Anthologist-activist Rocío Durán-Barba on his two Resistir anthologies and four poets and poems from those books.
“Native American authors created a new world of books, the crucial books of presence, resistance, survivance, and liberty,” from “Presence in the Book,” by Gerald Vizenor
The sculptures of Italian artist Italo Lanfredini—harmoniously integrated into the “aura” or “spirit” of their site—are conceptualized as giant books that can be “read” by the viewer, ultimately turning into “song, enchantment, beauty, and prayer.” The artist claims that he “does not claim to have the truth and above all has no answers, only questions.”
“And yet they still read / real books / turning page after page,” from “Real Books,” by Anna Frajlich (trans. by Piotr Florczyk)
“How to raise an offspring who curses a place that / she has never visited, / who dreams in a language she doesn’t know, / who lives in another one which will always be foreign to her?,” from “Obscenity,” by Paloma Chen (trans. by Lawrence Schimel)
“mama says: you should know your own language / papa says: you’ve gone completely Russian / if I hadn’t come to this country, / my kids would be normal / my kids would have grown up normal,” from “‘mama is laughing haha . . .’,” by Egana Dzhabbarova
Abidjan ’99: A Journey through Disbelief
Looking for relief and new possibilities, a lecturer at the University of Ibadan travels to Cape Town, but the route is anything but direct.
Where have books been? Where are they going? In this tour d’horizon, Alice-Catherine Carls finds common goals among keepers of books even as the many forms of the book expand.
With the introduction of new platforms for reading and engaging with the printed word in recent decades, book lovers might be forced to wonder: Is this a book? The authors mull the protean transformations of books and the ongoing evolution of print culture.
“Books,” writes Robert Bringhurst, “are things that humans make, or try to make, as persistently as birds make nests, and we do it for similar reasons.” In the following essay, the author mulls the future of these “cultural universals” that manifest as both oral books and the codex form, whether print or digital.
Born in Winter: A Conversation with Shizue Ogawa
For Shizue Ogawa, creating is more important than publishing and selling, and yet her readership has been steadily growing in Japan and internationally. Her poetry paints the world with serenity and wonderment without hiding its underground turmoil.
Books in Perpetual Becoming: A Conversation with Serge Chamchinov
Alice Catherine-Carls interviews Serge Chamchinov, a man of many languages and a scientist, visual artist, writer, and book binder.