ALT Amsterdam Review Fall 2026 Mircea Cartarescu, Katrina Naomi, Marion Rost, M. Anne Avera, Alina Stefanescu, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, Daniel Carden Nemo, Gabriela Denise Frank, and many more...

ALT Red Bead: Interiors Don’t make me name the film. All I’ll say: interiors this red can’t exist in the world. It rains so much & the number of alcoves for sheltering in exists in direct proportion to the number of secrets & volume of rain. In the final scene, the man speaks the unsayable into a vacancy in a temple wall. A vacancy? Fuck it; a hole, & how desperately the man traces a single finger on its edge before he can even begin to speak. Of the wall, the hole, the hand, the mouth, the clean, sharp part of the man’s hair, the shadow, the orange light, the dust, the infinite & tender quiet— it is the secret itself that most asserts its thingness.

ALT Two ​by James Norcliffe Bach on the beach: Ruby Bay ​Of course there is firewalking: rockets above, cinders below. The Dionysian winemaker shakes his wild white locks and rakes coals over the sand, coals glowing like knowledge in the darkness. Lord, have mercy on our souls, the loudspeakers implore, and choruses crash as the surf smashes with rushing phosphorescence

ALT Funeral Rites An essay by Raúl Zurita translated from Spanish and with a foreword by Karen Elizabeth Bishop amstedamreview.substack.com

ALT british english ​by Harriet Bradley i’m not being funny but did you ever stumble half pissed into an east london morning when you’re sour like cranberry, hang off the phone in a box on high holborn begging your sister to let you in cos you lost your keys at the jazz cafe in camden town and stupid cow she screams but you’ll cop to it, catch the 23 with the loose change in your pocket and stand outside in the sunday market waiting for the keys to land violent at your feet, scoop them up fuck’s sake this lock is complicated

ALT Selected Poems ​by Ben Jorisch Beneath the Bridge ​I sit in my apartment dreaming of the women I’ve been with whose names I never knew, their memories completely undisturbed by their absence. And the heroin in Washington Heights is like a fine wine. The television glows beneath the window, with the George Washington Bridge lit up like a crucified thief.

ALT Island: some definitions ​by Katrina Naomi Not sea Only a fraction of the land mass is visible see iceberg Doesn’t necessarily have palm trees Often has a feeling of inferiority but very good at hiding this see above

ALT I didn’t want to be myself for a while, or by myself—being me was lonely even when I pretended to be someone else. To lose myself I went for a walk through the snow. My fear of the future followed. Of late it felt close at hand, ready to stalk up behind me

ALT The Möbius Strip of Reality and Dream Amsterdam Review in conversation with Mircea Cartarescu "If the words don't shine with all their power, if you don't send 'most of your stars out,' as Salinger wrote, everything is in vain, because for a real writer literature is more than a profession and even more than an art: it is a religion."

ALT What Music Is Have you ever seen a Pomeranian goose? One comes to visit me every morning at the end of third shift. It's domesticated & the people next door to our medical facility let it wander. It waddles up to the walk as I leave work: honk honk do you have bread sir? Perhaps a fish or two? It's brown & white & big & a bit pushy. Pretty bird I tell it & it preens like an addled swan. I always wonder what the birds are saying. How do starlings sway in their murmuration across the sky? After do they tell each other,

ALT LATE QUARTETS The canyon walls’ striations Wrought by water, by wind, Reveal deviations In the parallel of lines. : : How to integrate the minutiae— The febrile marks, a torn web, A ragged rope bridge— when Each act of ritual distances?

ALT alight ​​​ i thought we were trees, shrieking, dense, millenial. but no, we were hands, we were ocean hands, blind, fleeing, ignorant. unknowing we swept seawater into speech, cleaving, the fugitive madness settles, grief a feathered mouth, a mother that stays, when we face pain she says, alight, child, alight, we are torn, born wanting. hollow as moon & sometimes the fragment is a continent that floats

ALT Scenes from the Lives of a Girl i The dead leaves clung to the young girl. They leapt from the earth to clothe her. The linden and the oak, elm and sycamore. Every time she arrived home she was met by her exasperated mother moaning about the leaves’ flaky deposits in her hallway, the baby slugs, the not completely dead aphids. “Why don’t you brush them off before you come home?” Her mother presumed electricity in some static form had a hand. She never witnessed the looks of astonishment that greeted her daughter all along the road as leaves swept themselves up to envelop her, astonishment too deep to rally an insult or catcall. Astonishment of a kind no emoji exists for.

ALT Market Forces When there was less, it was easier to tell a story about why there wasn’t enough. Inside the lion’s emptiness, the zebra’s; inside the zebra’s, the field’s; inside that, the sky’s. In the age of sieges, you could draw a circle around a city and, just like that, boost the cost of flour. And doors’ futures. In the age of abstractions, a market force can not be demoed in dominoes. Instead the tongues of our sneakers tell tales. In all of them, the capital of capital is a city impossible to besiege. It moves, after all, all the barons and pirates setting up shop over and over, halfway between a zeitgeist and the latest fad.

ALT Hemlock, 1956 ​A wooden door in front of everything. A door on my country. A door on the lake. My poems prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a door on my heart in the poem, then there is. Now I can open this door. The door is a short door though. I must kneel down to crawl in, drag my body through with my wooden elbows. I bump into my wooden mother who is also crawling in my heart. She smiles so large at me that her suffering lights up the tunnel. I can now see my