tag:almostisland.com,2008://2 2008-08-27T16:25:22Z Movable Type 3.35 tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.150 2008-08-13T15:06:37Z 2008-08-27T16:25:22Z

Agni Currently under Sven Birkerts as editor and William Pierce as senior editor, Agni continues to pioneer and champion risky and rigorous work, including a lot of literature in translation, on the American literary landscape. The website includes exclusives not...

almostisland Agni Currently under Sven Birkerts as editor and William Pierce as senior editor, Agni continues to pioneer and champion risky and rigorous work, including a lot of literature in translation, on the American literary landscape. The website includes exclusives not available in the print magazine and is very regularly updated. Guernica An online magazine of literature and politics out of New York, edited by Joel Whitney and Michael Archer, that makes a serious attempt to buck and challenge the continuing cultural and national insularity and inward-looking of so many American literary / cultural magazines, whether online or off. Kafila An improvised, sometimes vibrant, sometimes inspired, sometimes argumentative forum for broadly non-party based Left political, theoretical and cultural discussion that falls, for the most part, beneath or beyond the radar of the big Indian media. Kwani? Online hub of the print magazine and literary trust, Kwani? the herald of a powerful and diverse new literary vision, devoted in equal measure to high art and street culture. Phalanx Edited out of Bangalore by the film critic M.K. Raghavendra, Phalanx is a quirky, rigorous and always surprisingly various magazine that takes up ideas and arguments relating to everything from popular culture to mathematics to politics. Pratilipi An ambitious new magazine that aims, as few have done before, to mediate between Hindi and English literary worlds:“possibly India's first bilingual online literary magazine”. Silliman's Blog Written by avant-garde American poet Ron Silliman, and quite likely the most read single-author poetics blog on the planet, although his dramaturgy of American poetry politics is frequently disputed. Silliman writes most eloquently on the question of expanding scale in poetry, which is to say, how to deal with an expanding world full of information, and of poets; this is also an abiding concern in his poetic works, which attempt to distill this world using various formal mechanisms. ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.149 2008-08-11T14:52:48Z 2008-08-24T03:24:48Z

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."...

