Rain: Spring 2023

RAIN IS a blessing and a curse, a source of sustenance and danger, beauty and annoyance. In this issue we honor the many faces of the rain -- and of its attraction and repulsion of its rhythms and power for poets, short-story writers, and anonymous supplicators.

Salma Harland illustrates its importance for the latter in “Making It Rain: Rain Deities in Pre-Islamic Arabia," while a wide range of poets address the driving power of the rain: Moroccan-Dutch poet Nisrine Mbarki, Palestinian-French poet Olivia Elias, Saudi poets Ashjan Hendi and Muhammad Al-Turki, and Bahraini poet Wael Almahdi, who writes back to one of the most well-known poems about the rain, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's unforgettable "Rain Song." They are translated by Michele...