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How thrilling to include poems by Joy Ladin in the very first issue of LIBER. She’s a wonderful and prolific poet, with nine books and counting. Her most recent, The Book of Anna, won this year’s National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the first trans woman to be tenured at an Orthodox Jewish university, Yeshiva, in New York City. Many of Ladin’s poems are long and deal in a deeply philosophical-religious way

What a pleasure to introduce five poems by the prolific and brilliant Molly Peacock, queen of rhyme and meter, who has done so much to bring contemporary freshness and zing and a sometimes-startling intimacy to formal poetry. In this grouping, Peacock writes about the death of her husband, Joyce scholar Michael Groden, about the strains of caring for a sick and dying person, no matter how beloved, and about the beginning of a new life

We’re often told that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Historically, newcomers have been expected to be grateful and to blend into the dominant culture, and that’s what a lot of them have done. My grandparents left what is now Belarus in 1920 and made a great life for themselves in Brooklyn. Not for them Elizabeth Bishop’s question, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” If they had stayed home,

When I accepted three of Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s poems I didn’t realize that, in different ways, they were about the dialogue of life and death. That’s a measure of her variety of tone and her skill as both a poet and a storyteller. In “To Live,” a father is killed by a cluster bomb as he protects his child with his body. (Well, there are worse ways to go, like “a bullet / to the head,

THIS ISSUE BRINGS together two poets we were thrilled to publish in the Women’s Review of Books, and they couldn’t be more different. Linda Bamber infuses her poems with a Buddhist sense of detachment—or rather, the hope of detachment, which life so often defeats. In “Nirvana,” she’s embroiled in the comedy of dailiness: a missing can opener, a visit from the plumber, computer problems, friendship problems, just . . . problems! Nirvana has never seemed

OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi, age seventeen, is partially infected by a murderous corkscrew cyclops and has to learn to live with “Migi” (his literal right hand, now quite maternal,

In Sync I worked a bunch of minimum wage jobs in college, hard-selling suede bomber jackets at Wilson’s Leather, guzzling Frangelico-flavored coffee while reading Backlash at a failing coffee shop, and nude modeling for figure drawing classes. That last one paid twice the hourly wage of the others, but the real pay-off was the impact that holding a pose (nude, for two to three hours, in front of my peers) had on me as a