Books in Brief
December 1, 2023
Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors
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Joshua Mensch is a poet, literary translator, and a founding editor of the Prague-based literary journal B O D Y. His first book of poetry, Because: A Lyric Memoir (W. W. Norton, 2018) was a finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. His most recent translations include Petr Hruška’s I Caught Sight of My Face, (Kulturalis, 2024), illustrated by Czech painter Jakub Špaňhel, and Pavla Melková’s The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible (KANT Books, 2022), a collaboration with British sculptor and visual artist Antony Gormley. Raised in Nova Scotia, Canada, he has lived in the Czech Republic since 2003.
Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors
It has been an enormous privilege to edit this magazine and I’m astounded by the sheer volume of great writing we’ve been entrusted with over the past ten years. The poems, stories, and essays in this selection represent, to me, what this project has really been about since the beginning: discovering great new writing.
Poetry by Nelly Sachs, Josef Kučera, Mark Scroggins, and Tim Postovit. Fiction by Marek Šindelka, Elena Alexieva, Duncan Robertson, and Daša Drndić. Interviews with Alan Bilton, Tatiana Tîbuleac, and Joshua Weiner. An essay by Marina Porras. Reviews of Flight and Metamorphosis by Nelly Sachs, translated by Joshua Weiner; Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems by Kateřina Rudčenková, translated by Alexandra Büchler; and My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová, translated by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood. Reviews of other new translations in our Books in Brief.
Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems, brings to readers of English the first full-length volume of poems by Czech poet Kateřina Rudčenková.
There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs / and various birds anas crecca, / there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks / and the cracking of pinecones
Herewith a fresh selection of our favorite recent poetry, fiction, and biography in translation from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.
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