Liu Xiaobo, 1991 / Courtesy of Wang Ya Translator’s note: This photo of Liu Xiaobo swimming surfaced on the Internet after the sea burial in Dalian, China. Those of us who were hear…

Bury Me tell me            wet limestone            flinching coral reefs  what’s it like to alwaysbe night                                      tell me  what is it to be rooted in shadow           …

coniferconifer, “water ablution pavilion,” November 30, 2013   Sparrows, Sparrows She is a man in her late forties and nobody knows when she was born or when she built a silvery house at the notorio…

Chañaral is a small coastal city in the Atacama region of Chile. Devastating flash floods in 2015 caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damage to the region. Photo by jipe7. worldlittoday · Chanaral by…

Editorial note: This Sunday, July 30, marks the World Day against Trafficking in Persons, established in 2013 by the UN General Assembly. Nadia Murad—nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and c…

Eros Bendato (Eros bound), bronze, 1999, by Igor Mitoraj, Kraków, Poland / Photo by Val Kerry Not Elegy, But Eros             for Xulhaz Mannan, LGBT activist murdered i…

Rich, “On a Saturday Afternoon” (on the road from Royal, Nebraska, to the Ashfall Fossil Beds), May 25, 2013 Creation Stories My favorite creation story right nowis the Babylonian one,where Apsu and…

Translator’s note: Considered Morocco’s greatest living poet, Abdellatif Laâbi wrote this poem in 1975, roughly three years into his decade-long prison sentence, one of many thousan…

Stone faces in Cambodia. Photo by Tammy Ho. In the second installment of “Asian Traumatic Poetics” (to read part 1, click here), I will look at two more poems published in Cha that discuss a…

Chris Beckett, One & Other, by Antony Gormley, Trafalgar Square, London, 2009. In this post and one that will follow next week, I will explore the representation of personal trauma in po…

A girl waves the Egyptian national flag as thousands of demonstrators participate in antigovernment protests, February 8, 2011. Photo: Felipe Trueba / EPA / Thinking Images v.9 afterwar…