
On Thin Ice
KATHRIN SCHMIDT
Multi-award-winning contemporary poet and novelist Kathrin Schmidt was born in the former German Democratic Republic, her voice feminist, political, and distinctly of the east. Her themes range through unemployment, loneliness, suicide and disaffection, which she sees as characterising the experience of East Germans during and since Reunification. Schmidt’s novel ‘You’re not dying’ (2009) won the German Book Prize and will at last appear in English in 2021 translated by Christine Les.
SUE VICKERMAN
The UK’s Brexit vote triggered writer Sue Vickerman to throw a rope across to Europe by turning to literary translation. Being northern English, Vickerman empathizes with East German peer-writer Kathrin Schmidt who similarly hails from a region where people feel ‘left behind’ and where right-wing populism is on the rise. Sue has translated TWENTY POEMS BY KATHRIN SCHMIDT, Arc Publications, 2020. She edits for Naked Eye Publishing (UK). suevickerman.eu
Recent Posts
Summer Land
EVER SINCE VERNON WAS A TEENAGER, HE WAS GOOD AT SLEEPING. SO GOOD in fact, that his mother was scared he’d never wake up when he went to bed. Vernon held the record for the longest sleep ever taken in his family. And there weren’t many records between him and his mom, although she was good at all sorts of things.
Three Poems
Blue Dress I've hung my light blue evening gown on the bedroom door so that at night, when I turn away from you to sleep, I still have something to...
The Oppression Tables: Genesis
blackis not the desired colorof women...

How Can Black People Go Camping at a Time Like This?
LIKE A BEACHED WHALE, THE REFRIGERATION CONTAINER RESTS ON LOWRY Avenue behind North Memorial Health, a trauma hospital in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. It’s been there since March. Either whitewashed or dulled by time, the hand lettering on its side reads, Frank’s Vegetables.

A Review of Kerrin McCadden’s AMERICAN WAKE
American Wakeby Kerrin McCaddenBlack Sparrow Press, 2021 From its epigraph to its final line, award-winning poet Kerrin McCadden’s exquisite third book, American Wake, is about going places. In its energetic momentum, we encounter who moves on and who and what is left...

Keeping an Eye Out for Cougars
Narrow was what they called my cousin who is now as exquisite as the Kenyan model pouting on the cover of French Vogue, but before we were of age, I was the pretty one, light, with good hair, and regular. In every photo from the seventies she was my shadow. I’d...

There are no more silkworms in the wild
Maybe I am being sensitive but when C is teaching our Sunday morning Black-Lesbians- Only-Group about silkworms, I become anxious. We are curling over ourselves, watching through computer screens: a video of women's hands laying out carpets and carpets of...

Love Below the Stairs
Daryl lifts the top of the velvet jewelry box with his free hand and carefully scans the pieces. “Oh! Gimmie here!”

unit_52
thank you for being a present uplifting presence. main, these doors open the other way, what kind of truck we in? fade to live action footage of a haggard face man sitting on the curb with his shoes and socks off, picking at dead skin between his toes.

Two Poems
My aluminum-free/deodorant is made/of charcoal. Iterative/self-perceptions slam/into one another with/the incongruity of/perched hummingbirds.

A Review of G.C. Waldrep’s THE EARLIEST WITNESSES
Hailed by his contemporaries as a visionary poet, G.C. Waldrep aptly presents an intimate study of the literal, physical, and spiritual act and implications of seeing.