Featured Commentary |
on Killing Spree, poems by Jorie Graham
“Graham writes from within a world where catastrophe no longer announces itself as event and instead settles … into the very medium through which perception itself must now pass.”
July/August/September 2026 Edition
Literature in Translation |
“The Whisper of the Wind”
“They started in the middle of nowhere, heading towards what she supposed was the closest highway. The whole group began to walk, with the last rays of the sun skirting the hills that could be seen in the distance, very small, on the horizon.”
Poetry |
“Mother’s Day” & “Bad birds”
“Still I struggle to rise, breathing in the quiet, / trying to believe in patience / as I teach the child to make the bread, to mix the flour and water …”
Commentary |
on Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America by Kim Phillips-Fein
“As this timely, incisive book suggests, liberty exists for the elect few, the rest of us be damned — a notion as American as Mom and apple pie.”
Essay |
“Criminal Behavior”
“In the beginning, the fatal beating is just a local news story. A curiosity to follow. Terrible behavior reported in a newspaper circulated through small towns and rural communities within an hour’s drive.”
Commentary |
on Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems by Jeannette L. Clariond, translated from the Spanish & introduced by Forrest Gander
“The poetry strips back the extra, the social, the trauma of living with people, to try to get to a physical, spiritual core that connects us across chronological time and to the physical world.”
Literature in Translation |
from The Pure and the Impure
“I am revealing a leniency that people will find strange, that people will fault me for. It’s true that these two men whom I have just briefly depicted offered me the tangible expression of union, and even of dignity. A kind of austerity enveloped them …”
Interview |
“‘Call Every Resource’: on Muriel Rukeyser in the Twenty-First Century, with Catherine Gander & Stefania Heim”
“There is an uncanniness to how chillingly Rukeyser seems to anticipate aspects of our moment … understanding the deep impacts of living in perpetual war, her insight into the insidious interweaving of consumerism, journalism, and the war machine.”
Poetry |
“Gold Watch” & “Autumn”
“A person is a grieving monster, / said Aeschylus, the past / shapeless as muscle and expressed / as a faceless mass. It’s crawling out to eat.”
Commentary |
on New York Trilogy, poetry by Peter Balakian
“His work takes on the larger picture of historical formation, human rights writ large, and its accretive echo across time, while also reveling in the very material culture that sustains it.”
Poetry |
“After a Language Is Lost”
“My tongue, as if sitting on it / Two minutes of a day / heavy enough / to crush words / coming out my mouth.”
Commentary |
on Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, essays by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
“She urges all of us who live primarily in one language to recognize that our seeming linguistic purity or separateness is only an inability to see the differences that inhere between and within languages.”
Commentary |
on Under the Falls, a novel by Richard Russo
“Under the Falls is a thriller, but at its best it’s concerned about that matter of haunting — about whether the child can ever be reconciled with the adult, and who gets hurt along the way.”
Fiction |
“Ecce Homo”
“She was nearing the end of book 72 in Dio Cassius, his chronicle of Ancient Rome, waiting on the line for which his book principally enjoys fame (“our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust”), when she heard a disturbance in the yard.”
Poetry |
“Double Negative”
“On my third night there // I was out watering when my phone buzzed. / ‘I thought you all should know,’ the email began.”
Commentary |
on My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, a fiction by Deborah Levy
“The book, which Levy dubs “a fiction” rather than “a novel,” functions as a brief journey through the titular writer’s pioneering career as well as a slice of Parisian life, relishing in wordplay that draws from Stein’s bag of tricks.”
Poetry |
“Epiphora, If That’s What It Is,” “An Old Man Walking Along a Trail, Under an Umbrella, Through Heavy Snow” & “Every Soul Smokes”
“Here’s the nine-mile cigarette John Prine planned to light, / with a vodka and ginger ale, when he arrived here. / We’re on a heavenly balcony, it’s a starlit night …”
Commentary |
on Best Literary Translations 2026, edited by Arthur Sze
“What sets this anthology apart is its transparency and celebration of the translation process … offering readers a window into the creative, ethical, and at times collaborative negotiations behind the English versions.”
Poetry |
“Beginning” & “The Gingerbread Man”
“Even what I didn’t have / was what I had — / I said that, / trying to believe myself / When I say myself I mean us / because / those were days when we were never found”
Literature in Translation |
“The Old Age of Narcissus,” “Fear,” “Prayer” & First Communion”
“… from seeing myself so much in this cracked mirror / I’ve lost all sense of my face / or, from talking about it so much, it’s become infinite to me”
Poetry |
“The Scent from a Cupboard”
“breathes out what you were / & were not — / myrrh & the hanging / music of smoke”
Poetry |
“Ghazal” & “Rinsed Rice”
“It takes an image to describe the feeling / in another image; which is to say, / once I tore brittle leaves and hid them / in a book; which is to say, / whatever once lurked within / my honeycombed mind now evades / its reach …”
Commentary |
Book Notes — Nonfiction: on Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World by Alyce Mahon, Diaries by Josef Koudelka, The War That Made the Middle East by Mustafa Aksakal & Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger
“In 2004 at age 94, the painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning published A Table of Content, the first of her two poetry collections. Her poem ‘Sequestrienne’ begins, ‘Don’t look at me / for answers. What am I but / a sobriquet, / a teeth-grinder, / grinder of color, / and vanishing point?'”
