MPT’s summer issue ‘A Blossom Shroud’ focuses on poets and translators associated with this year’s Shubbak festival of Arab Culture in London and it publishes a selection of new translations of poets appearing at the festival: Mona Kareem, Dunya Mikhail, and a new long sequence of poems by Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts. The focus also includes a conversation between Alice Guthrie, Shubbak’s literary producer, and poet, translator and activist Mona Kareem, who has led the campaign to get Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh freed from a charge of apostasy in Saudi Arabia. Also featured are new translations of Hisham Bustani, Najwan Darwish and Syrian actor and activist Fadwa Souleiman. This stunning work from the Arab world appears alongside documentary poems by Chinese poet Shen Haobo on the AIDS villages of China, new translations of Rilke’s French poetry by Paul Batchelor, poet Katrina Naomi’s translations of Mexican poet Yohanna Jaramillo and Golan Haji’s selection of the Kurdis