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Almost Island comes to you in a new look after fifteen years. We loved the old design and are sorry to let it go, but it needed technical changes and updates. We have this new one now created by Siddhartha Chatterjee. We hope you find it light, transparent, and easy to navigate.

In this issue we have two Latin American poets who will participate in the Almost Island Dialogues, 2022. The leading Cuban poet Reina Maria Rodriguez with her infinitely delicate yet searing work, equally delicately rendered into English by Kristin Dykstra. 

Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo, who brings together tenderness and violence from his geographical realities of migration. The excellent translations are by Michael Willis. 

Yet another Latin American, a prose writer whom we have showcased several times, Sergio Chejfec, this time with an excerpt from a fictional work written and published as a slim pamphlet. Translator Whitney DeVos has done a remarkable rendition. 

Very different from all of the above is Gustave Roud, a Swiss poet born in 1897, looking at his own geography with an attentiveness that is rare in our times. The chapter here is from his Air of Solitude, translated by Sean Reynolds and Alexander Dickow. 

Manoranjan Byapari from Bengal writes prose about the lives in his own chandal community in this excerpt from his seminal Chandal Jibon Trilogy, translated by V. Ramaswamy. 

Emily Sun reflects on the cross-pollination between writers from different geographies as she talks to Hisham Matar, Togara Muzanenhamo, and Sergio Chejfec among others, producing a fascinating conversation. 

The delicacy of touch that Kristin Dykstra shows in her renditions of Reina Maria Rodriguez can also be seen in an excerpt from her own work, Who Disappeared Into the Hills, which has a sight and listening that receives the most fragile things.