issue 32: winter 2025
editorial
László Krasznahorkai reads from Animalinside at the Almost Island Dialogues 2013.
Don Mee Choi takes us inside her "vast homesickness" where disparate things come together to form and re-form the ways of looking that we call memory and history.
The narrative changes suddenly in the searing poems of Roxana Crisólogo, the tender turning hard, flight painfully brought to ground. Translators Kim Jensen and Judith Sanpietro bring an exceptional skill to render her into English.
In the startling poetry of Kim Hyesoon, reality is pushed over its edge as we encounter the universe and the hopelessly quotidian fused together. Don Mee Choi translates these poems manifesting in English all their beautiful, jagged sharpness.
In Aaron Peck’s piece, Caravaggio’s revisionary vision and the Brussels terror attack converge as instances of rare, but misplaced, martyrdoms. Through the loss of others they name their own sacrifice.
In this excerpt from Rahul Santhanam’s haunting book-length sequence Elk, we find a voice returning to the same note, the same epithet, but each time arriving there with a different flexion, a different order, and a different charge of sameness.
Vyomesh Shukla's prose is light and without a centre, so he can travel anywhere through the incisiveness and humour of his sight. He teases out connections between the most prosaic things and moves from one to the other with acrobatic skill. Mantra Mukim's deft translation retains the lightness and the surprise of Shukla's prose.
A contemporary elegy from poet Jeffrey Yang, composed from the things gathered over a life, perhaps an elegy even for the things themselves.