This Peculiar Radiant Landscape: The Climate Issue from the Bare Life Review: A Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Literature

From The Bare Life Review–the only publication whose sole mission is to publish the work of immigrant and refugee writers–comes this special climate-themed volume, featuring fourteen original works of poetry and prose by writers from more than ten distinct nations. Punctuated by a series of photographs from Shaktoolik, Alaska, an Inupiaq village whose largely Indigenous population ranks as one of the world’s most imperiled by climate change, This Peculiar Radiant Landscape considers the crisis’s impact on human migration–not only in the so-called developing world, but in regions where an illusion of stability has long presided–charting both the vast extent of its reach and its troubled intersection with the legacy of colonialism.

In this volume: Joan Naviyuk Kane pays homage to Shaktoolik with a poem equal parts elegy and ode; Omar El Akkad maps the disturbing ethics and complex economy obscured, in a cold future, by the warmth of a blanket; Heidi Kaloustian draws upon history, art, and our present crises to paint a vivid, Borgesian nightmare; and Olga Zilberbourg channels a single mother who, nursing new life, cannot escape an old sense that the planet… must be as tired of humans as we are of ourselves.

Taken together, these fourteen pieces constitute an impassioned missive to a damaged world–to this peculiar, radiant landscape–and further illustrate the vitality of world literature in grappling with the urgent problems of our time.

Prose by:

Keyan Bowes

Omar El Akkad

Amanda Kallis

Heidi Kaloustian

Caroline Kim

Melissa Mogollon

Abbigail N. Rosewood

Casey A. Williams

Olga Zilberbourg

Poetry by:

Elinam Agbo

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto

Joan Naviyuk Kane

Liu Daohang

Francis Santana