Five Poems by Jacques Prevel, translated from French by Caleb Bouchard
And I remember the regrets / Those winged monsters of great departures / Darkening the sky and delivering us the night / And in their talons taking us to a country / where we were human / Standing faceless... Read More
Three Prose Poems by Yoo Heekyung, translated from Korean by Stine Su Yon An
i am so very curious about the thing you said you’d planted and i wonder why you are so sick of such peonies, you who would have brushed off your hands loudly after planting them... Read More
Four Poems by Emmanuel Merle, translated from French by Jeffrey Jullich
These people, it’s simple, / they’re like creases in reality, folds found / in rocks, bulges on tree trunks, these strange / bodies wound the pupil of my eye, forcing me to look... Read More
Five Poems from The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, translated from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Freedom and solitude go together. / The hand is better at killing than the mind. / The way power steers truth and steers lies. / The way they steer your life. / From a place in the present, you choose the past. / You accept the tyranny of circumstance... Read More
Three Poems by Franz Werfel, translated from German by James Reidel
The poison only masters life’s emptiness, / Food from sunlight requires its opposite. / God himself places this evil in our way / As a baser need of the soul’s well-being...
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Record of a Tryst In Tokyo by Eisuke Yoshiyuki, translated from Japanese by Marissa Skeels
The jazz grew fiercer in the colored spotlight’s rays, as if sobbing or adrift on rough beats, spitting tapes of lust as white as seed... Read More
The Washing and the Clothes Line by Serge Pey, translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
I learned my letters as I ate my alphabet soup. Tiny letters, without much meaning. For her part, my mother read the earth, because marks on the ground were the writing of the night. From those signs, outside the house, she knew that a fox had passed by along the road... Read More
Fragments from Moon Ring by Annie Le Brun, translated from French by Alicen Weida
Children of this century, avert your gaze. Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage... Read More
Excerpt from Agnomia by Róbert Gál, translated from Slovak by David Short
Even errantry has paths to follow. One could speak of being freed of the compassion that necessarily follows from circumstances. In her case, this means that when they’re dancing and she’s twirling around them she’s the only one who’s not dancing... Read More
Introducing Naked Thoughts by Róbert Gál, forthcoming March 24, 2019
Preorders for Róbert Gál’s Naked Thoughts are now available. Heralded by Joshua Cohen as “The Aphorism Master,” Róbert Gál revives the forgotten art of the philo-poetic line with vicious wit and tremendous dexterity. Naked Thoughts—his fourth book to be translated into English—is at once incendiary and revelatory, surprising and instinctual, defiant and delicate... Read More