Martha’s Quarterly 2026

Martha's Quarterly
Issue 38
Winter 2026

The Kraken

4.1” x 3” x 1.2”

About the Contributors; 

Alfred Lord Tennyson was an 19th-century English poet who is now recognized as one of the most well-loved Victorian poets.

Matthew Fontaine Maury was an American oceanographer and naval officer during the American Civil War. He is considered a founder of modern oceanography. 

Charles Moore is an oceanographer and environmentalist who first encountered and reported on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Holly Greene is an artist currently based in Connecticut. She is a studio manager and creates her own work as Lost Dog Studio (@lostdog.studio).

Here we are in the last days of a relentless winter. I write this on the morning of Sunday, March 8, 2026, Daylight Saving Time. Birds are chirping, and the heaps of snow are quickly melting.

In this arrival of spring, another war appears to be unfolding, this time in the Middle East between Israel—with the support of the United States and several Western allies—and Iran. I cannot say that I am surprised; the two countries have been engaged in a shadow conflict for decades, carried out through proxy wars, covert strikes, and increasingly open threats. Yet I am still stunned. Over the past days, I have watched videos circulating online: footage of explosions near Dubai’s port (1) and clips from Tehran showing plumes of smoke rising above the city (2). 

There is so much I do not know or understand about the Middle East, but it has been a presence in my mind since my earliest memories of watching the news with my parents. As someone interested in how nations begin, I know that many of the foundations of what we call the West originate in the regions surrounding the Middle East—the stories of the Hebrew Bible, the emergence of Christianity in Roman Palestine, and the philosophical traditions that passed between Greece, Persia, and the early Islamic world.

From this region, one can trace how ideas and values migrate east and west. Greek philosophy passed through the Islamic world and eventually returned to Europe through centuries of translation and intellectual exchange. Religious traditions spread outward, transforming as they traveled. In many ways, the world’s intellectual and spiritual currents pass through the Middle East. Perhaps this is why this war feels immediately consequential, even as my own understanding of the region remains incomplete—close enough to feel its gravity, yet distant enough that much of it remains abstract.

The movement of ideas is not the only thing that circulates across the globe. Goods, energy, and waste move through their own systems of exchange, following routes that are often invisible until they accumulate somewhere.

This artist book is enclosed in a red box designed to resemble a shipping container. When opened, it reveals a diagram by Holly Greene tracing the ocean currents that gather debris into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This “thing,” assembled from humanity’s waste, has an almost mythological quality, which is why we include, on two Möbius strips, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s nineteenth-century poem The Kraken. As you turn the strip of paper in your hands, I hope the tentacled monster of Tennyson’s imagination begins to echo the strange accumulation of debris drifting across the Pacific.

Enclosed in the folded booklet is an excerpt from Matthew Fontaine Maury’s The Physical Geography of the Sea. Printed alongside it is a newspaper article from 2002 describing this garbage phenomenon in the Pacific. In many ways, the mass is truly a place. Sailors avoid it; it is often described as comparable in scale to a continent, yet no nation claims it. Studies suggest that roughly ninety percent of Hawaiian sea turtles ingest plastic debris from these waters. The article asks a practical question: why can’t we simply vacuum it? The answer is sobering—it would be easier to vacuum every square inch of the United States than to clean this gyre. The debris is dispersed through a vast and deep ocean system, and no economic structure exists to make such an effort viable.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a profound mess, and it is the central subject of this quarterly as it arrives to you in the context of the present—a world where our systems of trade, waste, and conflict move through the same global currents.

- Tammy Nguyen

(1)”Explosions rock Dubai, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait as war spreads across Middle East”, The Guardian, February 28, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/28/dubais-famous-fairmont-hotel-in-flames-after-iranian-air-strike
(2)”Watch: Huge flames in Tehran after air strikes on oil depots”, BBC News, March 7, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c7vj9redqz2o 

@passengerpigeonpress

Martha’s Quarterly, Issue 38, Winter 2026, The Kraken was produced using digital printing, screen printing, various colors of text weight paper, and cardboard boxes. The typefaces Optima and Baskerville were used throughout in various sizes and styles. On the blue Möbius strips, The Kraken by Alfred Lord Tennyson was reproduced from the public domain. Special thanks to William Belfiore, who granted us access to use the excerpted newspaper clipping from the Santa Barbara News-Press. Matthew Fontaine Maury’s The Physical Geography of the Sea is in the public domain. The map depicting the garbage currents in the Pacific Ocean was created by Holly Greene. This issue was designed by Tammy Nguyen with editing from Holly Greene. Production by Holly Greene and Chance Lockard.  

Published in March 2026, this is an edition of 250.

The last issue of Martha’s Quarterly will be Martha’s Quarterly Issue 40, Summer 2026. If you have an active subscription from Fall 2025, Summer 2025, or Spring 2025, you will receive this publication. Otherwise, this issue and all remaining issues will be available for individual purchase.