First place winner of the 2021 Elgin Award, The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee (Jaberwocky, 2020) is an epic fantasy about a young king who must defend his kingdom against a number of outside forces, both human and terrifyingly otherworldly. Lee draws from Chinese culture to create a legendary figure in King Xau, one of honor, nobility, and subtle magic. With light, clean, and lyrical language, these poems shape an epic story of heroism and humanity. “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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

New Books in Poetry

Mary Soon Lee, "The Sign of the Dragon" (Jaberwocky, 2020)

The Cloud of Longing: A New Translation and Eco-Aesthetic Study of Kalidasa's Meghaduta (Oxford UP, 2021) is a translation and full-length study of the great Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa's famed Meghadūta (literally: "The Cloud Messenger") with a focus on its interfacing of nature, feeling, figurative language, and mythic memory. While the Meghadūta has been translated a number of times, the last "almost academic" translation was published in 1976 (Leonard Nathan, The Transport of Love: The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa). This volume, however, is more than an Indological translation. It is a study of the text in light of both classical Indian and contemporary Western literary theory, and it is aimed at lovers of poetry and poetics and students of world literature. It seeks to widen the arena of literary and poetic studies to include classic works of Asian traditions. It also looks at the poem's imaginative portrayals of "nature" and "environment" from perspectives that have rarely been considered. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

E. H. Rick Jarow, "The Cloud of Longing: A New Translation and Eco-Aesthetic Study of Kalidasa's Meghaduta" (Oxford UP, 2021)

A conversation with booksellers from three of the most dynamic, exciting, and community-oriented independent bookstores in the country. Lisa Swayze of Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY), Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ), and Alena Jones of Seminary Co-op Bookstores (Chicago, IL) join me and my special co-host, professor Kasia Bartoszynska for a roundup of their favorite books of the year, and a fascinating look into indie bookstores during the pandemic. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Best Books of the Year 2021, Booksellers Edition

Gloria Maité Hernández's Savoring God: Comparative Theopoetics (Oxford UP, 2021) compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentaries: for the Cántico, the Comentarios written by John of the Cross on his own poem; for Rāsa Līlā, the foundational commentary by Srīdhara Swāmi along with commentaries by the sixteenth-century theologian Jīva Goswāmī, from the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and other Gauḍīya theologians.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Gloria Maité Hernández, "Savoring God: Comparative Theopoetics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Kate Rigby's book Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation (Bloomsbury, 2020) rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kate Rigby, "Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

In The Girl Singer (Fireside Industries, 2021), her latest collection of poems, Marianne Worthington weaves together nature writing, feminism, and country music to form a powerful strand of interlocking poems. In the book's first section, Worthington inhabits famous woman singers like Hazel Dickens and Sara Carter, but also unsung artists who struggled to find a voice or an audience in the patriarchal world of country music. Later sections pivot to more personal themes, but the resonances of the first section remain in lines that recall the lyrics of folksongs, evocations of the singing of birds, and poems that make use of traditional song structure. The collection as a whole is an immensely satisfying volume that should appeal to poetry fans in general, as well as fans of country, folk, and old-time music. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Marianne Worthington, "The Girl Singer" (Fireside Industries, 2021)

How can it be that deeply religious poetry is being written by a committed socialist, literary revolutionary and modernist? How sacredness appears in working in the field? How one can pray after the “death of God”? This magical contradiction is being explored and explained in the book Abraham the Hebrew Believer: Secularism and Religion in the work of Abraham Shlonsky (1900-1973). The book is a journey to the world of one of the most creative figures in modern Hebrew culture. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Rani Jaeger, "Abraham the Hebrew Believer: Secularism and Religion in the Work of Avraham Shlonsky (1900-1973)"

Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such preternatural attraction for now several generations of readers. The early 20th century German-language poet captured the experience of European culture irrevocably lurching into modernity, where an entire continent was forced to trade in its untenable and ultimately fantastically unrealistic Romantic worldview for the sober realization that humans are capable of even greater evil than any gods, and that life has meaning only if we continually create it. But unlike some other modernists, Rilke captured this vast cultural rupture in exceptionally beautiful and ever more effectively crafted, if ever less formal, poetry. Instead of explaining this effect away, Louth deepens the transformative experience of reading Rilke by offering his interpretation as one option among others and thus engaging the reader directly in the unfolding of each of Rilke’s words. Louth’s book follows the chronology of Rilke’s life (1875 – 1926) but focuses on the works, often in the context of the situation when they were written, rather than on Rilke’s itinerant life. I spoke with Charlie about the enduring importance of Rilke, about the Duino Elegies, and whether Rilke’s 1915 poem “Death” – or any of his works in general – can alleviate the cold fact that as humans, no matter how blessed, we will face inconsolable loss. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Charlie Louth on Rainer Maria Rilke

