Current Issue: September - October 2026
PN Review 291

In this issue:

Pushkin House - in conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky
on Alphabet Soup
Jane Yeh - Four Poems
Erin Conway-Smith - ‘The Snake’ and Other Poems
Sasha Dugdale - in conversation with Dan Burt
Rod Mengham - Wrocław and the Coils of Art
Richard Price - Listening Door: Tibullus Retold

Current Issue: September - October 2026
PN Review 291

in conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky
on Alphabet Soup Pushkin House Eugene Ostashevsky is a writer, poet and translator known for the ingenious play with language in his translingual writing. His latest book is Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father (Tamizdat Project & Rab-Rab Press, 2026). Alphabet Soup collects the sayings of his daughters from toddlers to teenagers, as their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin. The girls communicate in a witty and colourful language of their own, effortlessly mixing words of different origins. Eugene shared with us some fascinating insights into the book and his wider work: about the benefits and challenges of a life across languages, and the evolution of translingualism across the generations of his family; the relationship between our identity and the way we speak; children’s inspiring linguistic playfulness and much more.......
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Current Issue: September - October 2026
PN Review 291

Four Poems Jane Yeh Self-Portrait as Autopsy

          after a painting by Soheila Sokhanvari

The pockets of your dress don’t contain anything of value.
There’s a peach tree growing dementedly from your head,

Branching off in two directions. One way the leaves
Are like kindly ruffles, the other way is bare. When you ask
......
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Current Issue: September - October 2026
PN Review 291

‘The Snake’ and Other Poems Erin Conway-Smith
The Snake

I’ve been resisting narrative for years when I finally give in. It feels cold this morning. The heat wave is over. Bee-eaters circle beneath the clouds.

Yesterday a friend and I drove through the same storm in Limpopo, travelling from opposite directions. We didn’t meet but must have passed near Haenertsburg. Later it grew hot again. The clouds burned off. I drew even with the time.

*


I never believed it: this happened, I feel that way, maybe you’ll feel it too. Giraffes on the horizon, retreating into the valley from the midday sun. A Mozambique spitting cobra that doesn’t but could have. I’m too close. I’m too close without knowing it.

In the afternoon an elephant forces me to reverse over a river along a narrow causeway and keeps coming, I put a wheel off the edge into the muck and it keeps coming, I reverse up a narrow road cut through the embankment, it keeps coming, I am not good at backing up.
......
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Cover of Issue 291 of PNR
A book can absorb a reader into a world of its own as if it were the one and only. A magazine like PN Review, on the other hand, refracts many aspects of our manifold being in a shared world. I love seeing difference, even creative disagreement, between one set of covers.
Anthony Vahni Capildeo
 
Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. In 2023 PN Review celebrated its jubilee.

Our vast archive now includes over 280 issues, with contributions from some of the most exciting and radical writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, Christopher Middleton, John Ashbery, Les Murray, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.
Cover of PNR 10 1979
Cover of PNR 36 1984
Cover of PNR 57 1987
Cover of PNR 100 1994
Cover of PNR 134 2000
Cover of PNR 226 2015
Cover of PNR 243 2018
Cover of PNR 264 2022

From the Archive

Ponies Bill Manhire  
It was just after the assassination of Indira Gandhi that I came into the employ of Jason Michael Stretch. Wellington is a city of hidden steps and narrow passages, dark tributary corridors which are rapidly being translated, courtesy of the new earthquake codings, into glittering malls and arcades, whole worlds of space-age glass and silver. Inside these places, on their several levels, there is a curious calm, which is now beginning to extend out on to the footpaths. No one points excitedly; people drift along, pale, ice-cold, gazing into windows in a way which is almost tranquil, or ride escalators which take them up and down but not quite anywhere. A few years ago - as, say, a first-year student - I think I might well have scorned these aimless citizens, or felt sorry for them: a bit superior, ... READ MORE

Readers' Choices

Rebecca Watts

The Cult of the Noble Amateur

(PN Review 239)

Stav Poleg

The Banquet

(PN Review 279)

Stav Poleg

The Citadel of the Mind

(PN Review 276)

Rory Waterman

Remarkable Coincidences

(PN Review 286)

Stanley Moss

In conversation with Neilson MacKay

(PN Review 279)

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