[World Poetry Books; 2025] Tr. from the German by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabela Dinwoodie On the nine-hour train ride back to Berlin from Vienna, a young man takes the seat next to me. He asks whether I think it’s safe to leave a suitcase back by the train’s entrance, out of sight from our seats. […]
Berlin Atomized – Julia Kornberg
We can’t use irony to cope with catastrophe forever.
Bodies Found in Various Places – Elvira Hernández
Hernández offers readers a poetry of survival and disturbance, but only as much as we can cup in our hands.
Hymn to Moray Eels – Mireille Best
Why love a boy just on the basis of his boy-ness?
Rather than recounting a biography, Ernaux is writing into a silence.
A Very Cold Winter – Fausta Cialente
War, and its constitutive masculinism, threatens everyone’s dreams, chances, and sense of selves.
Rahul Soni’s translation makes space in English for a bridge between the historic and the contemporary, offering a critique of power across time and space.
The nose is not just cartilage and skin; it is inheritance, race, femininity, a mark of refusal, a repository of hatred and desire.
In Bianco, intellectual conviction slips into conspiracy.
At stake in such multitudes, of which Reza’s novel surely is another substantial contribution, seems to be a fundamental rejection of the premise of Adorno’s dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”