Danyal Hassan presents four poems that—in trying to make sense of the word ‘Kashmir’—develop a manifesto-in-verse against the nauseating exotica and orientalist framing that Kashmir is subjected to while a history of war, subjugation, and dispossession remains conveniently ignored—and at the expense of such exoticization and orientalization.

Olayioye Paul Bamidele presents a poem “about the need for black people to unite irrespective of tribe, culture or tradition.” According to its poet, the poem’s inspiration comes from “the story of slaves being mistreated by their traders, as narrated to me by my father.” The young writer and Mass Communications student adds, “These slaves were mistreated at home and betrayed abroad. Later these people became the freedom fighters of Africa and the founders of the Négritude movements across the globe.”

Dustin Pickering presents a short poem whose “general spirit”—as the poet suggests—”can resonate across different subjects.” One of these, in the least, is the irremediable misery of those who do wrong to others.

All the way from Italy, Martin Pedersen presents four poems that explore memory and experience in four unique ways. From memories of a mother and a grandmother to the experience of thirst and the experience of solitude, Pedersen’s verses are characterized by a purity that arrives with age and silence.

In Mashood Rather’s poem, a mother seeks her son and a son seeks his mother, with the two kept from each other by a spectral curtain that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. The engraver tasked with pronouncing “death with each chisel mark” is their intermediary in these haunting verses where life and death converge as they do tragically upon a valley.