issue 33: monsoon 2026
editorial
Clint Burnham’s Sea of Sludge is an incredible chain reaction. Its riotous parataxis summons us to measure the crisis, distill the film, alarm the statisitcs, and (partially) erase the poem.
In these Mukhatabat (Discourses), Najwan Darwish not only diversifies the themes of this classical mystical Arabic genre, but also enacts a radical shift—grounding it entirely in the earthly realm and reconciling the spiritual with the political. They are rendered into English by the singular translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
From the very deft translator Okamoto Sayuri, we have a penetrating essay on poetry by legendary Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gozo, exploring certain rare elements that make a poem.
Elvira Hernandez’ sequence of five poems, is a haunting work of forensic recovery. Bodies lost to historical violence and mangled by amnesia are here redeemed in lyric attention and emphasis. The poem appears in Alec Schumacher and Daniel Borzutsky’s nimble translations.
Translated by Erín Moure from Galician, Chus Pato’s ferocious long poem calls upon us to move metrically and rest volcanically. Moure’s translation addresses the reader directly in the second person, asking it to resist, to occupy the night, to ‘establish the dual face of silex’.
Rajalakshmi Rao is a necessary discovery in Indian literature. She wrote in both Kannada and English in the 1950’s and her bold and sharp short stories are at a tangent to the conventional narrative form of her times, stories with a void at their centre.
A seamless bilingual reading in English and Slovenian by poet Aleš Šteger.