After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster's fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through.

Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General's and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Award. Her work has been translated into French (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d'Alice, Les Éditions du Noroît, 2007), Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. She edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope), the inaugural volume in that ongoing series; and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000.

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Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 Preview
From Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd.
Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Prize winner, 2020) returns with a long poem that repurposes the language of the present. Interposition borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis. It compresses sound and rhythm into paradox, and it conflates absurdity and emergency.
Mapping the continued encroachment of capital and virtual culture upon our psychic space, Interposition examines how, with each click, we are reconstituted online and sold back to ourselves, and asks: How do we uncouple our selves from our avatars?

KAIE KELLOUGH is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen’s University.

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Book Recommendations:

Niina Pollari Paths of Totality

Song Cave Press, Emily Skillings, Tantrums in Air

Michael Earl Craig, Thin Kimono

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Join YIVO to celebrate the publication of Tsen Lider. Ten poems. Dešimt eilėraščių prepared by the National Library of Lithuania in collaboration with YIVO. This new publication offers facsimile images of the original manuscript, translations into English and Lithuanian, and essays on Sutzkever and his work by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas and David Fishman, with a forward by Lara Lempertienė. The event will feature a discussion panel on Sutzkever's work with Lithuanian Minister of Culture Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempertienė, head of the Judaica Department at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy, moderated by YIVO's Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent and with welcoming remarks by Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas, Director General of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.

This panel discussion was originally held on November 23, 2020.

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the ocean waves, breaking against

the history of ourselves.

So concludes the first poem in Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2025) by Jennifer Wong. This book is a meditation on time. These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change. The collection offers glimpses into the journeys of a migrant, a daughter, and a mother; with the passage of years, the poems ask what it might mean to move like light itself, beyond expectations and into new ways of understanding ourselves more profoundly. With sublime precision, Jennifer Wong’s poetry brings clarity to the spaces between the stars – the time difference between memories and place, between our loved ones, and everything we hold dear in life. 

Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong-born poet who lives in the UK. She has three collections including Letters Home (Nine Arches Press).

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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You can find Crystal Simone Smith on her on her Wikipedia page, and at her website.

Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents.

By comparing and at times intertwining these two poetic narratives, the book explores themes of art, migration, narco-violence, family, spirituality, and the idea that every human being represents all humanity at any moment in history. Both Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Domínguez become relatable and intimate figures, part of our own story.

Written in simple, sharp language, the book employs surprising imagery and a novel structure to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, while examining the intricacies of the human condition--from the life of Saint Anthony to the violent acts of narcos across Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border. With formal sophistication and philosophical depth, this work enriches the tradition of poetry about both migration and art, contributing to the literary heritage of Mexico and the United States over the past several decades.

Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, including The Disguises of Fire [Los disfraces del fuego].

Kevin C. McHugh is book editor and former writer and editor for international branding studios. He taught writing for thirty-one years.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter.

In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world.

Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society. 

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Today, we are discussing two of Eric’s recent books that share a connection to the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman. The first is Cycle of Dreams (Punctum, 2024), a poetry collection that uses motifs, literary devices, and themes of William Langland’s surreal poem as a springboard to meditate on the equally surreal experience of political and social life in the twenty-first century. Cycle of Dreams is published by Punctum Books. The second book we are discussing is a new edition of the A-version of Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the A-Text (U Exeter Press, 2025)

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When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text.

Find Diamond at her website and on Instagram.

And find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Diamond continued their conversation.

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In his most personal collection to date, award-winning poet David Martin elegizes his younger brother who died by suicide at the age of twenty-three. With a mixture of childhood recollections and anguished moments nightstead produces a complex memorial while pushing against the utmost limits of memory's power. Dislocating experiments juxtapose with searingly direct verse to make this book a haunting poetic memoir that will remain with readers long after they put it down.

David Martin has published three previous collections of poetry: Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), and Limited Verse (University of Calgary Press, 2024). He lives in Calgary.

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You can find Dr. Darius Phelps on Instagram and X.

And find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell-all expos of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers - why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And allthe while, character actors gather for the endless convention...

Guy Elston's debut poetry collection, The Character Actor Convention, is a curious smorgasbord of personas, new voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting 'I' questions its relation to reality, and itself. Wist, wit, obsession and irony rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner.

The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It's something else.

Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He's a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine.

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Featured poets include Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Alberto Rios, A. E. Stallings, Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein, David Mason, Mary Jo Salter, and Dana Gioia, and other exemplary practitioners of the form. In these poems, character, plot, and dialogue turn up as readily as in prose fiction. As John Dryden wrote of Chaucer’s works, “Here is God’s plenty.” Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story―these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar, who introduces each poet and the anthology itself.

Sunil Iyengar is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press). His poems and/or book reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, PN Review, Essays in Criticism, The American Scholar, The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network.

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Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. The Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book.

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Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection.

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William Carlos Williams's English translation of the play, Mi Señoría, by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, reflects Williams's connection to his Puerto Rican roots and deft skills as a translator. The play is a satirical critique of political corruption, featuring comical malapropisms and an idealistic but naive politician's rise, highlighting themes of materialism and power, and showcasing Williams's adept handling of language.

William Carlos Williams’s mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Williams was deeply engaged with translation and the unique cultural worlds wrought by migration. His rendering of My Excellency invites us to think about translation not simply as a linguistic act, but as an ethical and artistic one: What happens when a Puerto Rican political satire crosses languages, audiences, and power structures? What is gained, what is altered, and what remains unresolved? In this episode, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera (UPR-M) and editor Jonathan Cohen discuss the historical context of the play, Williams’s role as translator, and the broader questions the work raises about voice, authority, and cultural mediation. By looking closely at My Excellency, we open a wider conversation about literature in translation and the complex relationships between language, migration, text, and translation.

This conversation forms part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which seeks to connect medicine, science, technology, and engineering with the interpretive and ethical sensibilities cultivated in the humanities. By foregrounding literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts, the initiative reimagines how humanistic study can serve as a central component of technical and scientific education.

In this episode are:

• • Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M) and Director of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes.
• • Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and scholar of inter-American literature. He is editor of Williams’s verse translations from Spanish, By Word of Mouth, and his translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella The Dog and the Fever.

Topics discussed and scholars mentioned:

• Emilia Quiñones Otal, Directora del Departamento de Humanidades, UPR-M
• Julio Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams.
• Marta Aponte Alsina
• "The Art and Science of Translation"
• Rebecca Ruth Gould and “co-translating”
• William Carlos Williams Society 2024 conference at the UPR-M
• Last Nights of Paris, Philippe Soupault
• "Translation will motivate English to do new things ... to serve as an apprentice to a master writer."—Jonathan Cohen
• "The Sugarcane Girl who was my mother"
• Walter Scott Peterson podcast, “[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson”
• “Williams struggled throughout his life, and the conflict produced great literature.”—Jonathan Cohen
• David Unger

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This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down.

About the editors: 

Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, essayist, and poetry curator, with numerous published pieces and three books. Songs of Exile was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Letters to My Father was published in 2017. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse and brave poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012). Shab-e She'r bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, poetic styles, voices, and visions. Bänoo calls herself a war correspondent in verse. Others describe her as a political, metaphysical, and spiritual poet.

Cy Strom works as an editor. He holds MA and MPhil degrees in early modern European history and has published in academic and other areas, including the visual arts. He edits in different genres and sometimes languages, and has had a role in developing professional editorial standards and educational materials.

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These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time.

A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025) by Professor Catherine Clarke is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Professor Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This was an intimate and powerful discussion which will help the field of memory and Holocaust studies.

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Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.

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Gian Piero Persiani is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Fight or Flight artifacts the trauma of McFadyen-Ketchum's divorce and the journey he took across the wilds of America (living in a tent on the California coast, getting intentionally lost in the Utah desert, tracking wild animals in the bitter cold of Indiana winters) in search of healing that led to the greatest discovery of all: his indigenous wife and her three children he now calls his own.

Andrew Fadyen-Ketchum is an author, editor, and ghostwriter. He is author of three poetry collections, Fight or Flight, Visiting Hours and Ghost Gear. He is the assistant Director of the Owsley Fork Writer's Sanctuary, Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days; He is also the acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books.

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What Kind of Daughter? is a poetic memoir by Rayanne Haines that considers identity and gender expectations while exploring the public perception of the space between the spaces we inhabit during periods of grieving, whether that grieving is based in loss of self or the loss of another. In this hybrid collection of poetry and essay, Haines reflects on her life growing up in rural Alberta, and considers the loss of her mother to cancer while asking questions such as how do we steer through holding patterns of almost grief, how do we navigate the terrain of discovery, how do we journey through the burden of care? In, What Kind of Daughter? Haines reflects on the choices women are asked to make and challenges readers to reflect on the way we value, devalue, or simply exist within the spaces of gender and grief.

About Rayanne Haines:

Rayanne Haines (she/her) is an award-winning hybrid author and pushcart nominated poet as well as a cultural producer of films, stage shows, and panels. Rayanne has penned three poetry collections – The Stories in My Skin (2013), Stained with the Colours of Sunday Morning (Inanna, 2017), and Tell The Birds Your Body Is Not A Gun (Frontenac, 2021) which won the 2022 Stephan G. Stephansson, Alberta Literary Award for Poetry as well as being shortlisted for both the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, and the National ReLit Award for Poetry. She hosts the literary podcast Crow Reads, is the president for the League of Canadian Poets, and is an Assistant Professor in Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University. Rayanne has been published in the Globe and Mail, Minola Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, FreeFall, Prairie Fire, and others.

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Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him.

In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule.

Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?

About Yvonne Blomer: 
Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

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A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (Duke UP, 2025) explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors—earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy.

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This is a collaborative collection that crackles in its exploration of land, language, and page space. Combining the intensity of Dub Poetry with the intricacies of experimental poetics, Muttertongue presents a sonorous soundscape echoing with the question of where (and why) is here (hear). The book opens with a dialogue between the three authors, and concludes with an Afterword by Kaie Kellough. The release of the book recedes a new music LP by the three authors (June of 2025). This is a project by the Muttertongue Trio: Allen • Barwin • Betts.

Lillian Allen is the 7th Poet Laureate of Toronto and a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is a two time JUNO award winner and trailblazer in the field of spoken word and dub poetry. Lillian’s debut book of poetry Rhythm An’ Hardtimes became a Canadian best seller, blazing new trails for poetic expression and opened up the form. Lillian’s latest collection Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen, edited by Ronald Cummings was published in Spring 2021 and is part of the Laurier Poetry Series. Her other collections, Women Do This Everyday and Psychic Unrest are studied across the educational spectrum. Her literary work for young people includes three books: Why Me, If You See Truth, and Nothing But a Hero. She received the Margaret Laurence Lecture award, 2020 and the Gustafson Distinguished Poet award, 2021. She is a Toronto Cultural Champion and the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate for her contribution to Canadian Letters. Her current art practice veers into vocal sonic poetics and explores pre-language and post-language poetics.

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 34 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His last poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead will be published in 2026. He has received the Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and has twice been shortlisted for their Spoken Word Prize. His art and media works have been exhibited internationally. A PhD in music, he has been writer-in-residence and taught courses at many universities and colleges. Born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Lithuanian Ashkenazi descent, he lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Website here

Gregory Betts is a poet and professor at Brock University and the author or editor of 25 books. His poems have been stenciled into the sidewalks of St. Catharines and selected by the SETI Institute to be implanted into the surface of the moon. He has performed his poetry at such venues as the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games as part of the Cultural Olympiad, the National Library in Dublin, and the Sorbonne Université in Paris, amongst many others. He is an award-winning scholar of the Canadian avant-garde, curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Literary Arts Residency Lead at the SETI Institute.

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Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence ? a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home.

About Concetta Principe:

Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on the impact of the secular unconscious on culture and political thought. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet's Raymond Souster Award. Her essays, ?Who Shot Meriwether Lewis was long-listed for the 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award at The New Quarterly, and ?I Title it ?Suicide Letter was short-listed for The Malahat Review 2019 Constance Rooke award. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. Her academic monograph exploring trauma in contemporary secular thought, Secular Messiahs and the Return to Paul's Real: A Lacanian Approach, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham.

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You can check out the YouTube list of relevant Kabir's songs curated by S. Anand here.

For readers interested in the paradoxical, downside-up language in Kabiri and its resonances with Daoist language (e.g. this translation of Daodejing), especially the mysthical atheist aspects, check out appendix B to this book by Brook Ziporyn.

Feel free to check out Anand's Navayana Publishing, and his insightful blog posts here.

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What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma.

What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.

In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.

Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.

