I could not be more grateful for an excuse to escape into rereading If I Should Say I Have Hope. Situated in another of time, I might write praising the wondrous lyricality in Melnick’s poems, how lush her language, how slick her line breaks are, how skillfully strange and disorienting her images can be.
Shira Dentz is the author of three books, black seeds on a white dish, door of thin skins, and how do i net thee (forthcoming), and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather and FLOUNDERS, newly available from Essay Press. Dentz is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize.
I conducted short interviews with a group of hotshot poets, scholars, and critics to help out. I invited them to nominate an American poem they think is underrated—a poem they wish more people loved and taught, a poem that might be for many an unknown unknown.
In a blog series for Ploughshares, I interview a poet and a non-poet. This time, digital media artist Liz Mputu and poet Justin Phillip Reed. I want to talk about how to manage the expression of violence, feeling of violence, portrayal of violence and also, anger as a thing that you work with.
Margaret Rhee’s poems use the what-if of machines falling in love as a springboard to launch us into a strange, beautiful, unforgettable new world that is all her own. Earlier this year, we had the chance to talk about poems, robotic realities, and whether someday machines might really fall in—and out—of love.
A central theme of the novel Laurus is that time is a spiral. Events and themes recur throughout history, but each time with a slight variation. The structure of the work, by Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin, mirrors that premise. Scenes and pages reference and reshape each other constantly. Though the book follows an ascetic holy healer in the Middle Ages, the events echo back to Biblical times and forward to present-day, literally.
Ciaran Carson’s poems explore the risky territory between the personal and the political. They are grounded in the local, yet outward and upward tending—toward the larger truths he inspects with a sharp mind and a wary eye.
Over the past four decades, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross has become a Canadian institution. The co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Fair and the Meet the Presses collective, he sold some seven thousand of his self-published chapbooks on the streets of Toronto during the 1980s.
For that reason, the translator has to hold back his or her poetic tendencies, which can be difficult in the horrific passages toward the end. Harder than that, though, is making sure that the plainness of the voice doesn’t turn into blandness.
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