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June 11, 2026
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Feltspade
June 11, 2026
Poetry, Translation
Poem by ELIAS SADAQ, translated from the Danish by DENVER DAVID ROBINSON.
The piece appears in both English and Danish below.
Translator’s Note
I bought a copy of Elias Sadaq’s debut poetry collection DJINN on a windy December morning in Copenhagen in 2024. Although I’m not Danish, Moroccan, or Muslim, I’ve spent over half my life going between the United States and a small seaside village in Denmark not so far―in kilometers―from where Sadaq grew up. I was curious to know what it’s like to be of Danish and Moroccan descent, queer and Muslim, and come from one of (highly homogenous) Denmark’s most ethnically diverse districts, a place I had visited occasionally with my father. Sadaq’s work enchanted me immediately. There was much I recognized, and more I did not, including incantations to punish and protect. As I read, I scribbled a rudimentary translation in pencil next to his lines. Eventually, I reached out to Sadaq, who gave me permission to translate and seek American publishers for his work. Now, after several months of collaboration and getting to know one another, I have finished my translation of DJINN. I’ve learned so much in my work with Elias, who is one of Denmark’s most versatile and exciting new artists. For one, my understanding of modern street Danish has improved. More importantly, his generosity and playful curiosity have inspired me in this time of increasing discord. His work opens doors, welcoming all who care or clamor to enter―strangers, DILFs, saints, and demons―while narrowing the gap between the sacred and profane.
A felt spade is a military entrenching tool, a survival shovel, but also carries a derogatory connotation employed to infer one is an idiot. I considered translating the title with an English colloquial equivalent, such as blunt instrument, dull blade, or simply tool. In the end, I chose to keep the literal translation to allow readers to sit with the original title’s ambiguity.
― Denver David Robinson
Freedom
June 9, 2026
Essays
Excerpted from the essay collection FREEDOM.
I arrive in Johannesburg, South Africa, on December 2, 2013. My father will join me in two weeks, with my brother to follow a week later. In one month, we will unveil my mother’s headstone in the township where she grew up, one year after her death. Weeks before my arrival, a report detailing unlawful expenditure of taxpayer money in the form of $20 million of “security improvements” to President Jacob Zuma’s lavish compound, is leaked to the press. Nine years ago, the country’s first all-race elections were held and South Africa finally regained freedom from apartheid rule.
Mother is a Kind of Holding: Jenny Qi interviews Preeti Vangani
June 8, 2026
Interviews
PREETI VANGANI and JENNY QI first met as inaugural Rooted and Written Fellows at the San Francisco Writers Grotto in 2019, the same year that Preeti published her debut poetry collection, Mother Tongue Apologize. Their shared experience of writing through grief after mother-loss as young women bonded them, and they became close friends. Both were subsequently awarded a Brown Handler Residency and a McCormack Writing Center Fellowship (formerly Tin House).
Loons in Strandir
June 3, 2026
Dispatches
By JEFFREY WOLF
Hólmavík, Iceland, 2023
The Westfjords. Iceland’s necrotic hand. Gnarled fingers reaching for the icy water. This is my interlude. A day between artist residencies, a rental car from Hertz. Just a short detour off my route. I may never have the chance again.
The fjords sit back and cast their spell. They rise from the ocean like the backs of sleeping beasts. For eons, they’ve waited. Layer after layer, gray upon gray, so deep and infinite that I start to feel afraid. Surely this is where the darkness lives.
A short detour isn’t so short. The land wanders, the roads double back. Time warps in the hypnosis. I’ve driven for hours and made no progress. Suddenly I’ve crested a mountain, and I’m staring down like a king. Then I’m low along the beach, small and insignificant. Then the mist rolls in, and it’s anybody’s guess.
May 2026 Poetry Feature: Arielle Hebert, from Bottom Feeders
May 28, 2026
Poetry
This month we bring you three poems selected from Bottom Feeders by ARIELLE HEBERT, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.
TOC:
—“Elegy for Florida”
—“Red Tide”
—“The Dead Layer”
Elegy for Florida
Almost everything they said about her was true.
Even the bad things.
Especially the bad things.
She began reaching for the water
and never stopped reaching
until she became
an extension of water itself,
her delicate arm just begging
to be snapped off from the panhandle.
Review of Cécé by Emmelie Prophète
May 26, 2026
Reviews
Review by SAM SPRATFORD
Book by EMMELIE PROPHÈTE
Translated from the French by AIDAN ROONEY
Uncle Frédo lies in the dark, water dripping through the sheet-metal roof. His American Dream crushed by the reality of existence as a non-white, non-citizen in the U.S., he returns to Haiti for the remainder of his life. He rarely speaks and is nearly always drunk. He spends his days in a dreamless twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness.
Cécé, his 20 year old niece and the inheritor of his psychic burden, is our real protagonist.
Cécé was born into a slum outside Port-au-Prince, a place fractured by violence. It is the recent past, in the heady early days of the digital age. Facebook was still the social platform of choice and capitalism had not yet made an industry of influencer marketing. Abandoned by a kleptocratic state, the Cité of Divine Power and its counterpart, Bethlehem, have seen gangs step in to provide structure for residents by claiming a monopoly on violence. Unlike the Hobbesian Leviathan, there is no law underwriting the circumstances under which violence can be applied. It is a lawless place—but not without an order of its own.
Rocket City Rising
May 20, 2026
Dispatches
Huntsville, Alabama
The news came on a Tuesday: U.S. Space Command was moving to Huntsville. The headlines said Redstone Arsenal wins the bid, but that word wins sat strange in my mouth. In the breakroom, someone printed the article and pinned it to the bulletin board above the coffee pot. The photo showed the gates of Redstone shining in the morning sun, a soldier standing guard beside the sign.
Outside my office window, trucks rumbled past loaded with pallets of equipment. The air always smelled faintly of dust and jet fuel. I thought about how this patch of land in northern Alabama, once a cotton field, then a proving ground, then a missile test site, was about to become home to something even bigger.
The Sound the Sun Makes
May 19, 2026
Fiction
The village sits in the throat of the Maloti mountains, which hum pink with the setting sun. From east to west, the mountains resemble many fists, the knuckles as peaks, the fingers as slopes, the space between a deep emerald.
Tsepiso—fifteen, lover of algebraic maths, The Bold and the Beautiful, and the Greek-American singer Yanni—must walk to the village pump and return home before dark. Thabang, her neighbor, who saves sweets for her from the Chinese shop, intends to marry Tsepiso. This news drifted through the village like a Sunlight soap bubble, and so Tsepiso’s mother has warned her to be home early. Otherwise, Thabang will take her into the maize fields, lay her down, and make her a wife.
What We’re Reading: May 2026
May 15, 2026
Reviews
Curated by KEI LIM
With our spring issue hot off the press, check out these recommendations from three of the issue’s contributors: LIZ DEWOLF, ANDREW STEINER, and MARIA TERRONE.
Zach Williams’ Beautiful Days, recommended by Issue 31 contributor Liz DeWolf
I first came across Zach Williams’ work when I read his 2022 story “Wood Sorrel House” in The New Yorker. The story, in which a family arrives at a rental cabin and then forgets everything about their lives before, including how they got there, deeply unsettled me. Something about Williams’ careful, straightforward prose makes each disturbing revelation—The baby doesn’t age while the parents do! Food mysteriously appears in the freezer!—all the more destabilizing.
