French-American poet, playwright, translator, and editor Nathalie Handal is originally of a Palestinian family from Bethlehem. She has lived in Europe, Latin America, the Arab world, and the United States. She has taught at New York University, Columbia University, and at the Low-Residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. She writes the literary travel column "The City and the Writer" for Words without Borders. Handal’s poetry draws on her experiences of dislocation, home, travel, and exile.
By Joyce Kilmer
Now by what whim of wanton chance
Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance
Walk weary and laborious ways?
But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
The glory of celestial mirth.
The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
As winds that blow against a star.
By Ahn Joo Cheol
Faintly remains.
Scarcely remains.
Drops of water form inside my life
as if I cherish a drop of light
just as love is formed inside the word love
just as the word goodbye doesn’t permeate it
it faintly lingers.
A thin part of me remains.
Sometimes inside me...
By Diane Thiel
We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.
We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...
By Kevin Young
night watch
You can fall in love
in a museum, but only
with the art
or its silence—or the stranger
you don’t mean to follow
suffering past the Old Masters
& the unnamed
servants. Rembrandt’s face
half in shadow—
you can fall for what
isn’t there already, or
with the 13th century—the...