almostisland Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture." He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst College and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. His other books are Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Readings, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. Nguyen Quoc Chanh was born in Bạc Liêu in 1958 and lives in Saigon. The backbone of the underground literary scene in Vietnam, a fearless critic of the government, he is the author of four collections of poems, Đêm mặt trời mọc [Night of the Rising Sun] (1990), Khí hậu đồ vật [Inanimate Weather] (1997), e-book Của căn cước ẩn dụ [Coded Personal Info] (2001) and samizdat Ê, tao đây [Hey, I'm Here] (2005). His poems have been translated into English by Linh Dinh and published in the journals The Literary Review and Filling Station, and in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue (Palgrave 2001). Along with Phan Nhiên Hạo and Văn Cầm Hải, he's featured in Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), also translated by Linh Dinh. From the introduction to that book: Chanh's first collection, Đêm mặt trời mọc, came out in 1990 and was greeted by a degree of hostility almost comic in its intensity. In an article titled "The Bizarre in Night Of The Rising Sun," the newspaper Youth compared Chanh's work to "a cemetery of the spirit and of the body. There is nothing left for a person to look for or to lean on. [...] This work can only lead man towards madness, irresponsibility, obliviousness towards the present; humans and objects, the lofty and the abject, the real and the fake, right and wrong, virtues and cruelties are here mixed together in a slimy disgusting gob." In an article titled "An Unhealthy Book," the newspaper The People began by complaining of the "somewhat murky and entirely irrational title." Then it evoked Chanh's poem "Prometheus" to predict that both the poet's life and career will perish in a flame he's "toying with." In 2005, he gave a reading with Linh Dinh at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, as part of its Southeast Asian arts festival.MYPAGEBREAK Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 , in a former 'untouchable community' in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. As a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps, prostitues, petty criminals, and gangsters in Bombay's underworld. He has had very little formal education. In 1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant organisation inspired by the Black Panther movement. The same year he published Golpitha. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this selection is drawn. In 2004 Sahitya Akademi hounered Dhasal with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Dhasal's long-time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, acclaimed for his translations of the seventeen century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram, has translated Dhasal into English. Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.MYPAGEBREAK Forrest Gander is the author of books of poems, translations, and prose, much of it published by New Directions. He has edited several anthologies of poems in translation and individual books by Mexican and Latin American writers. The recipient of the Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize, Pushcart Prize, Gertrude Stein Award, and awards from PEN, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Whiting and the Guggenheim foundations, Gander publishes critical essays for numerous journals, including The Nation, The Boston Review, and The Providence Journal. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University in Rhode Island. His website can be found at: Forrest Gander MYPAGEBREAK Joy Goswami was born on November 10, 1954 in Kolkata. Goswami's formal education stopped early, in grade eleven. His first poetry collection, named Christmas o Sheeter Sonnetguchchho (Sonnets of Christmas and Winter) brought him immediate critical acclaim. Goswami is one of the most powerful poets of Bengal and one of the best in the post-Jibanananda Das era of Bengali poetry. Primarily a poet, he has also written novels and literary prose. He has more than 30 published books, including three volumes of compiled poems numbering close to a thousand. He has written 12 novels, two of which are written in verse and 5 collections of essays related to interpretation and appreciation of Bengali poetry. He has received the most prestigious Ananda Puroshkar twice, in 1990 for Ghumiyechho Jhaupata? (Have you slept, Pineleaf?) and in 1998 for Jara Brishtite Bhijechhilo (Those Drenched in Rain). In 1997 he won the Bangla Academy Puroshkar for Bajrobidyut-bharti Khata (Scrapbook of Thunder and Lightning) and in the same year he also won the Birendra Chattopadhyay Smriti award for Patar Poshak (Garments of Leaf). The Sahitya Academy Award from the government of India came in 2000 for his collection of poems Paagli Tomar Shongey (With You, Crazy Girl). Goswami has expressed his dissent on several grave injustices that have taken place in India. These include the mass killing of Dalits in Jehana village in 2001 and the Nandigram massacre of 2007. He has been vocal against state brutalities. His poems have taken a very different turn in his most recent book of poems Shashoker Proti (To The Powers That Be), translated into English by Sampurna Chattarji. In 2007 he left the premier Bengali magazine, Desh and joined the newspaper, Sanbad Protidin, where he currently works. Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction writer and translator. Her translation of Joy Goswami's Surjo-Pora Chhai (The Ashen Sun) is forthcoming. Her books include Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray (translation, Penguin, 2004). The Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters) published her debut poetry collection Sight May Strike You Blind in 2007 and her first novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins.MYPAGEBREAK W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He has published seven volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised. His last five collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Saltire prizes. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Northern Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, was a PBS Recommendation. All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, Bad Shaman Blues (2006), was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S.Eliot Prize. After holding several Scottish residencies he moved to Newcastle in 1994 to take up the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship and has remained there ever since, holding residencies with Cumbria Arts in Education and the Wordsworth Trust. He taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University (1996-2002), and is now Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Newcastle. He has engaged in numerous public art and cross-media projects in the North-East, making a film in Berwick, originating sculptures in Ambleside and Dumfries, writing a poem for a strip of stainless steel to be set into the pavement in Graingertown, and collaborating with the composer Naomi Pinnock on the ongoing project Nostos. He is the poetry consultant for the Westpark project, originating text and co-ordinating artworks across this development in Darlington, one of the largest public art projects in the North East. In 2000 he edited the bestselling anthology Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry with Matthew Hollis. He also edited the interactive CD-ROM Book of the North (NWN, 2000), featuring prominent writers and artists from the region; and recently edited A Balkan Exchange: Eight Bulgarian and British Poets (Arc, 2007), featuring both translations and specially composed poetry. He lives in an old lighthouse in North Shields with his wife, the novelist Debbie Taylor, and his daughter Izzie.MYPAGEBREAK László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954, in the town of Gyula in the east of Hungary, close to the Romanian border. Having studied Law first then literature in Budapest he went on to publish a series of novels and other writings. The current excerpts are from his first novel, Satantango, published in 1985. Other notable books available in English are Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance), first published in Hungary in 1989 and in England nine years later and Háború és háború (War and War), published in Hungary and Germany in 1999 and in the USA 2006. Much of Krasznahorkai's work has been filmed by Béla Tarr and they have co-operated on a number of films. László Krasznahorkai has been a considerable traveller. His books are now in several languages and have received international prizes. George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His family were refugees from the 1956 Uprising and settled in England where he studied sciences at school, trained as an artist and finished up being a poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door won the Faber Prize in 1980. His twelve books since have won various awards, most recently the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). He has been translating from the Hungarian since his first return in 1984 and has published over a dozen books of translated prose, verse and drama, that have won a number of prizes. He has edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian writing and written a book on art as well as a number of libretti and musicals. He reviews for The Guardian, The Times and other papers and teaches part time at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he has published Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006) His website can be found at George SzirtesMYPAGEBREAK Claudio Magris is the author of the landmark book Danube, a journey from the source to the Black Sea, and Microcosms, journeys in the area around Trieste, as well as the novels Inferences From A Sabre and A Different Sea. Till very recently, he was professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste. Magris is the author of several scholarly works which include Behind Words and Ithaca and Beyond. He is a columnist for the Corriere Della Sera, and has been a member of the Italian Senate. He lives in Trieste. Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One, and New Life. An extract from Book One is at New Writing 15. A long excerpt from New Life can be found at Inertia Magazine. Mohanty's work has appeared in journals and magazines in India, U.S.A., U.K., and France. She has held a fellowship at Germany's Akademie Schloss Solitude, as well as in France and the U.S.A. She is also a recipient of a Senior Fellowship in Literature from the Indian Ministry of Culture. Her translations of Tagore's fiction, Ruined Nest and Other Stories is due out soon. Mohanty attended the MFA programme in Fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is currently at work on a new novel, Sub-continent, and a book of prose texts, one of which can be found on the website of George Szirtes. More articles can be found at New Statesman and Open Space India. Mohanty's other serious interest is cinema. She has worked as a scriptwriter in the serious Indian cinema with Mani Kaul, Rajan Khosa, and Kabir Mohanty. She lives in Bombay.MYPAGEBREAK Fabio Morábito (1955) has written three books of poetry: Lotes baldíos (FCE, 1985), which won the Carlos Pellicer Prize, De lunes todo el año (Joaquín Mortiz, 1992), won the Aguascalientes Prize in 1991, and Alguien de lava (Era, 2002). These books have been featured in a volume La ola que regresa (FCE, 2006). He has also written three books of fiction, La lenta furia (1989, 2002), La vida ordenada (2000) and Grieta de fatiga (2006), which won the "Antonin Artaud" award in 2006 for its narrative. He has written a novel for children, Cuando las panteras no eran negras (Siruela, 1996). He has translated the complete works of Eugenio Montale and Torquato Tasso's Aminta (UNAM, 2001). His works have been translated into German, English, French, Portuguese and Italian.MYPAGEBREAK Poet and novelist Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) is considered the greatest Bolivian writer of the twentieth century. His poetry is apocalyptic, transcendent and hallucinatory. He lived his whole life in La Paz, Bolivia, seldom venturing out of the city. It is that indigenous culture of the place which features so prominently in all his writings. His life was defined by an intense experience of alcoholism and struggle. He sought God in unlikely places: slum taverns, alcoholic excess, and the street. Saenz was nocturnal. Occult in his politics, unashamedly bisexual, secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological and the symbolic. He once stole a leg from a cadaver and hid it under his bed. On his wedding night he brought home a panther. In The Night, Saenz explores the singular themes that possessed him: alcoholism, death, nightmares, identity, otherness and his love for La Paz. It is said that, the four movements of this epic poem, 'The Night', 'The Gatekeeper', 'Interval' ,and again, 'The Night', culminate in some of the most profoundly mystical, beautiful, and disturbing passages of modern Latin American poetry. Forrest Gander is the author of books of poems, translations, and prose, much of it published by New Directions. He has edited several anthologies of poems in translation and individual books by Mexican and Latin American writers. The recipient of the Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize, Pushcart Prize, Gertrude Stein Award, and awards from PEN, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Whiting and the Guggenheim foundations, Gander publishes critical essays for numerous journals, including The Nation, The Boston Review, and The Providence Journal. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University in Rhode Island Kent Johnson is Instructor of English and Spanish at Highland Community College. His books include Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War and Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, with Forrest Gander.MYPAGEBREAK Anne Waldman, poet, editor, performer, professor, curator, cultural activist carries in her genetics the lineages of the New American Poetry, and is a considered an inheritor of The Black Mountain, Beat (Allen Ginsberg called her his "spiritual wife") and New York School (Frank O'Hara told her to "work for inspiration, not money") mantles as well as being an originator of her own deeply investigative and polyvalent "modal structures". She is a noted performer of her own work, and its rhizomic sprechstimme strategies. Her published work is prodigious.She has had her work translated into German, Italian, Czech and there are forthcoming editions in Chinese and French. She has been working on her epic IOVIS for over 25 years, now running to 800 pages. Waldman has helped create and nurture poetry zones in the USA and abroad for much of her life. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley prize for poetry, and has had residences at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center and at the Christian Woman's University in Tokyo. She has taught experimental writing workshops for years at the Zen Mountain Monastery, as well as universities and colleges across the USA and abroad. Recent appearances and residencies: Wesleyan University, Barnard College, Cal Arts, and The University of Buffalo, and she participated in a recent Poetry festival in Mumbai this past February of 2007, and the PEN World Voices in New York. Directing the Poetry Project at St Mark's Poetry Project over a decade, she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in 1974. She currently is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Naropa's Summer Writing Program and is working with the Study Abroad on the Bowery project in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Author and editor of over 40 books and small press editions of poetry, including the epic IOVIS project (two volumes published by Coffee House Press, 1993, 1997, the full test: Colors In The Mechanism of Concealment due in 2009) and has published in recent years: MARRIAGE: A Sentence, Penguin Poets 2000, IN THE ROOM OF NEVER GRIEVE: New & Selected Poems with CD collaboration with Ambrose Bye, Coffee House Press 2003, Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow, with photographs by Patti Smith, Heavenbone Press 2003, and STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD COMPARED TO A BUBBLE, a long Buddhist poem, Penguin Poets 2004. She also co-edited the major anthology CIVIL DISOBEDIENCES: Poetics & Politics in Action, Coffee House Press 2004 with talks and essays by Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Michael Ondaatje, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Sonia Sanchez and others. She has directed productions with the Gertrude Stein Players in Boulder, Colorado and has worked in collaboration with students, dancers, videographers, visual artists, musicians, composers for over 30 years. She has, in particular collaborated with artists Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Donna Dennis and Richard Tuttle and her husband, movie director and writer Ed Bowes. She has also helped cultivate and worked with poetry programs in Vienna (the historic Schule fur Dichtung) and Prague. She is co-founder of the Poetry Is News collective which curates forums of political and poetical discussion, and is a co- artistic/curriculum Director of The Study Abroad On the Bowery Program in New York City. RED NOIR, a collection of short performance pieces and the CD THE EYE OF THE FALCON (produced and with music by her son Ambrose Bye are now available from Farfalla, McMillen and Parrish. And OUTRIDER - a selection of essays, interviews and poetry, including an interview Waldman did with Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal, has just been published by La Alameda press in New Mexico. She is also a cultural guardian of some of the history and archive of the New American Poetry L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and beyond and is active with the Audio Archive project at Naropa which has thousands of hours of readings, performances, lectures, panels by the likes of William Burroughs, John Cage, Gregory Corso, Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Roberto Tejada, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Diane diPrima, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Cecilia Vicuna and many others. Anne Waldman's comprehensive and ongoing personal Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Some of her performance work may be accessed on Charles Bernstein's PENN SOUND. She makes her home in New York City and Boulder, Colorado and frequently travels to other poetry zones throughout the world, most recently the Conference on 20th Century American Poetry in Wuhan, China and at the International Literature Festival in Berlin (2007). ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.148 2008-08-05T11:27:03Z 2008-08-23T13:58:44Z

