The work of German photographer Karl Blossfeldt and his relationship to plants is reimagined in this poem by 2019 Poems in Translation Contest winner Alba Cid from her collection Atlas.Light is choral…

Love is a work of art in a can.

I suspect something in Kinue / reminds him of his own life.

These are the years directly preceding the onset of vulnerability.

Like the border between the word leave / and the concept of returning

Dinara Rasuleva questions received notions of home and national identity in this poem about her relationship to Russia.

The most horrible things, remember this, are incremental.

Enough of their butchery.

before their paths divided, they formed, together, three glints of light and shadow moving on at last

O, it is a defeated god, approaching the dusk of time.

Not as a multitude, but as one.

nothing is certain but and taxes

Soon the volunteers will arrive

The dead don't let us go, I say to my friend Sirius, putting my father's letters in a drawer.

“She was hot, your aunt Carmen, / she didn’t look Chinese.”

My eyes fill with rowboats

I have licked the tip of evil

In Germany the statue of Marx is playing chess with the family doctor

water boils up from grouped stones, grips me.

At light of dawn I rise and make fire, / and dry in nascent fire-gleam the space where dew once pearled.

a dark stillness / goes about sowing death.

I alone / plunge my roots / and outstretch my branches.

I practiced the art of clairvoyance, / became a sorceress, a witch, a woman

In echoes of the Kafka text from which this poem takes its name, a queer man longs to confront his homophobic father for a lifetime of injury in this poem by Berlin-based writer and artist Ricardo Domeneck.

They’re as naked as the day they were born

The wisdom gathered from those wanderings is far deeper / Than that of ancient Greece

somewhere in between the promise and the certainty of rain / the bounds of things / —all things, including you— / are blurred

take custody of my mouth

the window frames have become national borders, the doorknob a border guard.

Inert stone, atomic, / nuclear before life.

In point of fact, Lisbon was not waiting there [to greet us.

The Esplanada, thick with the scent of fragrant [DDT

The music played / on Apollo 11, it turned out, was “Georgia / On My Mind,” sung by Ray Charles.

I write to you from the red zone.

Words Without Borders is leaning into poetry's ability to fill the void of isolation.

”Amnesia shrouds a generation.”

the poem is riding a bicycle; / trembling and in haste.

I swallowed fire / And forgot you were an ocean.

Flowers will slip from a torn veil.

When a man cries / he floods himself in salt tears / and colorfast he drowns

What does he have to fear?

I proceeded with caution / Like a marble inching toward the line

silence sullen-faced fate reaches my ears

Three or four days / he hangs out in our house.

How does one grasp making / sense of timing when to hurl and when to catch?

Like a fish / in an aquarium, you are a source of distress and distraction.

In the mind, a flock of birds, feathers from an unshakable, shadowy thing.

What / are the things we need to prepare?

Upsidedownistan here.

I don’t understand how we walk around the world / ​as if there were a single way for each of us

“Pillow” is a poem by 2019 Poems in Translation Contest winner Lee Young-ju, translated into English by Jae Kim.Listen to Lee Young-ju read her poem “Pillow” in the original Korean.…

On waking, I see my body has been rearranged.

it’s awful of me to interrupt, but I just / need you to understand how certain kinds of wounds can be useful.

There's no cloth hawker in the bazaar / willing to make dirty deals

On a mattress / amidst an armful of hair / a beautiful woman tosses and turns

Their wailing won’t let me sleep, won’t let me sleep . . .

my body, / like a spoon, here on this earth, sweetly scoops out / my brain.

right in the center, / sat the completely empty dharma throne, / richly decorated, the heart’s dream waiting / like a balloon floating through desire

I see your unfamiliar riverbank / and walk toward you.

I dare not use mortal eyes to contemplate you