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I read “The Dice Player” in its entirety in an Arabic newspaper right after Darwish read the poem for the first time in Ramallah in June 2008—what would be his last public appearance in that city. 

In early October 2007, almost three years to the day after I began my career as a journalist in Russia, a conversation with a former CIA agent brought it to an end. 

Kimberly Johnson, Alex Lemon, and Brenda Shaughnessy take up the poetics of God-lust with renewed, edgy, often darkly humorous imagination in distinctive second books of poetry.

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics

and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,

which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”

Susana Osinaga Robles is the nurse who washed Che’s corpse. She’s a small woman of seventy-four with wavy hair and swollen legs. Her story begins on October 9, 1967, in Vallegrande, a town lost in the far reaches of eastern Bolivia. Those...

Inspiration comes from the unlikeliest of places.

Bernardo Atxaga draws a line between theft and homage in his delightful “Obabakoak.”