IN AN ESSAY that appeared in these pages forty-five years ago, Tomás Rivera wrote: “For me the literary experience [of Chicano literature] is one of total communion, an awesome awaren...

If one were to drive a nail through this decade, planetary history would swing in the balance. – Kathleen Dean Moore, ISLE, Winter 2014 FIVE YEARS AGO, in the headno...

The page is both full of death and free of it. – Edwidge Danticat “And because my mother did not write letters and because I did not ever want to forget the things I wished my mother were tel...

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’ConnorMilkweed Editions In many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the...

. . . like a premonition of eternity. – Xavier Bordes M ost writers and—by extension—artists take the brute facts of existence as a starting point, then fashion their work with vary...

How does one become a writer? For German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, it was less epiphany than the gradual accretion of circumstance and intention. Here is what she told Haaretz in 2011: “I tu...

The Art of Death Edwidge Danticat Graywolf Press (2017) It might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about t...

Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.– Yehuda Bauer   Just this morning, as I began drafting my note for the current i...

Harvey Dunn, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, 1926 / Courtesy South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota For more, read two new poems by Ted Kooser. While in Lincoln to attend the r...

Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire. Anne Carson Float Random House I fo...

Kim Stafford The Flavor of Unity: Post-Election Poems Little Infinities, 2017   Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the ge...

Language written in the aftermath of extremity [arises] not from recollection in tranquility but from wanderings in a debris field. – Carolyn Forché, “An Inexhaustible Responsibility...