Three+ reviews of St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped
Thanks to poet and editor Cindy Hochman for her fantastic book review in Gently Read Literature (scroll at right to page 15), poet and editor Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom for another on-target review in Melusine, and chapbook reviewer Emilia Fuentes Grant for her favorable words in The Pedestal. In addition, Canadian poet Pearl Pirie highlighted Cindy’s review in Pesbo.
And interviews
Thanks to Kim Wells for her lovely interview with me that appears in the current issue of Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression. In addition, hot off the press is Beth Gersh-Nesic’s interview with me in WomenArts Quarterly Journal. Also about to debut is my long poem, “Demoiselles 7”, in the winter issue of Feminist Studies. That’s sort of an interview too—but with the women in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Emma Lazarus: Poet of ExilesClaudia Hammon, a dear friend, sent me this New York Times review of a new exhibit, “Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles,” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage which runs through 2012. Lazarus (1849-1887), as you know, wrote the “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” inscribed at the Statue of Liberty. Not a poor immigrant herself, she came from a wealthy family that gave her entrée to notable literary salons of the day.
Despite these advantages, living as a Jewish person in a non-Jewish community was, she wrote, “a hard nut to crack.” This duality, this sense of comfort and distance at once, however, yielded—as the reviewer notes—some of her finest poems. As writers, our best work may be found by, as poet Suzanne Gardinier says, “holding the opposites together.” Lazarus lived only to 38 and look at her imprint on the world: We who are much older than Lazarus now would do well to mine the complexities of our lives to find our own literary treasures.
‘Round the Net
Thanks to the following people for their achievements or sending me these links:
· ALTA list-serve for this book review on Luis de Góngora
· Also this article on the demand for English translations of global best-sellers
· And this NPR interview, “What Gets Lost in Translation”
· My brother, Bill, for hilarious dog videos here and here
· Translator Leonard Fox for this recording of dual-culture poets in the United Kingdom
· Red Glass Books Publisher Janet Kaplan for announcing Margaret Diehl’s latest chapbook
· Translator Lucas Klein for his translation-promoting blog
· Ski patroller and Francophile Dusty Sackett for this breath-taking meditation on peace
· Poet Linda Simone for this fun insect poetry reading and video sampling of British poets
· Poet Thomas Transtromer on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature
May this year be your annus mirablis!
Ann