Jessica Romney's book Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of self for their groups, focusing in turn on the construction of identity in martial-themed poetry, the protection of group identities in the face of political exile, and the negotiation between individual and group as seen in political lyric. By conducting a close reading of six poems and then a broad survey of martial lyric, exile poetry, political lyric, and sympotic lyric as a whole, Romney demonstrates that sympotic lyric focuses on the same basic behaviors and values to construct social identities regardless of the content or subgenre of the poems in question. The volume also argues that the performance of identity depends on the context as well as the material of performance. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that sympotic lyric overwhelmingly prefers to use identity rhetoric that insists on the inherent sameness of group members. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Jessica Romney, "Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece" (U Michigan Press, 2020)

[This episode contains explicit content.] Artists from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse command fascination not only for their work but also for their drug addictions and the manner of their death. Communions is an attempt to understand the role that opiates play in the artistic lives of those who are gripped by addiction. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Adam Lehrer, "Communions" (Hyperidean Press, 2021)

Aubrey L. Glazer's Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide (Academic Studies Press, 2013) immerses readers in the experience of the contemporary kabbalistic Hebrew poet, serving as a gateway into the poet’s quest for mystical union known as devekut. This journey oscillates across subtle degrees of devekut―causing an entranced experience for the Hebrew poet, who is reaching but not reaching, hovering but not hovering, touching but not touching in a state of mystical vertigo. What makes this journey so remarkable is how deeply nestled it is within the hybrid cultural networks of Israel, crossing over boundaries of haredi, secular, national-religious, and agnostic beliefs among others. This volume makes a unique contribution to understanding and experiencing the mystical renaissance in Israel, through its multi-disciplinary focus on Hebrew poetry and its philosophical hermeneutics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Aubrey L. Glazer, "Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide" (Academic Studies Press, 2013)

“My poetry captures a moment,” remarked Dr. Castillo when asked about the process of writing her most recent collection of poems My Book of the Dead: New Poems (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). While many of us would be immobile at the news about the effects of climate disaster, school shootings, and anti-black racism which often resulted in extralegal violence, Ana Castillo reached for pen and paper. She processed these events through writing carefully, intentionally, and vividly about the world which gave rise to these catastrophes. She forces us to feel that moment with her – confusion, anger, grief. My Book of the Dead is the result of Ana’s mourning turned artistic bodily expression. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Ana Castillo, "My Book of the Dead: New Poems" (High Road Books, 2021)

Ricardo Wilson speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem, “nigrescence,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Ricardo talks about his new collection Apparent Horizon and Other Stories, winner of the PANK Book Contest in fiction. The collection includes several short poetic fragments scattered amongst stories and novellas, with both historic and contemporary storylines. He discusses his process for writing from historical research, and what it’s like writing creative and critical work at the same time. Ricardo also talks about Outpost, a fully-funded residency in Vermont for creative writers of color from the US and Latin America. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Ricardo Wilson, "nigrescence" (The Common magazine, Spring, 2021)

The poet Shachar-Mario Mordechai was born 1975 in Haifa and he currently lives in Tel Aviv. He has published four volumes of poetry, all of which attracted critical attention. Mordechai is the 2017 recipient of the Prime-Minister’s award for creativity in poetry and the 2010 recipient of Tel Aviv Municipality's nationwide Poetry Competition. He was Poet in Residence at Johns Hopkins University for 2018/9. His book of poems "Make Room For The Rain" won first place in poetry by the Rachel and Leib Goldberg Foundation for 2021. The book was written in the USA when Mario lived for two years in Baltimore and one year in NYC. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Shachar-Mario Mordechai, "Make Room for the Rain" (Pardes, 2019)

Shlomit Naim Naor’s poetry is a unique voice in Israel. She is inviting the readers to delve deeper and engage in a dialogue with the Jewish religion and texts which are relevant to the most banal, everyday life. In her poetry, Naim Naor searches for places to which the Divine is NOT welcome, like abortions or the Oncology Department. She openly speaks about the (un)meaningful lives of single (religious) women and more. In her sensitive way she shares with us her personal journey as an Orthodox Jewish woman who lives in Jerusalem, but her words speak universally to all of us. In this podcast we will focus on her books: No End in Sight (2016) and The Things We Are Not Talking About (2020). Shlomit Naim Naor is a poet, an educator and a religious feminist. She lives in Jerusalem with her partner and their three daughters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Shlomit Naim Naor, "The Things We Are Not Talking About" (2020)

Interview with Poets about their New Books

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New Books in Poetry

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