Reviews Editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of It’s Not Over Once You Figure It Out by Isaac Pickell, Border Wisdom by Ahmad Almallah, and Tung by Robyn Maree Pickens. Here is the review of Almallah: Reading Almallah’s haunting collection in 2024, it is impossible not to feel the loss and pain of genocide, the slow violence that unfolds each day with rapid intensity in the Gaza Strip. Border Wisdom grapples with this loss through a bilingual lens of Arabic and English, through life and death that surface with the loss of a mother and a mother tongue: “in this land of new beginnings / I own no language.” Translation and malformations become necessary strategies to refuse linguistic, social, and political borders. “I tell you this translaformation is more accurate a / translation than I ever imagined,” writes Almallah. This collection is a beautiful elegy for a mother and a mother tongue.

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of Bamboophobia by Ko Ko Thett, Air Raid by Polina Barskova, and Togetherness by Wo Chan. From the Ko Ko Thett review: “The collection includes thirteen poems Ko Ko Thett had written and translated himself from the Burmese, but arguably this is entirely a work of translation. The poet compellingly demonstrates the fuzziness of language to convey its atmospheric social and political nuances: ‘Come morning, we say, “Have you eaten?” to / celebrate the day, for we are still here.’”