Splayed before the white plastic table
two hearts an orifice several ears a hue & a small cloud
…And are we supposed to believe
she can suddenly
talk angel? Who thought this stuff
up? …
—from “Girls Overheard While
Assembling a Puzzle” by Mary Szybist
TABLE OF CONTENTS
literary revolution rolling out through the spring
Minna Zallman Proctor
Editor’s Letter
This is a revolutionary moment in that everything is changing. But it’s not a revolution, because most of the forces we’re all reacting to (pandemic, injustice, a massive failure to find common moral ground) are not forces put into motion by ideas.
Julia Guez
Still Life with Insufficient iCloud Storage
On the Occasion of Our Tenth Anniversary
And here we are— sewing
secrets we have wanted in some form
to keep, sewing ….
María Ospina, Colombia
Policarpa
translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary
“The problem is that novels aren’t made for the jungle”….
Lucas Hirsch, The Netherlands
Lament
Necropolis
translated from Dutch by Donna Spruijt-Metz
Having had to absorb a lot of life lately
I learned through so much pain that being dead doesn’t seem so bad ….
Joseph Levens
Girl in Tow
At 3:02 in the afternoon of a summer Wednesday, a man in soiled red hiking boots approaches the summit of Mount Katahdin having traveled the entirety of the Appalachian Trail by foot ….
Willie Perdomo
Six Haikus
Tell me more, heartbreak….
Jessie Van Eerden
When the Season Is Fitting
My friend Diane says: When the season is fitting, a book will come, the words will come ….
Sara Kearns
Rosalia
When I was a child I was pixie dust.
That’s only part of the story. ….
Daniel Elkind
Son of Wine
The most handsomest horses live by the cemetery by the old airfield. Whattaya mean why. I don’t make the rules. I can show you better than I can tell you…
Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden
Schubertiana
translated from Swedish by Patty Crane
In the evening darkness at a place outside New York, an overlook where in a single glance you can take in the homes of eight million people ….
Kornélia Deres, Hungary
Pressure Lights
The Hero’s Triumphant Exodus
translated from Hungarian by Timea Sipos
This tunnel is underwater. It doesn’t matter whose it is ….
Gabrielle Bates
Mediated Experience
“Person” Comes From “Mask”
Complete focus can resemble utter distraction, just like
there’s a point where my lover begins to look like a stranger ….
Neta Alexander
Mostly Healthy, Always Sick
You are more than the sum of all your traumas…
Paco Márquez
The Comma
The Psychologist at Her Operating Table
Splayed before the white plastic table
two hearts an orifice several ears a hue & a small cloud…
Daniel Wolff
Tug (Into the Market)
The screw of a tug stirs the night,
thrums the chest like a heart in blood.
Brookes Moody
Portrait of a Guy
The night leaves snow on the docks
but morning grays it…
GennaRose Nethercott
Drowning Lessons
My sister has drowned in rivers, in bathtubs, and in soup bowls. She’s drowned in swimming pools and drinking glasses. She has drowned in mall fountains and in sidewalk puddles and in the birdbath in the back garden…
Geoffrey Nutter
The Opera Called “Boys Against Girls”
The Actuarial Fallacy
What Does This Phrase Mean to You?
But what does this phrase mean to you:
“People in glass houses should not throw stones”?
Does it mean you might break things, these things…
Matthew Lippman
Home Safe
I’m sitting on the floor watching Jackie Robinson die…
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Saga
translated from Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
…the surge slowly grew, clouds pushed by the south wind thickened, and Hans could see that a storm was gathering. But he was not afraid of the storm and, his clothes billowing with the wind, he walked to the end of the promontory.
Gina LeVay, cover artist
Rejoneadora, 2006
COVER ARTIST
Gina LeVay’s award-winning documentary work about the legendary NYC miners, The Sandhog Project, premiered as a large-scale photo and video installation at New York’s Grand Central Terminal, and the companion book Sandhogs, was published by powerHouse Books. LeVay’s work is shown in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe, including Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museo d’arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO), American Museum of Natural History, Photo España, and Museum of the City of New York. Her photography was selected for New York in Color, which presents the best color photography of New York over the last century. LeVay has been a grant recipient of The Andrew Rhodes Fund at The Visual Arts Foundation, as well as one of PDN’s 30 image-makers of the future, and an adjunct professor of photography at The Fashion Institute of Technology.
CONTRIBUTORS
Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Colgate University, New York. Her public scholarship, encompassing topics such as the Internet of Medical Things, predictive personalization, and the limitations of technology, has been published in The Atlantic, Public Books, Real Life Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Haaretz. Her recent book, Failure, co-written with Arjun Appadurai, was published by Polity in 2020.
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Gabrielle Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. The recipient of support from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Princeton Poetry Festival, her poems have appeared or will soon in the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Buzz Words: Poems About Insects (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series), among other journals and anthologies. You can connect with her at www.gabriellebat.es or on Twitter (@GabrielleBates).
