To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Letters From Latin America
Reviews of poetry collections by Maia Elsner and Andres N Ordorica
A 1910 postcard of the New Synagogue in Cestochowa blown up by the Nazis on December 25 1939
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If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
OVERRUN BY WILD BOARS (Flipped Eye, £6,95) is British Latinx author Maia Elsner’s debut poetry collection. Multilayered and ambitious, it explores the nuances of family histories, migration, belonging, genocide and love.
The poet, who was born in London to Mexican and Polish Jewish parents, manages to create a work that is as lyrically beautiful as it is formally exciting — it encompasses elegies and ghazals to sestinas, sonnets and poems inspired by art and architecture.
The book is filled with vibrant coloured birds, with Polish and Mexican stories of loss, strength and redemption, as well as explorations of what it means to live between cultures and languages.
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ROGER McKENZIE draws attention to the much-neglected oral traditions of the global South that define the identity – and therefore the liberation – of its custodians
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin