Elsewhere: An Elegy by Faisal Mohyuddin Next Page Press, 2024. 68 pp. Reviewed by Donna Vorreyer In this tender and riveting chapbook, Faisal Mohyuddin captures the elusiveness of grief. Here grief is a river, a bird, a song that appears on the lips of every living thing, and Mohyuddin uses form, image, and feeling to transform that grief into beauty, hope, and remembrance. Wrestling with loss that is both personal and ancestral, Mohyuddin’s elegy mourns the father as parent, the father as a child of Partition in the context of history, and the father as a model for the speaker ..read more

    Fugitive/Refuge, by Philip Metres Copper Canyon Press, 2024, 144 pages Reviewed by Susanna Lang Like many of us, Philip Metres feels distraught as he reads the news of refugees forced to leave their homes across the globe because of war, persecution, climate change, or economies that don’t allow them to feed themselves or their families. They travel over dangerous routes, aware that they may not reach their destination, only to find themselves unwelcome when they do arrive. In these stories, Metres hears echoes of his own family’s history, which he outlines in the afterword to h ..read more

    Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok Yale University Press, 2024. 100 pp. Reviewed by Emily Pérez A ward can be both a protected person and a place of protection. In Ward Toward, her Yale Younger Prize-winning debut collection, Cindy Juyoung Ok explores literal and metaphorical wards to discover how they confine and liberate. In “Orientation,” an early poem in the collection, the speaker visits a friend in prison.  When he asks me, tenant of the language  in which I meet him, what the outside is like, I offer reluctant lines. The friend is “tenant,” or ward, of both priso ..read more

    Desolación: Centennial Bilingual Edition, by Gabriela Mistral, trans. Inés Bellina, Anne Freeland, and Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho. Sundial House, 2023. 598 pages. Reviewed by Anthony Madrid I’m reluctant to admit this thing is a useful book, but I have to. In fact, as things now stand, it’s probably indispensable.  Number one, there’s no other complete translation of this book into English. Before now, you could get selections, but you couldn’t get the whole thing. (This, even though lots of people consider it her best book.) (The 1945 Nobel Committee thought that.) Numbe ..read more

    Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali Alice James Books, January 2024. 100 pages Reviewed by Rosanna Young Oh In the San Francisco Chronicle’s illuminating article on her debut poetry collection, Theophanies, Sarah Ghazal Ali explains that, while responding to a professor’s prompt encouraging students to explore the origins of their names, she became interested in “matrilineal modes of history” with women as “origin points.” The book’s epigraph (a quote by the poet Edmond Jabès) highlights the name Sarah, foregrounding Ali’s necessary lyric poems about motherhood and Muslim womanhood ..read more

    Yaguareté White by Diego Báez University of Arizona Press, February 2024, 112 pages Reviewed by Lúcia Leão “The first Paraguayan American poet to publish a book originally in English in the United States”—is how Rigoberto González’s forward introduces Diego Báez, a writer and educator who lives in Chicago. Each word in this description gives one pause—and together they equip the reader for the many trips in the book where they will meet, among others, a jaguar whose last name is White. Although Yaguareté White, Báez’s debut collection, circles questions about belonging, the way ..read more

    Elsewhere: An Elegy by Faisal Moyhuddin Next Page Press, 2024. 68 pp. Reviewed by Donna Vorreyer In this tender and riveting chapbook, Faisal Moyhuddin captures the elusiveness of grief. Here grief is a river, a bird, a song that appears on the lips of every living thing, and Moyhudddin uses form, image, and feeling to transform that grief into beauty, hope, and remembrance. Wrestling with loss that is both personal and ancestral, Moyhuddin’s elegy mourns the father as parent, the father as a child of Partition in the context of history, and the father as a model for the speaker ..read more

    The Corrected Version by Rosanna Oh Diode Editions, 2023. 88 pages Interview by Naoko Fujimoto Naoko Fujimoto: Rosanna Young Oh’s debut collection of poems, The Corrected Version, is "an immigrant narrative that ponders what it means to be American" (from Diode Editions website).  She was born in Daejeon, Korea and grew up on Long Island. Here is, “Picking Blueberries.” It was a risk my father had taken in midwinter: ordering 240 pint boxes of blueberries in less than desirable condition at a discount so they could be repicked, repacked, and resold… …Suddenly, my father’s ..read more

    The Torture Camp on Paradise Street by Stanslav Aseyev Translated by Zenia Tompkins and Nina Murray Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2023. 304 pp. Reviewed by Nathan Jeffers Translating Russian prison language (and its relatives in the post-Soviet space) is never easy. It is like translating a language within a language, one whose vocabulary and reference points trace the shape of a world most of us have never seen, and hopefully never will. This is a language that encodes the lived experience of the incarcerated: the strict hierarchies they live under and their secret ..read more

    One Impossible Step – Collected Poems, by Orides Fontela Translated by Chris Daniels Nightboat Books, November 2023, 112 pages Reviewed by Lúcia Leão One Impossible Step, a book by Chris Daniels, presents Brazilian poet Orides Fontela in translation and in a condensed version, bringing us less than a third of her more than 300 poems. But his selection is very effective in showing us her subjects and her insistence on struggling with language to approach the idea of Being, which fascinated her, and which was part of the singularity of her poetry in the Brazilian context of her ti ..read more