24 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 photo : zvika melamed poetry Song of the Younger Brother 1 I can think of nothing but the little one, the younger brother. He holds his father’s hand. Peering into the camera, he scrunches up his little face. The world is all made of this, his younger brother sweetness – because he is in his younger brother world doubly safe, doubly secure. 2 There should be nothing left in the world after his little body on the beach 3 And where is the older brother? He of the serious gaze – where is he? Lost to the serious sea. 4 If pain made a sound the world would be a steady hum all the time. 5 Sequestered in forever now held lost in empty arms impossible song (for Aylan and Ghalib Kurdi) Two Poems by Rachel Tzvia Back Autumn Tercets (October–December 2015) 1 In home caves, in corners, in dark quiet of the temporarily safe, we huddle and wait for the killings and not the killings to reach not to reach us. 2 My daughter studies Plato’s Cave. She says, “I know we are them.” And though with knowing she is loosed from those chains, still the flames all the while engrave heat and deep stinging imperilment into her lovely long back. 3 The eastern winds like evening jackals in the final shadowed wadi never stop howling. In first darkness they scale the stony slope, thick paws pounding at lowered blinds. Our house circled, they hurl themselves at panes and never stop howling. Rachel Tzvia Back, poet and translator, lives in the Galilee where her great-, great-, great-grandfather settled in the 1830s. She has published four poetry collections and four collections of translations, including the award-winning With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry and In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. The poems included here are from her new collection, entitled What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking. 4 With first rain after the winds, the stabbings, house demolitions, retaliatory shootings, politicians’ obscenities, targeted assassinations, random street killings – all pause. Garden weeds sprout suddenly to become a gracious green blanket spread over the deep creviced dirt. Only then do I note I have long since stopped noting the names of each day’s newly dead. 5 It was a long autumn. Winter refused to come. photo : stéphane chaumet summer reads WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 25 Summer weather has already arrived in Austin, and it’s the perfect excuse for WLT’s digital media editor, Jen Rickard Blair, to jump-start her annual summer reading list. Her selections this year include a “cli-fi”novel, a short-story collection, a podcast adapted to book, and poetry. Claire Vaye Watkins Gold Fame Citrus Riverhead Books, 2015 This debut novel by Claire Vaye Watkins is a realistic dystopia that follows the story of two young “Mojavs”—Luz and Ray—in the badlands of a drought-destroyed southern California. Her beautiful prose and enrapturing story is the recipe for an engrossing page-turner. Andrés Neuman The Things We Don’t Do Trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia Open Letter Books, 2015 I read Neuman’s Traveler of the Century a few years ago and have since been craving a dive into more of his captivating storytelling. The Things We Don’t Do is a short-story collection that contains a collection of unpredictable tales ranging from philosophical to playful. Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor Welcome to Night Vale Harper Perennial, 2015 I’m a longtime fan of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and am thrilled to discover the creators have spun their darkly funny and mysterious stories into a novel. The book is based in the same town in a nameless desert where ghosts, angels, the “glow cloud,” government conspiracies, and more intersect to create a mysterious atmosphere that could be likened to Twin Peaks or The Twilight Zone. Wisława Szymborska Map: Collected and Last Poems Trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015 I’ve been wanting to read more of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry, and this newly published collection includes the poems from her last...