Heather Cleary’s translations include Betina González’s American Delirium, Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre (nominee, National Book Award for Translated Literature 2018), Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, Best Translated Book Award 2013), and The Dark (nominee, National Translation Award 2014). A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective and a founding editor of the digital, bilingual Buenos Aires Review, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Portuguese poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919-2004) is the author of thirteen books of poetry including O nome das coisas (The Name of Things), Geografia (Geography), and Ilhas (Islands). In addition to poetry, she wrote collections of short stories, essays, plays, and children’s books. She was awarded the Camões Prize, the most prestigious award for poetry in Portugal; the Max Jacob Poetry Prize; the Portuguese PEN Club Prize for Poetry; and the Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, among other honors. In 1974 she was elected Member of Parliament by the Socialist Party. She died in 2004 in Lisbon. She was awarded National Pantheon Honors posthumously in 2014.
Daniel Elkind is the author of Theory and Failure: Some Latter-Day Curse Tablets and Reflections on the Nature of the League (Gauss PDF). He lives in San Francisco.
Julia Guez is the author of In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame (Four Way Books, 2019). Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in Poetry, Guernica, The Guardian, The Kenyon Review, PEN Poetry Series and the Brooklyn Rail. Four Way Books will be releasing her next book, The Certain Body, in 2022. Guez teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. She also serves as the senior managing director of program design and implementation at Teach For America New York. Guez lives in Brooklyn and online at www.juliaguez.net.
Lucas Hirsch is the author of five collections of poetry and a novel. Hirsch has published poems in Dutch, Belgian, and American magazines and performed on stages in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the USA. His poetry has been translated into English, Polish, Finnish and German. He lives in Haarlem, the Netherlands, where he is currently working on his second novel and a sixth book of poetry.
Sara Kearns is the author of the chapbook, Incisor, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She has been a runner-up for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the New Issues First Book Award and Boulevard’s Emerging Poet Contest. Her work has been most recently published online in DMQ Review and Rogue Agent. She lives and teaches in Pittsburgh.
Joseph Levens’ story is the first chapter in the first of two linked novels seeking publication. They are currently being adapted for the screen. Many of his short stories have been published in literary journals such as The Gettysburg Review, AGNI, and The Florida Review. A short story of his appeared in TLR issue 55:02. See what some of his characters are saying about him at josephlevens.com.
Alexis Levitin has published forty-seven books in translation, mostly poetry from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His work includes Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words. He has published translations of poetry by Sophia de Mello Breyner Adnresen in well over forty magazines such as Translation, Chelsea, Boulevard, and Prairie Schooner, as well as a collection of stories,Exemplary Tales. He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal; the Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador; and the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. He has held translation residencies at the Banff Center, Canada; the European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany; and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.
Matthew Lippman’s collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful won the 2018 Levis Prize and is published by Four Way Books. He has published five other collections of poems including The New Year of Yellow (winner of Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Sarabande Books), Salami Jew, American Chew (winner of Burnside Books Prize), Monkey Bars, and A Little Gut Magic. He is the Editor and Founder of the web-based project Love’s Executive Order (www.lovesexecutiveorder.com).
Paco Márquez is a poet based out of Manhattan, author of Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His poems can be found in Fence, Apogee, Live Mag! and Huizache. As Spanish Editor for William O’Daly, Paco was fundamental in bringing Pablo Neruda’s initial book, Crepuscualrio, for the first time into English as, Book of Twilight (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Originally from León, México, Paco has spent most of his life in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. Find out more at: pacomarquez.net
Brookes Moody is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she taught literary journal production and creative writing. Her work has previously been published in Crab Creek Review, Yemassee, Barnstorm, and The Northern New England Review. She worked in the Publisher’s Office at Red Hen Press as she completed her doctoral dissertation on intertextuality in poetry and popular song lyrics. You can find her at www.brookesmoody.com.
GennaRose Nethercottis the author of The Lumberjack’s Dove, selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Lianna Fled the Cranberry Bog: A Story in Cootie Catchers. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally performing from her works and composing poems-to-order on a manual typewriter with her team, The Traveling Poetry Emporium. Her first novel and a short story collection are forthcoming from Knopf Vintage.
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of the poetry collections Christopher Sunset, Water’s Leaves & Other Poems, The Rose of January, and most recently Giant Moth Perishes, among others. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City, where he lives with his family.
María Ospina was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and teaches Latin American culture at Wesleyan University. She has written about memory, violence, and culture in contemporary Colombia. Her stories have appeared in anthologies in Colombia and Italy. Azares del cuerpo, her first book of fiction, has been published in Colombia, Chile, Spain, and Italy. “Policarpa” is part of the collection, Variations on the Body, forthcoming in summer 2021.
Donna Spruijt-Metz is Professor of Psychology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and is a translator of Dutch poetry. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as The Los Angeles Review, Copper Nickel, RHINO, The Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her chapbook, Slippery Surfaces was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. You can find her at https://www.donnasmetz.com.
Jessie van Eerden is the author of the portrait essay collection The Long Weeping and three novels: Glorybound, My Radio Radio, and Call It Horses which won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction and was just released in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, Image, New England Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Jessie teaches creative writing at Hollins University and serves as nonfiction editor for Orison Books. This is van Eerden’s second appearance in TLR.
Daniel Wolff‘s “Tug (Into the Market)” is taken from More Poems About Money, which will be published in the foreseeable future by Four Way Books. His latest chapbook, Ayiti, came out through Finishing Line Press, and his previous collection, The Names of Birds, was also from Four Way Books.