Photo by Marco Arment / Flickr
Sunday morning on the parquet
Sunday morning on horseback
Sunday morning picking lice from her hair
. . . with a rosary and prie-dieu
Sunday…
Poetry
June 16, 2020
June 1, 2020John Ciardi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Luciano Rebay, and Ivar Ivask after presentation of the award certificate, Norman, Oklahoma, March 14, 1970 / Photo by Jim Lucas Today (June 1) marks the fiftieth…
March 2, 2020Ernesto Cardenal in Santiago, Chile, 2009 / Photo by Roman Bonnefoy Editorial note: The editors of WLT were saddened to hear that Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal passed away on Mar…
February 25, 2020Photo by Stephen Clarkson / Flickr The following essay introduces readers to the early texts that writers produced dealing with the April 21, 2019, bombings targeting Christian places of worship…
February 11, 2020The introductory notes to Quesadilla and Other Adventures (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, lay the ground plan for the anthology. “Food is history,” writes Ganguly.…
December 18, 2019Photo by Eric Parker / Flickr A Cuban writer living in the US writes a requiem for Havana, a city of contradictions, to mark its five hundredth year. Havana just turned five hundred. The bea…
December 17, 2019Photo by T Foz / Unsplash Alphabets of My Heart Because I am from East and West a mother with two alphabets and I must not love one more than the other if they are to grow up and love each other…
December 11, 2019Photo by Kea Mowat on Unsplash Dear WLT Readers, I am thrilled to offer the following translation of “Eagle Poem” from English to Arabic in honor of poet Joy Harjo who, this year, was named…
December 9, 2019You Will Grow Together in Your Rage, illustration by Meg Lionel Murphy. This piece originally accompanied Barbara Jane Reyes, “Three Tracks from Brown Girl Mixtape” from the Autumn…
November 21, 2019Photo by Ervins Strauhmanis / Flickr 1 We maintain antiquity and elegance on paper; inside we are full of shame. We present heaven and hell on paper; our self-disgust results from…
November 1, 2019Dorothy Wang of Williams College, Ammiel Alcalay of the Graduate Center City University of New York (CUNY), and Sesshu Foster at the CUNY Graduate Center, March 27, 2018 / Photo courtesy of the autho…
October 28, 2019Many poets, writers, and thinkers have dwelled on the meaning of poetry following great tragedy, with Theodor Adorno’s claim that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism an…
October 28, 2019Photo by Bryan Kuwada Aunty says She climbed a ninety-foot cliff in the dark Traced the scars of a long-forgotten waterfall Cried as she felt the green disappearing under her fingertips And I lea…
October 24, 2019Photo collage courtesy of the author El Matador after Argentina’s World Cup Victory in 1978 La Patria comes dressed in multiple costumes, during the “…
October 23, 2019Georg Rafisch, “headless,” 2015 / Flickr When I lived in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I made a point of stopping in San Francesco a Ripa whenever I was running errands. The church houses Bern…
October 22, 2019Perfecto Santiago / Courtesy of the author Culebra, Puerto Rico, 2018 Let us sit in the open air where days I work, my hands shaping a small plane out of sticks. I tell you only what I li…
September 25, 2019Photo: AndyM / Flickr I imagine the crocuses also sometimes come down unexpectedly feverish, spreading their long green leaves through the wrong season. So it’s Oct…
August 12, 2019Photo by Shevaun Williams A well-traveled road in our collective consciousness is the question of what it means to be human. Joy Harjo is a master of this examination and delves through layers of ori…
July 5, 2019Chris Barnes, Egypt, December 2010 / Flickr To Hisham Harbi who said to me: “don’t stay in the shadows” but I didn’t listen Epigraph rushing as always, my shadow jumped but I…
June 20, 2019The poet Phoebe Giannisi and WLT Translation Prize (Poetry) winner Brian Sneeden Leaves Inside these articulations the beginnings of language outside of yes and no inside…
June 13, 2019Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy in 2013. Edwidge Danticat won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.…
June 11, 2019Paulo Valdivieso, Porto das Hortas / Flickr Portugal was rocked earlier this year by the news that one of the most popular poems attributed to one of the nation’s greatest modern poets, Sophia de Mel…
June 4, 2019Photo: Chandrashekhar Basumatary / Flickr The cover of Rudencio Morais’s collection of prose poems, Os dialetos do Amor (filLetras Editora, 2018; The languages of love), features a woman con…
May 14, 2019Humpback whale / Photo by Wade Tregaskis / Flickr 7. For about a minute you spin and the world shifts galaxies. What germinates in your flesh is the viper’s dream. You slither through the underbru…
May 9, 2019Ahmad Shamlou (left) | Photo by Hadi Shafaieh. Niloufar Talebi (right) | Photo by Devlin Shand In Self-Portrait in Bloom, Niloufar Talebi (www.niloufartalebi.com) tells her story of grow…
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