The first full-length English translation of Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt, A Blind Salmon engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, and also explores mothering, multilinguality, madness. A Blind Salmon, Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt’s sixth collection of poetry, is her first full-length collection in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna; ranges over mothering, multilinguality, madness; takes up sameness and differences; and is shot through with desert sand. In these poems, Wong Kcomt engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision. She renders homage to the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing these poems. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose. She builds a lyrical menagerie.

From Venezuelan reporter Paula Ramón comes a powerful memoir about one woman’s complicated relationship with her family as her beloved homeland collapses into ruin. In the span of a generation, oil-rich Venezuela spiraled into a dire state of economic collapse. Reporter Paula Ramón experienced the crisis firsthand as her middle-class family saw their quality of life deteriorate. Public services no longer functioned. Money lost its value. Her mother couldn’t afford to buy food, which was increasingly scarce. The once-prosperous country fell into ruin. Like many others, Ramón’s family struggled to survive each day in their beloved city, Maracaibo—until, one by one, they each made the unbearable choice to leave the home they love. In the end, it was Ramón’s mother, a widow, who stayed behind, loyal to the only home she’d ever known. In this heartbreaking mix of lived experience, family chronicle, and journalistic essay, Paula Ramón explores the anguish of her own relationships set against the staggering collapse of a country. Motherland is a uniquely human account about the ties that bind—and the fragile concept of home.