Editorial

The first issue of 91st Meridian was conceived in the shadow of the Twin Towers' destruction. A year and two additional issues later, the dust of that collapse is being blown by a wind of war. If the IWP has any function, it is to make it possible for distinct voices to continue to be heard over—and against—the sound of that wind. Read on.

James Galvin's poem, addressed from Iowa City to Rome, and Buland al-Haydari's poem, "Baghdad," co-translated and read by Christopher Merrill, were two of the many presented in the Iowa City version of Poets Against the War on February 14 (press release). We'll be adding others as we receive them.

In the two micro-narratives, S. Diwakar traps the novelist's freedom in a numerological prison, while Ina Grigorova's strikes at the jugular vein of current American politics with a delicate knife.

If there should be another war fought in the desert, Motti Lerner's play has a thing or two to say about what it might be like to come home from it.

The poems of Alvin Pang and Marjorie Evasco take root somewhere in the Iowa landscape, then branch out–like those of many visiting poets before them.