Editorial
Welcome to Issue 17 of Almost Island:
Christopher Nealon works through “the things you have to push against on late imperial streets” through to the shore, the ocean we’ll all have to share and swim with.
Andrew E. Colarusso uses an electric attention to vocabulary, form and space to explore the past, present and future of Puerto Rico, his complex relationship with it.
In making “Buddhist Inscriptions”, Bangla writer Subhro Bandopadhyay (translated by Souradeep Roy) transcribes, striving for faith, in series, the littlest, faintest tremors of the self that roves beyond the self.
Tsitsi Jaji shows us what it actually means to listen across a border, or across the crystal river.
Ari Sitas’ Slave Trades (1999) channels what sometimes feels like hundreds of intermingled voices in its pages in a lacerating and deeply ambiguous take on Rimbaud’s Ethopian years; we excerpt that classic of recent African poetry here along with one of Sitas’ most recent, “Hooding“: a poem that investigates what it means to wear a hood.
Nandini Dhar’s unclean dreams of Nirma washing powder challenge us to unlaunder our own memories.
In the poems of Maxime Coton (trans. Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody) there is a great simplicity, worked at and achieved. A new voice in the French to watch for.
In her debut collection for Eyewear, Sohini Basak remakes the staccato line with “more fiction [and] less fog“.
Among the most important of contemporary Tamil writers, Imayam (trans. Padma Narayanan) strips away easy journalistic narratives to train a slower, more persistent and patient eye on the varied texture of everyday life among the marginal, not just the marginalized.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai translate the singular imagination of Vinod Kumar Shukla in two early stories. Here Shukla already achieves the transformation of the ordinary by staying with it and pushing at its skin, something he would go on to sharpen and stretch over a longer time in his later stories and novels.
Mantra Mukim explains just why he has not spoken to anyone about the great Urdu writer Naiyer Masud (1936-2017). “The secrecy I desired was not for the prose or its writer ... (but for] the unique encounter one has as a reader confronted with an idiom, a language, so painstakingly new.”
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