Our twenty-eighth issue shines a spotlight on two women writers whose work stands out for both its literary boldness and its political heft, tackling questions of place, power, and migration: María Fernanda Ampuero of Ecuador and Giannina Braschi of Puerto Rico, with dossiers curated by Issa Aguilar Jara and Tess O’Dwyer, respectively. We also feature poetry by Roque Dalton, one of the definitive literary figures of Latin America’s twentieth century, plus international writing and indigenous voices in multilingual edition from the pages of World Literature Today, along with exclusive interviews with Javier Calvo, Eduardo Sacheri, and Vera Land, a reflection on Severo Sarduy in translation by Chris Campanioni, and excerpts from new and forthcoming books by Mikeas Sánchez, Carlos Pintado, and Sara Gallardo.
The three authors of this dossier have sought answers, and to justify the pain María Fernanda Ampuero’s writing has caused in us. We say, for example, that she writes from the migrant’s solitude, from familial mourning, and that in this way she forges her readers’ character, and the character of her women readers in particular… and we repeat this until we are convinced. Because we like to read and we know literature is cutting, not complacent. We are, in these texts, three little girls made sisters, to the point of becoming triplets who collapse face-up and trembling on the same bed, full of fear, waiting for a man to sit down in an old wooden chair and read us the last story that’s keeping us from falling asleep. Our feet are cold, our eyes wide, and our tongues numb.
Poeticus Eficacciae
You can judge
the moral fiber of a political regime,
a political institution
or a political man,
by the degree of danger they consent to
by way of being observed
through the eyes of a satirical poet.
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