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Volume 60, Issue 3

Front Cover by February James, Untitled, 2018.
WATERCOLOR. Courtesy of the artist.

Introduction

“TO DWELL IN A MYTH is to dwell in a prison.” It takes a few paragraphs, but eventually that’s how Mahmoud Darwish boils it down, in an interview published in these pages, translated by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché. Myths are prisonhouses; if they don’t fall, they make us dream, as Darwish did, of breaking out. For young writers in the United States, such words may seem strange, coming from a poet whose words express the dreams of an entire nation. In this country, the number of creative writing programs continues to mushroom at a rate most often found in Ponzi or pyramid schemes, with thousands of young writers each year earning their M.F.A.s and Ph.Ds. Their dream is to break in, not out. For some, Darwish may already be a central figure in their personal pantheon, even if they’ve never visited a country where poets draw rock star–sized crowds, much less lived or grown up in one. Though he is also central to ours, we’d still think...

(siege)

Baiba Bičole, translated by Bitite Vinklers

poetry

To My Younger Self

Alison Prine

fiction

The Sea

Silvina Ocampo, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan

essay

Europe: The Way I See It

Erri De Luca, translated by Jim Hicks

Working Titles

AMOUR: Fields of Battle, Fields of Love

Véronique Tadjo, translated by Carolyn Shread

Featured From the Blog

The Awakening of Dignity

December 10, 2019

By Manuel Garcia

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Broadsides

2019 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

The 2019 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Amit Majmudar for his poem, "Invasive Species," published in Volume 59, Issue 4.

Join us for a celebratory reading at Amherst Books on Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Amit Majmudar's next books are Soar: A Novel and Kill List: Poems. His most recent book is Godsong: A Verse Translation...

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“We are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest [...] the teachings of Thoreau are alive today, indeed, they are more alive today than ever before.”
—REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (MR 4.1, Autumn 1962)

From the Blog

Our America

The Awakening of Dignity

December 10, 2019 - By Manuel Garcia

The ongoing crisis in Chile has brought the country to a standstill, unsettling the daily lives of all citizens. However, it has done more than just that. Mass protests have a way of altering the personhood of everyone involved in ways previously unimagined. Over the last week, thirty days after the eruption of social unrest, I have talked extensively with four people from Santiago who have lived the uprising from the ground up. Here I will share some of their experiences and testimonies during this process. To the best of my knowledge, none of them know each other. Let me introduce them to you now.

Maria is thirty-eight years old, married and the mother of two. She is self-employed as a baker and works mostly from her home in La Pintana. La Pintana is one of the most spatially...

10 Questions

10 Questions for Jesse Bertron

December 6, 2019 - By Catherine Fox

I flushed that flock of doves three times.
An hour’s worth of wingbeats in a rush
and then a rush and then a rush.—From “Walking on a Path by Fisher Creek, I Flushed a Flock of Doves,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first thing I wrote that I think still holds up, I wrote when I was about fifteen. I had a Livejournal, which was an early blogging platform. And some of the stuff on there I still find very funny. There were some poems, but mostly just silly riffs. Like here's one I went back and found:

There are three towels in my room.

These clearly represent the three wise men.

...

Favorite Things

William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance: A Meditative Choreographic Act

December 5, 2019 - By Mark Franko

Photo: Ander Zabala (left), Parvaneh Sharafali (right) in A Quiet Evening of Dance. Photo: Mohamed Sadek. Courtesy of The Shed.

This fall Peter Brook presented Why?, a play-as-conversation between three actors in which they reflect intellectually and performatively in deftly sketched scenes on theater-making from the actor’s perspective. This chamber work, composed of discussions about the actor’s craft, is directed in part toward the audience with no lack of enlightening, whimsical, and sometimes quite moving illustrations. Why? is a theoretical and historical brief on theater’s infinite possibilities and mortal dangers, a fit addition to the distinguished career of Peter Brook, which now spans seven decades. In the play’s...