Volume 11 • Issue 1 • 2021 • Spring

Editorial

The pandemic keeps abating, then surging, changing its shape in different parts of the world. Four poems by the Wuhan poet Zhang Zhihao 张执浩 give the overwhelming but unnamed events in that city a first formal shape.

A personal loss: the untimely death in the fall of 2020 of the Korean poet Choi Jeongrye 최정례. An alumna of the IWP, the brilliant, wry, warm Choi Jeongrye was a kind of comet. Her intense and luminous poems signal from a distance, linguistic, aesthetic, cultural. Here they are brought closer by Brother Anthony’s and Chung Eun-Gwi’s translations.

This issue’s prose section is comprised of four excerpts from longer works, so it may perhaps be a bit trickier to enter the pieces but stick with it, for each will carry you into a large imaginative space: a busy, smoky kitchen in 1920s Kabul, where women cooks take a newborn girl under their collective wing; a wild Balkan landscape in which a dowser searches for water; an unnamed Colombian city where a young woman mulls infatuation, sex, and wealth; the memory fundaments of “Ayiti” on which a woman self/exiled from Haiti tries to build a space for herself and for her kids--in her head, in Minneapolis, in the “Youwés.”

Finally, the Postcard, this time from Burma/Myanmar. The frame grabs are from an 8-minute video of 30-some poets daring to face the full force of state-sponsored violence and taking their protest against the military junta’s crackdown to the streets. Among them are also courageous IWP alumni. Read up on some context, then sign a petition to demand the end of their prosecution and release from prison here.

—The Editors
Iowa City, May 2021