‘If I am washing dishes, everything must be fine. If I am scrubbing scrambled egg from a pot, everything must be fine. … If I stay home and hang the clothes on the line, that means everything is normal, doesn’t it?’

In the spring issue of the Dublin Review, Doireann Ní Ghríofa writes about the vague conception of karma that underpinned her decision to become a breastmilk donor for sick newborns – and about the terrifying turn of events that left her and her family in the situation she most feared. ‘Milk’ is a precise, moving and gripping account of these experiences and the mental states they brought about.

Also in the spring Dublin Review, Kevin Power anatomizes the call centre where, out of economic necessity, he worked for eighteen months, and relates the psychological toll of a job that entailed a sickly cocktail of pressure, boredom and cognitive dissonance. Karen O’Reilly writes about an Iraqi refugee she encountered in Jordan – and about her own recent experience of becoming a citizen of the United States shortly after it froze its refugee-resettlement programmes. Ian Sansom’s 2017 diary recounts a year full of unpleasant surprises. Ian Maleney explores the deep past and ambiguous present of a bog near his family home in the midlands. Plus, fiction by Anna Metcalfe, Martina Ryan and Sally Westrick.