New work from our contributors: MARK KYUNGSOO BIAS, SARA MUNJACK, and DANIEL TOBIN
Table of Contents:
Mark Kyungsoo Bias | Visitor
| Meeting My Mother
Sara Munjack | Friendship Talk after Love-lives
Daniel Tobin | The Door
| Prayer in Passing
Poem by IMMANUEL MIFSUD
Translated from the Maltese by RUTH WARD and IMMANUEL MIFSUD
Poem appears in both Maltese and English below.
Translator’s Note
The Poem
Malta is a country caught in the crosscurrents: between North Africa and continental Europe; between insularity and a constructive role on the world stage; between prehistoric ruins and the blockchain. Mifsud is the voice of Malta, reflecting the archipelago in its richness, complexity, and contradictions. His is the voice through which the margins question the center; myths of progress are challenged; and the ancient interrogates the present, as in “Ġgantija II.”
The Ġgantija (“Giantess”) temples of Gozo were built during the Neolithic and are thought to be more than 5,500 years old, older than the pyramids of Egypt. They were erected by a people who worshipped a mother figure, a goddess. Awareness of intergenerationality and the unbroken cycles of life takes on a peculiar intensity when all that you have ever been surrounds all that you are in the present — and all you might aspire to become. It is comforting; it is confining. “Ġgantija II” was commissioned for an interdisciplinary event and an excerpt from it, in the Maltese, has been incorporated into a public sculpture on the island of Gozo.
Poems by AUSTIN SEGREST, from The Groom.
Table of Contents:
• The Groom
• After Caravaggio
• Revision
• Raptures
New poems by our contributors: MADELEINE MORI, G. C. WALDREP, ELLEN DORÉ WATSON, and ROBERT FANNING.
Table of Contents:
Madeleine Mori | Marrow
G. C. Waldrep | Rereading “Corson’s Inlet” at the Glendale Methodist Cemetery
Ellen Doré Watson | In Which I’m Not Allowed to Lie
Robert Fanning | Inarticulata
Poems by ELVIRA HERNÁNDEZ
Translated from the Spanish by THOMAS ROTHE
Poems appear in both Spanish and English.
Translator’s Note
When Elvira Hernández began publishing poetry in the 1980s, the few pictures that appeared of her in literary supplements never revealed her entire face. A hand, an arm, a post, a leaf, a slightly out-of-focus photograph would interrupt the frame to conceal her identity. Whereas some of Chile’s most renowned poets—Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Pablo de Rokha—chose unique pseudonyms difficult to forget, Hernández, whose birth name is María Teresa Adriasola, adopted a pen name that could easily get lost among the crowd. Far from an artistic pose or esoteric performance to gain attention, Hernández’s decision to remain unrecognizable speaks of the very real political persecution that swept through Chile and the Southern Cone during the 1970s and 80s. To write or make art in the asphyxiating environment of Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, in the midst of disappearances and exile, media complicity and a cultural blackout, implied an act of resistance, a conscious decision, despite the risks involved, to create dangerously, as Albert Camus and, later, Edwidge Danticat would say.
Poems by ESTHER RAMÓN
Translated from the Spanish by EMMA FERGUSON
Poems appear in both Spanish and English.
Translator’s Note
Esther Ramón, born in 1970, lives in Madrid and taught one of my very first writing workshops at various café tables in Lavapiés more than a decade ago, where she skillfully introduced me and fellow students to what it could mean to truly collaborate, to be interdisciplinary, to do more than look at a painting while writing a poem and instead to enter into the methods and mindsets of different mediums, seeing the world not only in a different language (in my case) but with a more creative intention. She continues to be a collaborator with other artists and it feels meaningful to translate her work, in a sense collaborate too, and become involved in her poetic world so many years later.
New poems by our contributors.
Table of Contents:
POLINA BARSKOVA | Joy (translated by Valzhyna Mort, appears in both Russian and English)
ALDO AMPARÁN | Parable of the Haunted Cloak
TOM SLEIGH | A Dictator Walks into a Bar
MICHAEL DUMANIS | Ordeal
The dermatologist injects the local anesthetic
into my upper arm. When she begins to carve,
Winner of the 2021 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
The pidgin form of ‘to be’1
A young child, I was privy to hearing this word
in my household, around my uncle and his friends
reminiscent of his schoolboy youth.
A part of a pidgin I could never participate in
for fear that the broken English might
have too much of an essence, might
tarnish my own English.
They would not let me code switch
thinking the pidgin would overtake me
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Celebrating 15 Years