About Lorne Daniel:

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.

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The archives - in particular the archive of the writer Muriel Spark – are used to create a space to come to terms with the complexities of a life and how we in turn tell stories about ourselves: the depths of our familial relationships, relationship breakdowns and the death of a parent. What’s found in the archive’s boxes -- including recipes, telegrams, letters -- stirs and amplifies feelings of belonging, disorientation, triumph and grief.

With a focus on women writers and interracial relationships, the book explores objects belonging to significant figures in the poet’s imaginary: along with Spark, the actor Maggie Smith, poet Elizabeth Bishop, the 19th century slave owner’s daughter Eliza Junor and psychotherapist Marie Battle Singer.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Source: Publisher

Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Kavya has always enjoyed reading, writing, and engaging with literature in any form, and is thrilled to be in conversation with these authors through the New Books Network.

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Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace’s confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives.

Patrick Grace is an author and teacher who divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, BC. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Columba, EVENT, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and more. His work has been a finalist for literary contests with CV2 and PRISM international, and in 2020, his poem "A Violence" won The Malahat Review's Open Season Award for poetry. He has published two chapbooks: a blurred wind swirls back for you (2023), and Dastardly (2021), both of which explore aspects of love, fear, and trauma that represent a personal queer identity. Deviant, his first full-length poetry collection, continues to explore these themes and was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award. Follow him on IG: @thepoetpatrick.

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This episode concerns the poet and physician William Carlos Williams, whose mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was born and raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. This conversation is part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, that links medicine, science, technology and engineering to the sensibilities honed in the humanities—rethinking ways to blend and combine studies in literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts as more central dimensions of technical preparation.

The discussion explores the profound connection between medical humanities and poetry, highlighting how their combination enriches our understanding of patient care, fosters empathy, and humanizes the medical experience. Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field combining arts, literature, philosophy and cultural approaches to the human condition—considering each of these as insights into the emotional and ethical dimensions of healthcare. Poetry can serve as a powerful tool for expressing the complex feelings and narratives that often go unspoken in clinical settings. Blending poetry and the science of healthcare reminds us that medicine is not just a science but also an art, emphasizing compassion, understanding, and the shared human experience at the heart of healing.

In this episode are:

• Walter Scott Peterson is a retired ophthalmologist and William Carlos Williams scholar; he is the author of the first book-length study of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson, titled An Approach to Paterson (Yale, 1967).
• Vamsi Koneru is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.
• Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

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New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Dr. Adam Bremer-McCollum is Series Co-Editor of the Texts & Translations of Transcendence & Transformation (4T) Series and Research Associate at The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Lydia Bremer-McCollum teaches Religious Studies at Spelman College.

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"John is brilliant at communicating. She's also really funny. Poems don't get more direct and precise and unforgettable than this." —National Post The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John. IS THERE A SYNONYM CLOSER TO COMPASSION THAN PATIENCE? A PERSON WHO LOVES BEAUTY MORE THAN THEY FEAR IT THE CLOSEST TO NOTHING YOU CAN DO FOR MONEY TO TOUCH TIME TO ITSELF

About Aisha Sasha John:

AISHA SASHA JOHN is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal.

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Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.

What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.

Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.

About Farah Ghafoor: 

Based in Tkaranto (Toronto), Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). A finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, selections of Shadow Price won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice ? and FACE/WASTE, as well as anthologies and post-secondary course curriculums.

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You can find Taylor on Instagram and Bluesky.

Find host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Taylor went to continue their conversation.

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This edition, which contains several previously unpublished poems, will make the poetry of this emblematic figure in nineteenth-century Irish writing accessible to a contemporary audience for the first time.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In Silt: Prose Poems (Palabrera Press, 2019) she follows the pathways of water across the natural and social landscapes of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, tracing the real residues of their relationship, and turning that long story into a kind of prayer, for our waters, our planet and our lives.
In this conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Joanna Cifredo de Fellman (יוחנה סיפרדו פלמן) and Aurora Levins Morales discuss Silt in the context of contemporary Puerto Rico. 

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In it, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness must be suppressed to make way for “progress?”

Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.

Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and youngest person in Alabama’s history to hold this position, which was created in 1930. You can find her online at Ashley M. Jones Poetry.

You can find host, Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Ashley discuss Ashley’s tenure as Poet Laureate.

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Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon provides a fresh route into Blake, taking him at his word. Exploring this brilliant thinker's passionate writings, arresting artworks and fascinating life, Vernon illuminates Blake's vivid worldview. Like us, he lived in a tumultuous era of war, discontent, rapid technological change, and human estrangement from nature. He exposed the dark sides of political fervour and social moralising, while unashamedly celebrating love and liberty. But he also conversed with prophets and angels, and was powerfully, if unconventionally, religious. If we take this seriously--not easy, in secular times--then Blake can help us to unlock the transformative power of imagination.

Written for both longstanding fans and unfamiliar readers, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (Hurst & Co., 2025) reveals Blake as an invigorating and hopeful guide for our modern age.

Mark Vernon is a London-based psychotherapist, writer and former Anglican priest. A keen podcaster and a columnist with The Idler, he speaks regularly at festivals and on the BBC. He has a PhD in Philosophy, and degrees in Theology and Physics.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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An exciting new collection of ekphrastic poems accompanied by a compilation of green sketches via the lens of a queer poet and visual artist. Zachari Logan carried a sketchbook as he travelled the world and responded to iconic artwork as well as art that once existed but is now lost, destroyed, or far away. Whimsical art and thoughtful poems that ponder the nature of existence.

Zachari Logan is a queer Canadian settler poet and artist whose artwork has been exhibited throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Logan’s work can be found in collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Remai Modern, Peabody Essex Museum, McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Nerman MOCA among many others. In 2014 Logan received the Lieutenant Governor’s Emerging Artist Award, in 2015 he received the Alumni of Influence Award from the University of Saskatchewan and in 2016 Logan was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. In 2010, his chapbook, A Eulogy for the Buoyant, was published by JackPine Press and in 2021, A Natural History of Unnatural Things, was published by Radiant Press. Logan’s artwork and writing has been featured in many publications throughout the world. Zachari Logan lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

“Green is a ravishing compendium of attention—a book that bristles with subtle and unexpected poetic turns, and the peculiar thrum of being human in a world increasingly out of step with itself. Here, the act of writing is inseparable from drawing, from walking, from remembering, from witnessing—and from loving, deeply, the fragile and persistent textures of the earth. Zachari Logan’s poems pulse with vegetal sensitivity, moving between alleyways and art history, between inner monologue and ecological longing. Green is not merely a colour: it is an atmosphere, a consciousness, a sensual and moral register. What it captures is more than the sum of its fragments—it is their residue, their ache, their adaptation, their ephemeral and often unintelligible traces. There is a deep and haunting beauty across these pages, but also fury, wit, and a quiet defiance. A sensual invitation to pay attention, this little but mighty book is not only an artistic gesture, but a political and ethical one. With luminous precision and a mind turned toward both the microscopic and the mythic, Green is a spell cast in language and images—one that lingers long after the page is turned.”— Giovanni Aloi, author of Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits, Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art and Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene“A poem in its very color; deep green, wildly queer. This book captivates with its folds and cracks. The dissection of worlds, coupled with meticulous sketches of botany, art and the quotidian carried by the fascinating complexity of nature. One is lost between the body of a naked man or an abandoned thistle flower in a thick ditch. At once a sketchbook, a collection of poems, and an essay- this collection opens a door to the striking universe of Zachari Logan.”— Julie Hetu, author of Pacific Bell, Les dormeurs de Nauru and MotZachari Logan

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In this collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Anchored by elegies for NASA's Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift's cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.

About Natalie Lim:

Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022).

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At a time when binaristic and hierarchical relations are being readily interrogated, MA|DE — a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third — takes up a critique of the human-animal divide in their full-length debut, ZZOO. From the depths of the oceans to the outer reaches of the sky, a menagerie of species trade off time in the limelight, none of them solely occupying the central space on the global stage. MA|DE’s collaborative practice foregrounds interdependence, outward focus, shared spaces and non-hierarchical thinking, all of which emerge allegorically in interzonal poems that are as richly realized as they are formally eclectic. This wild-blooded collection turns conventional exhibitionism on its head, treating humans and animals as equal subjects of art, science and selfhood. ZZOO is a bestiary for the modern world.

About MA|DE:

MA|DE (est. 2018) is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace — artists whose active solo practices, while differing radically, serve to complement one another. MA|DE’s work together is often exploratory in nature, formulating a set of shared visions, symbols and ciphers that invite the reader into their complex, continually-expanding internal universe. MA|DE’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and chapbooks, and they have delivered workshops on collaborative writing at several festivals, including VerseFest Ottawa. With the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, they completed their debut full-length collection, ZZOO (Palimpsest Press, 2025), and have now completed their next two collections, Alphabeticals and Detourism. Meanwhile, they are currently hard at work on two new, creatively divergent manuscripts: Twin Visible and Waste Not the Marrow.

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In Lost Signal, Chris Hutchinson celebrates the resilience and adaptability of language, while locating the tipping points of our ongoing environmental, informational, and humanitarian crises. Subtle semantic shifts mirror ideological rifts — yet lyricism thrives, along with a diversity of perspectives, forms, and styles, affirming faith in the power of the human spirit to challenge the insidious forces shaping our collective present.

About Chris Hutchinson:

Chris Hutchinson is the author of four previous poetry books, as well as the autofictive verse-novel Jonas in Frames. He has lived all over North America—from Dawson City, Yukon, to Brooklyn, New York—working as a line cook and, more recently, teaching creative writing to undergraduates. He is now a permanent faculty member of the English Department at MacEwan University, located on Treaty 6 Territory.

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Taking its title from Ancient Greek, Tracy Wai de Boer’s Nostos is a hero’s journey rooted in the quest for selfhood from elemental beginnings to an unknowable end. “Nostos” translates to homecoming and is one of the root words of nostalgia; the other, “algos,” means pain, making nostalgia a painful return home. This etymology acts as guide for de Boer’s “i” when she imagines homecoming as less a moment of arrival and more about desire to move through pain and mystery in the formation of self. Nostos is an essential debut from one of Canada’s fastest rising poets.

About Tracy Wai de Boer:

Tracy Wai de Boer is an award-winning writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist. She co-authored Impact: Women Writing After Concussion which won the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC’s Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021. Her chapbook, maybe, basically, was published with Anstruther Press in 2020. Tracy was a resident at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2017, 2023) and her work has been featured internationally in outlets including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Catapult, Plenitude Magazine, Ricepaper Magazine, G U E S T, canthius, Prude Magazine, Petal Projections, and Unearthed Online Literary Journal. Nostos is Tracy’s first full-length poetry collection.

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With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.

Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.

“We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening, from first periods to flashers, sticker books to maxi pad art, acid trips to blackouts, and creepy professors to close calls.

“This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries, and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.

In “My Dream House,” the past and the future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.

These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.

Anecdotes has been a:

Winner of the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Finalist for the 2024 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
Finalist for the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

KATHRYN MOCKLER is the author of five poetry books and the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023). She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020) and runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone. She teaches screenwriting and fiction in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

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Connor Lafortune is from Dokis First Nation on Robinson Huron Treaty territory of 1850 in Northeastern Ontario. He works primarily in Life Promotion, harm-reduction, mental health, and Indigenous education. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree at Nipissing University with a Double Honors Major in Indigenous Studies and Gender Equality and Social Justice. He is currently in the Masters in Indigenous Relations at Laurentian University. Connor is Anishinaabek, Queer, and Francophone; he uses his understanding of the world to shape his creations as a writer, spoken word poet, and musician. Connor often combines the written word with traditional Indigenous beadwork and sewing to recreate the stories of colonization, showcase resilience, and imagine a new future. He recently released a single in collaboration with Juno Award winner G.R. Gritt titled “Qui crie au loup? ft. Connor Lafortune.” Above all else, Connor is an activist, a shkaabewis (helper), and a compassionate human being.

Lindsay Mayhew (she/her) is a spoken word poet and author from Sudbury, Ontario. She is a recent English Literature Master’s graduate from the University of Guelph. Lindsay is the multi-year champion of Wordstock Sudbury’s poetry slam, a runner up in the 2024 Womxn of the World poetry slam, and she has featured in events across Ontario, including the YWCA, JAYU Canada, Nuit Blanche, and Wordstock Literary Festival. Lindsay’s written work can be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Moria, and multiple editions of Sulphur. Her work combines art and theory to voice feminist futures and human rights advocacy.

