Many of us can visualize a tsunami-ravaged village, or how emaciated Zahara Jolie-Pitt was before her adoption from an Ethiopian orphanage, thanks to the Internet and around-the-clock news coverage. But how much do we really know about how people beyond US borders live? Apparently, not as much as we thought, according to Words Without Borders, an advocacy group for literature in translation, which reports that “50 percent of all the books in translation…published worldwide are translated from English [while] only 6 percent are translated into English.” Now that the organization has published 28 poems and pieces of fiction by writers from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia in its anthology, Words Without Borders, we need not remain oblivious.

Who is Ethan Paquin? If we are to believe Part VIII of the title poem of his new collection, My Thieves, then, “Ethan Paquin is an aggregate/of sinew and worn things/that wrinkle easily.” This strikes me as true. Throughout the collection, Paquin adds surprising postmodern wrinkles to worn things, including a healthy serving of archaic language. When is the last time you saw the words “sleepe,” “addresseth,” “poesie” and “borne” in a poetry collection published in this centure (I mean, century)?