Illuminations first appeared in Columbia, SC in 1982 committed to publishing new and up-and-coming writers alongside already established ones. The current issue of Illuminations boasts the usual eclectic range of content, form, and style with poetry and photography from around the globe. In particular, this issue picks up where earlier issues have left off.

Brenda Marie Osbey, poet laureate of Louisiana, broadens the focus of last year's Haitian feature by giving us a scorching critique of the legacy of French colonial history; together with Osbey's "DOM-TOM Primer," Harold Baquet's dignified portraits of New Orleanians (taken before Hurricane Katrina's devastating assault) connect European colonial control with American history and its racial legacy. Also alluding to that legacy -- and appropriately so in this bicentenary year of the banning of the international slave trade, Neil Curry's "Monticello" comments on Thomas Jefferson's ability to "keep a secret, even from himself." If Katrina brought the secret of the contemporary economy of race out into the open here in Jefferson's United States, Allan Kolski Horwitz and Damian Garside's poems similarly draw attention to the ambiguities of freedom in New South Africa. Horwitz and Garside exemplify Kelwyn Sole's claim that poetry in South Africa "perhaps more than any other genre, has teased out deeply ambivalent emotions: the simultaneous feelings of hope for a new order and of fear at a possible social chaos at the onset of a new and uncertain era, in a country that is still, both racially and ideologically, deeply divided" (New Formations 45:25). As Sole argues, these poems still fulfill their function of bearing witness to the confluence of social crises, violence, and "the domination of materialism."

In its attention to beauty -- those moments of peace, of caught breath, of "joy in the rain," poetry may offer us some hopeful balm, but reading these poems together also bears witness to the truly global nature of contemporary anxiety: it is an anxiety that affects us all, whether in airports in Miami, or apartments in Manhattan; it may rear its aggressive head in suburban bookstores and it can make of Beaumont, Texas a suburb of Baghdad.