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Over the past decade or so, Erín Moure has become just as well-known for her translation work as for her own writing. She has published sixteen books of poetry, a book of essays, and has translated fifteen volumes of poetry from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese.
My introduction to Gary McDowell’s writing came through his poems, so it’s no surprise his essays feel so poetic—in the best sense of that word. We caught up via email to talk about what’s different (and what’s not) between writing poems and writing essays.
If Marcel Marceau as a performer and a French man was cheeky, brilliant, and impossible, it seems no accident the title of Wen’s book-length essay is what it is.
How can one adequately capture experiences that very often undo language itself, that are often so profoundly isolating precisely because they defy our common speech, our tested vocabularies and definitions of human experience? How do we find the right words to map that place?
One of the many things I have found so moving and gripping about classical Japanese literature is how concrete the worldview is. Here is a sensibility that is deeply enmeshed in the world and looks for beauty in the imperfections of nature, in the corrosive effects of time.
Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest begins, marvelously, with one of the best depictions of adolescent malaise I’ve ever read: the fifteen-year-old title character languishing on her porch in silent, miserable judgment (in “spasms of resentment”) while her mother knits, and gossips vacuously with a neighbor.
Birds are not alone in singing or in originating metaphors. There are other winged creatures that croon and hum and carry. We are among multitudes that raise a chorus to the elements, especially in August. Cicadas, yes, but also crickets, katydids, and grasshoppers.
In Book of Mutter, Zambreno writes, “It is something ineffable about my mother that I search for.” This search, conducted over the thirteen years since Zambreno’s mother’s death, manifests in a fusion of memoir, essay, and meditation, and suggests how writing might embody the lifelong process of mourning a parent.
Danez Smith’s second book of poems, Don’t Call Us Dead, takes up the project of rehumanizing black lives, reshaping lament into forward-looking prophecy. The collection’s opening epic poem, “summer, somewhere,” acts as a book of re-creation, turning premature mortality into a revived, embodied love drawn from the earth itself.
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