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Global Voices Interviews *Germany* Andra Schwarz & Caroline Wilcox Reul in conversation with LIT’s JP Apruzzese
A dialogue between authors and translators
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Last month Andra Schwarz’s poetry collection In the morning we are glass (Am morgen sind wir aus glass, 2017) was published in English by ZephyrPress thanks to a wonderful translation by Caroline Wilcox Reul. At LIT, we were delighted to publish five poems from Schwarz’s collection in March 2020. It is tempting when first reading these poems to assume they are about memories of a childhood home or reflections on the irretrievable past.
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Two Poems by Eddie Kim
Minimax
On a beach in Okinawa a super typhoon is coming.
I apply two layers of SPF 50 sport waterproof.
The coast is ours and the waves mischievous.
I feign little mind to the literal red flag
tattering above an empty life guard tower.
Fear of death is what reminds you, after all,
about living. My parents paced the decades
through rain with umbrellas over my brother and me.
Is there a difference between the things we live for
and the things we die for?I watch my nephew build sandcastles
close ashore, -
Two Poems by Jessica Goodfellow
Glass PianoAlexandria of Bavaria,believing she’d swallowed a glass piano,moved carefully through the world,even in doorways turning sidewaysso as not to shatter it.My father, my neighbor, crabwalkthrough the world in whatever way they mustso as not to pierce the things they believeinside themselves. Perhaps I do it too—it’s hard to see in a glassless mirrorof cloudy steel plate screwed to cinderblock wall, -
Global Voices Interviews *Hungary* Kinga Tóth & Timea Balogh in conversation with LIT’s JP Apruzzese
The Hungarian version of this interview is forthcoming in Aprokrif in early 2021.
In Kinga Tóth’s world everything is alive and moving and coalescing at each moment. Separation and disconnection are notions she considers unnatural in the natural world. In her work, the multimedia artist and poet captures what most of us neglect to see – not so much the interconnectedness of everything – which suggests the possibility of disconnection – but rather the relentless and organic becoming of everything into one living body that contains all animate and inanimate life.
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Four Poems by John Deming
Rhapsody in Rat
Rats know when you’re watching them.
Yeah, so I’m smoking on the fire escape
overlooking the alley, and rats
fleck in and out, as they do,
and I look with pure fury
at a rat maybe fifty yards off,
its furry back, thick tail
and burning oven of pursuit,
and it is not even facing me
but freezes then sprints
through a brick wall. The rat
ran through a brick wall.
Rats can feel you looking at them. -
Two Poems by David Kirby
Our Fathers Give Birth to Themselves
I am eight and riding the bus with my dad, and he tells a manacross the aisle to stop doing whatever it is that he’s doing,
and the other man starts to swing at my father, who says somethingin the man’s ear that makes him lower his hand and get off
at the next stop. “What did you say to him?” I ask,but my father just shakes his head,
