Celebrating 15 YearsBy RANA TAHIR
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Trenches at ShowBiz, Kuwait City
Two Poems: ”Trenches at ShowBiz, Kuwait City” and ”Coming Home”
March 1, 2023
Dispatches
February 2023 Poetry Feature
February 23, 2023
Poetry, Translation
We’re pleased to offer these new translations from ON CENTAURS & OTHER POEMS by ZUZANNA GINCZANKA, translated by ALEX BRASLAVSKY, out from World Poetry Books this month. This is the first selected volume in English of Zuzanna Ginczanka, a visionary Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish poet of the inter-war years whose life was cut short by the Holocaust.
Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1945) was a Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish poet of the interwar period. Born in Kiev, which her parents fled to avoid the Russian Civil War in 1922, Ginczanka began writing seriously as a child in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). She was nationally recognized for her poetry by sixteen years of age. Encouraged by a correspondence with poet Julian Tuwim, she moved to Warsaw in 1935. There she became associated with the Skamander group and the satirical magazine Szpilki, and befriended many writers including Witold Gombrowicz. Her 1936 collection, On Centaurs, was widely lauded upon its release. At the start of World War II, she moved east, living in Równe and Soviet-occupied Lviv. In 1942, after the German takeover of Ukraine, she escaped arrest and fled to Kraków on false papers to join her husband. She was arrested in 1944 and shot by the Gestapo a few days before Kraków was liberated by the Soviets. After the war, her last known poem “Non omnis moriar…” was used in court to testify against her denouncers.
Alex Braslavsky (born 1994) is a scholar, translator, and poet. A graduate student in the Harvard Slavic Department, she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. She was an American Literary Translators’ Association Mentee in 2021. Her work on Polish literature has been supported by the Jurzykowski Polish Grant and the ©POLAND Translation Program. Her poetry has appeared in Conjunctions and Colorado Review, among other journals.
Review: SAINT OMER
February 22, 2023
Reviews
Documentary filmmaker Alice Diop brings an unsettling sense of reality to her first fiction feature, which follows a novelist attending the trial of a woman accused of drowning her 15-month-old child. Based on a real-life incident of infanticide, the courtroom proceedings depicted in Saint Omer borrow from the 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, which Diop herself attended. In synopsis, this may sound like a lurid mix of fiction and documentary, but this precise and emotionally complex film, which sprung from Diop’s fascination with Kabou’s trial, does not have the anxiety-stoking energy of a true-crime story. It is so rooted in the point of view of Rama, the writer attending the trial, that I hesitate to describe it as a courtroom drama. The film’s dual focus—on both Rama, the writer, and Laurence, the young woman accused of infanticide—turns the trial into something other than pure spectacle and results in a story that looks closely at the frighteningly powerful bond between mother and child.
Excerpt from Tell Me How It Ends
February 21, 2023
Essays, Nonfiction
This piece is excerpted from Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
“Why did you come to the United States?” That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.
But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
Excerpt from We All Want Impossible Things
February 21, 2023
Fiction
This piece is excerpted from We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
“What do you think happens after you die?” she says. “Oh!” I say. “Gosh.”
I was raised in a fully atheist household, so not much is the short answer. “Just toss me in the dumpster when I go!” my dad likes to announce, and when I’m like, “Um, Dad, I think funerals are actually more about—” he interrupts me. “In the dumpster!” “Okay!” I say. “The dumpster it is!”
Excerpt from Wildseed Witch
February 21, 2023
Fiction
By MARTI DUMAS
This piece is excerpted from Wildseed Witch by Marti Dumas, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
The next day, a woman with a little pink umbrella showed up at my house at the crack of dawn. My mother always gets up that freakishly early, and I was up because something kept dinging even though my phone was on silent. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the sound was coming from my computer. I must have left YouTube open when I collapsed after my rant. The dinging was notifications for MakeupontheCheapCheap. I had 81 new followers and 147 new likes, and the count kept climbing.
Poems from Olio
February 20, 2023
Poetry
These poems are excerpted from Olio by Tyehimba Jess, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
Hagar in the Wilderness
Carved Marble. Edmonia Lewis, 1875
My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
Poems from The Trees Witness Everything
February 20, 2023
Poetry
These poems are excerpted from The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
Far Along in the Story
Once I sat in rain,
opened my mouth to the sky.
I yearned to be changed.
But each drop was a small knife.
Excerpt from Cheap Land Colorado
February 17, 2023
Essays, Nonfiction
By TED CONOVER
This piece is excerpted from Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge by Ted Conover, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
Prologue
It begins with a moment of contact—of driving up to a homestead and trying to introduce yourself.
The prospect is daunting: a lot of people live out here because they do not want to run into other people. They like the solitude. And it is daunting because many of them indicate this preference by closing their driveway with a gate, or by chaining a dog next to their front door, or by posting a sign with a rifle-scope motif that says, “if you can read this you’re within range!”
The local expert on cold-calling is Matt Little, charged by the social service group La Puente with “rural outreach.” Matt has let me ride around in his pickup with him so that I can see him in action. Distances between households on the open Colorado prairie are great, which gives him time to explain his approach, which he has thought about a lot, as he does this every day and in three months has not gotten shot.
Excerpt from The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
February 17, 2023
Essays, Nonfiction
This piece is excerpted from The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
The stories we tell about illness usually have startling beginnings—the fall at the supermarket, the lump discovered in the abdomen during a routine exam, the doctor’s call. Not mine. I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: “gradually and then suddenly.”