The monsoons are here again, like the last time I was writing an editorial. They were delayed then, but this time, they came surprisingly early, bringing great relief. After two weeks though, the nourishing, fertilizing rain, suddenly stopped. July has...

almostisland The monsoons are here again, like the last time I was writing an editorial. They were delayed then, but this time, they came surprisingly early, bringing great relief. After two weeks though, the nourishing, fertilizing rain, suddenly stopped. July has been largely a hot and oppressive month, the air swollen with humidity. At the Hazrat Pir Syed Ali Datar dargah in Mumbai we sweat in the heat of the afternoon, as crowds of people move towards it. The dargah is known for its power to heal the mentally afflicted, especially women. There are tables along the road with clay pitchers of cool water, and people tilt their heads back and empty their glasses in a way that even parts of their face gets drenched. This is the death anniversary of the saint, when the small market leading to the tomb does good business. Located in the dockyard area this is one of the most destitute parts of the city. On this day, hundreds of people come to pray and ask for the fulfillment of their deepest wishes. And most of all women who are mentally ill. There are poor women, some could be prostitutes, who roll on the ground, from a distance, all the way to the dargah. Some are dancing, to drums, but it is a dance of pain rather than ecstasy. There are families with some of them, who give them a glass of water every once in a while, others are alone. Their long hair is tangled and knotted and soiled from rolling on the ground. They are almost all thin, often bony. It is hard to be an observer of this, and I keep turning my eyes away. We are four of us watching, from a different part of the city, from really another world, but no one stares, no one asks, no one treats our presence here as anything out of the ordinary. It wouldn't surprise them if we too had come to ask something of the saint.MYPAGEBREAK The Sufis say that one travels for many reasons, to meet the masters, to achieve anonymity, for self -discipline, to learn. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the great heroes are sent into a long exile in the forests, a space that is the very opposite of what they have inhabited all their lives. There is travelling in almost all the writings in this issue. The Bengali poet Joy Goswami, who grew up in a small town in Bengal says, “The genesis of the poems in The Ashen Sun was really my terrible depression. Also, I was thinking of all sorts of things. About Andrew Wiles who was speechless when asked how it felt to have finally solved Fermat's Last Theorem - he had no words to describe the 'unbelievable beauty'. I was also wondering what Niels Bohr would have thought after the discovery of atomic structure. I was thinking of the enormous burst of energy from the dropped asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs from the face of the planet, of pterodactyls taking to the air in the split-second before their annihilation. I was thinking of myths, of Hiranyakashipu and Vishnu in his Matsya Avatar, I was also thinking of Lord Ganesha writing the entire Mahabharata without any breaks or interruptions. The whole notion of poetry being 'received' rather than 'written'. In this book, there is the image of this 'headless painter' painting his shlokas on the back of the universe - as if the universe were a giant canvas.”MYPAGEBREAK And Namdeo Dhasal, who comes from a small village in Maharashtra: “One should open the manholes of sewers and throw into them Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Socrates, Marx, Ashoka, Hitler, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Hopkins, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky, Edison, Madison, Kalidasa, Tukaram, Vyasa, Shakespeare, Jnaneshwar...” In one breath, the world. Perhaps travelling in the literature of different cultures means most of all that we carry more interventions in the imagination, binaries, juxtapositions, disturbances. Claudio Magris, the author of Danube and Microcosms, is the quintessential writer-traveller. He speaks of the circular journey which closes with the return, and he speaks of the rectilinear journey, citing Robert Musil, in which one goes ever onward, gradually losing one's way, losing parts of oneself, never being able to return home and undergoing all the incoherence and senselessness of the world.MYPAGEBREAK From the dargah, we move across the city towards its western coast. We walk towards an old fort, built by the British in the seventeenth century, at the edge of what used to be a fishing village. The area has few fishermen now, but it replicates the labyrinthine lanes of a village, its utterly human scale of homes and balconies, its lack of a sense of privacy, and its easy sense of welcome. Once more, it is a different world from the utterly deprived area of the dargah, and its expressions of prayer and pain. Here, standing at land's end, we watch the sun set over the enormous, circular city skyline, the new cable state bridge over the sea is almost finished, with the two parts about to meet over the water, and the old fort only has the remnants of some stone walls, because the rest has been broken and concreted and now houses a gym for the people of the village. Clouds begin to move overhead, but only a few drops of water actually fall. Leaving the village and moving towards our apartments to another part of the city, what I feel is not a return. That would imply a sequence. Instead, what one experiences is an architecture, times and places buttressing one another. tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.147 2008-08-01T16:32:47Z 2008-08-27T16:40:53Z

