Literature in Translation |
“Without its spirit,” “Scream in the grotto” & “The fire crackles”
“The fire crackles / the forest whispers to it / another legend.”
Poetry |
“Atopolis means without place“
“river carry me forward / from my displacement // from my place between rivers”
Poetry |
“The Ringing,” “Bare and Live” & “Madness”
“How thin the line between the eye / and darkness that runs like a thread / in the hem of a dress …”
Poetry |
“Exile” & “This Tree Is Sorrow”
“I visit him every Christmas / where everything is dry in the vacuumed / memory sealed by death: the cracked / beds of his thumbs …”
Poetry |
“London,” “Full Moon Over Beirut” & “The West Indies”
“A man reads a newspaper on the sixth floor. / He looks up and out at the open-air —/ once a wall, now an overhang, cliff of brick bombed last month.”
Poetry |
“San Francisco, 1992” & “The Boys”
“… You count them off: / ghosts with hard bodies and ghosts / with wet tongues, ghosts with slick fingers / and convincing eyes …”
Poetry |
“Butcher Song”
“Blitz of sun off blade, six a.m. Phạm Văn Hai Street, the butcher / drags two glinting metal bowls onto the sidewalk …”
Poetry |
“Kapuśniak”
“Let the smell remind us / that we’re not that far / from the deep belch // and thunder of tanks …”
Literature in Translation |
“The Whisper of the Wind”
“They started in the middle of nowhere, heading towards what she supposed was the closest highway. The whole group began to walk, with the last rays of the sun skirting the hills that could be seen in the distance, very small, on the horizon.”
Poetry |
“Mother’s Day” & “Bad birds”
“Still I struggle to rise, breathing in the quiet, / trying to believe in patience / as I teach the child to make the bread, to mix the flour and water …”
Essay |
“Criminal Behavior”
“In the beginning, the fatal beating is just a local news story. A curiosity to follow. Terrible behavior reported in a newspaper circulated through small towns and rural communities within an hour’s drive.”
Literature in Translation |
from The Pure and the Impure
“I am revealing a leniency that people will find strange, that people will fault me for. It’s true that these two men whom I have just briefly depicted offered me the tangible expression of union, and even of dignity. A kind of austerity enveloped them …”
Interview |
“‘Call Every Resource’: on Muriel Rukeyser in the Twenty-First Century, with Catherine Gander & Stefania Heim”
“There is an uncanniness to how chillingly Rukeyser seems to anticipate aspects of our moment … understanding the deep impacts of living in perpetual war, her insight into the insidious interweaving of consumerism, journalism, and the war machine.”
Poetry |
“Gold Watch” & “Autumn”
“A person is a grieving monster, / said Aeschylus, the past / shapeless as muscle and expressed / as a faceless mass. It’s crawling out to eat.”
Poetry |
“After a Language Is Lost”
“My tongue, as if sitting on it / Two minutes of a day / heavy enough / to crush words / coming out my mouth.”