“Borders were Made to be Crossed.” Marco Aime, Il Fatto quotidiano, 6 August 2017 He’d already said it in a poem from his collection Solo andata (“One-Way Ticket”): “Dry land in Italy is land locked down,/ We let them drown to drown them out.” And now, during a TV interview on Italy’s La7, he’s said it again. In . . .
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A review of The Year 200 by Augustín de Rojas (Restless Books, 2016) Cuban author Agustin de Rojas’s The Year 200 forces American readers to grapple with their assumptions about Cuba, communism, and the human condition. The novel’s Spanish publication in 1990 and English publication in 2016 line up with potentially crucial turning points in . . .
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1936The year your grandmother swallowed her gold coins to hide them from the soldiersThis is how you keep yourself safe, keep partsof yourself in different boxes Trust no onewith everything —from “In Case of Emergency” from Summer 2017 (Volume 58.2) Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.I worked for several . . .
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Since the end of the eighteenth century, and perhaps long before, visiting Napoli has been a feature item in Western Europe’s bucket list. In a letter from Naples written on March 2, 1787, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commented, “Of the situation of the city, and of its glories, which have been so often . . .
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Editor’s Note: There are many rewards in working for a literary magazine that has lasted nearly six decades. None greater, though, than the chance to receive messages of the sort that came in just the other day, when we heard from Dr. Cynthia Haft, a former student of the French scholar and . . .
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Double Portrait by Brittany Perham (Norton, 2017) So What So That by Marjorie Welish (Coffee House, 2016) As Robert Lowell saw it, the big division in American poetry after the Second World War was, that between “Cooked” poetry (traditional forms in polished perfection) and “Raw” poetry (open and organic forms, line lengths determined not . . .
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“We do not expect to be bludgeoned by laughter and/or by loveor other pleasantries, and neither do we expect music to be used on us. . .” – From “Muzak” which appears in the Music issue (Volume 57, Issue 4). Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.In art class . . .
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“. . .No one thinks this is enough to get the blood out. No one sleeps to the sounds of bombs.[ . .] No one shares the bed with his sisters and brothers.. . .” — from “No One and Syria’s Struggle to Sleep” which appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume . . .
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On July 14 and 15 of 2017, I taught a class of between twenty-seven and thirty-two high school students at UCLA, as part of the University’s Early Academic Outreach Program. There was certainly an exact number of kids in the room, but I was never certain what that number was. The teenagers, . . .
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“There are queens and divas here, holding notes and holding sway and cloaking themselves in poisonous ways that march on no feet. They say to be careful here in the desert, that the uninitiated will pay like the gamblers they are, amateurs welshing on a price they negotiated themselves.” —From “Desert Suite . . .
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