About the EditorsConnor LafortuneLindsay Mayhew

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About Callista Markotich:

Callista Markotich was a finalist for the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for Pushcart and National Magazine Awards. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

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Elizabeth Greene has published three books of poetry, The Iron Shoes, Moving, and Understories. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently I Found It at The Movies and Shy: An Anthology, and various literary magazines. She has also published short fiction and creative non-fiction. She edited and contributed to We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman which won the Betty and Morris Aaron Award for Best Scholarship on a Canadian Subject.

She taught English for many years at Queen's University, originating courses in Selected Women Writers from Julian of Norwich to Bronwen Wallace and Contemporary Canadian Women Writers. She was a founder of Women's Studies at Queen's and was instrumental in establishing the courses in Creative Writing there.

She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

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A powerful follow-up to the Governor General’s Literary Award shortlisted sulphurtongue.
antibody: poems is a protest, a whisper network, a reclamation of agency, and a ritual for building a survivable world.
antibody mobilizes body horror as resistance, refusing to sanitize the atrocities of sexual violence or to silence its survivors. Challenging myths of “perfect” victimhood, this collection honours the messy, rageful, queer, witchy, disabled, and kinky grief work of enduring trauma and learning to want to live.

About Rebecca Salazar:

Rebecca Salazar (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. antibody is their second poetry collection.

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Winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective, the oldest continuously running predominantly African American writing group in the country. He is a Professor of English, and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program the University of Kentucky.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Professor X continue their conversation.

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There are moments that change the course of a day, a year, or even a life.

Palpitations explores the journey through the twists and turns of the human experience. From childhood memories of struggling with dyslexia and what to be when one grows up, reflections on love, to the global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thomas Leduc delves into the shared experiences that have altered the world’s perception of itself. Full of vivid imagery and deep, thoughtful reflections, Palpitations is a tribute to that which makes us human – moments that palpitate with life, longing and change.

About Thomas L. Leduc:

Thomas Leduc was Poet Laureate of Sudbury, Ontario from 2014-2016 and the President of the Sudbury Writers’ Guild from 2017-2021. His poems and short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies. In 2019 he released his first collection of poetry, Slagflower Poems Unearthed From A Mining Town (Latitude 46). He lives in Sudbury, Ontario.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity mental health, was released by Guernica Editions and won a 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network and co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com.

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In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations.

With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts.

Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing—and holding—some of our greatest fears.

ABOUT CHRISTINE MCNAIR:

Christine MCNair is the author of Charm (winner of the 2018 Archibald Lampman Award) and Conflict (finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, and the ReLit Award for Poetry). She was also shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her chapbook pleasantries and other misdemeanours was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her work has appeared in sundry literary journals and anthologies. McNair lives in Ottawa where she works as a book doctor.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity mental health, was released by Guernica Editions and won a 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network and co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com.

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Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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About the Author:
Rosa Castellano, originally from Tampa, Florida, is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. A finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and co-founder of the RVA Poetry Fest, her work can be found or is forth coming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest among others. All Is The Telling is her first collection of poetry.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity mental health, was released by Guernica Editions and won a 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network and co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com.

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For millennia humanity has looked upwards and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward. In Supergiants, Kyle Flemmer turns his gaze in the other direction. What does our reach for the stars say about us? Working with the technical language of engineering and astrophysics, Flemmer reorients the reader within our galaxy. Families of asteroids expand to contain their physical attributes, the mythic stories of their names and the histories of real people. We see the course of lunar exploration through the fate of the flags planted on each mission. Nebulae, blue giants and black holes enfold us. Interspersed throughout are a series of found/collage poems that visually reconfigure the elements of space exploration and our understanding of it. Through it all, Flemmer shows how we turn to the stars to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

About Kyle Flemmer:

Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and released his first book, Barcode Poetry, in 2021. Flemmer is the author of many chapbooks and his work has appeared in anthologies and exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Supergiants is Kyle's first trade book of poetry, and his next, The Wiki of Babel, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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In Hard Electric Blouin presents a bleakly unsettling but ultimately life-affirming treatise that hints at his fascination with the same question and perhaps shuffles into the neighbourhood of an answer. That neighbourhood is peopled with late-night bars of Key West’s Duval Street, the sharp spice of BBQ joints, sunburned beach motels, and Christmas lights frozen to February trees. And Susan Sarandon’s cousin.

It’s a book not for the faint of heart, but for the lonely-hearted, and for those who know them well.

About Michael Blouin:

Michael Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, and the CBC Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award and the Archibald Lampman Award from ARC Magazine. His novel Chase and Haven won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, an award he received again for his novel Skin House. He is an Instructor at the University of Toronto, a guest lecturer for Carleton University, and has served as an adjudicator for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Two of his novels are now in a permanent archive on the Moon having landed with NASA in 2024. His collected poetry “Hard Electric” is slated to land at the lunar South Pole later in 2025.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Confessional, candid, and insightful, Forecast: Pretty Bleak looks at life in rural PEI. These poems explore climate change, work, family, love, and the idea that sometimes all you’ve got is hope for better weather and favourable winds tomorrow.

About Chris Bailey:

CHRIS BAILEY is a graphic designer and commercial fisherman from Prince Edward Island. He holds a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Chris’ writing has appeared in Grain, Brick, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories 2021, Best Canadian Stories 2025, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, is available from Nightwood Editions. His piece Fisherman’s Repose was a winner of the 2022 BMO 1st Art! Award. Forecast: Pretty Bleak is his second poetry collection.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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The conversation starts with a discussion of Anne’s epic, The Iovis Trilogy (Coffee House Press, 2011). Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry.

The Iovis Trilogy, Waldman’s monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman’s themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history.

Your Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically YDIR blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to YDIR is, in a word, empowering.

More about Your Devotee in Rags:

Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning.

Anne says: “Wizard Hal Willner would be proud of us companions in the vibrational matrix. Comrades in a studio of subtle suspense, and where were we headed? A magnificent voyage! Tender, rugged, true. I met Andrew Whiteman, genius player, composer, scholar, in one of Hal’s unpredictable alchemical laboratories. We instantly bonded as mavens of poetry and its attendant orality, dedicated to the passion of epic life that is the source of this album, the 1000 plus pages of the feminist canto: Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment; passages plucked to be re-imagined in ambient explosive word-sound. On the Yantzse, in a strip club, a maelstrom of memory honoring precursor male poets, dressed in the rags of Celtic hags, so much more as mendicant, witty siren, compassionate lover, exploding empires of patriarchy and war. A kind of mythic hospitality.”

Andrew says: “It was filmmaker Ron Mann and producer Hal Wilner who showed me the way. Hal was my guiding presence—whip smart, funny, gentle, empathic. This album is dedicated to him.”

More about Anne Waldman:

Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.

More about Andrew Whiteman:

Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings.

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Stedmond Pardy’s first book of poems The Pleasures of this Planet Aren't Enough was published by Mosaic Press in 2020 and launched his career as a boundary-pushing literary and poetic voice. His devoted readers can’t get enough of his compelling YouTube and Soundcloud spoken-word performances. Stedmond lives by his own dicta: “ An artist is an instrument through which the Universe reveals itself and word poetry is for every man, but soul poetry, alas, is not heavily distributed.”

About Stedmond Pardy:

STEDMOND PARDY is a self-educated, left-handed poet of mixed ancestry (Newfoundland and St. Kitts/Nevis). Originally from the Mimico area of Toronto, he now resides in Dionysus knows where… He has performed his work around the Greater Toronto Area and has appeared on stages in Montreal and Washington State.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.

More about Tolu Oloruntoba:

TOLU OLORUNTOBA was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and other "undesirables." More than 30,000 deaths were documented there, with many more unrecorded. In the midst of the horror, some inmates turned to poetry to provide comfort, to preserve their sense of humanity, or to document their experiences. Some were or would later become established poets; others were prominent politicians or theologians; still others were ordinary men and women.

My Shadow in Dachau: Poems (Camden House, 2014) contains 68 poems by 32 inmates of Dachau, in 10 different original languages and facing-page English translation, along with short biographies. A foreword by Walter Jens and an introduction by Dorothea Heiser from the original German edition are joined here by a foreword by Stuart Taberner of theUniversity of Leeds. All the poems, having arisen in the experience or memory of extreme human suffering, are testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual. They are also a warning not to forget the darkest chapter of history and a challenge to the future not to allow it to be repeated.

Dorothea Heiser holds an MA from the University of Freiburg. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

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Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.

This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art.

X: @mody_zana

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With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places

More about Charlie Petch:

Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for the speakNORTH national festival, winner of the Sheri-D Golden Beret Award from The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. Their debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named "Best of 2021" by The Walrus. Their film with Opera QTO, Medusa's Children, premièred 2022. They have been featured on the CBC's Q, were the Writer In Residence for Berton House (2023), were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021. Their solo show "No one's special at the hot dog cart" debuted at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2024, and their next poetry book "Infinite Audition" is out with Brick Books in Fall 2025.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Diana Nicolae, Producer & Director, is an accomplished documentary filmmaker who has produced or directed over 50 films. A native Romanian, she began her career in media working as a TV news reporter in the post-Communist era, prior to working as a writer for BBC Radio on the first dramatic series inspired by the country in transition.

She has produced several documentary films about Romania, starting with Red Darkness Before Dawn (2003), which was broadcast on PBS and included in the Cold War archives of the Hoover Institute and the US Holocaust Memorial. Her subsequent films have delved into topics as diverse as intellectual migration, substance abuse, dating violence, and a group of camera-shy nuns.

Matt Jozwiakowski, Camera & Editor, has worked as producer, camera and editor on over a dozen acclaimed documentaries. With more than 15 years as a marketing director for multi-national iconic brands, he has managed multi-million dollar budgets to shepherd highly creative and compelling advertising campaigns into market. His documentary work has likewise been featured in film festivals throughout North America and Europe, and been broadcast on PBS regionally.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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These poems are arranged in four sections: Setting, The Way Across, Bridge, And Back. Lieber, a practicing psychoanalyst, says that this follows the structure from "psychedelic journey work.”

Throughout the collection, Lieber (who lived in fourteen localities the first fourteen years of his life as an army brat) is a master of mise-en-scène; each poem located somewhere more or less specific. The vicissitudes of the specificity change to meet the reader on the journey out. For me, this is movingly demonstrated in what I interpret as the central poem on the journey, Gare Montparnasse: The Melancholy of Departure, read beautifully by Lieber in the interview. Gare Montparnasse is a specific point of departure. The train, however, will not stop in our small provincial village.” Where is the village? The reader gets to decide.

Lieber considers his poems “as children” and would like to know how they’re doing in the world. “I want an audience for the for these poems. I want to know, oh, 'they did nothing to me’. Or ‘they evoked something’ or whatever. Anything. So, they're not just stillborn in a vacuum. My personal investment is to send my poems into the world and they will fare as they fare. But I want them to run into others.”

He would like to hear from all readers and can be reached through his website.

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How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger's new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system--heart and lungs and blood--than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. "I'd like to think," Winger writes, "it doesn't matter / what we meant." But is that right? Could it ever be?

Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1's dormant thrusters, from country road culverts to the factory floor's punch clock, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.

About Rob Winger:

ROB WINGER is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Muybridge's Horse, a Globe and Mail Best Book and CBC Literary Award winner shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Ottawa Book Award. He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the classics, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, and Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Blending formal and free verse, with materials ranging from the historical to the personal, Dr. Dubrow offers readers a candid look at the experience of watching a loved one adjust to homelife after a career of military service.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kirby and Hollay talk about community and about Kirby’s work including their most recent poetry collection, She (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) as well as Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021). Kirby also read from some of their new work.

"She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. She is joy’s pronoun!" —ERÍN MOURE, Theophylline A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro,

Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers—real and imagined—conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word “queer” for those who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O’Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman’s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.

About KIRBY:

KIRBY’s work includes Last Licks (Anstruther Press, 2024) Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021), What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020), & This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019). Their column, “The First Time” is a regular feature at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher at knife | fork | book kirbyshe.com

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.

Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.

In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic form.

About Catherine Owen:

Catherine Owen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and prose, her latest being Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024) and Locations of Grief: an emotional geography, memoirs on mourning and place she compiled and edited from 24 Canadian writers (Wolsak and Wynn, 2020.) Born and raised in Vancouver, she has lived in a 1905 house in Edmonton for six years where she hosts the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz, has run the podcast Ms Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws, writes reviews and teaches Communications at NAIT college. Most recently, Moving to Delilah has been longlisted for the Al and Eurithe Purdy Prize for most outstanding new book by an author who has published over five trade book titles. 

