Editorial
Presenting Almost Island’s twelfth issue, that winds through geographies — from Hong Kong to India, from Hungary to Chile — and as many diverse ways of reaching the heart of the poetic.
Preparing Paradise, Chilean poet Raul Zurita’s talk at the Almost Island Dialogues (translated by Anna Deeny) this February, is a lightning flash of insight into what he sees as the task and ways of poetry.
This is Not My Home by Hindi writer Shrilal Shukla (translated by Prashansa Taneja), brings forth the deep melancholy and darkness of certain class aspirations.
Excerpted from a forthcoming reader from Hachette, Adil Jussawalla gives us haunted new poems that, among other things, seem to light up our passage through the world and make real the metaphor of the sea.
In Beyond the Cordons, Gabor Schein (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) writes in a voice weighed down by and weary of a history that is eternally recurring, that cannot be escaped, yet one that manages from the edge of despair to ask if we can “imagine another time.”
Ravi Shankar’s Three Collaborative Poems: ranging over geographies and histories, and homing in on startling tableaux and details, these are poems “where it seems like anything can happen to anyone at anytime and we are flying / smack dab through the middle of that energy field.”
Zhou Sivan brings us entries from a sequence of “sonnet”-like poems that are both driving and, suddenly, surprisingly delicate: “History is a leaf that latches on thatched wind...”
In Until the Lions, Karthika Nair reinvents — or restores? — the Mahabharata to English with uncompromising grit, detail and density.
Finally, Five Poems by the great Hindi “revolutionary" poet, Dhoomil (translated by Rahul Soni), that demonstrate a lesser known side of a poet more famous for his “language of bullets.”