Issue 17

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Announcing Issue 17

Announcing Issue 17

She noticed he was careful never to touch Annabelle with the hand that was missing fingers. They talked about gardening, and Kirill’s coworkers at the store (stupid, all of them), and his cousin’s apartment (dirty, noisy), and the woman at the fishmonger (she saved the best fillets for him), and the man at the bakery (he gave Kirill discounts). Kirill had a network all over town, people who did favors for him, who treated him specially for one reason or another. He spoke of these arrangements as if he had figured out how to get away with something. “America,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I am still wondering how to win her.” —JESSICA FRANCIS KANE’S “AMERICAN LAWN”

I received a call from S. many years later, one of those hot nights after Christmas in *osario when the heat and humidity stick to your skin, making it take shelter in a memory of cold days and the cold skins it once touched, and the voice on the other side of the telephone—a voice I barely recalled—told me that she’d just come back from two years in Europe and asked me if I still remembered our afternoons drinking on the grass, and I said yes, and the voice announced that she had a story for me like those we used to tell on those distant afternoons… —MARA FAYE LETHEM translates PATRICIO PRON

I turned from the sidewalk to the glass-fronted gallery and was there confronted by a phalanx of twelve impassively gleaming helmets, suspended at face height and seemingly locked on the whites of my eyes. Instead of our common humanity, I was impelled to consider in haste how we as a species are alien, to others, each other, the planet, and ourselves. In the game plan of those helmets I didn’t register even as an impediment. They made a deep phalanx, too, in staggered ranks of five, four, and three helmets each, such that an end run was inadvisable. In short, I was toast. —DOUGLAS CRASE on MICHELLE JAFFÉ’s WAPPEN FIELD

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new fiction by JOHN HASKELL, PETER ORNER, TOM DRURY and MEGAN CUMMINS

“THE MAUSOLEUM OF LOVERS”: NATHANAËL translates the journals of HERVÉ GUIBERT

ROGER GREENWALD translates CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT

poems by PIERRE REVERDY, MONICA FERRELL, VIJAY SESHADRI, and others

poetry from Palestine: FADY JOUDAH translates GHASSAN ZAQTAN

on the cover: ILONA OLKONEN

APS 17 is here. Renew or subscribe today.


Read more in Issue 17

Announcing Issue 17