Kazuko Shiraishi &amp; euphoric as Ken Kesey. Yet these poems are stripped to the bone&mdash;directly expressed. When the author orally reads her work, she subtly pays attention to spaces &amp; so shall you dear reader.
&ldquo;She's rocking the sexual &amp; cultural revolution with impeccable craft, irony, wit, and a woman's voice.&rdquo; &mdash;Leah Ann Sullivan, founder of the Nagoya Writers Group Open Reading series
&ldquo;Something pure and fragile in the midst of grimly damagingly real unyielding circumstances... These poems have an Icarus hubris and an ethereal eroticism about them.&rdquo; &mdash;Duncan Whom, delicate delinquent and queer art cabaret chameleon
&ldquo;Sticky and gritty and succulent language.&rdquo; &mdash;Sorcha Chisholm, singer, musician, and co-creator of Drunk Poets See God

Pause :: Heartbeat

The latest collection from Oregon-Tokyo pond-hopping firebrand, resident poet, co-founder, and Aikido black belt, Barbara Summerhawk.

Wake Me with a Shout

okyo Poetry Journal's Volume13 "Maladies, Calamities &amp; Misfortunes" is a broad poetic response to the pandemic but also includes responses to the killing of George Floyd in the US, the killing of Mahsa Amini in Iran, the invasion of Ukraine, the mob lynching of Madhu in India, as well as other events in the wake of the early 2020 outbreak. Trauma, in certain respects, seems to be the ongoing global &lsquo;new norm&rsquo; and we at ToPoJo wanted to give voice to diverse poetic expressions with our first completely open submissions for poetry. The result, these poems on theme, are eloquent expressions of events that seem to unfold endlessly and on a daily basis. We at ToPoJo believe that we all long for some glimmer of hope on the horizon that presents a turn away from many of the events over recent years. Godspeed.

ToPoJo Vol.13: Maladies, Calamities & Misfortunes

Tokyo Poetry Journal&nbsp;
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<h6>Tokyo Poetry Journal&nbsp; (a.k.a. ToPoJo&nbsp; or TPJ) is a biannual publication of poetry, art, reviews, and criticism. Bringing poetry to, through, and from the Tokyo world of words and sound since 2015.</h6>
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Cover design by Samm Bennett.&nbsp;

Conjurers Dream of Voyage

Tokyo Poetry Journalの他の書籍

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

Ölpest

DYSTOKYO

Ölpest

ToPoJo Vol.16: EcoPoetry

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

ToPoJo Vol.7: Yamato-Sepharad Constellations

DYSTOKYO

DYSTOKYO

Pause :: Heartbeat

Wake Me with a Shout

ToPoJo Vol.13: Maladies, Calamities & Misfortunes