Kathleen Graber: The Telephone
… once I fell in love with a beautiful voice passing through the wire. I remember the drop of it, a man talking about something he’d read, turning to a page with an audible rustle & breath, whispering, Listen. These are the lines that haunt. It’s not that the skin has no function, only...
Lidija Dimkovska: National Soul
And we look for the Macedonian soul among the number-plates on God’s East-West highway in cardboard boxes labeled ‘Do not open! Genes!’ loaded on the backs of the transparent dead. But one cannot rely on the dead. The dead are illegal immigrants, their swollen organs penetrating other peoples’ lands . . . Lidija Dimkovska’s collection...
More German Idioms
We Germans are selfish at times and always desire to have the last word. In fact, adding our mustard to everything—not only to a delicious pork chop—is a typical trait. This is a follow-up to our previous post on German idioms. everything is in butter Don’t think twice about your figure if asked by...
Jennifer Kronovet: I Talk to Another More Than Myself
“I wield a dull knife / to my way of seeing: / the cloud-thoughts, not muscles, / feel the threat.” Jennifer Kronovet’s poems from her prize-winning collection Awayward (Boa Editions, Ltd. 2009) are neatly carved sculptures, in which every single word exists for a reason—mainly to hone in on our somewhat strained relationship with language....
German Idioms
Be aware of the following idiom! If a German person ever calls you a bottle, don’t think you have a long neck or a nice figure. Being a bottle simply means that you’re a loser; perhaps we’re speaking of an empty bottle here. I recently moved to Austria to translate poetry on a Fulbright...
The Sorrow Gondola by Tomas Tranströmer
What Tranströmer expresses so eloquently in these lines is the idea that our lives are fleeting in relation to our history—the “cold sphinx, / empty arenas”—and even more so in relation to “Light and silent constellations. / The cold sea.” We are ultimately condemned to silence and have to make do with “the small script...
Olena Kalytiak Davis: An Imaginative Study in Degradation
“The rest of the day is a slanted floorboard. The rest of the day is the color of absinthe. Note the personal and detached attitude. Note the application of arbitrary color. The tilted perspective. This poem is all surface. You may stand where you choose. This poem has no vanishing point.” Olena Kalytiak Davis’ poem...
In a Beautiful Country by Kevin Prufer
The reader of these poems will sift through the radiant ashes of a country that has set itself on fire, as Prufer unburies the rotting bodies of a recent history. Kevin Prufer’s fifth collection of poetry, In a Beautiful Country, depicts a startling landscape that is eroded by war, violence, grief, and alienation....
Jeffrey McDaniel: The Forgiveness Parade
“There’s nothing like a full moon, reflected in the eyes of a blind man, using a telescope to stir a bowl of Russian alphabet soup for the cosmonauts . . .” Jeffrey McDaniel’s poem, “The Forgiveness Parade” (The Forgiveness Parade Manic D Press, 1998), is an excellent example of how poetry can serve as nourishment...
An Interview with Katie Farris
So much of the book is about being comfortable with paradox, especially the paradoxes that surround us every day but we prefer not to consider—for instance, what is the experience of a person who is both girl and boy? What is the experience of unexpectedly falling in love with someone of the same gender? ...
Paul Celan Revisited: Moving from Silence to Speech
In his famous “Meridian” speech Celan confessed that poetry is ultimately “an eternalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain.” The contradictions between silence and speech, between human consciousness and death are present in his poem “Chanson of a Lady in the Shade.” One of Celan’s earlier poems, “Chanson of a Lady in the...
Noose and Hook by Lynn Emanuel
Noose and Hook itself is a tearing and mending of identity and verse. Both are the noose and the hook, suffocating readers and at the same time grabbing and snagging their attention. Lynn Emanuel is a poet who challenges the lyrical “I” to a word match. Philosophical inquiries, particularly the poet’s struggle with language’s deficiencies,...