Editorial
A new issue of Almost Island: always international, chosen with love. This one is strong, calm, sometimes wild. I hope you like it.
We’re thrilled to have five poems from Cole Swensen: among the most original and
investigative poets writing today, doing a stunning modulation of the found text of ghost stories that, for me, somehow allows the space between words to be haunted and sung.
Then, Tomaz Salamun, to my mind, a treasure, perhaps one of the last genuine shamans still whizzing through the poetry world. These six poems, translated with Michael Biggins, are from Salamun’s new book The Blue Tower, which looks to be his warmest yet, in English.
Mukta Sambrani is a writer I’ve long admired, and I hope you enjoy seeing more of
her Broomrider’s Book of the Dead. It’s a mixed-genre work absolutely unlike anything else in what I know of Indian poetry, with lyric, prose, annotations, cries, beseeching and sly abuse of the reader all folded into the voice of the narrator Anna, who tells tales of almost unspeakable loss, from within what appears to be some kind of asylum.
Then we have new experimental translations, by Berkeley-based poet Nikhil Govind, of the seminal and often dizzying modernist Hindi poet, Muktibodh (of "Brahmarakshas" and the first sections of "In the Dark"); translations that attempt to cling closer to the syntax and the intense flicker of movement in the original text.
From Trinidadian Nicholas Laughlin, whose preferred form is the mid-length sequence, we
have two very different sets of poems, in a voice that is by turns intriguing, intense, or unabashedly tender. Small Husband is a series that appears to be addressed to a householder, or liege; at the same time, this may be an attempt to speak to, or with another species: the roitelet is also a bird, the Caribbean house wren, sometimes called the
godbird. The Strange Years of My Life, on the other hand, works through collage and related devices with everything from early travelers’ accounts to spy thrillers, transfiguring them into a contemporary ennui of identity and placelessness.
It’s great to have selections from the first two books of Gene Tanta, Unusual
Woods and Pastoral Emergency. His voice seems to me a vital new cross between American hipster smarts, formal alertness and a dark but unruly, ebullient babbling Slavic vision: in short a voice that allows him to have his history and eat it too.
Then we have selections from a few contemporary Japanese writers, in which, it seems to me, experiment is never less than a question of absolute necessity.
Two of these selections—the very different “notebook”-like gestures, both playing for the
highest and most personal of stakes, of Takashi Hiraide and Ayane Kawata—are translated with brilliant sleight of hand, by Sawako Nakayasu, winner of the 2009 Best Translated Book award from 3 Percent, and nominated again this year.
Then Ryoko Sekiguchi: whose investigative poetics hovers between empiricism and an acknowledgement of the generative power of language, without refusing either, in a set of moves that keeps taking me back to Cole Swensen’s work. Heliotropes, translated by Sarah O’Brien, is an amazing book about plants and also our epistemological relationship with them that ideally ought to be read as a whole, but I hope our selection here gives a strong sense of it.
And finally a bit of prose, by Haruki Amanuma, wonderfully and lithely translated by Mariko Nagai; an excerpt from what is ostensibly a children’s novel about the murder of cats, balanced stubbornly between horror and farce, the sacred and profane.
As always, do write to us with comments, suggestions, errata.
–Vivek Narayanan