Issue 18.1

 

Literary Matters 18.1

(Fall, 2025)

Editor’s Note:

John Matthew Steinhafel

Interview

Andrew M. Davenport: A Conversation with William Melvin Kelley

Reviews

Matthew Kirby: Modern Echoes in Kristin Dykstra’s Dissonance
Erick Verran: Say Less: Christian Gullette’s Coachella Elegy
Mary Grace Mangano: In Between the Lives of Others: Robert Pinsky’s Proverbs of Limbo

Translation

Tristram Fane Saunders: To the Reader (from the French of Charles Baudelaire)

Poems

Tristram Fane Saunders: Better Than Life! Not Life! And Still, Life!
Nida Sophasarun: She’s A Maniac
Nida Sophasarun: Yangtze Gorge
Morri Creech: Aristotle’s Table, Plato’s Chair
Morri Creech: The Moth
James Midgley: The Visitation
James Midgley: The Nightjar
Rachel Hadas: The Horses of Parmenides
Hailey Leithauser: The Bad Apple Sings
Hailey Leithauser: Did Hannah Say
George Bradley: Concerning Kipling

Translations

Ryan Wilson: Death and the Maiden (from the German of Matthias Claudius)
Ryan Wilson: Le Vierge (from the French of Stéphane Mallarmé)
Ryan Wilson: Ode 1.5 (from the Latin of Horace)
Ryan Wilson: The Swan (from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)

Essay

Yahia Lababidi: The Mystic and the Marketplace: Kahlil Gibran Between East and West

Reviews

Matthew Ryan: Henry Hart’s Seamus Heaney’s Gifts
Tim Tibbitts: So Much Secret Labor: James Wright and Translation

Translations

Gregory Mellen: The Wind (from the Italian of Virgilio Giotti)
Gregory Mellen: Along the Boulevard (from the Italian of Virgilio Giotti)

Poems

Sean McDowell: After Vermeer
T. O. Brandon: Regarding the Wreck
Sunil Iyengar: Crowd Control
Sunil Iyengar: Out of the Box
Sunil Iyengar: Assurances
Maya Venters: Women’s Work
Maya Venters: Prayer for the hair in the drain
Maya Venters: Tip of the iceberg
Elijah Perseus Blumov: Jacarandas
R. Nemo Hill: Narcissus

Translations

Elijah Perseus Blumov: Anguish (from the French of Stéphane Mallarmé)
Elijah Perseus Blumov: Ecclesiastes (from the French of Leconte de Lisle)

Essay

David Lehner: That Ain’t No Ghost Ma’am: Sexual Synonymy in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

Translations

Julie Steiner: To the Cicada (from the Greek of Meleager of Gadara)
Julie Steiner: The Cicada (from the French of Paul-Jean Toulet)

Poems

Shane McCrae: The Wanderer, Having Escaped Hell, Meets the Balladeer on the Moon
Niall Campbell: The End of the Age of Singing
Judith Harris: On the Memory Care Unit
Julie Danho: It Is Night in Lebanon Where You Are
Forester McClatchey: Spoor
Gregory Mellen: Argument: Narratology
David Lehman: Read Blake or Go to Hell
Pedro Poitevin: From First Fall and Other Dreams
Pedro Poitevin: Senryu at Zion National Park
Pedro Poitevin: Left-Handed Sonnet for My Future Absence
Pedro Poitevin: Odysseus’ Last Return to Ithaca