Commentary |
on Beirut Hellfire Society, a novel by Rawi Hage
“As the novel opens, a son is inducted by his father into the Hellfire Society, a clandestine group that arranges the disposition of dead people who have been denied conventional burial.”
Commentary |
on Beyond Babylon, a novel by Igiaba Scego, translated from the Italian by Aaron Robertson
“… a testament to the psychological dissonance that refugees suffer as they remake lives in foreign places while under the pervasive shadow of brutal pasts.”
Poetry |
“Mafia Myth” and “Midlife Aubade”
Fiction |
from My Mother’s Tears
“… she delivered this sentence that, true or false, desolates, rots the soul: You must always, at every moment, distrust everyone around you … Even your father … And even your mother …”
Commentary |
on Against Translation by Alan Shapiro
“His fidelity to feelings and insights that cannot be reconciled with each other, his paradoxical equanimity that allows for anger and forgiving anguish, have grown more extensive …”
Fiction |
from Études de silhouettes, micro-fictions by Pierre Senges
“… by the momentum of this detachment, I am able to remove the me who occupies these lines and is composing them, and who still ardently longs to exist on paper …”
Commentary |
on Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, by Patrick Chamoiseau, translated by Matthew Amos & Fredrik Rönnbäck
“The migrant is neither an exception nor a discontinuity but rather the harbinger and incarnation of globality”
Commentary |
on Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 by Lee Ann Roripaugh & Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe
“The discursive personae in these visionary narratives allow the poets to grapple with the enormity of human tragedy and folly.”
Fiction |
“The Other Side of the Dock”
“Looking at the sea too long made me nauseated, thinking inevitably of biology classes, of the teacher’s amphibious hands, explaining the cycle of life and of all those fish reproducing themselves so close to me, in a lukewarm salty broth.”
Commentary |
on Tap Out, poems by Edgar Kunz
“Kunz wants to look squarely at the ‘quiet hands’ not just of his father but of his entire world — and, if he can bear it, ‘not turn away.'”
Essay |
“The Small Psychoses”
“But that night before the robins. Coyotes and a struck sheen of moon. Others heard or you would have thought it was just your mind again.”
Commentary |
on Since When: A Memoir in Pieces by Bill Berkson
“An innovative poet and art critic in his own right, he had the good fortune to find himself in dialogue with some of the most inspiring figures of his time, at the heart of a fascinating cultural mix …”