First, the “luminous” poetry of Circe Maia takes center stage in the Saturday Interview. Chip Livingston talks to writer and teacher Jesse Lee Kercheval about her ongoing work translating Uruguayan poetry, much of which is written and performed in Montevideo, where “everyone is connected in one way or another.”

Meanwhile, Brandon Hicks pokes fun at didactic barflies in “The Bar Monologues.”

Lastly, in the Sunday Essay, Lea Page delves into fraught family dynamics surrounding her mother, her sister, Toni, and her nephew, after Toni’s husband suffers brain damage in a car accident. When her mother calls her for advice, Page admits:

I had majored in English. What did I know? Stories, that’s all. Not how to save a family. It didn’t occur to me, then, that stories—the right stories—might be the only way to save a family. I didn’t know, either, that the wrong story could destroy a family.