The Review Review gives Issue 04 five stars, saying it “seamlessly blends style, presentation, and experimentation with pieces that celebrate the universal human experiences of love, loneliness, heartbreak, and anxiety.”
SOFIA BELIMOVA
In this month’s Friday Reads feature, three of our interns recommend dynamic stories about the nightclubs of the Midwest, a boarding school in coastal Rhode Island, and the tangled relationships of a young person’s body and spirits.
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.
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.
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