Reading Minna Canth’s Children of Misfortune (translated from the Finnish by Minna Jeffery) felt like a jolt of moral clarity. In a year when I stopped apologizing, the play reminded me why anger, when shared and articulated, can still feel invigorating. Canth refuses the lie that oppression is inevitable, insisting instead that the world we inhabit was made and can be remade. There is something bracing, almost ecstatic, about watching oppressed people unite in fury, turning their rage against the lifeless property their masters prize so dearly.
That same refusal of appeasement runs through Hélène Laurain’s On Fire (tr. Catherine Leung from the French), whose blunt, abrasive narrator feels almost instructive in a moment when calls for meek compromise echo as loudly as calls for violence. Laurain offers no heroes, no romanticism, only a clear-eyed account of what resistance actually costs: police brutality, surveillance, isolation, depression. And yet resistance remains necessary, as does art.
If Canth and Laurain speak to the anger of the present, Zekine Türkeri’s A Jihadist Dried Up a Sea (tr. Keko Menéndez Türkeri from the Turkish) does justice to its grief. Few endings have struck me as forcefully as Türkeri’s explanation of the title. Stripped of sentimentality, the piece insists that meaning is not born from grief but constructed against it, and that only by recognizing our shared pain can we find the strength to go on.
That recognition undergirds Anatoly Loginov’s The Narrow Neck of Being (translated from the Russian by the author himself), a staggering survey of attention in Russian literature. For all its scholarly precision, the essay is bound to the issue’s most politically outspoken works by its insistence that attention and suffering are inseparable. To be aware is to be fragile, mortal, and therefore attuned to the vulnerability of others. Loginov’s call to spend attention lavishly, even on another’s suffering, feels like an ethical compass for an age of ceaseless crises.
I ended my reading in a quieter register with Rokhl Korn’s Four Poems (tr. Pearl Abraham from the Yiddish). Their exactness captures the shared longing of romantic love, but what stayed with me most was Korn’s use of the future tense in “My Wait” and “My Dreams.” Desire, she seems to accept, will never be fulfilled. And still, she grants it beauty.
—Julia Maria, Digital Editor
Reading Zekine Türkeri’s A Jihadist Dried Up a Sea (tr. Keko Menéndez Türkeri from the Turkish) alongside Sidsel Ana Welden Gajardo’s As a Child of a Refugee, I Have Learned That War Lives on Across Generations (translated from the Danish by the author) was devastating. Even knowing, intellectually, that war and displacement scar across generations, both pieces force a confrontation with that truth. Türkeri reminds us that every person in a refugee camp carries a story worthy of more than a report, while Gajardo’s letter to her father wrestles with how trauma persists long after exile, living on in loneliness and the mind. If time heals, these pieces ask, what does healing even look like? Can war ever truly end?
I was struck, too, by A Poetic Psychology of Attention, the interview with Kristin Dykstra, particularly her observation that interruption itself can signify. In a world saturated with stimuli, dissonance becomes not a flaw but a necessity. Estranging ourselves from the familiar may be the only way to recognize what realities truly matter.
János Háy’s Nuoc (tr. Eugene Brogyányi from the Hungarian) returns us to precarity and rupture. Its protagonist hovers between the no-longer and the not-yet, suspended between languages, places, and bodily endurance. As Háy notes, “the body prevailed,” a refrain that echoes across this issue’s meditations on survival.
That sense of precarious balance comes into sharp focus again in Anatoly Loginov’s The Narrow Neck of Being. Attention here feels like standing on a precipice: every shift of focus alters what is seen or ignored. To attend is an act, a labor, even a sacrifice. In a world designed for distraction, Loginov’s essay becomes a call to reclaim not only attention, but agency itself.
—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant
The Milo De Angelis poems, translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti, struck me as remarkably fresh. I was especially drawn to their soundwork, the subtle assonance threading through lines like “roads” and “clothes,” “reeds” and “need.” Having read De Angelis in Italian, I admired how Venuti conveys both the control and the enigma of the originals.
I was also a reader for Boris Ryzhy’s poems translated from the Russian by Olga Mexina, and they quickly became favorites. Comparing them with other existing translations made clear how decisively a translator can shape a poet’s reception. Mexina’s versions preserve the lifeblood of Ryzhy’s work without softening its edge.
Kristin Dykstra’s interview stayed with me for its insistence that interruption signifies, but must occur on one’s own terms. That tension between drift and discipline feels central to this issue.
The nonfiction piece by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by Wenxin Liang, offers a different mode of attention entirely. Blurring dream and waking life, it immerses the reader in an experiential awareness that feels bodily rather than analytical.
And the excerpt from Eduardo Halfon’s Tarantula (tr. Daniel Hahn from the Spanish) delighted me with its imagery, especially the moment when a childhood memory waits patiently, unlocked by the sight of a hand on a white coffee cup.
—Sabrina Fountain, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
January always draws me inward, and I found myself gravitating toward pieces steeped in longing. Dino Buzzati’s Unnecessary Invitations (tr. Seán McDonagh from the Italian) was my favorite fiction in the issue. Moving through the seasons, it conjures fantasies of total love and belonging, only to dismantle them with the realization that the imagined beloved never truly existed. I felt each season in my bones.
That sense of yearning continues in Rokhl Korn’s Four Poems (tr. Pearl Abraham), which trace loneliness across time and weather, each detail of the world colored by absence.
Morten Nielsen’s Message of a Defeat (tr. Sheema Kalbasi from the Danish) captures a drunken moment of intimacy insulated from a spinning world, its humor shadowed by political despair.
Ilgın Yıldız’s Vissi d’amore (tr. Jacob De Camillis from the Turkish) jolted me with its use of the second person, projecting a seemingly autobiographical narrative outward, implicating the reader in its examination of routine and escape.
Finally, Mar Gómez Glez’s Emergence (tr. Sarah Thomas from the Spanish) offers an absurd, exuberant take on bodily transformation. Reading it as a modern, young-adult reimagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, I found it as disturbing as it was poignant.
—Olivia Wohlgemuth, Assistant Editor (Fiction)
Wenxin Liang’s translation of Sanmao brought back memories of encountering her work for the first time, restoring her buoyancy and curiosity. Precision and restraint matter deeply to me, which is why Morten Nielsen’s Message of a Defeat (tr. Sheema Kalbasi from the Danish) resonated so strongly.
I was also captivated by A. J. Carruthers’s interview with Wang Guanglin, whose reflections on semiotics and world literature intersect productively with my own research interests.
—Junyi Zhou, Assistant Editor (Visual)
Mar Gómez Glez’s Emergence (tr. Sarah Thomas) reimagines girlhood through estrangement, as a teenager merges with a fungus and begins observing life from another organism’s perspective.
Mahsa Moeen’s Mind Fever (tr. from the Persian by the author) unfolds through lush, negated images, its tension between abundance and refusal lingering long after the final line.
Sanmao’s Travels in Ecuador (tr. Wenxin Liang) blends mourning with discovery, tracing cultural exchange across Taiwan, Ecuador, and the Andes.
Sidsel Ana Welden Gajardo’s letter, As a Child of a Refugee, I Have Learned That War Lives on Across Generations, asks when a war truly ends, examining inherited trauma with unflinching sincerity.
Sarah Gear’s interview with Hamid Ismailov introduced me to the ghazal form and to the entanglements of Uzbek literary politics, leaving me eager to read We Computers.
—Arla Hoxha, Social Media Manager