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"Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing  with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring  with replacing the noun. It is doing that always  doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.  Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and  pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is  what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no  matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a  great many kinds of poetry." 
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[Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), U.S. author. "Poetry and Grammar," Lectures in America, Random House (1935).]

The Irish Special edition launch at the
Cork International Poetry Festival 2017

The Blood And Poetry Of Non-belonging by Nikola Madzirov

Where Does Light Come From? by Arian Leka

From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill

Why Read War Poetry? by Constance Ruzich

José Carlos Becerra translated by Forrest Gander

Girl in a Forest by Elline Lipkin

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Translated by Vivien D. Glass)

Poems by Mile Stojić translated by Charles Simic

Deep Fish—Three Passes at Larry Levis’ Immortal Poem  by Suzanne Lummis

Photo Caption: A picture of Larry Levis giving a lecture, at the Aspen Writers' Conference, 1980.
“He was jealous of my Hawaiian shirts, so he went out and bought one of his own.”
– Kurt Brown

FB post, Ira Sadoff: “Larry wasn't awake for this one either. But he could say wise things about poetry in his sleep.”

Suzanne Lummis writes - The creation tales and lore of some Native American tribes, some Northwest Coast people certainly, and the Yuchi of the Southeast, posits the existence of three worlds. The Western tradition, in most of its expressions, holds to the idea of two— “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Of course, exceptions can be found, especially in poetry. 
I like to ask my students, the advanced classes, where Larry Levis’ “Fish” is best appreciated—for these poets have probably already attempted what he makes look so very easy—“Where does this poem take place, in the world below, the world above, or this one?”
There is a silence while the group considers the poem from this new point of view then someone will speak up. All three.    
Indeed, it moves fluidly, seamlessly, through and around the lower, middle and upper realms, each a chilly landscape glittering with a few sharp details that seem cut with an X-Acto Knife. 

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Read the essay here

from the Guest Editor of Issue XXXIX​

George Mario Angel Quintero

Events of every size and aspect are continually becoming our experiences, and we have no idea which of these will shape us. The unpredictability of sources, of what we will remember as living, is still surprising. Poetry is the spark of contact between consciousness and an event. Poetry is as close to creating experience as we can get. I did not say sensation, I said experience. The mind is not a screen, it is a place. It does not swallow an event, it mediates it. The mind does not stop, is not necessarily looking for new material, and certainly is not interested in receiving a world of sensation. The mind wants equal billing for having created the world. 

Read more

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Book reviews

Review of Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee by Hanna Pachman

Essays

Writing a Poem that is Larger Than You Are by Diane Frank

Poet in Focus​

Last known photo of Federico García Lorca, with Manuela Arniches on the terrace of Café Chiki-Kutz, Paseo de Recoletos 29, Madrid, July 1936

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editors' Recommendations
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International Poetry of the First World War Ed. Constance Ruzich (Bloomsbury, 2020) reviewed by Kathryn White

Coins in Rivers by Rochelle Potkar, Hachette, 2024 reviewed by Amlanjyoti Goswami

Witnesses of Remembrance by Kunwar Narain (translated by Apurva Narain) (Eka, 2021) reviewed by Mathura

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​Book review of We Are Not a Museum by Pramila Venkateswaran by Rohit Dey

Wings to Soar High, by Amir Or reviewed by Seth Michelson

War Music – An Account of Homer’s Iliad, Faber and Faber, edited by Christopher Reid

The Singer of Alleppey by Pramila Venkateswaran, Shanti Arts LLC (2018)

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Featured Poets

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a poet, translator, and editor of several anthologies. His latest collection is Book of Rahim & Other Poems. He has received the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award for Poetry.

Katharine Coles' tenth poetry collection, Time and Chance, was published in April 2025 by Turtle Point Press.  She has also published a collection of essays, The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing, and a memoir, Look Both Ways, along with two novels. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.

Born in the port city of Durrës, Arian Leka belongs to the avant-garde writers who emerged after Albania’s borders opened. His books in poetry, prose, essays, and literary studies have been honored six times with National Awards from the Ministry of Culture and Writers Association and three more International Literary Awards, among them “Opera Omnia Tudor Arghezi - 2022”, “The Poetry Scepter” (Skopje, 2018), “The Poet of the Cultural Capital of Romania,” (2019).

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"A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named." 
[Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772-1829), German philosopher. Aphorism 114 in Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798), translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Pennsylvania University Press (1968).] 

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