Communiqués by Maria Galina / Russian and English, bi-lingual edition Translated by Anna Halberstadt & Ainsley Morse.Cicada Press, New York. (2023-24) $22.00. Those Absences Now Closest by Dzvinia OrlowskyCarnegie Mellon Press, Pittsburgh. (2024) $20.00 Maria Galina (b. 1958) is an acclaimed Ukrainian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator. Born just outside of Moscow,
Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950by Katherine Hollander (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) To say Bertolt Brecht had an eventful life would be an understatement. He fathered four children by three women; enjoyed a dazzling career as a playwright and poet; and, in a life punctuated by two world
David Roochnik reviews journalist Peter Beinart’s Substack site, Beinart Notebook, a weekly “show” where he discusses issues concerning Israel-Palestine with his guests.
In her paramedic training, Ieva Jusionyte was told, when dealing with gunshot victims, to “always look for the exit wound.” Exit wounds are larger and more irregular than entry wounds, and their location helps medical workers discover the pathway a bullet has taken through the body, so they can make a
The notion of “the good war”—a just, nationwide effort against an obvious and perilous aggressor—pulses through Matt Gallagher’s latest novel, Daybreak (Simon & Schuster, Feb 20, 2024). This notion has perhaps been freshly reinstated in American public discourse, though Gallagher reminds us that it never ceased to throb in the veteran community—that tiny
Farewell ValleyBy Im Ch’ŏru, translated from the Korean by Jennifer M. Lee and Jonathan R. Bagley (MerwinAsia, 2016) Readers new to Korean literature who value historical memory as a gateway to truth, reconciliation, and healing will find Farewell Valley a representation of a nation now best known to the world
Today is a Different WarBy Lyudmyla Khersonska, translations by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). In the Hour of War: Poetry from UkraineEdited by Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky, with individual translators cited below (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktailsby Halnya
The January 6 Select Congressional Committee released its final report on December 22, 2022. The report is the culmination of the ten hearings the nation has witnessed on television from June through December at intervals. The hearings have had a dramatic impact on part of the nation. About seventeen to
The King’s TouchTom SleighGraywolf Press 2022 For years, Tom Sleigh was a Boston poet, a Cambridge poet, and he made poems that seemed associated with the interpretive and bookish spirit of those places, writing poems that were deeply and kaleidoscopically learned and also able to train our minds on how
The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three CantosSylvie KandéTranslated by Alexander DickowWesleyan University Press, 2022 Sylvie Kandé’s epic poem, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, describes two journeys over water from the west coast of Africa: One across the Atlantic, and the other to Europe.
Maybe the Land Sings BackBy Jan LaPerleGalileo Books, 2022 Jan LaPerle’s latest poetry collection, Maybe the Land Sings Back, begins and is interspersed with sheet music for Charles Wesley’s 1739 hymn “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” The words are omitted, which is fitting, because LaPerle chooses to fill
Cartography: Navigating a Year in IraqKatherine SchifaniPotomac Books, June 2022 The year is 2011, the United States is in the final stages of its two-year withdrawal from Iraq, and Katherine Schifani has been deployed with the US army as the head logistics advisor for the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service and
