Issue 34 Includes • Poetry Translation Folios with work by Guatemalan K’iche Maya poet Humberto Ak’ab’al, translated by Michael Bazzett; Lithuania superstar poet Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry; Spanish poet Sandra Santana, translated by Geoffrey Brock; and Venezuelan poet-in-exile Jesüs Amalio, translated by David Brunson, Jr. Plus a Fiction Translation Folio with two stories by nternationally renowned Portuguese writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, translated by Alexis Levitin. • Poetry by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón; Guggenheim Fellows Paul Guest and Mark Halliday; Ruth Lilly Fellow Marcus Wicker; William Carlos Williams Awardwinner Martha Collins; Rilke Prize winner David Keplinger; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett, Brian Henry, Lance Larsen, Alex Lemon, Jenny Molberg, and Corey Van Landingham; as well as Kelli Russell Agodon, Abdul Ali, Sean Cho A., Michael Dumanis, Chanda Feldman, Melissa Ginsburg, Matty Layne Glasgow, Niki Herd, Alicia Mountain, Lis Sanchez, Indriani Sengupta, and many others. • Fiction by Madeline Haze Curtis, Maria Poulatha, Alyssa Quinn, Kate Weinberg, and Tara Isabel Zambrano. • Nonfiction by Brooke Barry and Robert Long Foreman. • The cover features a recent piece by Minneapolis-based artist Dyani White Hawk, whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Walker Art Center, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, theSmithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and elsewhere.
"e;Sometimes,"e; writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, "e;everything reduces to circles and lines."e;In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love-teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics-couple with moments of wrenching grief-a father's life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother's waist; Freddie Gray's death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.But Worldly Things refuses to "e;offer allegiance"e; to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. "e;Let's create folklore side-by-side,"e; he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. "e;All of us want,"e; after all, "e;our share of light, and just enough rainfall."e;Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward-toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
Winner of the Max Ritvo PoetryPrize, Ryann Stevensons Human Resources is a sobering andperceptive portrait of technologys impact on connection and power.Human Resources followsa woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that dontexist. In discerning verse, she workshops thefacial characteristics of a floating head named Nia, who her boss calls histype; she loses hours researching June, an oddly sexualized artificiallyintelligent oven; and she spends a whole day trying to break a femaleself-improvement bot. Thespeaker of Stevensons poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even asshe endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts toharness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skincare, though she dreams about the department / that women get reassigned toafter they file / harassment complaints. With sharp, lyrical intelligence, sheimagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men butfor their ownwhere they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world thatnever appreciated them.Chilling and lucid, HumanResources challenges the minds programming our present and future to considerwhat serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human,Stevenson writes: I want to say better.
These essays share intimate stories of life and Indigenous resistance in the Amazon rainforest during an age of raging wildfires, mass migration, populist politics, and increasing deforestation.
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”
A collection that explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus, offering a reboot, a remix, a reimagining-and holding up the broken mirror of myth to late-stage capitalism, social media, and our present-day selves.
A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.For poet Victoria Chang, memory "e;isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally."e; It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
"e;We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world."e;Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding "e;that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe."e; In this intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life-separation from his family as a boy, substance abuse, incarceration, and ultimately the discovery of books and writing-and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people, in which animals were the teachers of human beings, until greed and a desire to control the more-than-human world led to anger, fear, and, eventually, profound alienation. At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, For Joshua is an unforgettable journey.
A bold, engaged new anthology spotlighting the work of contemporary Dutch poets influenced by international cultural exchange and linguistic invention.
An Indie Next Selection for September 2021From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAYShow book club pickLate Migrations: A Natural History of Love and LossFor the past four years, Margaret Renkls columns have offered readers ofThe New York Timesa weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.People have often asked me how it feels to be the voice of the South, writes Renkl in her introduction. But Im not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either. There are many Southsred and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brownand no one writer could possibly represent all of them. InGraceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.From a writer who makes one of all the worlds beings (NPR),Graceland, At Lastis a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.
Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.With Devon Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collection's eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church, past people plucking at the brambles of a place that won't let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmland-and further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. We wander with a kind of animal logic, like a beast with "e;a mind to get loose / from a valley fallowing / towards foul,"e; through the tense, overlapping space between movement and stillness.An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is "e;merely existence carrying on and carrying on."e; In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn't flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.For in Philomath, it is the poet's (sometimes reluctant) obligation "e;to keep an eye / on what is left"e; of the people and places that have impacted us. And there is always something left, whether it is the smell of burnt grapes, a twelfth-century bronze, or even a lock of hair.
"A poet of our precarious moment . . . James's searing attention is upon the fleeting, the untethered, upon fecundity and decay, the cosmic and the molecular." -CAROLYN FORCHE
From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's newest collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories."e;'You tell me how I was born what I am,'"e; demands Naka-Hasebe Kingsley-of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of DA mos: An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe; in the DA gen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive language that will leave readers breathless.With astonishing formal range, DA mos also documents the intolerance that dominates American society. What can we learn from mapping the genealogy of a violent and loud collective? How deeply do anger, violence, and oppression run in the blood? From adapted Punnett squares to Biblical epigraphs to the ghastly comment section of a local news website, DA mos diagrams surviving America as an other-ed American-and it refuses to flinch from the forces that would see that multitude erased.DA mos is a resonant proclamation of identity and endurance from one of the most intriguing new voices in American letters-a voice singing "e;long on America as One / body but many parts."e;
Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod-selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize-is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction.Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light-but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, "e;the bloody hand holding back / the skin,"e; revealing "e;the world's inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth."e; These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page.Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.
A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakhota family's struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhta people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato-where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited. On a winter's day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron-women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.
"Reading Ali is an act of redemption . . . both a challenge and a balm." -THE RUMPUS
A versatile missive written from the intersections of gender, disability, trauma, and survival."e;Some girls are not made,"e; torrin a. greathouse writes, "e;but spring from the dirt."e; Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound-selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry-challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates "e;buckteeth & ulcer."e; She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse's poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. "e;I'm still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral."e;Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse-elegant, vicious, "e;a one-girl armageddon"e; draped in crushed velvet-teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
"This book is our textbook for the education we most need." -DAN BEACHY-QUICK
Selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Thrown in the Throat "gloriously stakes new territory in queerness."
Hailed on its original publication as "eloquent testimony to the engaging power of art in a man's life" (Washington Post), this deeply moving memoir, long out of print, is reissued with an illuminating new afterword.
"Some of my favorite people on Earth are in this book, dear writers and grand spirits." -ANNIE DILLARD
"Both carefully observed and daringly philosophical . . . The cosmos aches, as it did for Orpheus and for Gilgamesh, and as it did for Eve." -MARK DOTY
This richly lyrical debut collection tells the coming-of-age story of a first-generation Korean American as she views the world from her parents' bodega in Queensbridge, New York, looking at our nation of immigrants eye-to-eye with humanitarianism and heart.
"Eric Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it." -DAN BEACHY-QUICK
"[Yuri Rytkheu's] deep emotional attachment to this landscape of ice (today melting away under global warming forces) makes every sentence seem a poetic revelation." -ANNIE PROULX
"A stunning overlap of a lost boy and lost landscape through the lens of a gifted poet's magical linguistic and storytelling abilities." -VICTORIA CHANG
"Beautifully written, masterfully structured, and brimming with insight into the natural world . . . It has the makings of an American classic." -ANN PATCHETT
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