Brilliant ObjectsManhattan, 2083. Sixteen year old Hannah knows that this is the real world. There is no doubt about that. But in this world, the world has taken to the skies. And, out of oil, the climate destroyed, famine, poverty and disease are widespread. History is erased, hierarchies and barriers are broken down and souls cross ages like clouds cross the sky; if something can be imagined, it is possible. But challenges swiftly mount. When Hannah saves a child

they live out their entangled existences

Jack Mapanje and Femi Oyebode

a boy who can bring dead spiders back to life

the ‘late work’ of Heiner Müller

His Selected Poems/ Rogha Dánta appeared in 2005 and the bilingual volume Bliain an Bhandé/ Year of the Goddess came out in 2007 (Dedalus)

war and loss

wool threads many of the poems together

The issue opens with Kuwaiti poet Saadiah Mufarreh

An elderly piano student is forced to flee her home village when word gets out that she’s had sex with her thirty-something teacher

Fiction writer and essayist Sergio Chejfec offers a series of numbered notes as an outline of Samich’s thinking-in-process

• The Jewish American Princess

He is the author of Workout: The Music of Hank Mobley (Northway Publications) and a book about the music of John Coltrane (forthcoming)