In Laynie Browne’s fourteenth book of poetry, Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, the poems are titled after dates—progressing chronologically from 12.16.15 to 5.23.16—and each line is numbered. Browne describes her process of writing the book as one of translating her daily to-do lists, line by line, into poetry. She says that the project […]
In Abigail Chabitnoy’s second collection, In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful, the speaker pulls us under again and again. As we follow her into the waves, we see her unearth the bodies of indigenous women and hear her unleash their voices. In complex, confident lyrics, Chabitnoy also unearths language for her readers, in translations […]
Listening to Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land: Suite always makes me cry. Tears evoked by certain passages of music and scenes of loveliness issue from some deep well of emotion felt as a vague ache, a foreshadowing of loss as much as an overflow of emotion. I’ve also felt this ache in amazed recognition of […]
William O’Daly is known as one of the preeminent translators of the poetry of Pablo Neruda in the United States and a cofounder of Copper Canyon Press. Astonishingly, for all he has done over many decades of service to poetry and its communities, The New Gods is O’Daly’s first full-length collection, though he has authored […]
The pleasure of writing a book review is, for me, found in the deeper level of engagement required as opposed to that with works I might be reading for other intentions. And so I found myself starting and restarting Robert Davis Hoffmann’s Raven’s Echo, not for any shortcomings of the work itself, but interruptions of […]
The poems in Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes, as translated from Galician into English by Erín Moure, strain against each other by putting pressure on images and language to constitute a form dense with structure and yet open to the mind’s acoustic thinking—a thinking that explores multiplicity, identity, language, and transformation. The book’s […]
Is there a way to say it? Maybe every act of writing begins here, with the already-exhausted question. Each poem in Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum contains and documents one of these beginnings. The title of the collection suggests a singular focus on America’s guns—gun violence, gun reverence, gun hate, gun mania, maybe even […]
In Su Cho’s moving debut, The Symmetry of Fish, language, culture, and family form a potent core for a speaker navigating the Korean-American experience. It dissects the world and the self’s unnamable parts, and reshapes them into tangible pieces the speaker gently offers to the reader. Memory and the tricks time plays on it are […]
“I saw you shadow of / a shadow / maybe I thought / I made you / up.” In this unknowing place begins Leila Chatti’s heartbreaking and breathtaking chapbook, Figment, which explores Chatti’s personal experience with pregnancy loss. Chatti is not new to writing about the body. Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her full-length, debut […]
The Red Flower For Viviano Pérez Pérez Photo by Giulia May The smallest hummingbird will only survive on another island. Two wings of the same bird. I once found my most coveted bed on a rooftop that overlooked a guava tree in the barrio of music. My father’s first word was Spanish when my grandmother […]