Poetry by Tadeusz Dąbrowski and Kirmen Uribe, fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, and nonfiction by Meghan Daum and Caroline Knapp

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It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found

in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence

in a language you don't know.

—From "Sentence," a poem by Tadeusz Dąbrowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The New Yorker (July 22, 2019), p. 60. 

Our grandmother worked at the cannery.

And our mother and aunts.

They were workers, not housewives.

Or were that, too.

—From "Back from the Cannery," a poem by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, The New Yorker (November 23, 2020), p. 60-61. 

The same thing for lunch every day. Every day he ate the same thing, the Set A menu from the cafeteria in the School of Liberal Arts. And the Set A menu was always the same. It included rice, soup, kimchi and three side dishes. The three side dishes did consist of of something different each day, but the overall menu was so similar from one day to the next that by the time he was on his way home, he could barely remember what side dishes he'd eaten.  
—From Evening Proposal, a collection of short stories by Pyun Hye Young (whose name is now usually listed in English as Hye-Young Pyun), translated from the Korean by Youngsuk Park and Gloria Cosgrove Smith (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016). Originally published in Korean by Moonji Publishing Company, 2011. This particular segment is from "Monotonous Lunch" (pp. 49-61).

People who weren't there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue.  

—From The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, a collection of essays by Meghan Daum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).  This section is from the first essay, "Matricide."

When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws. Around that same time, in my thirties, I started to notice that tiny blood vessels had burst all along my nose and cheeks. I started to dry-heave in the mornings, driving to work in my car. A tremor in my hands developed, then grew worse, then persisted for longer periods, all day sometimes.  

        I did my best to ignore all this. I struggled to ignore it, the way a woman hears a coldness in a lover's voice and struggles, mightily and knowingly, to misread it.  

—From Drinking: A Love Story, a memoir by Caroline Knapp (Dial Press/Bantam Dell/Random House, 1996).