Issue 65

The International Issue (#65) includes poetry in translation from Russian, Latvian, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We asked the translators who contributed work to the issue about how they see their art: What’s the value of reading poetry in translation? That is, if we’re not really hearing the sounds and rhythms of the poet’s original…

If Penetrated by Light: Five Poets Consider the Darkness The Fortieth Day by Kazim Ali (BOA Editions, 2008) Astonishment: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska ——-Translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon (Paraclete Press, 2007) The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado ——-Translated by Ellen Watson (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) Hovering at a…

So little was the warrior, how she held out her slimmed down arms to the flowers I carried and to all that which crumbled in such a theatrical New York evening she was lovely and bright, drinking the last of the champagne to avoid that burning in her throat— And she raised her clear eyes…

In the dark I inflate balloons ———————————for my children it’s nighttime in the house ——————————-I lose my breath, they grow their aerial games, ———————-the threads on which they become acrobats their water shins luminescent hair ———————-their laughter issues forth or holds off, paper decorations on the walls, and the colors, loose folds on their wrists,…

Love at its start and at its finish is not a sentiment ————–but in your arrival a restless fury, eye of cyclones, the dream of a fossilized gaze smashed under amber arrangement of stars in the air and on your face— each step a last judgment. Sentiments change, but not the struggle between the life…

MY SON AT TWELVE believes in the Greek gods. Zeus, Athena. Jin favors Poseidon and Ares but likes them all. He can tell intricate stories, like the one about Baucis and Philemon, an old couple who took in Mercury and Jupiter disguised as travelers. A thousand villagers had turned the gods away, and a thousand were…

Yes, a nameless quietness fills the frontiers within which my disgrace cries out. Maybe that’s why I tell my name to it when I wish no more we were together or when I tire of bearing myself. With my own hands maybe I’ll gather what’s left of the shiver of the aspen tree every evening.…

Born in Nigeria in 1977, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in the university town of Nsukka, living for a time in a house once occupied by Chinua Achebe. After briefly studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, Adichie moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut…

Through the gates of eternity I’ll ride On a grasshopper huge and green. ————————–—Egils Plaudis don’t beckon yet! I don’t yet want to ride to you on the back of a huge grasshopper I still want to linger here among various earthly substances still want to see how the wind sweeps away slogan after slogan…

1 the droning dies down, the sea steps back, leaving salt on stone foreheads, on the years’ shells and that which we so stubbornly call poetry. come, sit here, on this wind and wave crumbled shore and let’s be silent for so long, till night lowers eyelids on the open sea and no one remembers…