This review is a reprint. It was originally published by fsm. Review: tommy wyatt blake’s MIASMAMIST: a poetic display of egoist anarchy As the narrative begins, a nameless figure hands over their business card, yet no name or job title appears—instead, the card bears a grimly honest statement about the reader’s life: “trust me, i’m […]
Reviews
Review: tommy wyatt blake’s MIASMAMIST: a poetic display of egoist anarchy
Review: Fatemeh Shams’s Hopscotch
translated from the Persian by Armen Davoudian
by Mahdi Ganjavi
In The Beginning, There Was Translation Hopscotch (Falschrum Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024) is a collection of 13 poems in Persian by Fatemeh Shams, accompanied by their English translations by Armen Davoudian, and a series of evocative photographs by Stefan Maneval. This collection delves deeply into the themes of exile, memory, and the internal […]
Review: Miguel Avero’s Aguas/Waters
translated from the Spanish by Jona Colson
by Pepper Cunningham
Aguas/Waters is obsessed with dichotomies; the relationship between earth and space, the thin film between strangers and people we think we know, the struggle between naked truth and blissful ignorance, the heartache between presence and absence.
Review: Marlon Hacla’s Glossolalia translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim
by Jacqueline Schaalje
“Can our rot ripen? According to the books, our future is on fire like a child pelted with kerosene and lit, pushed to start walking. (‘Stairs’).”
Review: Sheyla Smanioto’s Out of Earth
by Jacqueline Schaalje
Out of Earth, the award-winning debut novel by Brazilian novelist Sheyla Smanioto, translated from Portuguese into English by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis, and published by Boiler House Press, is about digging. The digging is simultaneously of dead bodies from the earth, dogs dug from the body which invariably means violence is going to flare […]
You’re the Woods Too by Dennis James Sweeney
Review by Xander Gershberg
Dennis James Sweeney’s You’re the Woods Too—a hybrid collection of interwoven poems, journal entries, visuals, and stage directions—masterfully intervenes on literary and social figurations of nature in evocative language. Early in the collection, the speaker offers a definition of that operative concept: “Nature (n): the part of the world WE cannot control, no matter how […]
Hemley Boum’s Days Come & Go, translated from the French by Nchanji Njamnsi
Review by Jacqueline Schaalje
This is the vividly told story of three generations of women (and their husbands, friends, sons, and lovers—not necessarily in order of importance) both in Cameroon and after immigrating to France. Major personal and historical events, such as Cameroon’s war of independence, are told through the eyes of one character, whose circumstances provide the background […]
Review: Time Stitches by Eleni Kefala
translated from the Greek by Peter Constantine
Time Stitches starts with a shape poem:
to al
l those play
ing
hopscotch wi
thin
the gaps οf his
tory
The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli translated from the Italian by John Taylor,
reviewed by Caroline Maldonado
Italian poet Franca Mancinelli has internalized the landscape she grew up in poetically to express some of her deepest emotions. Beginning from the tremors, earthquakes and mudslides of her life and landscape, the poet develops her riveting ars poetica. “I have often felt that I carry writing in my body,” she writes, “that I have been inscribed in the darkness. (…) We are the imprint of the time that has been, of the life that has passed through us. By writing we bring to light these signs that we contain, as they are, obscure and indecipherable to us. It is like leaning over a threshold that looks into the void. We are between the unknown and nothingness.”
Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
The daring viewpoint of a homophobe widow makes for a toe-curling, but also hopeful read in the riveting Korean bestseller by Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter, dealing with the loneliness and ostracism of a lesbian couple and a single elderly woman.
