In Mexico, poets, journalists, artists, bloggers and students lead the fight for civil society and conscience now being called “The Mexican Spring.” A fight against violence and corruption, but also against the lies and submission propagated by Mexico’s all powerful media monopolies. ZZZYVA’s [Spring] issue on the Mexican drug war takes you to the front lines with pieces by Mexico’s bravest and most talented independent journalists. Anyone who reads it will get a strong dose of Mexico’s darkness, but also of the exhilarating new winds gathering force every day.—Francisco Goldman

Essential pieces of recent journalism from Mexico in translation for English-language readers, from the front-lines of the drug war in Mexico.—Daniel Hernandez, author of “Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century”

The newest issue of ZYZZYVA is our biggest—and most praised—yet. It comes in at 256 pages, including 16 pages of color art, and features a special section on writing from Mexican journalists and novelists on the drug war there—compelling work appearing for the first time in English.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Fiction from Peter Orner (on the peculiar play between two young brothers in 1970s Chicago), Wanda Coleman (on the sole white man living in a neighborhood in Watts just after the ’65 riots), and Daniel Sada (on three heads discovered in an ice chest during a drug cartel’s party).

• Verse from Philip Aijian, Kathleen Boyle, W.S. Di Piero, David Hernandez, Jonathon Keats, Ada Limon, D.A. Powell, Corey Van Landingham, Renee K. Nelson, and Henry W. Leung.

• Elena Mauli Shapiro’s melancholy story about a crumbling office romance, Lindsey Thordarson’s historical fiction of a teen girl making a life alone in the woods, and Don Waters’s riveting, disturbing tale of a woman who rescues animals and her excruciating visits to a cougar at a zoo.

• Reportage from Diego Enrique Osorno, who tries to puzzle together what exactly happened when the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel clashed in the border town of Ciudad Mier, and Marcela Turati, who visits a morgue in a northern Mexico and talks to the desperate people who have long been searching for their missing loved ones. And an essay from Cristina Rivera Garza on finding reasons to write amid the mayhem.

• And introducing Patrick Coleman and Benjamin T. Miller (and his story of the all-too-delicate relationship between an L.A. construction worker and his offbeat girlfriend).

• The Spring issue also commemorates the 20^th anniversary of the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco by featuring work exclusively from its West Coast artists: Sandow Birk, Timothy Cummings, Stephanie Syjuco, Travis Somerville, Anthony Discenza, Chester Arnold, Packard Jennings, Andy Diaz Hope, and Walter Robinson.

Get your four-issue subscription to ZYZZYVA now and start with the Spring issue. (Copies are limited.)