Selected Contributors:

Ron De Maris is an Endowed Chair Emeritus from Miami-Dade College. He taught for 40 years. His poetry has appeared in the USA and Canada including in The Paris Review, Poetry, the Nation, The New Republic and many others.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat, a native of Cuba, is the author of several books of poetry in Spanish and English, among them Bilingual Blues and Scar Tissue. He teaches at Columbia University, where he is David Feinson Professor in the Humanities.

Keith Hutson has written for Coronation Street and comedians. His poetry has been published in several journals, including The Rialto, The North, The Interpreter's House and Butcher's Dog. Keith is a recent Yorkshire Prize (Poetry Business) winner, judged by Billy Collins.

Nichola Lezard is a long-standing critic for The Guardian and columnist for The New Statesman, and is returning to poetry after a long absence.

Owen Lowery is a former British Judo champion who suffered a spinal injury while competing and is now a tetraplegic. He is currently completing a PhD on the work of Keith Douglas. His poetry has appeared in Stand, PN Review, Jewis Quarterly, The Times, The Independent and The Guardian.Owen's two poetry collections, Otherwise Unchanged (2012), and Rego Retold (2015), were published by Carcanet.

Abby Rosenthal, a born New Yorker, lived in California, Oklahoma, Washington, DC, and Wyoming before settling in Tennessee. She is the author of Ardor's Hut, a book of poetry.

Roberta Swann was a programme director at Cooper Union's Great Hall in NYC and co-founder of the American Jazz Orchestra. Her poetry and fiction have appeared widely. She has taught at Indiana University and the Bennington Writing Workshop.

Takamura Kôtarô (1883-1956) was a crucial innovator of modern Japanese poetry and was perhaps the first to master modern Japanese poetic form. His 1914 book, Dôtei (Journey), from which the poems in this issue are translated, has been immensely influential on the writers who followed him. John G. Peters is a distinuished research professor at the University of North Texas. He has translated Kôtarô's The Chicko Poems (Green Integer).