Essays

The Improbable Reality of Europe's Dark Past

By Anna Paterson

July 2011
Anna Paterson

The waves of mass killing that swept across the old Mitteleuropa during the 1930s and ’40s are neither forgotten nor ignored by twenty-first-century writers. Four recent novels illustrate this con...
What's in the Notes: The Sound of Jazz in Poetry

By Lauren Camp

March 2011
Lauren Camp

Listening suggestion: While reading Camp's essay, listen to Louis Armstrong’s version of the Fats Waller song “Black and Blue," available for streaming on YouTube. Can a writer ever hope to success...
By Wendy Call

January 2012
Wendy Call

For three days in November 2011, fifteen women writers gathered in Oaxaca City, Mexico, filling a colonial apartment next door to a church dedicated to the Virgin of Solitude. These woman are all—by...
By Clare Sullivan

January 2012
Clare Sullivan

¡Ay! diidxazá, diidxazá diidxa'rusibani naa, naa nanna zanítilu dxi guiniti gubidxa cá. Oh, Zapotec, dear Zapotec language that gives me life, I know you will not dieuntil the sun's demise.– Gabriel L...
By Mark Leenhouts

July 2011
Mark Leenhouts

The following essay is adapted from a talk given at the symposium honoring Han Shaogong, winner of the 2011 Newman Prize for Children’s Literature, at the University of Oklahoma in February 2011....
Cream Torpedoes: Recent Poetry in New Zealand

By Bill Manhire

September 2011
Bill Manhire

Photo by Ed Swinden Cream torpedoes? The reference is to a Tweet I spotted recently: "A cream torpedo from the Hataitai Bakery! I feel like I am in a poem by Jenny Bornholdt." The Tweeter? Cheryl Bern...
"Emerging Ukrainian Women Prose Writers: Twenty Years After Independence"

By Michael M. Naydan

November 2011
Michael M. Naydan

In the Ukrainian literary tradition there have been scores of women poets, several of them reaching extraordinarily prominent status. The most renowned of them include the legendary seventeenth-centur...
"Poetry in the Cloud: An Experiment, Results, and n+1 Hypotheses"

By Kevin M. F. Platt

November 2011
Kevin M. F. Platt

The seven poems published on the following pages are the offspring of a happy, twenty-first century union—between the ancient art of poetry and the Internet. In March 2011 twenty or so Russian and Ame...