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. Clarke's visions of canonical and apocryphal scriptures are black in ink, but lightning in illumination. Testament II issues re-readings, revisions, rewrites of scriptures crucial to the emergent (Anglophone) African Diaspora in the Americas. Canticles II (MMXIX) and Canticles II (MMXX) follow Testament I (also issued in two parts) whose subject is History, principally, of slavery and imperialism and liberation and independence. Canticles II is properly irreverent where necessary, but never blasphemous. It is scripture become what it always is, really, anyway: Poetry.

About George Elliot Clarke:

Acclaimed for his narrative lyric suites (Whylah Falls and Execution Poems), his lyric “colouring books” (Blue, Black, Red, and Gold), his selected poems (Blues and Bliss), his opera libretti and plays (Beatrice Chancy and Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path), George Elliott Clarke now presents us with his epic-in-progress, Canticles, a work that views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection. A native Africadian, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate ranges the atlas and ransacks the library to ink lines unflinching before Atrocity and unquiet before Oppression.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, ONLY POEMS, Frontiers in Medicine and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.

­­Read Gray’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/gray-davidson-carroll/

Learn more about Gray and their work at graydavidsoncarroll.com.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming in April 2025 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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While Baby Cerberus centers fun and nostalgia with allusions to video games, internet lore, and Tamagotchis, there are still heavy themes throughout which address misogyny, racism, and colonization. The unique integration of literary topics with some of the more pop culture references will distinguish the book in the minds of readers and expand what we can ask of poetry.

More about Natasha Ramoutar:

Natasha Ramoutar is a writer of Indo-Guyanese descent from Toronto. Her debut collection of poetry Bittersweet, published in 2020 by Mawenzi House, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was the editor of FEEL WAYS, an anthology of Scarborough literature. She is a senior editor with Augur Magazine and serves on the editorial board at Wolsak & Wynn.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen's isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: "if you never owned a bone-sharp biography... / i don't want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me."

Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she's never been seen before.

Maria Zoccola is a queer Southern writer and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. Maria has worked and written for nonprofits both big and small, and from 2017-2021 managed Deep Center’s Young Author Project in Savannah, Georgia, a program embedding creative writing workshops within the Savannah–Chatham County Public School System and serving 400 young people annually.

Maria’s fiction and poetry can be found in such venues as Ploughshares, Fantasy Magazine, the Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated Best Small Fictions and Best New Poets, has been a finalist for Best of the Net, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize.

Recommended Books:

• Alice Oswald, Memorial
• Rita Dove, Motherlove
• Ellen Bryant Voigt, Kyrie



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Join us as we speak with Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom about his recent commentary, Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric (Maggid, 2024).

Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom has been a dynamic and inspiring master educator in Los Angeles since 1984. He received his semicha from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, and lectures annually at the prestigious Tanakh Study Days at Herzog College. Etshalom has also written the highly acclaimed series Between the Lines.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020), and a recent 2 volume commentary on Numbers. He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as they bring their father’s, and their own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism of Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?

About Ellen Chang-Richardson:

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Grain, third coast magazine, Vallum Contemporary, Watch Your Head and more.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, they were raised in Oakville, Ontario and São Paulo, Brazil, and spent their most formative years growing up in Shanghai, China. A third culture kid at heart, Ellen's writing is informed by their love of contemporary art, their concern with the climate crisis, and their experience moving through the world as they are.

The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, an editor for Room and long con magazine, and a member of the poetry collective VII, Ellen is currently based in Ottawa, Canada, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. You can usually find them baking sourdough bread from their starter, Bubbles, or biking the riverside trails on their single-speed.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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In the Capital City of Autumn is an absorbing collection of poems that show Bowling’s mastery of language and imagery. Now living in Edmonton, Tim spent the first thirty years of his life in the town of Ladner, BC, at the mouth of the Fraser River, where he worked in the salmon fishing industry. His love of the natural world, along with his love of language, and his experiences as a child and as a father of three children (now young adults) all reveal themselves in his unmistakably transcendent poems that trace universal themes of love, loss, and finding home.

Bowling has yet again proven himself to be one of the prominent voices in Canadian poetry with this new collection, and cemented himself further as a must-read author.

More About In the Capital City of Autumn:

Tim Bowling is in top form in his latest collection of poetry, In the Capital City of Autumn. Threading through autumnal themes such as the loss of his mother and the demolition of his childhood home, his children growing and the inevitable passage of time, Bowling writes with rich lyricism and imagery. Sweet William and loosely woven woollen mitts for his mother, the moon as “an egg in the pocket of a running thief” for time, salmon for eternity. In the Capital City of Autumn, the characters of The Great Gatsby come to life, and three a.m. brings wisdom. These are masterful poems, lightened with a touch of whimsy, poems to sink into on a quiet evening.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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From Wasauksing (Parry Island) to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection.

These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world. The collection also just won the Betsy Garland Award for hybrid genre books.

Armand Garnet Ruffo is an Anishinaabe writer from Treaty #9 territory in northern Ontario. A recipient of an Honourary Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, he is recognized as a major contributor to both Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His publications Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (2014) and Treaty # (2019) were finalists for Govenor General’s Literary Awards. He teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Interviewee: Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, writer, and translator of Yiddish literature. Taub earned a Master of Arts degree in history from Emory University and a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Queens College, City University of New York.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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The book contains a comprehensive introduction that explores the lives of Yi Illo and his contemporaries, and the political landscape at the time this collection came into being. The translation itself is richly annotated to provide context to the allusions and to explore possible meanings.

The publication is an excellent resource for readers interested in the political and social environment of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392) and for anyone with a love for poetry and prose.

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner is assistant professor of East Asian literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures, at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Ruhr University in Bochum and his main field of research is Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context.

Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.

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Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by the boys raised in the Deep South.

Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of Altars of Spine and Fraction: Poems (Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books, 2024) and two poetry chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) and Cocodrie Elegy (2024). You can find his work in places like The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, and Missouri Review among others. He holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can find him on Instagram @nicholasmolbert and online at nicholasmolbert.com.

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Dr Naomi Cammayo’s academic/literary interests are within the fields of poetry, Philippine Studies, lesbian feminism and queer feminism. She is currently a tutor at the University of Sydney’s School of Art, Communication and English and the School of Languages and Cultures.

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This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.

Instagram: @ichristian3030

Twitter: @ichristian3030

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The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran (Columbia UP, 2024) explores the world of Seigan and Kōran, pairing an in-depth account of their lives and times with an inviting selection of their poetry. The book features eminent Sinologist Jonathan Chaves’s translations of more than 130 poems by Seigan and more than 50 by Kōran, each annotated and followed by the original Chinese text. An introduction by Matthew Fraleigh, a specialist in Japan’s Sinitic literature, offers insight into the historical and literary context as well as the poems themselves. Approachable and delightful, this book makes the riches of Japanese Sinitic poetry available to a range of readers.

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Kendra Sullivan is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and coleads the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the co-editorial director of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Kendra makes public art addressing waterfront access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on art, ecology, and engagement widely. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, a collective of artists, activists, and boatbuilders. Her work has been supported by grants, awards, and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Waverley Street Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Montello Foundation, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the T.S. Eliot House, among many others. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos.

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For a better understanding of this collection and the author, the following books are recommended by translator Dr. Jon Pitt:

• Hiromi Ito - Wild Grass on the Riverbank
• Hiromi Ito - The Thorn Puller
• Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
• Hope Jahren - Lab Girl
• Jeanie Shinozuka - Biotic Borders
• Banu Subrahmaniam - Ghost Stories for Darwin

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Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University. He has produced numerous books that have shaped the emerging field of the blue humanities, including Shipwreck Modernity; At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean; the Bloomsbury Objects entry Ocean; and the recent An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. He has published a chapbook of poetry, Swim Poems. His Bookfish blog is also a wonderful index for scholarly and creative work happening right now. Today, I am excited to discuss his most recent book of blue poetry, Sailing Without Ahab, just published by Fordham University Press in 2024.

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In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way.

The poets talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?”

"I feel the feathers softly gather upon

My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings.

Melodious bird I'll fly above the moaning

Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus,

I'll coast along above the coast of Sidra

And over the fabled far north Hyperborean steppes."

-- from "To Maecenas", The Odes of Horace, II: 20.

Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us.

David Ferry, “Resemblance”

Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die.

Henry Justice Ford, ‘Grendel’s Mother Drags Beowulf to the Bottom Of The Lake’, 1899

So furious. So furious, I was,

When my son called to me, called me out

Of heaven to come to the crag and corner store

Where it was that he was dying, “Mama,

I can’t breathe;” even now I hear it—

Roger Reeves, “Grendel’s Mother”

Mentioned in this episode

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press
• Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press
• Horace, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux
• Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press
• Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian, W.W. Norton Press
• Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press

Read transcript of the episode here.

Listen to the episode here.

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From re-definition to re-calibration, the poems in Quarantine Highway are artifacts to the early and mid-days of the pandemic. Though not specifically labeled as "Covid poems," they strike to the heart of the universal yet individual struggles of solitude, confinement, justice, isolation and, ultimately, self-reckoning. The poems push and pull between the constantly knocking global news cycle to the stillness of a surreal inner world.

Find more of Millicent's writings here.

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Born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, Karen Rigby now lives and writes in Arizona. Her latest poetry book, Fabulosa, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2024. Her debut poetry book, Chinoiserie, was selected by Paul Hoover for a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize.Karen’s work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. She is a 2023 recipient of an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her poetry is published in journals such as The London Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Oxonian Review, and Australian Book Review. She is a freelance book reviewer and lives in Arizona.

Preorder Fabulosa here.

You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Exploding Head (Persea Books, 2024), Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones (Persea Books, 2018), Paper Doll Fetus (Persea Books, 2014), and Sightseer (Persea Books, 2011). Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Lake Effect, Blackbird, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

To pre-order Exploding Head here. Find Hoffman's writing here.

You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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All non-English text and quotes are translated, with the original languages given alongside the translation or in the endnotes.

Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary.

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I Am Your Father includes the English language poems as translated by the American poet Michael R. Burch.

Adi Wolfson is a poet, environmental activist, expert on sustainability and a professor of chemical engineering. His poems have been published in a number of Hebrew literary journals and anthologies, and have been translated into several languages. He has published six poetry books in Hebrew, a nonfiction book on sustainability in both Hebrew and English, and have won several awards, including the Levi Eshkol Prime Minister’s Prize for Creative Work in 2017, one of Israel’s most prestigious literature prizes.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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With a delicate line, in a series of drawings, in a narrative that straddles poetry and prose, he wrote and echoed the construction of his own family nest, its dismantling, and the departure of the children from the home, while reflecting deeply on the dynamics between the pair of birds.

He Could See a Bird Outside if He Looked Through His Window (In Hebrew; Persimmon Books, 2023) is a lyrical and tranquil book about partnership, parenthood, and children. About the changing seasons of nature and the soul, a parable of pain and optimism.

A story that bridges art and poetry about the intimate space of each and every one of us. A beautifully crafted book that is both inspirational and a gift.

Ran Oron was a helicopter navigator prior to studying architecture at the Cooper Union. In 1996 he founded ROART, an architecture studio in New York City. For two decades he was a design professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. An Israeli born architect and artist Mr Oron exhibited and lectured around the world.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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The Archive Is All in Present Tense is an intensely cinematic collection of poems, intensely erotic and equally cerebral, where you will descend into archival folds making the body negative space in a restless, inescapable, eternal now. To write is to rewrite with alphabets of the past, surging into the present, being remade, where the self is both trapped and sublime.

Elizabeth Hoover is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, and StoryQuarterly. She teaches in the English Department at Webster University in St. Louis.

You can learn more about Elizabeth's work here. 

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The English translations presented in Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Academic Studies Press, 2022) are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.

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Ten years after his death, we continue to strain with Heaney to hear that pluralizing voice of radiant truth. “Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives” is the subject of an upcoming conference held at Boston College between November 16th, 17th, and 18th, 2023. The four keynote lectures, along with interviews with contemporary poets influenced by Heaney, have been published in the latest issue of the Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. I am excited to speak with the organizer of this conference, Joseph Nugent, and the co-editor of Éire-Ireland, Vera Kreilkamp, about Heaney’s continuing relevance, the conference, the special issue of the journal.

Joseph Nugent is Professor of English at Boston College. Joe is the creator of the iPhone app, JoyceWays: Ulysses for You, and the website, The Dubliners Bookshelf. His teaching includes courses on the digital humanities, Joyce, and Irish studies, and he has written the eBook Digital Dubliners, as well as articles on manliness and representations of the Irish saint Colmcill and olfactory domestic identity in rural Ireland.

