Books for sale

Styleissh

What if an author's intention is to mix styles such as pidgin with academic speak? How does one copyedit accurately, meaning how do we make sure the author's intentions still come across when the focus is a hybridity/differing power structures? The author's intentions may be to point out or defy conventional grammatical structure while still maintaining their mastery of it. Ah, maybe this is more of a "regular" editor question, huh.

I ask because I just read Sage Takehiro's column in the BIW, in which she systematically destroys (but is still nice) to a reader's response of her response to Maui Fever; yes, the show on MTV. Anyway, the article was da bomb, but I was thinking, ho, that would be one hard thing to copyedit!

Poetry

I'm the editor for "Seeds + Esssse." It's a public school-based poetry journal for students from K-12 (and perhaps even college.)

My problem: how should I edit pidgin? I have my own ideas of how to spell in pidgin--should I leave the words the way the poet wrote them, or should I create a kind of pidgin dictionary, specifically for the journal?