Witness Magazine

Yanara Friedland

Yanara Friedland
Yanara Friedland is a German-American writer, translator, and teacher. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Denver and took a long walk along multiple border regions in Europe. Her novel Uncountry: A Mythology is the 2015 winner of the Noemi Fiction Prize. A digital chapbook, Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak, is forthcoming from Essay Press. Some of her other writing can be found in Tupelo Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Quarterly West, within the wells of Lourdes, by the invisible trench lines of Berlin’s former East-West division, and buried deep within the soil of the German Harz forest. She lives in Tucson.

Lourdes

By
Poetry•Vol. XXVIII No. 3 (Winter 2015)

We take the road until we reach Lourdes. A day after I depart Spain, a train derails in Santiago. 80 or so people die. At the train station in Pau small pocket thieves make conversation. In Laruns the cash register in the supermarket breaks down. A stampede follows. Underneath the concrete and underneath the towns… [Read More]

Languedoc

By
Poetry•Vol. XXVIII No. 3 (Winter 2015)

The ancient Languedoc region once unified France, Spain, Italy. They called them the Sylvaticae (People of the Forest). The wagons traveled through Byzantium and Greece, through the Ukraine and Spain from Persia and Transylvania. We move from coast to coast. Seagrass licking the edges of narrow capes. Out of the water a woman ascends as… [Read More]