Vera Kreilkamp is Professor of Irish Studies at Boston College. Vera is the co-editor of Éire-Ireland, and is the author of The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse University Press, 1998) and the museum catalogs Éireland (2003), Rural Ireland: The Inside Story (2012) and The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish (2016).

Note: Around the 28-minute mark, I quote from Fintan O’Toole’s commemoration of Seamus Heaney, originally published in the New York Review of Books, but the quotation did not record clearly. Here are the uncorrupted lines from O’Toole’s article: “Poetry is language held taut by being stretched between the poles of competing desires. In Heaney’s work, the tensions extend in many directions: the Wordsworthian Romantic at odds with the Joycean realist; the atheist in search of the miraculous; the world-ranging cosmopolitan with his little patch of remembered earth; the lover of the archaic who cannot escape the urgency of contemporary history.”

John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Fool in a Blue House (U Tampa Press, 2023) crafts carefully appointed rooms, both interior and exterior, alongside familial and romantic love, loss and near loss of beloveds, selves, and even neighborhood rabbits. Dwelling in contradictions-strength and fragility, humor and heartbreak, safety and threat-this book ponders impossibilities as solutions to its own predicaments, "Perhaps it would be easier to write in a chorus." But these poems know that this is not the cure. These impossibilities are simply "a whole herring" dropped down a throat, a momentary pause before we dare "to defy what the sky tells us" and instead begin to tell "ourselves that we can will the sky to give."

You can find out more about Katherine here. You can find her chapbook Once Read as Ruin here. You can follow Katherine on Instagram and on Twitter.

You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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This interview focuses on Once You're Inside as well as Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery. Crash is the story of Helen Dempsey and her daughter Ann who both fall victim to the same regimen of overmedication at the hands of the mental health system. Helen struggles with intractable depression and initially turns to self-medication with alcohol, but finds herself unable to recover despite numerous drugs, hospitalizations, and electroconvulsive therapy. Ann vows to build a different life for herself, but eventually descends into the pain of a mysterious migraine and intractable darkness lasting for many years. She was severely overmedicated with opioids and psychiatric drugs and then Methadone, DHE-45 injections, Migrant nasal spray (for headaches) and injecribele Demerol (for really bad days) once she was off opiates. To keep her out of depression (maintenance), she was prescribed Wellbutrin, Elavil, Topamax, and Valium; Ann crashes her car twice. It took her 4 months of energy healing to discontinue the pain meds and two years later, about a year to get off of psych drugs. Because traditional medical treatments have failed her, she challenges her doctors' advice and discovers ways to heal the source of her physical and emotional pain without drugs. The question of why her mother never got well continues to haunt her long after her mother's death until she finds the missing puzzle pieces she'd searched for all her life stashed in a dusty box in her sister's attic.

You can find more about Ann as well as her books and other writings here. 

You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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Christopher Spaide is the N.E.H. Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of English at Harvard University and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He was a 2022–2023 writer in residence at the James Merrill House, and he currently reviews for the Poetry Foundation at Harriet Books.

­­Read Chris’s poems “Closure?” and “The Yoke’s on Us” in The Common here.

Follow Chris on Twitter @cspaide and learn more about him at christopherspaide.com.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a Preceptor in Ukrainian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. 

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In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Hirshfield to talk about the questions she’s been asking recently, why she views poetry as an antidote to despair, and how Zen rituals have informed her creative process. Plus, she reads a few poems from her new collection.

Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

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Grieving her faith, her love, and her identity, twenty-one-year-old Scarlett V. Leonelli is devastated by an unexpected tragedy--one threatening to unravel her to her very core. Following a series of inexplicable synchronicities, Scarlett journeys deep into the jungle of a hidden village in Costa Rica where, far beyond the only reality she has ever known, she is forced to trust the path as it appears beneath her feet. Led by the sacred invitations in riddles of mysterious guides, romantic rendezvous, and enticing adventures, Scarlett falls into the belly of the Beast itself. Will Scarlett give in or choose to alchemize one of humanity's inevitable tragedies? The Alchemy of The Beast is the first installation of The Lionheart Chronicles, a series inspired by author Alyssa Noelle Coelho's own truth-seeking journey. Drawing upon her training in sociocultural anthropology and her own experiences as a Traveler, wrestling with the meaning of existence, love, connection, and contribution, Alyssa shines a light on the raw truths of the human condition and showcases the beauty of cultures worldwide.

After sharing her first journey back to love in her 2016 #1 bestselling poetry compilation, CHOSEN, Death's breath sent twenty-one-year-old Alyssa Noelle Coelho on her first meaning-seeking mission around the world. Through her sociocultural anthropology training at UCSD and many seasons of disconnection with her soul and source, Alyssa unearthed some deeper truths behind the human experience and learned to alchemize her own tragedies into a greater sense of meaning and adventure.

A poet and novelist, dancer and world traveler, she has been passionately immersing herself in cultures worldwide, studying their traditions and transformations through the lens of meaning and purpose for years. A lover of novelty and a delighter in the extraordinary, Alyssa uses the power of words and stories to romance humans into falling in love with their precious existence. She reminds us of our wild potential, of our hungry spirits, and of the entire world awaiting our unique gifts.

As the Founder of Lionheart Creations, and Co-Founder and Lead Designer at Saved By Story Publishing, she serves messengers and enterprises on a mission to facilitate positive change in the world. She co-hosts the savory, storytelling madness of Sips of Story 'n Sanity podcast, showcasing the journeys of other Seekers and Creators from around the world.

You can learn more about Alyssa's work here, as well as Instagram and Facebook. 

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Amy Berkowitz is the author of Gravitas (Éditions du Noroît / Total Joy, 2023) and Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019). She lives in San Francisco, where she co-hosts the Light Jacket Reading Series. She's working on a novel that she likes to call Untitled Bisexual Jumpsuits Project.

Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press.

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In this conversation, Dong and Anna discuss landscape and memory, family and history, and poetry as a medium for storytelling and as a language all its own.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His poems have been published by Conjunctions, Fence, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. He has served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in creative writing at Colgate University and is a recipient of fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, March 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press.

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Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.

At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her. 

In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (FSG, 2023) – a joint exercise in history and literary criticism, Dr. David Waldstreicher writes that Wheatley is “Homer and Odysseus and the slaves and the women they knew or imagined. She aimed for the universal without forgetting who was suffering most and why.” Reading Wheatley’s poetry in historical context reveals the extent to which the American Revolution both strengthened and limited black slavery – and also how Wheatley herself affected the debates about American slavery and independence.

Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, Wheatley composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, and praised warriors. Despite her skill, knowledge, and fame, she often had to write indirectly about subjects that mattered deeply to her – race, slavery, and discontent with British rule. During a period in which writing was central to political conversation, she used her verse to lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. As Waldstreicher demonstrates, Wheatley wrote about events and people – turning what was available and acceptable for a person in her position into poetry that could be read for its art – but also subversively for its political ideas. He concludes that her work proves that the story of the American revolution and Phillis Wheatley are inextricably joined – and that story is one of “resilience and creativity, of antislavery and antiracist possibilities, and of backlash and loss, dreams dashed and deferred.” 

Dr. David Waldstreicher is distinguished professor of history, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include U.S. cultural and political history, colonial and early US, African American history, slaver, and antislavery. He is the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang) and Runaway American: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). His public facing writing includes contributions to The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, and The Atlantic.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Today’s guest is Hollis Robbins, the author of Forms of Contention, published with the University of Georgia Press in 2020. Hollis is the Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah. Previously, she served as Dean of Arts and Humanities at Sonoma State University, Professor of Humanities at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of English at Millsaps College. Hollis is also the co-editor of a number of field-defining books including The Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers (Penguin, 2017); The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton, 2006); and the Works of William Wells Brown (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Forms of Contention tests the premise that a literary form such as the sonnet can both offer opportunities for reimagining society and politics and pose perils of constraint. This book captures the complexity and longevity of a vibrant tradition of Black poets taking up the sonnet form to explore race, liberation, enslavement, solidarity, and abolitionism. It also invites us to find new directions for the intersection of literary formalism and African American cultural studies.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Another unique aspect of this already rare friendship is that they shared a therapist - one who was so beloved that, when she had a stroke and had to close her practice, both Peacock and Levin felt bereft like they'd lost a mother. In a fascinating role reversal, Peacock cared for her therapist after her stroke, and wrote magnificently about the experience and their years-long relationship prior to Joan's stroke in The Analyst (W. W. Nortton and Company, 2017). 

Peacock is a poet, biographer, and memoirist whose literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others, from poetry to prose and back again to poetry. In A Friend Sails in on a Poem she describes her decades-long friendship with distinguished poet Phillis Levin, quoting their poetry and outlining her personal rules for poetic form. In addition to The Analyst, Peacock's poetry collections include Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems from Biblioasis and W.W. Norton and Company. She is the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Malahat Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and Plume and are anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has written two books about creativity in the lives of women artists: The Paper Garden and Flower Diary. Peacock teaches online for the Unterberg Poetry Center at 92NY.

You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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A new collection of prose poetry, Bone Country (Cornerstone Press), was published in 2023 after being honored as a finalist in several national competitions. Recently, she was invited to read an award-winning selection from Bone Country at the West Cork Literary Festival in Ireland. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003-2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College. You can find out more here.

Nemec Foster's collection of prose poems is a reflection of the world before COVID. All of the pieces are inspired by other parts of the world-Istanbul, Rome, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Seville-not the familiar landscape of the United States. But, the narrator is definitely not a native of these countries; they are "the other," "the foreigner," the American with a distinct Midwest sensibility who is trying to make sense of a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe - the world as we used to know it.

You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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Matt Donovan is the author of three collections of poetry, and a book of lyric essays. His latest collection, The Dug-Up Gun Museum, came out last year from BOA Editions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He serves as director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

­­Read Matt’s poems in The Common here. 

Read more from Matt here.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow.

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Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi—and occasionally Naomi’s responses, as filtered through the speaker’s retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker’s personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences.

As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes—a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance.

Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a 2015 National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared, or will soon, at Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the Believer, and elsewhere. She is the series editor, since 2016, of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and serves as assistant poetry editor and reviews editor for AGNI. With Ruth Awad, she edited the anthology The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry for Sundress Publications.

Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press.

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DeBelli's latest collection New Wilderness takes readers through the nuances of raising a mentally ill child whose young adult brain cancer experiences transport this daughter and mother into an uncharted wilderness. With little more than a demagnetized compass and crayon-drawn treasure map, the daughter travels deeper into wastelands. Four states away, her mom charts a new topography to smuggle her back to civilization. The poems in this collection build on a triangulated path that moves between life before, during, and after cancer. Despite compounding loss, disappointment, and destruction, Jenifer DeBellis's versified narratives reveal that paths forged with love can lead even the wildest creatures out of bewildering terrain.

You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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Maldonado will be the organization’s first Latino leader and intends to highlight, among other things, the linguistic diversity of American poetry today. Prior to assuming his role at the Academy of American Poets, he co-directed the poetry center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where Ulrich Baer, one of our co-hosts, also teaches courses on poetry and literature. Follow Ricky on Twitter.

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. He is also the host of the podcast “Think About It” and editorial director at Warbler Press. Twitter: @UliBaer; Instagram. Caroline Weber is a specialist of French literature, history, and culture. She is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City. Twitter: @CorklinedRoom. Instagram.

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In Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes, poet and novelist Michele Herman explores a variety of timeless human predicaments - adolescent lust, overprotective parents, dementia, gender confusion and more - by imagining her way into the actual lives of eight familiar nursery-rhyme characters. Many authors have taken fictional or mythological characters and brought them into our contemporary world, but these eight story-poems accomplish something more unusual by roaming around in Mr. and Mrs. Sprat's house to find out what ails them, following little Bo Beep out to the Welsh pasture to learn how she lost track of her sheep, conjuring up a twin brother for Little Miss Muffet, and much more.

Save The Village features Herman's beloved home village, which feels itself like a character as alive as any other we meet in this novel as sprawling as it is particular. Life hasn’t turned out quite the way Becca Cammeyer of Greenwich Village – once voted most likely to land on Broadway or in jail for a good cause – had planned. Her only child has moved to another continent, she’s still living in a fifth-floor walkup with her aging dog, still single, still nearly broke, still not on speaking terms with her best friend or mother, and still hearing the ghost of her long-dead father whispering in her ear. But she’s a semi-famous tour guide, and on a perfect October evening, Becca almost believes all is well with her world as she helps a group of South Carolinian tourists fall in love with her beloved Village. The tour concludes, and Becca sends the women on their way, unaware that her world is about to be upended. In the aftermath of a tragedy, Becca must come to terms with her own paralysis, her survivor’s guilt, and the messiness of her life. She embarks on wildly improbable reconciliations and new relationships. At once a love story about Greenwich Village and a reflection on a changing world, Save the Village reveals how when a community comes together, everyone wins. You can find Save The Village at Regal House Press and at Amazon.

