“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...
“The Center aims to promote a truly global community, creating a world where writers and readers can cross both boundaries of borders and of language.” The San Francisco-based Center for the Art of Translation (catranslation.org) is a rich resource to visit online and in person. Since 1994 the Center has published Yoko Tawada is intriguing—she...
What echoes throughout Gailey’s work is the understanding and the desire to create alternate worlds when reality is chaotic. Jeannine Hall Gailey’s second book, She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books 2011), is a collection that is inspired by and recreates Japanese folk-tales, anime, and Shinto spirits. One of the themes of Gailey’s...
Sometimes poetry happens organically in the real world, far from the desks of poets, as in this menu from the Adams Avenue Grill in San Diego: Reading the first line, the reader begins to drool over the prospect of a savage, carnivorous meal—only to have expectations swiftly reversed in the next line. The...
As we pointed out in our review of Anne Carson’s Nox, the backbone of the book is a translation of an elegy written by Roman poet Catullus in the first century BC. Over at Harvard Review Online we found
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....
“…what looked like / part of the performance / was often just a lightning bug, or a planet / a chip of mica in the road. We clapped anyway.” Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (Boa Editions, Ltd. 2011), a tremendous collection of collaborative poetry by Buy Waldrep and Gallaher at Boa Editions
From my father I learned to believe in doubt, and from communism I learned to doubt in believing. Recently, we interviewed Nikola Madzirov about his latest collection of poems translated from Macedonian into English, Remnants of Another Age. Read the interview here. We also had the chance to hear Madzirov read from Remnants. Click on...
Addressing an epidemic that is still out of control and claiming lives worldwide, Pleasure represents Teare’s attempt to create a language for the politics of loss. Much like his second collection of poems, Sight Map, Brian Teare’s third collection of poetry, Pleasure, is an exploration of landscapes. Rather than a pastoral inquiry into the...
Recently I interviewed translator Piotr Florczyk on his latest translation of Anna Swir’s poems, many of which come from her book, Building the Barricade, where with her spare and direct language she documents the Warsaw Uprising in Poland in 1944. The photographs of the Warsaw Uprising featured in this post were published in an edition...
Read more of Lucille Clifton’s poetry at Poets.org Find quotes by Lucille Clifton at goodreads
“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...
