Introduction to AMWP Issue 6

This issue has been a long time coming, but I am delighted that it is finally, finally here. My thanks to the writers who stuck with us for so long. This issue would have been impossible without your patience and grace.

As ever, each piece of writing approaches language, translation, and explanation in different ways. In placing text and translation side by side, for example, some poems invite the reader into the fabric of the poem while others interrogate the notion, even the possibility, of translation. Some texts provide translations in a glossary at the end of the text, others postpone translation and explanation by placing it on a separate page, and still others eschew explanation altogether. These choices are born of the unique relationships the writers have with their languages, their subjects, and their readers, certainly, but each poem published in this issue is more than just a reflection of these existing relationships. In combining these languages and in making choices about how these languages are to be represented, each writer remakes their relationships with their languages, with their subjects, and with their audience anew.

I’ve used the word ‘relationship’ a lot above, and, having spent a long time with these texts, I think that is no accident. These are all works addressing the connection between interior and exterior, self and world, child and parent, individual and heritage, through the medium of language. There are intimacies contained herein, as well as considerations, lamentations, accusations, and celebrations, all delivered in text and via audio recordings provided by the writers themselves. Now it is time to invite you in.

— Nadia Niaz