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Mag Gabbert has received a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review Daily, Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Methodist University.

Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press.

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Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Naming the Ghost, Hockaday's first full-length collection, is a strikingly unique collection of poems that take on the grief of losing a parent just as the author becomes one herself during the time between onset of her chronic symptoms and a diagnosis that she was convinced, all evidence be damned, was fatal. Written during what the author herself calls her nervous breakdown, Naming the Ghost gives the reader a voicey visceral, encapsulating experience of the anxiety, disorientation and kind of fear of the tempts one to do reckless things that comprise the no-man's land between knowing something's wrong but not yet knowing its name. You can find Naming The Ghost on Cornerstone Press's store and on Amazon.

You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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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.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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Janine Beichman’s skilled and deeply sympathetic translations of Ishigaki's poems in This Overflowing Light (Isobar Press, 2022) capture Ishigaki's breadth and depths in English, from the early postwar political poems and cries for freedom from family ties all the way to the late poems in which she contemplates her own death. ‘How else,’ she asked, ‘could you write poetry except from your own life?’

Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience.

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The poems in In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) 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.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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Bourbeau’s latest collection Monarch (Cornerstone Press, 2022) is a vivid memoir in poem-collection form, bringing forgotten people and events that shaped California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington from time immemorial to the present. Through her record-keeping and research, Bourbeau, an experienced journalist as well as poet, creates a regional history that counteracts the simple narratives we are told and taught. Combined with a 21-page bibliography and teaching guide, Bourbeau's Monarch invites us to move through the places we call home, particularly if they are in one of the four states featured, with more care and awareness of the past we may be erasing and the kind of future we'll create if we remaining in unknowing.

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Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 202) is a remarkable poetry collection, which won the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award (gold, poetry category), aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Testimony finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. The use of innovative literary techniques, along with the author's own experience around the Special Court for Sierra Leone, works to share the voices of survivors of this violence across the world. A heartbreaking and ambitious book, Testimony will be of great interest to human rights, legal, and literary scholars alike.

Testimony also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and situating of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable, and for thinking about the intersections between poetry, human rights, and history.

Dr. Stephanie Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. She holds an MFA from The New School and is completing a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. Prior to becoming a literary scholar, she was the psychologist for the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone (2005-2007) and a psychologist/trainer for CVT (an NGO that focuses on survivors of politically motivated torture), first in Guinea and later in Jordan.

Dr. Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum Tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support.

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For Artifice is as much riddle as revelation, stirring delight and discomfort as it delves into the nature of aesthetics and the creative process. How are works made and how do they make us, in turn? What worlds can be built from words? This book dwells in possibility, presenting an ambiguous space for contemplation, connection and, ideally, hope.

Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring--one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country."

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Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.

Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?

Mentioned in the episode:

• Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here)
• Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“
• Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
• Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
• Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris
• Brian Teare, Doomstead Days
• Derek Walcott, “Omeros“
• W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs”
• Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“
• Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
• Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides)
• Trixie Belden
• Shel Silverstein
• Lois Lowry, “The Giver“
• Liz equates poetry and Tetris
• Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“
• Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“

Listen and Read Here:

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With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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Firestones

I was collecting rocks on the Cardiff coast,

a testimony to centuries of silt

left on the shore, of sediment pressed into stone:

sandstone, shale, tufa, travertine, jasper, flint.

There was the stone that knew the sadness of the sea,

that saved its secrets. It was pock-marked with holes

and lay half-buried in sand eager to save

the ocean's spray, like tears, in its miniature pools.

There was the stone that always rolled in place.

It had rolled round and round with each wave,

desperately trying to control the tide.

The was the stone that shoe rings upon rings

placed by the seas over the years,

that kept time for the Pacific.

There were stones that breathed sulfur,

that sparked when they touched.

Unremarkable in luster or shine, they

were the lovers of the ocean, firestones

whose sparks were not dampened by salty waves

(but they only made sense in pairs).

And there was this one, more white,

more brilliant, more polished than any stone.

But it was once upon a shell;

it needed centuries to become stone.

It was a counterfeit firestone:

it did not breathe sulfur, it could not make sparks.

I traced my steps back along the Cardiff coast

and the stones I returned to the sands.

The ocean's secrets would be well-kept by the stones:

its tears would be stored in pools,

its tides kept in check,

its years measured in rungs.

But love itself I could not leave on the beach.

I kept the firestones.

Discussing this poem with Sassan, we touched on Scholar's stones came up and also Gerard Manley Hopkins's journals full of words/names.

From here we moved to other poems and poems and Sassan's work in different languages (Persian, English), poetic traditions (haiku, Sufi poetry, ghazal) and activities (writing, translation, teaching). His dissertation on Persian poet Rudaki is mentioned. His "messy" practice across these many boundaries expresses a kind of playful profusion, ultimately rooted in sound, word, and the music of the lines.

*Qazal*

As a boy, I waited for the smile to appear in you.

Listened for echoes of the sigh I could hear in you.

You are the mirror where I have sought the beloved:

Her hyacinth curls, a nod, a wink. a tear, in you.

In the marketplace you can learn your future for a price.

They are merchants of fate; I see the seer in you.

What had been buried under the scriupture's weight,

Its truth, without words or incense, becomes clear in you.

They who bind you on the altar of sacrifice

Hide behind masks; don’t let them smell the fear in you.

As I approach the house lit by dawn's blue light,

Step by step, I lose myself, I disappear in you.

We closed out our talk with a reading of Sassan's translation of David Ferry's "Resemblance" (also featured in episode 55), with the Persian and English stanzas alternating.

Sassan's book Ferry to Malta will be out in April, and you can hear him read and discuss his work April 27th at Brookline Booksmith.

Read the transcript here

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Botanical Poetics, a wide-ranging study of print culture around poetry between the years 1568 and 1583, investigates the intersection of literary history and horticultural practice. The book includes new interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Romeo and Juliet, as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundred Sundry Flowers and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay. Botanical Poetics offers a variety of fresh concepts for the study of early modern poetry such as “the ecology of small forms” and “slippery poetics.” Not least of all, this book explores what it meant to “read like a pig” in the 1570s.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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In Veronica Franco in Dialogue (U Toronto Press, 2022), Marilyn Migiel provides a nuanced account of Franco’s rhetorical strategies through a close analysis of her literary work. Focusing on the first fourteen poems in the Terze rime, a collection of Franco’s poems published in 1575, Migiel looks specifically at back-and-forth exchanges between Franco and an unknown male author. Migiel argues that in order to better understand what Franco is doing in the poetic collection, it is essential to understand how she constructs her identity as author, lover, and sex worker in relation to this unknown male author.

Veronica Franco in Dialogue accounts for the moments of ambivalence, uncertainty, and indirectness in Franco’s poetry, as well as the polemicism and assertions of triumph. In doing so, it asks readers to consider their ideological investments in the stories we tell about early modern female authors and their cultural production.

Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu.

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Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007).

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In July 1882, Ellen O'Hara stepped off a ship from the West of Ireland to begin a new life in New York. What she encountered was a world of casual racial prejudice that characterized her as ignorant, dirty, and feckless, the butt of many jokes. From the slim range of jobs available to her she, like, many of her kind, found a position as a domestic servant, working long hours and living in to save on rent and keep. After an unfortunate marriage, Ellen determined to win financial security on her own, and eventually opened a boarding house where her two children were able to rejoin her.

Vona Groarke builds this story from historical fact, drawing from various archives for evidence of Ellen. However, she also considers why lives such as Ellen's seem to leave such a light trace in such records and fills in the gaps with memory and empathetic projection. Ellen--scrappy, skeptical, and straight-talking--is the heroine of Hereafter, whose resilience animates the story and whose voice shines through with vivid clarity. Hereafter is both a compelling account of an incredible figure and a reflection on how one woman's story can speak for more than one life.

Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.

Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

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In Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin (Brill, 2022), Kobi Peled, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes a corpus of poetry collected among the Bedouin of the Negev Desert over the past 100 years for themes of political resistance, dissidence, and reactions to the political changes facing the Negev Bedouin. The poems reveal how the Negev Bedouin responded to and perceived changes in state authority and rule from the late Ottoman period to the contemporary state of Israel. Peled argues that in addition to being a creative and artistic mode of expression, poetry and a close reading of Bedouin poetry can serve as a lens onto Bedouin worldviews, sentiments, and reactions to and participation in processes political formations and state-building undergone in the Negev region during the 20th century.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007). In her dissertation on Richard Brautigan, she focuses on postmodernism in American literature. Currently, she is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian program at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY).

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From its famous opening, "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land," to its closing Sanskrit mantra, "Shantih shantih shantih," The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new." What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot's storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the "men of 1914."

Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century's most influential poem.

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Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail (UP of Kansas, 2021) is Daldorph’s record of teaching at the jail for the two decades between 2001 and 2020, showing how the lives of everyone involved in the class—but especially the inmates who came to class week after week—benefited from what happened every Thursday afternoon in that jail classroom, where for two hours inmates and instructor became a circle of ink and blood, writing together, reciting their poems, telling stories, and having a few good laughs.

Words Is a Powerful Thing brings into the light the works of fifty talented inmate writers whose work deserves attention. Their poetry speaks of “what really matters” to all of us and gives the reader sustained insight into the role that creativity plays in aiding survival and bringing positive change for inmates, and, in turn, for all of us. Daldorph’s account of his teaching experience not only takes the reader inside the daily life at a county jail but also sets the work done in the writing class within the larger context of inmate education in the US corrections system, where education is often one of the few lifelines available to inmates. Words Is a Powerful Thing provides a teaching guide for instructors working with incarcerated writers, offering an extensive examination of both the challenges and benefits.

When Brian Daldorph decided the story of his classroom experiences and the great writing produced by the inmates deserved to be told to wider audiences, he struggled with how to bring it all together. Not long after, an inmate wrote a poem titled “Words Is a Powerful Thing,” offering Daldorph a title, concept, and purpose: to show that the poetry of inmates speaks not just to other inmates but to all of us.

Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Centro de Educación Superior de Enseñanza e Investigación Educativa (CEIE).

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Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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The poem ‘Chirag-e-Dair’ or Temple Lamp is an eloquent and vibrant Persian masnavi by Mirza Ghalib. While we quote liberally from his Urdu poetry, we know little of his writings in Persian, and while we read of his love for the city of Delhi, we discover in temple Lamp, his rapture over the spiritual and sensual city of Banaras.

Chiragh-e-Dair is being translated directly from Persian into English in its entirety for the first time, with a critical Introduction by Maaz Bin Bilal. It is Mirza Ghalib’s pean to Kashi, which he calls Kaaba-e-Hindostan or the Mecca of India.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter.

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Ellen Doré Watson’s fifth full-length collection is pray me stay eager. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and The New Yorker. She has translated a dozen books from Brazilian Portuguese, including the work of Adelia Prado. Watson served as poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review and director of the Poetry Center at Smith College for decades, and currently offers manuscript editing and workshops online.

­­Read Ellen’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/ellen-dore-watson.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualizing his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily Jane O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes in Istanbul. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi’s classic work.

At the heart of Rumi’s mystical poetry is the “religion of love” which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gift of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way.

Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino.

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Jane Satterfield’s most recent book is Apocalypse Mix, which was awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by David St. John. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. New poetry and essays appear in DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Orion, Literary Matters, The Missouri Review, The Pinch, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.

­­Read Jane’s poems and other writing in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/Jane-Satterfield.

Read more from Jane at janesatterfield.org.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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In my grandfather’s last days

He wandered the rice fields alone.

What was left of his mind bringing him back

to what he spent his entire life building.

We are the land—lupa ay buhay, land is living.

When my father talks of his poverty, he presents

a bowl of rice and says, ‘Your Inang

would put one piece of fish on the table,

and we would press our fingers

against it for flavor.’ Mimicking his hand

scooping rice out of the bowl.

— fragment from “The Low Lands”

Bayani’s recommended poets and artists from the podcast: Microchips for Millions by Janice Sapigao, This is for the Mostless by Jason Magabo Perez, Souvenir by Aimee Suzara, Circa 91 by Ruby Ibarra, Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay, Insurrecto by Gina Apostol, and Anak Ko by Jay Som.

