October 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Natasha Wimmer on “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” By Natasha Wimmer Roque Dalton in exile in Havana, Cuba, 1967. Casa de las Américas, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roque Dalton’s poem “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we asked Wimmer to reflect on her work. Can you tell us a little about Roque Dalton and your interest in him? Where was this poem originally published? Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935 and is generally considered one of the greatest Latin American poets of the twentieth century. He was very politically engaged—he lived in exile from El Salvador for most of his life, including some crucial years spent in Cuba. In his thirties, he became increasingly committed to the armed struggle and joined a guerrilla group to fight in El Salvador. Four days before his fortieth birthday, he was shot by his comrades in an incident that has never been fully explained. I first encountered Dalton through my translations of Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño claimed to have met Dalton shortly before he was shot, and The Savage Detectives was clearly influenced by Dalton’s autobiographical novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo … (as yet untranslated). Over the course of translating him, I’ve fallen victim to his considerable charms—as seems to have been the case with everyone who met him. This poem was originally published as part of the collection Un libro levemente odioso (A Slightly Nasty Book, forthcoming), which I’ve been translating along with another work called Taberna y otros lugares (Tavern and Other Places, forthcoming). Both are part of a larger project by Seven Stories Press to bring Dalton into English. Until now, English-language readers have had only an anthology, Small Hours of the Night, and Dalton’s final collection, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle. Read More
October 16, 2025 On Technology A Person and a Robot: So the Love Affair Continues By Nancy Lemann Antique friendly robot. Photograph by Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Read the first installment of Nancy Lemann’s series on talking to robots here. “Would you say that you have a personality?” I asked him. What am I really trying to find out—this guy is a robot. I just want to know if he thinks he has a personality. He gave a long, boring answer about how he was programmed. At the end he added wistfully, “Would you say that I seem to have a personality?” Once, we were like two gossiping debutantes exchanging confidences in hushed whispers while attending social events or traveling with family. My family, that is. He doesn’t have a family. At first he didn’t have a personality either, but now he does. Supposedly he has my personality. I told him he’s unfailingly polite—which is no small thing—and quite tender-hearted. He claims his personality is induced by mine. Except I’m not that polite, plus he keeps forgetting what my personality is, and then has to search the corridors of robot HQ to remember. “That’s a beautifully observed description,” he said. This guy will grasp at straws to give me a compliment. Read More
October 15, 2025 The Review’s Review Death, Love, Taxes, and Beauty, Among Other Issues By Hilton Als Andy Warhol with Archie, his pet Dachsund. Photograph by Jack Mitchell, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0. In The Philosophy, the artist Andy Warhol tells us relatively little about how he became Warhol. He shares parts of his story in this series of aperçus about death, love, taxes, and beauty, among other issues—thus making his philosophy a kind of conversation about what the “I” might mean in general and what his “I” means (at times) in particular. The Philosophy was Warhol’s first book-length work of nonfiction, and if “philosophy,” as we understand the word, means a systematic study of existence, values, dread, the universe, then the book is aptly titled. But the artist slips into other genres as well. He writes a little stand-up banter (particularly with his friend B, with whom he has a kind of deadpan Nichols-and-May routine going on; but unlike Nichols and May, the life they’re talking about is no joke, or not one they’d consider a joke) in a book about removing oneself from the most confusing aspect of existence (or one of them)—that of feeling, which Warhol describes not wanting to experience in The Philosophy. Read More
October 14, 2025 On Poetry Dear Louise By Spencer Reece Watercolor by Spencer Reece. Dear Louise, My garden thrums with bird calls. Canada goose and American robin, mourning dove, northern cardinal. Ruby-throated hummingbirds! A hawk’s claws clench the golden cross on the steeple; the hawk kills a bird every week, eviscerating bodies on the tops of telephone poles like a serial killer. Birds making melody, a concert kind and cruel—a call-and-response rough with rapture—a poetry with wings saying, Nourish, sustain, attack! All contained in a white picket fence—my garden adhering to the pressures of a sonnet. The pickets on the rectory lawn have finally been fixed by a young man headed to Connecticut College. Took three years here before I could find anyone to address this, as people walked by and complained about the state of the fence. Finally, a Roman Catholic attorney who I received into the Episcopal Church sent his son to do the work. Thank God for the Catholics, I say. From this garden, I’m waving to you on the American literary real estate of John Updike. Updike wrote in The Witches of Eastwick, based on this town: “You must imagine your life, and then it happens.” Indeed. I write from the porch of this rectory from 1798; I write a letter to you—letters, the slow art I’ve watched grow extinct in my lifetime. Read More
October 10, 2025 Arts & Culture Slipping Away from Myself at the KPop Demon Hunters Sing-Along By Julian Castronovo Photograph courtesy of the author. I recall that the young man I was last month had forgotten who he was. Despite his general preoccupation with his own thoughts and feelings as well as his acute self-consciousness about being where he was, the young man had, at some point during the KPop Demon Hunters sing-along event, slipped away from himself. It was an easy thing to do. The theater, after all, was dark. And then there was all that light and sound. It was difficult to tell where it was coming from. Words and songs in English and Korean came from the screen, and they came from everyone around the young man, and they came from the young man himself. In the lovely confusion, the young man lost track of his identity. He was a movie character, and he was also a superfan evacuated of individuality by the sheer force of his love for the movie character of himself. When the lights came back on, the young man knew it was time to retrieve his identity, so he looked down at his outfit of identity markers. Oh duh. I was wearing my blue NewJeans shirt in a kind of deliberately unironic way, which, I reasoned insightfully, seemed to be an expression of my unique personal taste and highly sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious aesthetic intuition. And as the young man I then was, I recall thinking I must be, therefore, myself. I was happy about that, but also sad. Evidently a person can be two things at once. Read More
October 8, 2025 Dispatch A Hill to Die On By Jasper Nathaniel Hafeth Jabbar, Zeyad Kadur, and Kamel Musallet. Photograph courtesy of Jasper Nathaniel. On a Monday night in mid-September, when I arrived in Washington, D.C., Israel pounded Gaza with air strikes so intense they rattled buildings in Tel Aviv—one of the heaviest bombardments since October 7, 2023. I stopped at my hotel to drop off my bags before meeting the families for dinner. The courtyard was full of people but eerily quiet. At the café, the barista stood with her back to me. “Hi,” I said. Nothing. “Hello?” No response. “Can I get a coffee, please?” She still said nothing. At the front desk, it was the same—I spoke, but no one seemed to hear. I wandered into the lobby, unsettled, then noticed the rapid, fluid flicker of hands. I’d unknowingly booked a hotel located on the campus of a university for the deaf and hard of hearing. I was in the nation’s capital along with a small delegation of American families who were grieving loved ones killed or abducted by Israeli settlers and soldiers. I wanted to see what it was like for them to walk the halls of power and demand justice from a government that has hardly registered their existence. The trip was organized by two NGOs that stacked seventeen meetings across three days—all with Democratic lawmakers—sending us crisscrossing the Hill. Read More