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Global Voices: A conversation with Iranian poet Ali Asadollahi
by LIT Translation Editor J.P. Apruzzese
Introduction
For more than two decades, Iranian poet, translator, and editor Ali Asadollahi has been quietly expanding the possibilities of contemporary Persian poetry. The author of six poetry collections, he has written across free verse, haiku, visual poetry, and other experimental forms, guided by a restless commitment to exploration rather than any single aesthetic program. Alongside his own work, he has devoted himself to translation, introducing contemporary world poetry to Persian readers while helping bring Persian literature into conversation with audiences beyond Iran.
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Writing Prompt for April: Special Poetry Month Edition 2026
by Grace Dignazio
It’s hard to believe it’s already spring. The season promises growth and rebirth, yet arrives in the midst of a particularly devastating historical moment, and that sense of renewal feels almost impossible to access against a backdrop of atrocities and the erosion of democracy unfolding on an international stage. As artists and writers, we are often tasked with registering what resists language. Lately, I’ve found that responsibility especially difficult, and for the past few weeks, writing itself has felt out of reach. And yet, here we are—National Poetry Month—perhaps an opportunity to return to practice as a way of staying with this moment.
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Global Voices Interviews
In the latest installment of LIT’s Global Voices interview series, Québecoise poet, translator, and scholar Chloé Savoie-Bernard speaks on fragmentation, feminist and queer legacies, the politics of opacity, and the power of poetry to make kingdoms from ruins.
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Global Voices Interviews *Germany* Andra Schwarz & Caroline Wilcox Reul in conversation with LIT’s JP Apruzzese
A dialogue between authors and translators
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Last month Andra Schwarz’s poetry collection In the morning we are glass (Am morgen sind wir aus glass, 2017) was published in English by ZephyrPress thanks to a wonderful translation by Caroline Wilcox Reul. At LIT, we were delighted to publish five poems from Schwarz’s collection in March 2020. It is tempting when first reading these poems to assume they are about memories of a childhood home or reflections on the irretrievable past.
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Two Poems by Eddie Kim
Minimax
On a beach in Okinawa a super typhoon is coming.
I apply two layers of SPF 50 sport waterproof.
The coast is ours and the waves mischievous.
I feign little mind to the literal red flag
tattering above an empty life guard tower.
Fear of death is what reminds you, after all,
about living. My parents paced the decades
through rain with umbrellas over my brother and me.
Is there a difference between the things we live for
and the things we die for?I watch my nephew build sandcastles
close ashore, -
Two Poems by Jessica Goodfellow
Glass PianoAlexandria of Bavaria,believing she’d swallowed a glass piano,moved carefully through the world,even in doorways turning sidewaysso as not to shatter it.My father, my neighbor, crabwalkthrough the world in whatever way they mustso as not to pierce the things they believeinside themselves. Perhaps I do it too—it’s hard to see in a glassless mirrorof cloudy steel plate screwed to cinderblock wall,