Jason Bayani is an MFA graduate from Saint Mary's College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the artistic director for the Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country. His publishing credits include World Literature Today, Muzzle Magazine, and Lantern Review, among others. Jason performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show "Locus of Control" in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin.

You can join New Books in Poetry in a discussion of this episode on Shuffle by joining here.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and the Horror Writers Association. Learn more at:www.andreablythe.com

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Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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Why Patti Smith Matters (University of Texas Press, 2022) is the first book about the iconic artist written by a woman. The veteran music journalist Caryn Rose contextualizes Smith’s creative work, her influence, and her wide-ranging and still-evolving impact on rock and roll, visual art, and the written word. Rose goes deep into Smith’s oeuvre, from her first album, Horses, to acclaimed memoirs operating at a surprising remove from her music. The portrait of a ceaseless inventor, Why Patti Smith Matters rescues punk’s poet laureate from “strong woman” clichés. Of course Smith is strong. She is also a nuanced thinker. A maker of beautiful and challenging things. A transformative artist who has not simply entertained but also empowered millions.

Caryn Rose can be found on Twitter and you can read her work in her newsletter. 

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Mark Kyungsoo Bias is the recipient of the 2022 Joseph Langland Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the 2020 William Matthews Poetry Prize. A semi-finalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize, he has been offered support from Bread Loaf, Kundiman, and Tin House. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has work published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Common, PANK, Poets.org, and Washington Square Review, among other journals.

­­Read Mark’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/mark-kyungsoo-bias/

Read more from Mark at markkyungsoobias.com, or follow him on Twitter at @mk_bias.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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In Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (Harvard UP, 2021), esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Whitman broke from past literature that he saw as “feudal”: obsessed with the noble and great. He wanted instead to celebrate the common and everyday. Song of Myself does this, setting the terms for democratic identity and culture in America. The work captures the drama of becoming an egalitarian individual, as the poet ascends to knowledge and happiness by confronting and overcoming the major obstacles to democratic selfhood. In the course of his journey, the poet addresses God and Jesus, body and soul, the love of kings, the fear of the poor, and the fear of death. The poet’s consciousness enlarges; he can see more, comprehend more, and he has more to teach.

In Edmundson’s account, Whitman’s great poem does not end with its last line. Seven years after the poem was published, Whitman went to work in hospitals, where he attended to the Civil War’s wounded, sick, and dying. He thus became in life the democratic individual he had prophesied in art. Even now, that prophecy gives us words, thoughts, and feelings to feed the democratic spirit of self 

Jonathan Najarian is Lecturer of Rhetoric in the College of General Studies at Boston University. He is the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, Culture, a collection of essays exploring the connections between avant-garde art and comics. He is also at work on a biography of the visual artist Lynd Ward, titled The Many Lives of Lynd Ward. He can be reached at joncn@bu.edu.

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The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way.

In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?”

Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die.

Mentioned in this episode

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press
• Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press
• Roger Reeves, Error! Hyperlink reference not valid., Copper Canyon Press
• Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric , Harvard University Press.

Read transcript of the episode here.

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In Synaptic (University of Regina Press, 2022) each section explores key themes in science, neurology, and perception. The first, Connectomics, riffs on scientific language to work with and against that language’s intentions. Attempting to map the brain’s neural connections, it raises fundamental questions about interiority and the self. The lyric considerations in these poems are juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes which, in turn, invoke questions undermining authority and power. The second section, Other Disasters, explores ways of seeing or and being seen, from considerations of folklore to modern art to daily life.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

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Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991 situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.

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Across fifty-one bewildering poems, Kim both engages and confuses readers with puns, distorted retellings of American popular culture, dystopian landscapes, robots, and more, all to a relentlessly queer backdrop of longing and sexual desire. Tune in to hear Suhyun and Archana read some of their favorite translations from this collection, talk about their own journeys to translation and translating Glory Hole, and share the challenges and joys of bringing this work into the English language: the Korean wordplay that they reimagine in English; their collaborative process of making sense of these poems in both Korean and English; some favorite (and most frustrating) parts of the translation process, and more!

Suhyun J. Ahn is a Korean-English translator who is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

Archana Madhavan is a Korean-English translator who works a day job in tech.

Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City.

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He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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From that ordinary beginning, the poems explore the many features of New York City--its people, its streets, its highways, and its neighborhoods--all delivered through the impressions of an Uber driver. Like Walt Whitman, whose poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” turned a short boat ride into a meditation on life, death and eternity, Sean’s poetry starts in everyday experiences and grasps large realms of significance.

Sean, now a former Uber driver, holds an MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of two other books of poetry: Discography, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Honey and Smoke---which the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa said was “made of life’s raw lyrical energy, where jazz becomes a spiritual compass.”

Sean now works helping people write poetry and academic prose at seansingerpoetry.com.

Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, where he served on Sean’s dissertation committee. He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York (Cornell, paperback, 2019) and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia, 2019). He can be reached at rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.

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Romeo Oriogun is the author of the 2020 poetry collection Sacrament of Bodies. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, he has received fellowships and support from the Ebedi International Writers Residency, Harvard University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, and the IIE Artist Protection Fund. An alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Ames, where he is a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University.

Read Romeo’s poetry in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/romeo-oriogun.

Hear more from Romeo in this interview with Arrowsmith Press on YouTube.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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In this interview, Doctor discusses her process and craft in the context of her personal journey and her work as a psychotherapist. She shares some poetry from her new collection and discusses the power of storytelling when it comes to reckoning with the past, healing, and moving forward. Her work is both deeply personal and incredibly resonant for all of us living in these challenging times. Find our more about Ms. Doctor at https://farzanadoctor.com/.

Jori Krulder is an English teacher in rural Northern California where she writes frequently about engaging students in the study of what it means to be human - literature. She can be found sharing lessons and ideas with the brilliant, generous community of writers and educators on Twitter at @jorikrulder.

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Sigal's poetry book, Machluta (Mixture in Arabic), deals with daily life in Haifa, a city that contains Jews and Arabs together. The dilemmas of a mother whose child has to enlist in military service, about love and sexuality, and more. Sigal's poetry does not allow us to ignore the nuances of life and allows us, readers and listeners, to meet them face to face.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com.

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Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine. The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects—and tallies—the poet’s predilection for similes. He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry.

An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today.

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Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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Wyeth’s clever and thought-provoking book of poetry—the title itself a reference to the message that appears in internet browser’s address bar to indicate an empty web page—meditates on what it means to be a writer in an ever-changing world and touches on philosophical questions surrounding identity, selfhood, and the absurdity of existence. 

B ridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library and is the Literature Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bridgetrenglis2

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The Sickness, a disease with unknown origins, is killing white children in the antebellum South, but Perpetua, a Black enslaved woman, is facing something much more devastating: Her daughter Meenie is missing. What she finds in her search for her child will change her life forever.

By fusing the past and present with the power of prose and poetry, Leslie T. Grover poignantly explores the ripple effect of history and the nature of love and family and the ties that bind.

Leslie T. Grover is a Black History writer and community scholar-activist. She is the founder of a small nonprofit, Assisi House, Inc., which uses the power of story to build the capacity of vulnerable communities. Her work in Narrative Medicine, social justice, and Black History has inspired this book. A native of Charleston, Mississippi, she is an unapologetic Black Southern woman, and this extends itself into her writing. Leslie’s work, which focuses on Black women characters, seeks to reveal the past in a way that honors art, the Black writing tradition, and her own deeply rural voice. She currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Weaving together their poetry and personally told stories, Chepp shows how poets tap into the beautiful, emotional, personal, and therapeutic features of spoken word to empathically connect with others, advance intersectional and systemic analyses of inequality, and make social justice messages relatable across a diverse public. By creating allies and forging connections based on friendship, professional commitments, lived experiences, emotions, artistic kinship, and political views, this activist approach is highly integrated into the everyday lives of its practitioners, online and face-to-face. Chepp argues that spoken word activism is a product of, and a call to action against, the neoliberal era in which poets have come of age, characterized by widening structural inequalities and increasing economic and social vulnerability. She illustrates how this deeply personal and intimate activist approach borrows from, builds upon, and diverges from previous social movement paradigms. Spotlighting the complexity and mutual influence of modern-day activism and the world in which it unfolds, Speaking Truths contributes to our understanding of contemporary social change-making and how neoliberalism has shaped this political generation's experiences with social injustice.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Tom Sleigh’s many books include The King’s Touch; House of Fact, House of Ruin; Station Zed; and Army Cats. His book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers, recounts his time as a journalist covering refugee issues in the Middle East and Africa. He has won a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace Award, both the John Updike and Individual Writer Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and two NEA grants. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College.

Read Tom’s poetry in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/tom-sleigh.

Read more at tomsleigh.com. Watch Tom read more poems from The King’s Touch on his Vimeo channel.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel Heartland is forthcoming in spring 2023 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.”

Mentioned in This Episode:

C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of Dislocation

C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road

Lorine Neidecker, Lake Superior

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Anne Carson, Plainwater

William Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

Listen and Read:

Read transcript here: Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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In this interview Senior discusses her craft and inspiration for writing. As she writes in her preface, “These poems capture the paradox that even as we are forced into consciousness of being a part of the world, we are at the same time forced to be apart.” and these pandemic poems became a way of engaging the community outside her door and sparking a conversation about what it means to live in this world together.

Jori Krulder is an English teacher in rural Northern California where she is a frequent contributor to Edutopia.com and other publications writing about engaging students in the study of what it means to be human - literature. She can be found sharing lessons and ideas with the brilliant, generous community of writers and educators on Twitter at @jorikrulder.

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Upcoming episodes: As you know, we always have a new episode for your delectation on the first Thursday of the month, and on the second Thursday an essay by a young scholar connected to the episode. Following on the success of our November reissue of a 2019 conversation with Martin Puchner, we are dedicating the third week of the month to an "archival treasure." So on February 17th, we think you'll be pleased with an older poetical conversation, also starring Elizabeth.

In March, a change of pace: we tackle the legacy of settler colonialism in "land grant" universities with a scholar who has been documenting the ways that stolen Native land funded the growth of America's higher education complex.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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“Who saw them raft over the river,

three hours before daybreak?

Who saw their half-dark lanterns

glimmer on helmut and shield?

The heron in the reeds;

the crane startled to air.”

— from “Crossing”, The Sign of the Dragon

Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. She writes both fiction and poetry, and has won the Rhysling Award and the Elgin Award. Her two latest books are from opposite ends of the poetry spectrum: Elemental Haiku, containing haiku for each element of the periodic table, and The Sign of the Dragon, an epic fantasy with Chinese elements.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction.

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Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. A Syrian multinational, he studied at Yale and earned a certificate in beekeeping from SOILS Permaculture Association Lebanon.

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Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Dr. Rani Jaeger is a scholar and educator at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the co-founder and rabbi of “Beit Tefila Israeli” in Tel-Aviv.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Charlie Louth is Associate Professor of German and Fellow of Queen’s College, at Oxford University, in England. His research interests include poetry from the 18th century onwards, especially Goethe, Hölderlin, Mörike, Rilke and Celan; romanticism; translation; and comparative literature. His books include: Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford: OUP, 2020); Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (Oxford: Legenda, 1998); (editor, with Patrick McGuinness), Gravity and Grace: Essays for Roger Pearson (Oxford: Legenda, 2019); (editor, with Florian Strob), Nelly Sachs im Kontext — eine »Schwester Kafkas«? (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), and other works. He’s also translated Rilke’s Letters to Young Poet & The Letter from the Young Worker (Penguin, 2011).

Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer.

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All non-English text and quotes are translated, with the original languages given alongside the translation or in the endnotes.

Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary.

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Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions probes the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.

Adam Lehrer speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about addiction and class, our fetish for the artist flirting with death, communing with his heroes, his experience of the opioid crisis, and the role for art criticism in unraveling these issues. Lehrer reads a chapter on Darby Crash from Communions.

Adam Lehrer is a writer and art critic, but he’s also a former heroin addict himself. He blogs at Safety Propaganda.

