Spring 2021 vol 11 no 1

Spring 2021

Editorial

The pandemic keeps abating, then surging, changing its shape in different parts of the world. Four poems by the Wuhan poet Zhang Zhihao 张执浩 give the overwhelming but unnamed events in that city a first formal shape.

A personal loss: the untimely death in the fall of 2020 of the Korean poet Choi Jeongrye 최정례. An alumna of the IWP, the brilliant, wry, warm Choi Jeongrye was a kind of comet. Her intense and luminous poems signal from a distance, linguistic, aesthetic, cultural. Here they are brought closer by Brother Anthony’s and Chung Eun-Gwi’s translations.

This issue’s prose section is comprised of four excerpts from longer works, so it may perhaps be a bit trickier to enter the pieces but stick with it, for each will carry you into a large imaginative space: a busy, smoky kitchen in 1920s Kabul, where women cooks take a newborn girl under their collective wing; a wild Balkan landscape in which a dowser searches for water; an unnamed Colombian city where a young woman mulls infatuation, sex, and wealth; the memory fundaments of “Ayiti” on which a woman self/exiled from Haiti tries to build a space for herself and for her kids--in her head, in Minneapolis, in the “Youwés.”

Finally, the Postcard, this time from Burma/Myanmar. The frame grabs are from an 8-minute video of 30-some poets daring to face the full force of state-sponsored violence and taking their protest against the military junta’s crackdown to the streets. Among them are also courageous IWP alumni. Read up on some context, then sign a petition to demand the end of their prosecution and release from prison here.

--The Editors

Iowa City, May 2021


►Poetry

Zhang Zhihao: four Wuhan poems; translated from the Chinese by Yuemin He

Choi Jeongrye: five poems; translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony and Chung Eun-Gwi

►Prose

Homeira Qaderi, from Noqra, the Daughter of Kabul River; translated from the Dari by Ali Araghi

Iana Boukova, from Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, translated from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova

Pilar Quintana, "Easy Money," an excerpt; translated from the Spanish by Joel Streicker

Beaudelaine Pierre, "You May Have the Suitcase Now," a memoir-essay.

91st M 2021 Vol 11 no 1

►Editorial

►Poetry:

· Zhang Zhihao: four Wuhan poems; translated from the Chinese by Yuemin He
· Choi Jeongrye: five poems; translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony and Chung Eun-Gwi

►Prose:

· Homeira Qaderi, from Noqra, the Daughter of Kabul River; translated from the Dari by Ali Araghi
· Iana Boukova, from Taveling in the Direction of the Shadow, translated from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova
· Pilar Quintana, "Easy Money," an excerpt; translated from the Spanish by Joel Streicker
· Beaudelaine Pierre, "You May Have the Suitcase Now," a memoir-essay.