Issue Four Contents

3 poems
by Maria Alyokhina
2 poems
by Simonas Bernotas
Fiction
by Andriy Bondar
2 poems
by Luis Chaves
Poetry
by Ramón García
2 poems
by Julia Guez
Poetry
by Salgado Maranhão
Photo Essay
by Josip Novakovich
A poem
by Catherine Tice
Fiction
by João Tordo
2 poems
by Samantha Zighelboim
Frogpondia
2 poems
by Luis Chaves
translated by Samantha Zighelboim & Julia Guez
Luis Chaves (Costa Rica, 1969) is a poet, novelist, chronicler and translator. Chaves’ works have been published in Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. His work has been awarded the National Poetry Prize by Ministry of Culture, Costa Rica, 2012. Translations to English (by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim) have appeared in POETRY Magazine, PEN America Poetry Series and Circumference. The Akademie Schloss Stuttgart in Germany awarded him the “Jean Jacques Rousseau” grant in 2011. He was a 2015 fellow for the Artists in Berlin Program.

Samantha Zighelboim's poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, The Guardian, Sixth Finch, PEN Poetry Series, Stonecutter, and Circumference: A Journal of Poetry in Translation, among others. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

Julia Guez’s poetry, essays and translations have appeared in POETRY, PEN Poetry Series, The Guardian, Circumference, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston Review. Guez works at Teach For America-New York and lives in Greenpoint and online @G_U_E_Z. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.

Born in 1969, Luis Chaves is a Costa Rican poet who was recently awarded the National Prize in Poetry from the Ministerio de Cultura in San José. He is considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Costa Rican poetry and is frequently spoken about as the new national poet.

What sets Chaves’ work apart, among other things, is the range of registers—quotidian, metaphysical, pseudoscientific, religious, historical and pharmacological, to name a few. The movement between these registers is vertiginous at points, abetted by myriad references to high- and low-culture.

The intersections are uncanny. For example, in “Equestrian Monuments,” dialogue from The Exorcist co-exists with Kyrie, Rex. The figure of Leon Cortés, who is presumably the man in the title’s monument (“pointing towards a place / without historical value”) is counterbalanced by a cast of mock-heroic or non-normative foils: a transvestite, a cripple, a singleton, homunculus, thief, and gardener, as well as “the children of the Second Republic . . . who shave heads and chests and armpits,” the unemployed (“who consume anxiolytics / rolled-up in a candy wrapper . . .[at] a cinema in the suburbs”) and the elderly (“unmoving”).

The work inhabits a space that is often strange and unsettling. We are sometimes unsure if we are in Buenos Aires, San José or Santa Teresa. (Or, for that matter, Wyoming or New York.) Vis-à-vis genre, there are similar questions. The title poem is a litany, one of many lists intermixing poetry and prose and drama. Ekphrastically rendering TV, photographs, monuments and films, it also enacts the process of writing, speaking and performing one’s role in society (down to the “mechanics of a smile set in motion / by a signal from the stranger who took it.”) Perhaps not surprisingly, everything is “off-center,” “out-of-focus,” steeped in the “fog of the drug”, until the ordinary begins to border on the sublime in a moment as fleeting as it is indelible, as when:

a few minutes of orange light are left
flattering the silhouettes
of the park’s elderly, unmoving.
This is how it is or this how I see it through
the extenuating filter
of 10 mg of Klonopin.

Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim
Brooklyn, 2016

Wyoming

Sonnet

Wyoming

There is no beginning but that’s the least of our concerns: one afternoon, the reek of gasoline and an ad for Goliat soda seen through the window of this bus. The watch’s reflection uneasy against the still sky. The hem of a skirt bunched up in a pair of panties, a constellation of ants suspended in a honey jar. All is well up to this point, but now for the hard part: drowsiness comes on with the force of gravity. This much is certain: a cold wind blows in, say, Bahía Blanca. Mute is the mantle of frost over the flatlands of Wyoming.

Sonnet

Landing at Ezeiza at dawn on the first day of the year, a rabbit or maybe it was a hare ran alongside the plane. Bounding from the asphalt to the grass and back again to the asphalt, it strained to keep up with this gigantic machine on the tarmac.

Luis Chaves (Costa Rica, 1969) is a poet, novelist, chronicler and translator. Chaves’ works have been published in Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. His work has been awarded the National Poetry Prize by Ministry of Culture, Costa Rica, 2012. Translations to English (by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim) have appeared in POETRY Magazine, PEN America Poetry Series and Circumference. The Akademie Schloss Stuttgart in Germany awarded him the “Jean Jacques Rousseau” grant in 2011. He was a 2015 fellow for the Artists in Berlin Program.

Samantha Zighelboim's poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, The Guardian, Sixth Finch, PEN Poetry Series, Stonecutter, and Circumference: A Journal of Poetry in Translation, among others. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

Julia Guez’s poetry, essays and translations have appeared in POETRY, PEN Poetry Series, The Guardian, Circumference, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston Review. Guez works at Teach For America-New York and lives in Greenpoint and online @G_U_E_Z. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.