To begin with “klang” is inherently onomatopoetic: you get the primary sound and also its “klang,” you get the signification and its associative resonance. So many of Tranströmer’s poems are about listening, or even living, in a kind of sonic aftermath.

Perhaps, newly attuned to her own insatiable desire to create, she would reach her own form of understanding from the drafts that she would copy out eleven times by hand.

There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists.

Darras’ poetry may long for the alleged poetic horizon from which waves—and, indeed, shades—emanate but, in its subtle (if finless) wisdom, remains coastal, content to let lyric fall tame upon the sand.

In the new post-apocalyptic world, the litany has been lost, the prater silenced. Catastrophe discards everything into the same junk pile of existence; which is to say, catastrophe turns everything into junk.

If the act of translation is often reduced to a dichotomy of foreignization and domestication, Dodson’s work is an interrogation; apropos of the book’s slippery relationship to the idea of national identity, of what constitutes the foreign and domestic in the first place.

An inchoate despair is the dominant mood of the novel, as Natsumi’s feelings of emptiness, dizziness, and vertigo collide against her Sisyphean rituals of domesticity.

Like a smothering deformative blight, these poems arrive in remission, the moment before full collapse, a slipstream incongruity between locations, futurities, and the clouded cataracts of speculation.

Hašek is mocking authority and bourgeois respectability, of course, but the criticism is ultimately of the individual’s inability to tolerate being the butt of a joke. If the universe is absurd, then we shouldn’t be so foolish as to take it seriously.

As long as you have things to say, you don’t have to package or repackage things in a very intellectual way. If the thought is forceful enough, it will find a way to convey itself, even if it’s in a broken language, even in broken English.

A US readership may be seeking the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views, a challenge that will change them, but these poems are after something different.

The past is dead, but Cixous is alive, and she resurrects only what she thinks of, what incites her, what comes to her mind. Through this persistent act of journeying, the grand gesticulations of the twentieth century come to be concentrated in the beloved, diaphanous figure of a woman: her mother.

Ernaux’s recent popularity in the US points to our desire for literature that plumbs sexuality without sentimentality. Do away with the crumbs of dissociative sex and give us something raw.

21. When you say you’re going home, they ask: To Belgrade?

22. For them, it’s as though this war hasn’t happened.

And yet,

23. There are exceptions.

MANON: If this keeps up,

THE WRITER: says Manon, who looks at the sky, which is not letting up at all, not lightening anywhere,

MANON: Because it looks like it’s going to keep this up.

A specific image unfolds in my mind when I think of the Tohoku Earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, referred to in Japan simply as 3.11: thick, dark water easily pushes against the opposing flow of a river.

Contrary to no one’s expectations, Emmanuel Carrère has written another book about himself. If you’re just being introduced, this is his fourth or fifth.