Read Suits of Armor by Fabio Morábito Fabio Morábito (1955) has written three books of poetry: Lotes baldíos (FCE, 1985), which won the Carlos Pellicer Prize, De lunes todo el año (Joaquín Mortiz, 1992), won the Aguascalientes Prize in 1991,...

almostisland Suits of Armor by Fabio Morábito Fabio Morábito (1955) has written three books of poetry: Lotes baldíos (FCE, 1985), which won the Carlos Pellicer Prize, De lunes todo el año (Joaquín Mortiz, 1992), won the Aguascalientes Prize in 1991, and Alguien de lava (Era, 2002). These books have been featured in a volume La ola que regresa (FCE, 2006). He has also written three books of fiction, La lenta furia (1989, 2002), La vida ordenada (2000) and Grieta de fatiga (2006), which won the “Antonin Artaud” award in 2006 for its narrative. He has written a novel for children, Cuando las panteras no eran negras (Siruela, 1996). He has translated the complete works of Eugenio Montale and Torquato Tasso's Aminta (UNAM, 2001). His works have been translated into German, English, French, Portuguese and Italian.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.146 2008-07-31T02:17:26Z 2008-09-28T08:43:43Z

This Almost Island exclusive is an extract from Waldman's epic poem, Iovis, that she has been working on for over 25 years. It is forthcoming from Coffee House Press, 2009. In order to represent these poems in their exact form...

almostisland This Almost Island exclusive is an extract from Waldman's epic poem, Iovis, that she has been working on for over 25 years. It is forthcoming from Coffee House Press, 2009. In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window.
Read also another extract from Iovis, "Che Guevara Came to Me in a Dream" in this issue.]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.145 2008-07-31T02:04:59Z 2008-09-28T08:46:33Z

This Almost Island exclusive is an extract from Waldman's epic poem, Iovis, that she has been working on for over 25 years. It is forthcoming from Coffee House Press, 2009. In order to represent these poems in their exact form...

almostisland This Almost Island exclusive is an extract from Waldman's epic poem, Iovis, that she has been working on for over 25 years. It is forthcoming from Coffee House Press, 2009. In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window.
Read also another extract from Iovis, "Eleven Faces One Thousand Arms", in this issue.]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.144 2008-07-31T01:57:35Z 2008-09-30T06:23:21Z

In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. These poems have been translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji (scroll down for her...

almostisland In order to represent these poems in their exact form they have been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. These poems have been translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji (scroll down for her bio). ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.143 2008-07-30T14:00:41Z 2008-08-27T16:28:19Z

almostisland Pensées by Sven Birkerts. Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the “electronic culture” He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst College and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. His other books are Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Readings, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.142 2008-07-30T10:50:15Z 2008-08-27T16:29:53Z

Read Yellow Light by Sharmistha Mohanty Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One, and New Life. An extract from Book One is at New Writing 15. A long excerpt from New Life can be found at Inertia...

almostisland Yellow Light by Sharmistha Mohanty Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One, and New Life. An extract from Book One is at New Writing 15. A long excerpt from New Life can be found at Inertia Magazine. Mohanty's work has appeared in journals and magazines in India, U.S.A., U.K., and France. She has held a fellowship at Germany's Akademie Schloss Solitude, as well as in France and the U.S.A. She is also a recipient of a Senior Fellowship in Literature from the Indian Ministry of Culture. Her translations of Tagore's fiction, Ruined Nest and Other Stories is due out soon. Mohanty attended the MFA programme in Fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is currently at work on a new novel, Sub-continent, and a book of prose texts, one of which can be found on the website of George Szirtes. More articles can be found at New Statesman and Open Space India. Mohanty's other serious interest is cinema. She has worked as a scriptwriter in the serious Indian cinema with Mani Kaul, Rajan Khosa, and Kabir Mohanty. She lives in Bombay.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.141 2008-07-30T05:03:23Z 2008-08-25T04:31:55Z

The team at Almost Island would like to apologise for the inordinate delay in going online with the second issue and updates, because of a series of technical problems. Now that these problems have been addressed we hope to have...

