Many thanks to Piotr Florczyk and the other editors at The Los Angeles Review for including my translation “Water Walking Balls” by Krystyna Dąbrowska in the Spring 2017 issue, out today. Dąbrowska is one of the most unforgettable voices to come out of Poland in recent years—a worthy successor to an extraordinary poetic tradition. You can read more of her work in English translation at Versopolis. Now to finish translating the full collection of her selected poems!
Krystyna Dąbrowska
My poem “Washington, DC” from The Literary Review was featured on Verse Daily on April 18. Many thanks to the editors for attending to the health of poetry by publishing one new poem a day from excellent literary journals and books. Their archive is a veritable treasure trove of poetry.
Thanks to the editors for including my poem “Washington, DC” in the latest issue of The Literary Review, which is dedicated to the theme of “I Live Here.” Minna Proctor writes in her salient editor’s note:
Over the past year, I found it harder and harder to think of “I live here” as dissociated from “stand your ground.” The question of territory–over land, one’s body, one’s privacy–started to feel argumentative rather than metaphysical. One week, “I live here” means “I live here, too.” Another week, it means “get off my property” […] It is perhaps the very deep sense of division [after the election] that leads me to think “I live here” is a theme about diametric opposition and its disruptions.
I’m glad to be in dialog about such issues with the likes of Mary Ruefle, Jason Schneiderman, and the inimitable translator Jessica Cohen, among others.
As a way to affirm spontaneity, play, and the pleasure of working with received form, the editors of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review put a challenge to a group of poets: compose a sonnet in less than an hour on one of five themes (A Walk, Silence, Water, Frames, and Containers). The results were beyond fabulous! With A. E. Stallings’ “Silence” and Maurice Manning’s “Rainstorm” for company (among others), I’m pleased to have my sonnet “Radio, Morning” included in the issue.
I’ve got five new translations from Tomasz Różycki’s Book of Rotations and an essay up at Waxwing. Find out about “Getting Drunk in the Toolshed, or What I Do When I Translate.” Thanks oodles to editor Curtis Bauer and to the whole Waxwing team for an amazing issue, including new poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Danez Smith, among others.
A recording of my poem “Swallow” is featured on this week’s Oxford American blog. My work has never been tagged with “Kentucky” or “Food writing” before. There you go!
The latest installment of my column on new poetry in translation is out in the Sept/Oct issue of the American Poetry Review. In “Friendships Between Ghosts,” I take a look at a number of recent translations that are guided by innovative conceptual frameworks, including Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Claudia Keelan’s Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz, and Angelica Freitas’ Rilke Shake, (translated by Hilary Kaplan). The last book is up for this year’s National Translation Award. I’m hoping it wins!
