This month we’re pleased to bring you poems by PEDRO POITEVIN translated from Spanish by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV and new work by 2025 Disquiet Prize finalists AIDEN HEUNG and ELLIE BLACK.
Table of Contents:
By TASH AW
Reviewed by BRITTA STROMEYER
Readers familiar with Tash Aw know that the power of Aw’s writing lies in the intricate layering of complex themes, brought to life through nuanced characters. His latest novel, The South, the first of a four-part saga, is no exception. It is an ambitious portrayal of a family navigating profound transformation and the complexities of identity and belonging within Malaysia’s rich and challenging political context of the late 1990s.
Following his grandfather’s passing, sixteen-year-old Jay journeys southward with his family to inspect their inherited failing farm. Blighted trees and drought-stricken fields greet them upon arrival. Told in rotating third- and first-person perspectives over a few weeks, the novel introduces Jay, his mother Sui, and farm manager Fong as they grapple with identity and belonging within fractured family dynamics. The novel, both broad in its scope and delicate in its intimacy, explores the repercussions when personal lives intersect with wider societal currents. It unfolds with a quiet yet remarkable sense of pacing, each moment carefully weighted, drawing the reader deeper into the rich inner lives of its characters.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD and KEI LIM
This month’s recommendations depart to new and old worlds, and explore what we can bring back from them. With CHRISTOPHER AYALA‘s recommendation we find ourselves among magic and aliens alike, with CHRISTY TENDING‘s we return to Mussolini-era Italy, and with MARIAH RIGG‘s we are brought to a climate-ravaged future. Read on to traverse these collections of stories and essays.
Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears; recommended by TC Online Contributor Christopher Ayala
I’ve taken up the habit of hitting independent bookshops wherever I travel and buying the first interesting book I see, eschewing the never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover adage and one-hundred percent judging a book by its cover. Good design suggests to me a deeper, more thoughtful curation on behalf of the press, that a book itself is an art object whose cover is a deep and personal aesthetic representing the work of the writer and the work of the press. This is exactly how I found myself in Tucson Arizona’s Antigone Books, where I was led into Verso Books’ edition of Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan.
Pictou County, Nova Scotia, Canada
Lint blue thunder flavors the memory. The waves are enormous, curling up high and mighty like Caribou antlers. In hindsight: Why are we at the beach during a thunderstorm? But back then, in all of my five year old wisdom: The water is so warm and excited to see me.
The power went out for three days during one hurricane or another. My niece was only a baby, my mom and sister murmuring about warming the milk. Everybody crowded together onto a bed, every blanket in the house employed. I thought it was wonderful. I remember standing in the middle of the street, the wind tearing straight through me. I watched my red hat get sucked up and away into the grey, watched trees flail, calm as a clam, as a strange and lonely little girl transfixed, like watching a snow globe from the inside. The Ship Hector crept up onto Caladh Avenue and my mother finally burned the candle. Life went on.
When MAURICIO RUIZ told MELISSA FEBOS he was interested in addiction, she said he could borrow her books. “I have done a lot of research,” she said. “You’re welcome to use the material.” They stood in the lobby of the Old Capitol Building in Iowa City after the 2024 Krause Essay Prize ceremony. Ruiz plucked a praline from a tray and told her he missed Belgian chocolate. Febos pushed up her glasses and said, “Do you know anything about the Beguines?”
By TED CONOVER
In seventh grade English class, I read a poem in an anthology that felt custom-written for me. “It’s Raining in Love” captured almost perfectly an anxiety that I, at 13 years, felt practically every day: how to talk to a girl. The first lines are all about the speaker, worrying about the right things to say, but then it shifts to the girl’s perspective and finally this ending:
By HENDRI YULIUS WIJAYA
Translated By EDWARD GUNAWAN
Content warning: Some offensive slurs that appear in the source text have been carried over into the translation.
Translator’s Note
Fueled by far-right nationalist politics and religious extremism, persecution and violence from both state institutions and the general public against queer and trans Indonesians have reached unprecedented levels—mirroring similar disturbing patterns worldwide.
A Mathematical Formula for Continuing
I’m asking for a new geography,
something beyond the spiritual.
Tell me again, about that first
drive up Appalachian slopes
how you knew on sight these hills
could be home. I want
this effervescent temporary, here
with the bob-tailed cat
and a hundred hornet nests.
Will you tell me the sequence
of Fibonacci? The secret
of the nautilus? Answer:
After the departure of your bedbound
lover, you took to the spiral,
reached what was thought the end
and found yourself pirouetting.
I have just entered the dance,
crawled inside the shell, you promise
this is its own beginning.
Photo credit: Rachel Balkema (IG @raba.co)
Lake Michigan
This Trail Leads to Lake Michigan
I’ve been reading to numb things, namely
the evidence that my childhood creek
is drying, that something inside me is splintering,
like that wedge of the dock that buried itself in my thumb
while we watched quagga mussels starve another body.
You asked if I still had thoughts about starving. Lake Superior
is the clearest of the Great Lakes, but its belly is hungry.
I dust the house for the third time this week and wonder
at the ecosystem of our apartment: the under watered plants,
the dog that’s always pacing. I meet a stranger on a walk
and learn his home has woodfired heat, that his dog howls
when his wife leaves, that after this he’ll head to church
to cut the turkey. Today is Thanksgiving. I do not ask directions,
I let my conversation ask for company. He points to the trail post.
This leads to Lake Michigan, he says. As if I hadn’t walked this path
since the age my feet could carry me. At home, I ask
M if he’d like a woodfire stove, if he’d like to run away,
build a home with me. Somewhere Great: Lake Superior,
Huron, Erie. How about here? He asks. Why wait to start building?
Shanley Poole is an MFA candidate at UNC-Greensboro. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in Analog, F(r)iction, 14 Poems, and Quarter(ly) Journal. She was a 2017 fellow at the Beargrass Writing Retreat, a 2024 writer-in-residence at Azule Residency, and former Storyteller at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.
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