This book of photos, poems, and essays chronicles like never before the inner world of GoGo, Washington D.C.'s official music. Thomas Sayers Ellis masterfully captures the rhythms, beats, and souls of a culture which is ever expanding beyond the beltway of our nation's capital. Crank Shaped Notes is a must-have volume.
Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. "This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday," writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem's speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a "democratic-minded" Westerner "determined to develop/ Civil societies around the world." Not since Byron's Mazeppa has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray's masterly translation into Ukrainian.
Kythe Heller's Firebird sequence probes the capacity of the human spirit to endure under extreme conditions. Here, fire is both a destructive and a unifying force, altering people and landscapes. Runaways, the sick and the poor, a forest and a smoldering mattress - these stunning images burn themselves into the reader's imagination. The female body becomes the site of trauma and myth, a place where "everything is burning, has been and is always burning." Fiercely intelligent and relentlessly visceral, Firebird renders the world with singular clarity: "there were so many things that would look-nice-if they were seen through flames."
Steven Cramer's newest book of poems, Departures from Rilke, derives from his favorites among Rainer Maria Rilke's two volumes of New Poems (1907/08). Cramer repurposes, updates, and sometimes upends the subject matter and style of the originals, often leaving Rilke's premises almost altogether. A practice dating back to Thomas Wyatt's imports of Petrarch and including Robert Lowell's Imitations (1961), Cramer's approach makes for an original poetry of personal and contemporary resonance, while remaining alert to Rilke's chastening presence.¿
Tiny Extravaganzas, Diane Mehta's fiercely lyrical new collection, works the American sentence to its limits. Mehta's poems are miniaturist examinations of art, aging, literature, grief, parenting, the sublime, labor, and faith. She chases rhythm, rhymes with wit, and upends formal verse with phrasing that moves like jazz against and within tradition. Art is both anchor and a framework for understanding the world, and each poem is an opportunity to have a conversation with the reader and with art and other artists. Her poems vary from small, contemplative musical interludes to epic poems about collective suffering. Mehta's refined and propulsive poems come with an emotional bang that quietly breaks your heart.
"We act like children with our dead," Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: "confused,/ as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die." In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: "a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart..." Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine. These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine's most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: "nothing predicted the arrival of humankind..../ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank..." Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: "what will kill you will seduce you first," or they can strike you like Lomachenko's lightening jabs: "flirt, Cheka agent, bitch." Leading readers into the world's darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.
Few writers have embodied the heart and soul of a nation as fully as Venezuela's Rafael Cadenas. Poet, translator, and educator, the ninety-year-old Cadenas has been admired and acclaimed by Spanish-language readers for over half a century while remaining virtually unknown to US audiences. At once painterly, personal, and philosophical, Cadenas' poetry conveys both the poet's pride in and his awareness of the struggles of his native land. His poems, probing the relationships between reality and consciousness against the backdrop of intense political ferment, could not be more timely. In The Land of Mild Light, poet, editor, and broadcaster Nidia Hernandez has assembled Cadenas' most important poems in vivid translations by some of the English-speaking world's finest poets and translators, including Robert Pinsky, Forrest Gander, Sophie Cabot Black and others. The selection includes an informative introduction by poet, translator and long-time resident of Venezuela, Rowena Hill.
Don't Close Your Eyes, a collection of Hanna Melnyczuk's drawings created during Russia's war on Ukraine, attempt to process what is happening to the country her parents left in 1945. Influenced by her work on children's books, these drawings convey events through colored pencil and watercolor. Melnyczuk draws as a way to understand the unfathomable acts of war, and images that line her mind unfurl onto paper. When the people plead "close the sky!" her work closes the sky with needle and thread. The destruction of buildings and bricks begin to reveal the bodies beneath. These drawings bring to the fore the death and horror of war through the filter of time and distance, expressing the emotions of one viewing the war from afar, depicting what can only be seen in the mind's eye. Proceeds of this book will be donated to the war and recovery efforts.
Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. "Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing," note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. "It includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West."These poems offer a startling look at the way language both affects and reflects the realities of war and extremity. This anthology is sure to become the classic text marking not only one of the darkest periods in Ukrainian history, but also a significant moment in the universal struggle for democracy and human rights.
It's 1939 and young Maeve O'Sullivan and her family are among the last inhabitants of a windswept island off the south coast of Ireland. After her father's death, Maeve finds herself the last inheritor of the old ways of healing. But the future beckons to Maeve with the arrival of Seamus, a handsome young medical student heading for Dublin. Maeve suddenly finds herself at a crossroads, torn between the pull of the past and the lure of the modern. Must she sacrifice one in order to accommodate the other? St Brigid, patroness of poetry, craft and midwifery, hovers over this richly evocative story about the tension between progress and tradition. Timely and timeless, Kearney's novel offers sensual homage to a singular landscape brimming with a Gaelic wisdom about the natural world.
Today is a Different War is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what's in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems.
Sherod Santos' brilliant new collection, The Burning World, shows us exactly why the New York Times Book Review has said, "Santos possesses an intensity akin to Rilke."
The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets is a new anthology edited by Venezuelan-born editor and poet Nidia Hernández. In this collection, Hernández, winner of the Sundara Ramaswamy prize for The Land of Mild Light: Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas, gathers the voices of Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Piedad Bonnett (Colombia), Yolanda Pantin (Venezuela), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Rossella Di Paolo (Peru)-five award-winning Latin American poets-into a definitive bilingual anthology. This collection, representative of the region''s rich poetic history, samples the poetry of trailblazing female voices from the last sixty years. "If I write a poem it''s like I''m in the middle of my words, my fears and dreams-in the middle of a reality that belongs to us all but that is also mine alone," says Rossella Di Paolo. This quote embodies The Invisible Borders of Time, in which five female poets share words, fears, and dreams with each other and with us all, yet each remains undeniably singular.Many celebrated poets and translators have brought this edition into English, including Sophie Cabot Black, Forrest Gander, Sally Keith, and Rowena Hill, among others.
A medical doctor composing sonnets at the height of Covid, John Okrent's This Costly Season examines what it was like to be on the front lines of loss, while holding on to the preciousness of life and the beauty of our world.
Robin Davidson''s Mrs. Schmetterling is a book of poems like no other. Paired with and inspired by the incredible artwork of Sarah Fisher, this book brings us into the deeply personal yet universally relatable inner world of a woman questioning herself and her world with intelligence and fearlessness. Mrs. Schmetterling thoughtfully and flawlessly hooks onto our inner world with her own, and won''t let go. The second Poet Laureate of Houston, Robin Davidson is the writer you''ve been looking for.
In his first collection in over 25 years, poet Martin Edmunds' Flame in a Stable is an alarmingly poignant and intelligent book of poems. From the author of the National Poetry Series winning The High Road to Taos.
The Silence Of Your Name tracks one woman's journey from her young husband's unexpected suicide during their trip to Ghana all the way through to her life as a writer, finding love and redemption at home and abroad.
The Age of Waiting by Douglas J. Penick is a personal memoir enriched by the history of Buddhism and a re-telling of foundational Buddhist tales. Penick confronts not only his own mortality, but also that of the planet. This eloquent, impassioned investigation links our contemporary reality - with its medical, economic, and ecological emergencies - to an inner landscape which may prove more constant, durable, and transformative than we realize. "In this illuminating work, Penick explores contemporary crises using the frame of a classic story from Buddhism... By reflecting on personal as well as global issues, Penick models an unflinching but also compassionate orientation toward life." - Publisher''s Weekly A brilliant, compassionate, heart-breakingly written, woven, acknowledgement of the unimaginable Anthropocene rolling toward us. Douglas Penick Writes with insight and wisdom, with Buddhist stories, with the life of the Buddha, with turning points in his life with his Teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, and with touching, telling alightings from his own life from childhood until his aging (slightly) now. Well worth anything you can give to its reading, musing, in this vast humming, in this "Ocean of Buddhas." - Zentatsu Richard Baker
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