This issue celebrates the forty-fifth anniversary of The Louisville Review! For this special anniversary issue #90, our cover features new work by painter Corie Neumayer, Sunday Morning. With colors evoking sunlight filtered through a geometry of clean lines, Sunday Morning suggests a bright, distinctly urban landscape; in an essay accompanying her painting, Neumayer describes how the ongoing pandemic has, for her, called for new ways of seeing that led to embracing new aesthetic approaches.

We open this issue with a suite of poems spanning multiple nations and times by Regina Derieva (1949-2013), both in the original Russian text and in English translation by Frederick Smock. These poems appear from Images in Black, Continuous, Smock’s recent collection of Derieva’s poems in translation from M-Graphics Publishing. In Nadeem Zaman’s “The Holy Visit,” an immigrant family from Pakistan living in Chicago wrestles with the loss of a son in their adopted home in the U.S.—while still haunted by family deaths in Pakistan’s war of liberation in 1971.

The theme of looking at the world differently—or looking at a different world—due to constraints of the pandemic emerges also in Kelly Craig ’s short story “We Cook a Family Meal” and in poems by Olga Marie Cruise, inspired by her quarantine use of Window-Swap, a website where visitors can experience the views of strangers through webcams that look out of windows across the globe.

Sarah Gorham’s essay “Benedictus,” Requiem, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” meditates on sensual and intellectual joys of music and narrates Gorham’s experience of attending a rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem performed by the Louisville Orchestra, led by conductor Teddy Abrams. This issue also features “I Couldn’t Say No,” an excerpt from poet Johnathan Weinert’s recently completed memoir, Five Minutes in Heaven.

Editor: Sena Jeter Naslund
Associate Editor: Flora K. Schildknecht
Managing Editor: Amy Foos Kapoor
Guest Poetry Editor: Frederick Smock
Guest Fiction Editor Nathan Gower
Guest Cornerstone Editors: Amy Foos Kapoor, Flora K. Schildknecht

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