ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Letters from Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Argentinean Natalia Casali, poetry by Salvadoran-American Janel Pineda and Colombian Maria Paz Guerrero and an essay by Puerto Rican Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
“THE WAR never happened but somehow you and I/still exist. Like obsidian,/we know only the memory of lava/and not the explosion that created/us.”
In these opening verses of Lineage of Rain (Haymarket Books, £7.99), Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda begins her mesmerising story, one of Salvadoran migration, diaspora and the US-sponsored civil war that fuses the personal with the communal and the political with everyday life.
Each poem in this powerful pamphlet sings its own beautiful tune, taking the reader on a journey of discoveries and redemption, from El Salvador to Los Angeles and back. There are moving family narratives where women take centre stage, as in Rain, where the grandmother Tana passes down stories and memories to her granddaughter.
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