Commentary |
on Offseason, a novel by Avigayl Sharp
“This novel is often brutally sad; it’s also often brutally funny. It’s neither a comic novel or a tragedy; instead, it’s something much stranger.”
Literature in Translation |
“Restanza”
“People my age like to wallow in nostalgia for the town, in a romantic narrative of slow living, of sunshine, sea, and wind. I envy them. I wish I could be more forgiving toward my hometown, and toward myself too.”
Poetry |
“Untitled” & “Found Abecedarian: Your Guide to Total Health Care, 1996“
“We’re in public. Academic // coffee complete with neatly inked / questions in my notebook. He presses // gold-rimmed glasses closer …”
Essay |
“Strange Gatherings: The Nightworld of “Dream Song #10”
“If ‘Dream Song #10’’s dreaming Henry stands for Berryman dreaming … then the Song represents one of Berryman’s most agonized debates between his racist and his progressive instincts.”
Commentary |
on The Old Fire, a novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
“A strain that runs through Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novels: characters are let down quietly, delicately, the pain, like a pinprick, festering just below the surface.”
Poetry |
“Intermezzo” & “My Mother and Robert Penn Warren”
“At the end of La Bohème / Rudolpho gives Mimi a muff / to help keep her warm. / I thought of that as I held his hand. / It was midnight, an hour / until he let go of mine.”
Commentary |
on The Eighth Wonder, a novel by Vlady Kociancich, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira
“That Kociancich should have produced such an intricately surreal novel is perhaps unsurprising given that her English literature professor … was none other than Jorge Luis Borges.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Gap Between Mountains,” “The Wheat Is Ripe” & “Boundless Snow”
“The sky rises higher every moment. / On top of our heads a tile-blue hat / adds to the weight of Wanxi Basin. / From all directions laborers learn its lessons / and get more ignorant, too.”
Essay |
“Frank Rosenblatt in Passing: The Rebirth of the Mimetic Impulse”
“Now we recognize that what he explored and created are at the core of Artificial Intelligence, a technology transforming communication, research, design and the nature of work.”
Poetry |
“The Chalk Pig”
“Where I was, was pitch dark. / I was alone in it, / with a sound like a chirp ‘ or what a broken windowpane might make / as its pieces fell slowly to the floor.”
Commentary |
on A Season, poems by Michael Joseph Walsh
“… we each experience our lives as seasons populated by foreigners within. These poems offer a textual reflection of these processes across time …”
Poetry |
“A Planet Is A Moment”
“In the before is / everything possible / in the after even / the nothing that’s / there is missed / its absence / remarkable”
Commentary |
on The Butterfly Who Dreamt He Was A Man by Boria Sax
“Sax believes that insects’ lives render them especially suitable for comparison with human concepts and institutions. He highlights insect metamorphoses as a ‘model for human transformations.'”
Literature in Translation |
“No,” “Talk Less” & “I am tired”
“Slowly. / Yell at me. / So I can really hear you, fully grasp what you say / and determine who is in charge.”
Commentary |
on All There Is to Lose, poems by Aiden Heung
“Heung’s work touches upon the universal sorrow over the loss of an irretrievable past but individualizes that experience by focusing on the poet’s own loss and pressuring it into something stranger – an ethics of sacrifice.”
Commentary |
on Can We Laugh At That? by Jacques Berlinerblau
“The one who is laughing defines what is funny, including comedy that is provocative or nasty. But at what point does comedy become hate speech issuing from xenophobia, misogyny, bias, or rage?”
Poetry |
“Down by the Humus Lake”
“water worries the house posts / sits on the steps // moody / made of murk // eventually / we approach the door / the stairway down // carrying our lights / our tendency / to drown”
Poetry |
“The Visible Woman”
“Her open palms faced out — / she looked like she was asking for mercy. // I stopped playing with The Visible Woman / when she started reminding me / of Jesus Christ on his crucifix.”
Poetry |
“Invisible,” “Window I” & “Window II”
“… If I were / in a painting, if you were // to turn that painting upside- / down, I’d fall from water // into sky. What would you see? / A blur of blue …”
Fiction |
“Thinker” & “Second Chances”
“She told her husband that she was tired of pretending to be smart. She had been undone since the surgery, her thoughts short circuiting all over the place after twenty minutes of thinking.”
Poetry |
“On Ellsworth Road”
“See the cracks in our foundations? / But Sharon isn’t worried about that. / Tonight, and every night: Who will feed the feral cats — / her front step is lined with aluminum bowls …”