almostisland The team at Almost Island would like to apologise for the inordinate delay in going online with the second issue and updates, because of a series of technical problems. Now that these problems have been addressed we hope to have a regular rhythm, with updates and a new issue every six months. The Archives, containing the first issue, will be activated by the end of August. In March of this year Almost Island had three days of writers dialogues and readings, Almost Island Dialogues:Two, at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The participating writers were the Italian writer Claudio Magris, the British poet George Szirtes, the Chinese poet in exile, Bei Dao, Indian writers Allan Sealy, Udayan Vajpeyi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Vivek Narayanan and Sharmistha Mohanty. The discussions centred around issues in poetry and prose, and included two exclusive sessions: one on the work of Bei Dao, the other on the work of Claudio Magris. The evening readings, held outdoors on the lawns bordering Lodi Gardens, were bilingual where so required. The audience for the discussions came from a variety of backgrounds:students, musicians, literary theorists, filmmakers, and of course, writers. They had been given, a month prior, some books by the participating writers, so as to make the discussions more full and rigourous.MYPAGEBREAK Here is what George Szirtes had to say about the Dialogues on his website, George Szirtes 05.03.08 : HEATHROW ________________________________________ ...is remarkably efficient today. Terminal 3 is definitely better than Terminal 4, The long bus journey from W to here spent reading G M Hopkins, Claudio Magris, Bei Dao and Paul Celan. All useful. It is a long time since I read Hopkins, especially the prose. What a splendid observer, thinker and feeler he was. Bei Dao is very good too. I know Magris chiefly for 'Danube' - the book I have been dipping into is Correspondances. There is a roughly Sebald shaped cloud there and in many other writers now. The world registers itself as history, association, musing and melancholy. Delhi is 31C apparently. Not so here, though the airport is the usual stifling, airless, holding station. Hours to go yet.MYPAGEBREAK 06.03.08 : DELHI 1 ________________________________________ Arrived here late morning in bright sun. Hot and close. As usual little sleep on the plane - which was, I add as an advertisement, a Jet Airways (India) flight. It was much the most comfortable journey, seats well designed, leg room, great courtesy, excellent food, the screen sharp and clear and loads of movies to watch, starting where and when you please. That is economy class. I assume the first class / business class are given massage and a personal visit from Kylie Minogue. I watched No Country for Old Men, right through and am still quietly dwelling on it. Wonderful statuesque cinematography, hard-comic dialogue, a nightmare killer, bodies everywhere (but surprisingly little violence) - a contemplation on how anyone, anywhere, can come to a rough end and how death looks like faintly like Charles Bronson in a crude wig. It was like being thumped on the head with hammer wrapped in a hundred layers of bandages. Kind of droll after a while. Oh yes, and brilliant. My head still hurts. Here, greeted by organiser and friend SM. The usual threading the eye of the needle traffic... More later. Did I say it was hot and close? 07.03.08 : DELHI 2 ________________________________________ Time snatched as we are kept busy. This morning it was Bei Dao and self talking about poetry and language. This afternoon it was Bei Dao on his own poetry with a lot fascinating material about The Cultural Revolution and some of its inadvertent side effects. Claudio Magris talks tomorrow. I read with Vivek Narayanan tomorrow evening. The readings are in the gardens of the annexe, in front of a beautiful young tree. They are very well attended, the audience - as I have noted before in India - closely attentive. Then music, of which more later. Have to dash. Outside, the world.MYPAGEBREAK 07.03.08 : DELHI 2B ________________________________________ A late post after tonight's evening readings in the same garden. Not quite such a big audience this time and there is the distraction of mechanical noise in the background, but the readings are fully focused. Meanwhile, a cat leaps off the far wall, slinks one way, slinks back, leaps back on to the far wall, returns, repeats the exercise twice more. A brindled cat, though mostly in shadow. I register this while listening. It is warmer, a little humid. In ten days time the gods will turn the heating on full blast and my chances of survival would be much reduced were I still here. There is so much music. Even as I write in a corner of the accommodation lobby, a woman on TV is singing. Mani Kaul, the film maker, was explaining the principles of a raga to me at lunch apropos last night's concert. The concert was a single 45 minute raga and though I know next to nothing about a raga I thought I could tell that the melody was constantly avoiding the tonic. It began with about ten minutes of deep quiet ornamented moans at the bottom of the fretboard, then working its way up the with ever clearer melodic patterns until it got to the top at which point the melody line went into repeat mode and the drum, which had been utterly unemployed till then, took over, creating an extraordinary range of rhythms. I can't remember the name of the instrument though I do have it written down upstairs. It consisted of two gourds (that is to say shapes derived from gourds) with the long fretboard between. Four strings. Knowing nothing about something usually means one quickly gets bored, but not this time. Part of it was suspense, seeing how long the drummer would wait, fingers at the ready, before he actually did anything. It turned out to be a little over half an hour.MYPAGEBREAK This is, of course, the crudest and most ignorant of descriptions. Nevertheless it IS a description. Diffidence is not my middle name. After the readings tonight a group of us was discussing the caste system and comparing it to English notions of class. They are, we concluded, quite different because the English system is less overt and no one knows where anyone else stands in the pecking order of respect. Hence the deathly diffidence of the aspiring lower middle class. Hence the silences, the changings of subject matter, the fear of manners, of looking too big or too small, of putting one's foot where one's mouth should be. There is, from a foreigner's point of view, a thin charm to this, but, God knows, it's thin!MYPAGEBREAK 09.03.08 : DELHI 3 ________________________________________ So what do we talk about? The relation of experience to writing; the notion of experience, of fact and its interpretation; about style; about history; about the self and its shadows; about the Danube and the Cafe San Marco; about the Cultural Revolution, the Misty Poets and Mao; about the fragility of life; about Goethe and Newton; about film and music; about speed and slowness; about Browning and Nietzsche; about time; about function and amelioration; about failure; about the shipwreck of knowledge; about kinds of knowledge; about art and photography; about theory and its relation to practice; about the notion of trust, about some idea of responsibility (is what we do of any use to anyone?)