Mario Bellatin’s complex dreamscape, offered here in a brand-new translation, presents a timely allegorical portrait of the body and society in decay, victim to inscrutable pandemic. In a large, unnamed city, a strange, highly infectious disease begins to spread, afflicting its victims with an excruciating descent toward death, particularly unsparing in its assault of those on society's margins. Spurned by their loved ones and denied treatment by hospitals, the sick are left to die on the streets until a beauty salon owner, whose previous caretaking experience extended only to the exotic fish tanks scattered among his workstations, opens his doors as a refuge. In the ramshackle Morgue, victim to persecution and violence, he accompanies his male guests as they suffer through the lifeless anticipation of certain death, eventually leaving the wistful narrator in complete, ill-fated isolation.

Like A New Sun features poetry from Huastecan Nahuatl, Isthmus Zapotec, Mazatec, Tsotsil, Yucatec Maya, and Zoque languages. Co-edited by Isthmus Zapotec poet Victor Teran and translator David Shook, this groundbreaking anthology introduces six indigenous Mexican poets--three women and three men--each writing in a different language. Well-established names like Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) appear alongside exciting new voices like Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque). Each poet's work is contextualized and introduced by its translator. Foreword by Eliot Weinberger. Poets include Victor Teran (Isthmus Zapotec), Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque), Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec), Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya), Juan Hernandez (Huastecan Nahuatl), and Enriqueta Lunez (Tsotsil).

A collection of poetry from acclaimed yet underrepresented Kurdish poet Farhad Pirbal. Like his contemporary Abdulla Pashew, this poetry is a chronicle of exile and displacement, longing and not belonging. Poetry is in turns wistful and disoriented, reflecting his role as dissident and persecuted prisoner."Poéte maudit" of Kurdistan, Pirbal is known as well for his highly publicized antics as for his prolific literary output. Pirbal, born in 1961, "may be the greatest innovator of Kurdish literature in the twentieth century, in both poetry and prose" (Shook, Poetry Foundation).