Photo: karina_lo via Adobe Stock Another year is almost over, and it’s time to look back at the books we read in 2025. As always, it’s a rich and varied collection. The fiction section includes three Booker Prize longlisted books, including the winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, as well as Tash Aw’s The South and Benjamin …
Tag: Poetry
Station Island: Seamus Heaney
Published by Faber & Faber, 1984, 123 pages. “I was stretched between contemplationof a motionless pointand the command to participateactively in history.”—Away from It All, quote from Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Definition The thread that runs through this collection the poet’s role in history and politics. Is the poet an observer or …
Breaking the Veil of Politeness: An Interview with Usha Raman
Usha Raman is an Indian author and poet. She is also a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad. Her first novel, Polite Conversations, was published in 2024. Her other books include Writing for the Media (2010); a collection of poems, All the Spaces in Between (2009); and a children’s book, …
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Dearly: Margaret Atwood
Published by Chatto & Windus, 2020, 124 pages “Dearly beloved, gathered here togetherin this closed drawer,fading now, I miss you.I miss the missing, those who left earlier.I miss even those who are still here.I miss you all dearly.Dearly do I sorrow for you.” “You can wander away. You can get lost.Words can do that.”—Dearly These …
No Gods Live Here: Conceição Lima
Translated from Portuguese by Shook.Published by Phoneme Media and Deep Vellum, 2024, 255 pages. The original versions of the books from which the poems are taken were published in 2004, 2006, 2011, 2014 and 2024. “The dead ask:Why do roots sprout from our feet? ...What was this kingdom that we planted?”—From Plantation “The enigma is some …
Iep Jāltok—Poems from a Marshallese Daughter: Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner
Published by the University of Arizona Press, 2017, 82 pages. From 1946 to 1958, the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in what is now the Marshall Islands, an event which seems to have slipped into the mists of history. But it is still very real for the islanders, as Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, a Marshallese poet, …
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