... ... and mostly these themes hang together under specific headings. Bei Dao is moving and dreamlike and oppositionist, a severe critic of the American psyche, visionary, precise, warm, clear. Claudio Magris has read everything and cannot quite follow Nietzsche on interpretation, is funny and wise and endlessly humane; Allan Sealy, gentle but passionate, tentative, almost diffident in manner but firm and adventurous in mind; Sharmistha Mohanty speculates wisely, searchingly and patiently about what lies between fiction and documentary because such things are important; Vivek Narayanan leaps and probes, his mind running fiercely. As for me? I talk my head off, as usual, watching myself that I should not run away on what seems intoxicating, the taste of eloquence, a quality I admire - but distrust in myself.MYPAGEBREAK And there are the other interlocutors, all of whom keep me pepped up, mind racing. And as ever, next to the sense of mind-on-adrenalin, a kind of deep-sleep melancholy about the very notion of that excitement. Inevitably, at a certain point of such proceedings, especially in circumstances so continuous and intense, the melancholy grows steep and, frankly, I can see no point in any of this - in anything of much. That is also the point of exhaustion. It lasts about an hour or so, then I am up again, sprinting. This afternoon I suggested to Bei Dao we visit Old Delhi. Third time for me, but he has never seen it and it is an experience not to be missed. India is extraordinary. On the one hand the newspaper delivered to my door every morning with page after page of female film stars and starlets in cheesecake poses, plus a few growly looking male film stars, next to articles about International Women's Day, which seems to be entirely a matter of Shilpa Shetty lookalikes sprouting heels, chests and money. On the other hand the great humbling zoo of Old Delhi with its alleys, beggars, Moslems and Hindus, its rickshaws, its stalls, its thin goats, its crowds; crowds so dense you wonder how they can move at all. The great sweep of the poor and not so poor who remind me of paintings by Repin. Do I feel comfortable there? No, not comfortable. I am a spoilt European. But I do feel human, my sense full. I am not in the least afraid. I think I trust these people as they trust each other. It is not very far, but it is something.MYPAGEBREAK 11.03.08 : REFLECTIONS ON DELHI: 1 ________________________________________ A long 19 hour journey from beginning to end. Home late. This afternoon to London, the Guardian newsroom. The last morning's discussion was partly about the relationship of seeing to reading, or, as I tend to think of it, the relationship of primary experience to secondary experience. This could take a long time discussing so just the briefest kernel of the issue. Allan Sealy begins by telling us about his experience of the Arctic and the Aurora Borealis and his desire to write about the deserted red-stone city of Fatehpur Sikri, the ancient Mughal stronghold that I visited some three years ago, without first filling his head with knowledge. He wants to distinguish between first-hand experience and book-learning. On the other hand we had the long debate the day before about the relationship, following Nietzsche, between fact and interpretation, which claims that there are no objective facts, only interpretations, so, as the pomo theorists have it, it doesn't matter if you fall out of a window and break your neck, gravity still remains merely interpretation - part of a narrative or discourse - not fact (a crude example but see Sokal, et al).MYPAGEBREAK The young bright sparks particularly love this kind of theorising because they are all theory and no experience and because it makes them feel clever and superior. They have sharp white teeth and nothing to bite on, so they attempt to redress this disadvantage by denying that anyone ever has had anything to bite on. So, for example, Bei Dao's experience of the Cultural Revolution means nothing in particular. He, as well as we, is simply part of a historical process. They can state this for a fact. They can say something about the historical process, observing it from some vantage point outside it. History is their enemy. I remember one young theorist dismissing Max Sebald's oeuvre as 'Central European miserablism'. Dresden? Miserablism. Same message. We young, our teeth sharp: you old, your teeth blunt, and not through biting. We smart and cool: you thick and sentimental. They look at us pityingly. One young novelist said he has striven hard to get rid of all facts in his book. (He will nevertheless expect something that he can interpret in terms of rupees and dollars for his endeavours to help him go on interpreting.)MYPAGEBREAK OK, he is wrong, but one has to go some way down this path with him before turning round. As Claudio Magris implied, he could not run the full distance with Nietzsche on this but that doesn't mean the mad philosopher was mad. My own line is that there are clearly some differences between seeing-as-fact and reading-as-interpretation - that there is a difference between seeing the Aurora Borealis and reading about it, or seeing pictures of it - but that: a) We experience reading too; b) We do not go naked before objects, nor did Allan see the Aurora Borealis with a naked, innocent eye; c) The imagination is also a fact. In other words experience - our apprehension of first-hand facts - is complex. We cannot put aside what we know, we can only delay its impact by an act of the will. The second-hand can act on us much as the first-hand can. The writer needs to hold knowledge at bay only to the extent that it follows half a step behind. It has to follow, or nothing gets done. If it doesn't follow at all we are lying to ourselves.MYPAGEBREAK Furthermore, since it is impossible for us to truly know each other (even our closest and most intimate contacts remain a closed book in some respect) or ourselves (we do not have thoroughgoing knowledge of ourselves), the contact with the world through the agency of another human being's mind in the form of a book or a film or anything else strikes us as almost as real as anything else, or, at any rate, part of reality. In other words, a novel, a poem, a work of visual art or a piece of music is not necessarily worse for working through or being about other such works; that it is in fact unavoidable that it should do and be so. A writer need not have been in a house fire to write about a house fire. It might help if he had burnt his finger sometime but even that is not a requisite. Something however is. What? We don't know, not exactly, but we have been there. Are we merely personal interpretation and no fact? Certainly not. We have a responsibility to each other because the one thing we do know is that our arguments are not perfect, even our arguments about interpretation. And beyond the failure of the artistic enterprise to convince us that the world has substance and form, is comprehensible, and is, in fact, out there, beyond language, beyond, as Magris had it,“the shipwreck of knowledge” there remains the fact of the voyage itself, and there remain our fellow voyagers.MYPAGEBREAK Each and every individual voyage is wrecked, but hope remains. We set out in hope and are aware that it is good to do so, that beyond the place where we personally founder, there are further places that constitute an image of the real: that the sea has been real, the boat has been real, the sweat of our companions has been real. The enterprise of art is an attempt to give a value and shape to that reality: to sing very close to the music of what happens. Look, I can still taste the salt. Look at the marks on my fingers. Watch these glittering eyes.MYPAGEBREAK The first Almost Island Dialogues was held at the end of 2006. The writers were George Szirtes, Allan Sealy, Vinod Kumar Shukla, K. Satchidanandan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vivek Narayanan, Sharmistha Mohanty, and the filmmaker Mani Kaul. Almost Island will be back next year, around the same time, with another set of dialogues in New Delhi. ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.140 2008-07-26T10:50:27Z 2008-09-30T06:20:03Z

