Adedayo Agarau’s debut poetry collection The Years of Blood invokes dreamscapes with oneiric lyricism to meditate on communal loss and grieving. Confronting histories, social and personal, he contends with the costs of inheritance, including the afterlives of ritual violence, in a series of elegiac poems whose ululations echo beyond the borders of the page. – Won Lee

In a recent interview, I talked with Tamar Shapiro about her character-driven writing style, about how families can resemble countries, and about what we, as citizens of a politically divided America, stand to learn by taking a deeper, more intimate look at a history we thought we knew.

The porous nature of Girmay’s world, sprawling between and through life and death, does not portray an easy communication with the deceased. Instead, we strain, we grasp at what may only be shadows in the aftermath of immeasurable loss.

Welcome to the soundtrack for Issue #168! These songs have been hand-selected by our contributors to serve as the soundscape for our new issue. The playlist is available to listen on Spotify here.

“But honestly, most really great players that I’ve studied have that hungry, obsessive temperament. In the world of the book, it doesn’t occur to Mack that you can play ‘for fun.’ Why would you step on the court, play a game and then let it go?”

As poets, we navigate silence, but we also have the choice to proliferate some silences and not others. We may lock a door to one audience and open it for another. There are doors we, ourselves, may not open.

“First, one must apprentice themselves not to my work but to the Japanese classics.” 

“The Palestine I knew was the product of the language of people I grew up reading – Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Fadwa Touqan... So many of us owe our sense of self and lineage and belonging to language that was intentionally and defiantly crafted by our poets and writers….Language is also a place, and a way to build home. It felt important to really lean into that."

“Drawing is something new to me. A couple years ago I was obsessively drawing, perhaps as a way of not writing, honestly, and I was able to find myself doing it for hours and hours and hours in a way that was very different from how I was able to write.”