• A Statement On My Severed Relationship With The Quietus
• Art's Moral Fetish
• Darby Crash
• Frisk, film based on a novel by Dennis Cooper
• Dash Snow
• Beautiful Boy, film based on memoirs by David and Nic Sheff
• Zoë Tamerlis Lund

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Each poem offers a snapshot in response to personal and national tragedies. Ana mourns loss at all levels – from the passing of artist friends she danced with to the national news of slain schoolchildren. “You hear of his death by the virus and // it all comes back – // meeting in Chicago, // celebrating his first novel, // dancing to a sweat together in New Orleans,” Ana writes in “Hache ¡Presente!” (8). Eight pages later she launches into an exhaustive yet incomplete list of mass shootings in the United States between 2016 and 2019. “+ Plus más – // domestic violence // deaths // at the hands // of someone that loved you, // loved your baby, // mother, // the neighbor upstairs who came running,” Dr. Castillo writes in “Mass Shooting (2016 to 2019 and Counting” (16-23). Sixty-three incidents of mass shootings span eight pages, each indicating the number of deaths in bold. These two poems sit alongside poems about anti-Black racism, police violence, and the threat to Democracy posed by the Trump administration.

Dr. Castillo’s My Book of the Dead also carries with it a sense of urgency about the future of the United States. By connecting the relationship between domestic terrorism (i.e., mass shootings and anti-Black racism) and the imperial violence inflicted across the world by the U.S. through bombs and other warfare, Ana takes to task the history and the present U.S. In “Xicanisma Prophecies Post 2012: Putin’s Puppet,” Ana writes, “Putin’s Puppet sees color and it revolts him. // Blacks belong in Africa, he opines, and Muslims must stay in the Mid-East. // Mexicans are the scourge. // Like with his father, // his father before him, and so on. Darker races serve their purpose – // servitude or genocide. // As for women – // you kill a rhino for sport or for its horns. // (A woman is worthwhile only if she enhances your status.)” (80). In several poems such as “Gotas caían en el techo” (31), “A Storm Upon Us” (3), and How to Tell You Are Living under Rising Fascism (A Basic Primer in Progress)” (41), she indicts the Trump Administration for advancing white supremacy, their attacks on history, and their denial of science. Ana is insistent about calling out every aspect of exactly how the rights of people of color, the elderly, and women are continuously being restricted. She is particularly focused on the plight of mothers.

Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz

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Ricardo Wilson is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness. His fiction and critical writing can be found in 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, and Stirring. He is director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America. Read his poem in The Common at thecommononline.org/nigrescence.

Read more about Ricardo and his work at ricardoawilson.com. Follow him on Twitter @ricardoawilson.

Purchase An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories from PANK Books.

Find out more about Outpost, and apply by November 1, at outposttheresidency.org.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Shlomit Naim Naor is a poet, an educator and a religious feminist. She lives in Jerusalem with her partner and their three daughters.

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In the text (which is both an essay in the etymological sense of an attempt as well as a longform poem, a making), Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen. [No one / bears witness for the / witness.]”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness articulates the Nazi holocaust as part of a constellation of horror that includes the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Israeli occupation of Palestine, and settler-colonial practices across the globe Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps, and language. Zolf’s No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work.

Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.

(US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize. 

Her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was published by Bloodaxe Books, also in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards.

Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Additional translations are by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva.

For a video of the May 2021 launch event for The Voice Over, featuring Maria Stepanova and several of the translators, see 

Book Launch of Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over: Poems and Essays – A Reading and Conversation – CREECA – UW–Madison (wisc.edu)

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.

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Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. 

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“When the sun rose it was smaller

than in my dream. I had been asleep

for what felt a long time, and woke

confused and claustrophobic.

The texture of the sky still magnetized me,

a desert bright day. But the light is streaked

like too much everything pulled to the edges

of a window in storm.”

— from “A Science Fiction”

Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the collection Cue Lazarus, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry and Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction & Fantasy. Carl has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers Conference. And he has also served as a Canto Mundo Fellow from 2011 to 2015.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction.

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Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her books include four collections of poetry: Rewriting the Body, The Breathing Field, Perfectly Normal, and The Afterlives of Trees. Wyatt’s work has been read on NPR, featured in American Life in Poetry, and published in journals ranging from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Formerly a dancer, Wyatt has developed and trademarked her own yoga system, Yoganetics, now practiced on six continents.

Read Wyatt’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/wyatt-townley.

Read more about Wyatt Townley, her poetry, and Yoganetics at wyatttownley.com.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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Dr. Kevin Quashie (he/his) is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. He is the author or editor of four books, including Black Aliveness and The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012). His studying now is organized by the phrase "a book of black ideas."

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.

The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between [Nersessian] and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and she, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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In a collection that is equal measures an exploration of pain after her uncle’s passing and an honoring of her own heart, Nicole Danielle’s book Broken Ballads (2019) asks who gets to be innocent? How do we move towards the life we want? What legacy do we leave for future generations? In her debut book, Nicole Danielle finds a way to unearth joy without using blinders to hide the tender spots of the heart that need to heal. She mosaics together the shattered bits of life and shows they can still be beautiful. They can still be a reflection of who we are, what we want, and where we are headed.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Nicole Danielle is a writer, singer, and educator. She currently resides in New Jersey with her family.

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor.

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In this lively, well-crafted podcast, leading Bishop scholar Bethany Hicok of Williams College completely fails to control her infectious enthusiasm for Elizabeth Bishop’s writings. She explains to Duncan McCargo why Bishop has become for her the poet of the pandemic, and above all what happened when she spent three weeks embedded in the Vassar archives with sixteen other scholars and poets – a project that resulted in this beautifully produced and copiously illustrated edited volume.

Since Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive is an Open Access publication, you can and should download it (free of charge), so you can read along here. 

Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. 

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explored in this poem. She also discusses her Queens-centered poetry project QUEENSBOUND, her work as a visual artist, and her experience living a block and a half from Elmhurst Hospital in Jackson Heights, the epicenter of the early pandemic.

Poet and essayist KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) as well as the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. She is 2021 poet in residence at Works on Water on Governors Island. With Spencer Reece, she co-curates the weekly Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights.

Read KC’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/kc-trommer.

Explore the QUEENSBOUND map and listen to those poems at queensbound.com.

Read more by KC Trommer and explore her visual art at kctrommer.com.

Follow KC on Twitter at @kctrommer.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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Kevin M. Jones' The Dangers of Poetry: Culture, Politics, and Revolution in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2020) is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego.

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Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York and is an assistant professor of poetry and nonfiction in Old Dominion University’s MFA program. His poetry collection Colonize Me won the AAAS award in Creative Writing: Poetry.

Jan-Henry Gray currently teaches at Adelphi University in New York. Born in the Philippines and raised in California where he worked as a chef, Jan lived undocumented in the U.S. for more than 32 years. His poetry collection Documents won honorable mention in Creative Writing: Poetry.

Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia.

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Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include The Fool and Object Lesson, out this year from Lily Books. Her teaching resource, Object Lesson: A Guide To Writing Poetry, is also out this year. Jennifer’s awards include a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Fellowship, a DISQUIET Fellowship to write and study poetry in Portugal, a “Her Story Is” Residency (where she worked with Iraqi women artists in Dubai), and an Ambassador for Peace Award for her activism in the arts. She’s the translations editor for Talking Writing Magazine and the program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's Online Writing Program. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and children.

Order Object Lesson and the companion teaching resource, Object Lesson: A Guide To Writing Poetry, here.

Learn more about Jennifer Jean and her work at jenniferjeanwriter.weebly.com.

Follow Jennifer Jean on Twitter at @fishwifetales.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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Look into the Persian so that you may see paintings of myriad

shades and hues;

Pass by the collection in Urdu for it is nothing but drawings and

sketches.

Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep: A Critical Biography (Allen Lane, 2021) by Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi explores the work of Mirza Ghalib to perhaps explain why the power made the switch from Urdu to Persian and back to Urdu.

In this interview, I ask Mehr to introduce us to Ghalib and his work. We explore Ghalib as both a poet and a person, and why he made the switch from writing in Urdu to Persian and back again.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi is currently an associate professor of Urdu and South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia. Her research publications address complex issues of Urdu literary culture particularly in the context of modernity. A well-known translator, anthologist, and columnist, she is the editor of the pioneering two-volume work The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature. More recently, she has published the acclaimed monograph The Postcolonial Mind: Urdu Culture, Islam and Modernity in Muhammad Hasan Askari. Farooqi also writes a featured column on Urdu literature of the past and present in the Dawn. Mehr can be followed on Twitter at @FarooqiMehr

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ghalib: A Wilderness At My Doorstep. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus’s whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our current times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt’s renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.

After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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Danielle Rose is the author of At First & Then, available now from Black Lawrence Press, and The History of Mountains, forthcoming from Variant Lit. Her work can be found in Palette Poetry, Hobart & Sundog Lit.

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Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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“When I was doing [Hotel Almighty] and even now when I work on projects, a lot of what I find I’m doing is just expressing a love of reading and of books themselves,” says Sloat in discussing her new book. “I mean, I just love paper. To take a book and be able to make it into something — that was really fun and exciting for me."

Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection of visual poetry published in September by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived in Kansas, China, and Italy, and now splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works as a news editor. She has spent most of the pandemic in Germany with her husband and son, eating take-out schnitzel and working in her pyjamas. Her favorite poets include Federico Garcia Lorca, Vasko Popa, Natasha Trethewey and Charles Wright.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction.

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Veprinska’s text is anchored by a tripartite structure of negation in which she explores the unsaid, the unhere, and the ungod, all of which deal with the internally fractured and dissonant nature of poetic empathy. By mingling textual analysis with philosophy, psychology, history, and trauma studies, Empathy in Contemprary Poetry after Crisis seeks to sketch out and approach the limits of empathy and to show how poetry is uniquely situated as a medium through which we can be with each other in the aftermath of world-altering events.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of (white, foreign) producing academic knowledge about African places and people.

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Sharon Olds is the author of twelve books of poetry. Arias was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize and her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds is the Eric Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and work has appeared in various publications, including the The New York Times Magazine and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2016 to 2020. In August 2020, she joined the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.

Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com and his website address is https://www.drphiliplance.com.

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Tara Skurtu is a two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she studied with Nobel Laureate Louise Glück and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Her poems are published internationally and translated into ten languages. She is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game. Before moving to Romania, she was a lecturer in creative writing at Boston University and taught composition to incarcerated students through BU’s Prison Education Program. She is currently based in Bucharest, where she coaches writing clients around the world and is working on her forthcoming poetry collection Faith Farm.

Read “Offering” by Tara Skurtu at thecommononline.org/offering.

Find out more about Tara Skurtu at taraskurtu.com, or visit her writing coach page at taraskurtu.com/oneonone.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily.

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“This isn’t supposed to be a history book, and yet it is,” says Guzmán in discussing Catrachos. It’s not supposed to be anthropology, sociology, or a testimonial either, and yet it is. “Those are the contradictions, especially when you’re a marginalized writer, your words are always operating on so many different frequencies at once.”

“It is not a fallacy that the pulpería owner who wakes up

dressed in a tunic of warriors’ pelos, or the milkman

pressing his rough hands against the cow’s tectonic body,

remembers the skirted boy with an ovarian lipstick for a tongue,

the boy who offered a tenth of his knees to the teeth

of a country with dentures.”

— from “Finding Logic in a Crushed Head”

Roy G. Guzmán received a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship. Raised in Miami, Florida, Guzmán currently lives in Minneapolis. Catrachos is their first book of poetry, published by Graywolf Press in May 2020.

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Shakira Croce’s poetry translations have appeared in Babel magazine, and her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and journals, including the New Ohio Review, Pilgrimage Press, HIV Here & Now, Transactions, Ducts, pioneertown, Permafrost Magazine, and Shark Reef. She was a featured reader in the Boundless Tales Reading Series, and she was a finalist in the Linda Flowers Literary Award competition.

Croce holds a Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master’s in Public Administration from Pace University. Born in Geneva, New York in 1987, she grew up in Gainesville, Georgia and later studied in Florence, Italy. She currently works in New York City as Assistant Director of Communications and Public Relations at New York’s largest Medicaid Special Needs Health Plan, Amida Care.  She lives with her husband, son, and two cats in Brooklyn.

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Kelly Harris-DeBerry received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and Cave Canem. Some of her publishing credits include: 400yrs: The story of Black people in poems written from love 1619–2019, Words Beats & Life The Global Journal of Hip Hop, Angles in the Wilderness: Young and Black in New Orleans and Beyond, Torch Literary Magazine, The National Parks Service Centennial Commemoration publication with Sonia Sanchez, Yale University's Caduceus Journal, Southern Review, Say it Loud: Poems for James Brown and many more. Her podcast episode for About Place Journal called Congo Square: Sustaining the Sacred Post-Katrina highlights her talents as a producer and researcher. Kelly is a former guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine at the University of New Orleans. She serves her literary community as the New Orleans Poets & Writers’ Literary Coordinator and on various community boards. Kelly is a cultural leader with business savvy. Learn more at www.kellyhd.com.

Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com

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