JOSHUA MENSCH | EDITOR

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 translation of Czech poet Pavla Melková’s poetry collection, The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible, a collaboration with the British artist Antony Gormley, was published by KANT Books in 2022. He grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and lives in the Czech Republic. 

Personal Website | Instagram


Books

Because: A Lyric Memoir, by Joshua Mensch. W. W. Norton, 2018. 144 pages.


Because: A Lyric Memoir, by Joshua Mensch. W. W. Norton, 2018. 144 pages.
The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible: Poems by Pavla Melková, illustrations by Antony Gormley. Bilingual Edition, translated by Joshua Mensch. KANT, Praha, 2022, 135 pages
The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible: Poems by Pavla Melková, drawings by Antony Gormley. Bilingual Ed. translated by Joshua Mensch. KANT, 2022, 135 pages

Essays, Picks & Translations in B O D Y

Books in Brief

Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Joshua Mensch

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.

The Winter Issue | 2022

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.

Josef Kučera

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

Dante

Books in Brief | Friday Pick

Herewith a fresh selection of our favorite recent poetry, fiction, and biography in translation from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.