Related Posts

Cover of Mona Kareem's I Will Not Fold These Maps, orange cover with white writing.

Review of “I Will Not Fold These Maps”

SUMMER FARAH
My first encounter with Mona Kareem’s work was not her poetry, but her essay in Poetry Birmingham on the trend of Western poets “translating” from languages they are not literate in. Kareem brings attention to what she calls the “colonial phenomenon of rendition as translation,” in which a poet effectively workshops a rough translation done by a native speaker or someone who is otherwise literate in the original language. Often, this is the only way acclaimed writers reach Western audiences.

Cover of Louise Gluck's "American Originality," with a small yellow diorama of a room on white background.

Friday Reads: April 2023

Things are finally warming up here in Western Mass: old snow banks are melting and fuzzy buds are popping up on the trees. Our spring issue—which features a portfolio of stunning fiction from Kuwait, apocalyptic poetry, a Ramadan romance, and a story about a dog in a Texas barrio—launches in just a few short weeks. If you’re wondering where these writers get their inspiration, look no further than this round of Friday Reads. 

Book cover of Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Oyehaug

Present Tense Machine: A Review

OLGA ZILBERBOURG
In Present Tense Machine, Øyehaug offers us the opposite scenario: the connection between a mother and her child is severed completely by their lives splintering into parallel universes in which the other has been forgotten. Øyehaug’s narrator attempts to persuade us that even in this situation, the connection between a mother and a child would remain, however tenuous.