Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
This month, contributors KATHARINE HALLS, THEA MATTHEWS, and OLGA ZILBERBOURG take your reading lists to Prague, Damascus, and New York City with four poetry and fiction recommendations that are wholly absorbing, in their stories and settings alike.
Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, trans. Paul Wilson; recommended by TC Online Contributor Olga Zilberbourg 
By SARAH SAWYER
This piece is excerpted from The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer ’97, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
Austin, Texas
1987
A girl leans on a metal guardrail at the edge of a brown field. She will not stand here again. She knows this, so she is trying to notice everything: the tall stalks of grass turning into thick stitches of coral and gold, the sun a dark orange marble rolling past the clouds. When she looks down, she sees her toes curling in the gravel, the dents from the hot guardrail burning the soft undersides of her forearms.
If she stays here, facing the field, she can’t see the bulldozers, perched like yellow vultures in the cul-de-sac behind her.
New poems by our contributors CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON, OLENA JENNINGS, MEGHAN MCCLURE, and JONATHAN FINK
Table of Contents:
At Sea
Each summer the cadets of Maine Maritime Academy put to sea with a crew of instructors aboard their eponymous training ship, State of Maine. Here, like medical students at a teaching hospital, they set about practicing the skills of their aspirational careers on a live patient—navigating, steering, chipping paint, avoiding collisions, and tending to a diesel plant whose thundering mass fills a room large enough for basketball. Everything is big on a ship like this, which sleeps 350 people and needs 30 feet of ocean just to stay afloat. In tanks below the living spaces there are 3,300 long tons of fuel and 770 tons of potable water. The anchors weigh 5 tons each, set out on chains with links fourteen inches across. An old Navy ship built for speed, not baggage, the State of Maine is slim and pointy at her ends, like a canoe. In a calm sea she moves with almost no feeling of displacement, just a low white-noise rumble of engines and the shoosh of water sliding by.
By BLAIR KAMIN
This piece is excerpted from Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago by Blair Kamin ’79, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2024. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
Looking back on nearly thirty years of architecture criticism at the Chicago Tribune, I realize that I have borne witness to a dramatic transformation of Chicago, from a declining industrial colossus to a dynamic yet deeply troubled postindustrial powerhouse, whose favored emblem is a jellybean-shaped sculpture of highly polished steel. The mirrorlike surface of that sculpture, officially titled Cloud Gate but widely known as “the Bean,” reflects the striking skyline of the city’s ever-growing downtown, now home to $10 million condominiums, Michelin-starred restaurants, and an elegant promenade that rims the once badly polluted Chicago River. But the Bean does not reflect the reality of a very different Chicago. That Chicago, though not without distinguished buildings and untapped economic potential, is also a place of weed-strewn vacant lots, empty storefronts, and unceasing gun violence. Indeed, Cloud Gate may be the ultimate shiny, distracting object. While the 2020 census revealed that Chicago’s population grew by nearly 2 percent during the previous decade, to 2.7 million, the dramatic disconnect between the two Chicagos prompts the question: Is this a good city, a just city? Absolutely not. Which prompts a second query: Can those responsible for building the city advance the fortunes of neighborhoods devastated by decades of discrimination, disinvestment, and deindustrialization? On that crucial matter, the jury is still out.
One day in 2008, after not writing for almost 10 years, JENNIFER MARTELLI searched “poetry workshops on the North Shore of Massachusetts.” She signed up for the first “hit” that came up, a Sacred Poetry workshop led by JENNIFER JEAN at the now-defunct Cornerstone Books in Salem, Massachusetts. Both Jennifers bonded over poetry, parenthood, and publishing—and a great friendship was formed! They continue to write together, travel together (because Jennifer Martelli is afraid to drive over bridges, Jennifer Jean takes the wheel), and share their work.
In this interview, Jennifer Jean asked Martelli about her latest collection, The Queen of Queens, which explores the political and emotional zeitgeist of the present by probing the past in a lyrical, smart, and singular voice. Jennifer Martelli’s poetry is the self-deprecating inheritor of Sylvia Plath and Marie Howe.
By KIRMEN URIBE
Translated by ELIZABETH MACKLIN
Reviewed by NATASHA AYAZ
There is an undeniable poetry to transportation. The reverie of a train roping across land, the intrepidity of a boat charting depthless waters, the surrealism of an aircraft cutting through cloud—all tracing paths like storylines across terrain, all positioning the passenger as an Odyssean protagonist. In Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, Kirmen Uribe takes the family novel to the skies. Originally written in Basque and published in 2008, this latest edition was published in 2022—translated by American poet Elizabeth Macklin and featuring an incisive new foreword by Lebanese-American writer Youmna Chlala. The first of Uribe’s four novels, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao won the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain. True to the timelessly familial tendency of many debut novels, its narrative pulse is Uribe’s desire to excavate his ancestral past, collaging testimonies from disparate historical voices into a cohesive portrait.
NICHOLAS GOODLY’s debut full-length poetry collection, Black Swim was published by Copper Canyon Press in September 2022. JAAMIL OLAWALE KOSOKO and Nicholas recently connected over Zoom and talked about interdisciplinary art and writing, the essential nature of rest, and prioritizing creative expression.
By BETH HAHN
Swimmer Cyanotype Print by Rosalind Hobley.
A man swims to the left of Julia, and a woman to the right. They are blurs of misted goggles, the glint of a silver, latex cap. They flip like sleek fish at the pool’s wall.
Julia is sure they are having an affair. The two showed up at the same time, splitting the three-lane pool with Julia, who had gotten used to swimming alone. At first, she resented the wake of their bodies in the water—that reminder of competitive sport. She watched as they left the pool, noticing the nod, a touch as they crossed paths at the changing room doors.
Julia is a night swimmer. She likes the pool’s cool indoor lights and the way the black winter sky beyond the glass windows feels framed and distant. The goggles distort her peripheral vision—creating a blue shadow that she imagines as one of the sea creatures she and James used to visit at the aquarium when they first met.
If James were at home, she would tell him about the swimmers, but he is in New Zealand, studying the impact of climate change on a fur seal colony.
Under water, Julia feels the shudder of the commuter train as it passes.
Compression, airway, breath.
Be the stranger who will save your life—
By URVI KUMBHAT
Kolkata, India
From my window I see a boy shaking the bougainvillea
for flowers. My parents talk of pruning it. They talk
of little else. The tree, spilling wildly past our house into
the gulley—where boys come to smoke or piss, lanky against
betel-dyed walls—acrid ammonia, posters begging for
votes, pink crowning above them. The boys linger even
when it rains. Each drop caught briefly under
the golden streetlight, and me, holding my breath.
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Celebrating 15 Years