MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
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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
MARTIN HALL examines the way the Roman orator took on different schools of philosophy
ALEX HALL is amused at the way the UFOs appear exactly where commercial interests, conspiracies, militarism and right-wing media overlap
ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Eagles Of The Republic, The Balloonists, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK is intrigued by a the changing significance of its vast areas of forest to Russia’s history
“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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JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
HENRY BELL welcomes a fine demonstration of the need to love the words themselves in the communication of political messages
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
Heart Lamp by the Indian writer Banu Mushtaq and winner of the 2025 International Booker prize is a powerful collection of stories inspired by the real suffering of women, writes HELEN VASSALLO