In order to represent this work in its exact form it has been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. Forrest Gander's poem runs in a dialogue with photographs by (and with our thanks to)...

almostisland In order to represent this work in its exact form it has been placed in a new window. Click here to open the new window. Forrest Gander's poem runs in a dialogue with photographs by (and with our thanks to) Ray Meeks.
Also in this issue, read Jaime Saenz, translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, and the following essays by Forrest Gander: Homage to Translation: Mexico Homage to Translation: Benjamin in Japan Homage to Translation: Argentina ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.138 2008-07-17T16:22:14Z 2008-09-28T06:58:20Z

Read poems by Namdeo Dhasal, translated by Dilip Chitre. Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 , in a former 'untouchable community' in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. As a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps, prostitutes, petty criminals,...

almostisland poems by Namdeo Dhasal, translated by Dilip Chitre.
Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 , in a former 'untouchable community' in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. As a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps, prostitutes, petty criminals, and gangsters in Bombay's underworld. He has had very little formal education. In 1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant organisation inspired by the Black Panther movement. The same year he published Golpitha. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this selection is drawn. In 2004 Sahitya Akademi hounered Dhasal with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Dhasal's long-time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, acclaimed for his translations of the seventeen century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram, has translated Dhasal into English. Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.137 2008-07-16T18:22:35Z 2008-08-27T16:27:24Z

Read The Self that Writes by Claudio Magris Claudio Magris is the author of the landmark book Danube, a journey from the source to the Black Sea, and Microcosms, journeys in the area around Trieste, as well as the novels...

almostisland The Self that Writes by Claudio Magris Claudio Magris is the author of the landmark book Danube, a journey from the source to the Black Sea, and Microcosms, journeys in the area around Trieste, as well as the novels Inferences From A Sabre and A Different Sea. Till very recently, he was professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste. Magris is the author of several scholarly works which include Behind Words and Ithaca and Beyond. He is a columnist for the Corriere Della Sera, and has been a member of the Italian Senate. He lives in Trieste.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.136 2008-07-11T14:45:40Z 2008-09-28T07:01:06Z

Read selections from Bad Shaman Blues and a set of new poems by W. N. Herbert. W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the...

almostisland Bad Shaman Blues and a set of new poems by W. N. Herbert. W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He has published seven volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised. His last five collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Saltire prizes. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Northern Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, was a PBS Recommendation. All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, Bad Shaman Blues (2006), was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S.Eliot Prize. After holding several Scottish residencies he moved to Newcastle in 1994 to take up the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship and has remained there ever since, holding residencies with Cumbria Arts in Education and the Wordsworth Trust. He taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University (1996-2002), and is now Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Newcastle. He has engaged in numerous public art and cross-media projects in the North-East, making a film in Berwick, originating sculptures in Ambleside and Dumfries, writing a poem for a strip of stainless steel to be set into the pavement in Graingertown, and collaborating with the composer Naomi Pinnock on the ongoing project Nostos. He is the poetry consultant for the Westpark project, originating text and co-ordinating artworks across this development in Darlington, one of the largest public art projects in the North East. In 2000 he edited the bestselling anthology Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry with Matthew Hollis. He also edited the interactive CD-ROM Book of the North (NWN, 2000), featuring prominent writers and artists from the region; and recently edited A Balkan Exchange: Eight Bulgarian and British Poets (Arc, 2007), featuring both translations and specially composed poetry. He lives in an old lighthouse in North Shields with his wife, the novelist Debbie Taylor, and his daughter Izzie.
Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]> tag:almostisland.com,2008://2.135 2008-07-10T15:19:49Z 2008-09-28T08:13:39Z

Read poems by Linh Dinh. Read Nguyen Quoc Chanh, translated by Linh Dinh. Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author...

almostisland poems by Linh Dinh.
Read Nguyen Quoc Chanh, translated by Linh Dinh. Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese. Click here to read about all the contributors to this issue ]]>