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THE WILD RIVER REVIEW PRESENTS:
Spotlight: Every Face Tells a Story: An Interview with World Voices Photographer, Beowulf Sheehan
by Kim Nagy
Photographer Beowulf Sheehan captures the creative spirit of the PEN World Voices Festival, as well as the stories behind photos of writers, dancers, models, and actors.
"I've been lucky to have photographed so many amazing literary faces with great mystery, beauty, and depth, both inside and out."
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What it Means to Yearn:
One Photograph by Seydou Keita
by Nancy Brokaw
From 1948 to the 1960s, Keita ran a portrait studio in the city of Bamako, a major port along the Niger River and the Capitol of what was then the French Sudan… The picture I gravitate to—the one I carry in my memory for months after the exhibition has closed—is the least characteristic of all the photographs hanging on the gallery wall...
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Full and Empty:
The Contradiction of Translation
by J.C. Todd
I don’t like to say that Ivón Gordon Vailakis and I met online. It seems banal, as if our bytes had bumped elbows on a wiki, but the electronic anonymity of our first exchanges, that faceless dialogue of email, created a safety zone. Through questions and responses we began to build a structure that connected us...
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NEW COLUMN:
The Mystic Pen: Sacred Spaces
by Katherine Schimmel-Baki
This concept of “the water of life” permeates, for instance, oriental poetry. We find that is true time and again in Arabic. But even more in Persian, Turkish, Urdu and its related poetry. It is always connected with a search for something that lies at the end of a very long and difficult road. Which brings us, as we shall see later on, to the concept of pilgrimage and search...
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Black Peruvians: A Vanishing Presence
by Constance Garcia-Barrio
This damning portrayal of a black woman brings to mind the Inquisition, imported from Spain, the mother country. Inquisition officials often punished and sometimes killed black and native peoples caught practicing their own faiths. Did la negrita germinate when black women performed rituals from their West African homeland? Centuries have hidden the answer, but Lima’s Museo de la Inquisicion displays some instruments of torture used in interrogations...
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The suitcase was stuffed
by Ivón Gordon Vailakis
translated by J.C. Todd
The suitcase was stuffed
with scorpions, with clay pots and dirt
roasted corn and fava beans, with pans of warm bronze
of dulce de leche and quince
canvas bulging from the lunges of poisonous snakes.
Our destiny was to be far from the aroma
of plantain and tree tomato
ripened on the lips of roofs.
Our destiny was like my father's -
a couple of schellings in the pocket pierced by a star
he said goodbye to his father with the idea of detaching himself
like a caracol rooted in chasms of tenderness
no time to take the black doll
whose arm was stitched so often the thread held time...
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