I’m so grateful to have two poems, “Ancient History” and “Labor,” in the latest issue of December magazine. One reflects on being a girl, and one reflects on giving birth to a girl. As companion poems, they speak to each other about childhood and childbirth, violence and safety, body and mind. Many thanks to the editors for featuring them together!
I wrote “Liberty Bell” while researching the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco for a cycle of sonnets about that city and wage labor and miscarriage and widening income inequality. Many thanks to the editors of the Southwest Review for their enthusiasm and for a beautiful issue!
Others from the series can be found in Zyzzyva, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Faultline, North American Review, Subtropics, Memorious, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Connotation Press, and elsewhere.
My deep gratitude to the editors for publishing my poem “Mythology” in the latest issue of Ninth Letter. Rarely have I had a poem write itself. But this one came out in one sentence, one breath, ending with one deftly wielded stick against men who try to take what they want. It’s for anyone enraged by all the rape stories, from ancient times to the present day. Anyone sick and tired of being groped on the bus or followed down the street. Anyone done with being paid less than male counterparts or told that your experiences are minor exceptions and not worth being told. Tell them!
You can read the poem here.
I started my poem “Then a While Dedication” (featured at The Missouri Review) while sitting on a bench in a field at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Redwing, Minnesota. The Center—an old estate built by the inventor of puffed rice—was originally in the middle of nowhere. But now a four-lane highway runs right by its gates, so the sound of passing trucks and cars reaches every last corner on the property. The sound brought to mind the history of our interstate system, which was built as a defense route, and how it dispossessed thousands of people of their land, destroying neighborhoods and communities. It also brought to mind the ocean waves and my two young daughters, running along the beach. I was missing them. The poem comes from a series set in the California chaparral region, a landscape affected by climate change and the ecological disaster of drought—only in this case the drought is also internal, reflecting the silences that society maintains around the experiences of women. The poem owes some of its structure of thought to Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Initiation Song from the Finder’s Lodge,” and the title is a misquoting of Shakespeare’s “A cause more promising / Than a wild dedication of yourselves / To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, most certain / To miseries enough.”
Many thanks to the editors of Meridian for providing safe passage into the universe for my poem “Constellation,” in which I finally figure out some words for what bugs me about the Pleiades, why I distrust global positioning systems, and a haunting memory from adolescence.
“There are those who say that translators will save the world,” Polish poet Tomasz Różycki writes in his new essay, “Star Vehicle: On Translating Poetry,” out today at the LA Review of Books. I tend to agree with him! Many thanks to the editors for publishing my translation of this star-gazing essay.
Many thanks to the editors of the Yale Review for publishing my translation of Krystyna Dąbrowska’s poem “Yesterday I Saw a Dog at the Tideline.” It’s one of my favorite poems of Krystyna’s in one of my favorite journals!
I know, I know! A girl’s not supposed to say her age, or walk out on a job, or write a ghazal in one-line stanzas. But here you go: my poem “Waiting on Forty-Five (A Ghazal)” in the beautiful, Spring issue of The Common.
And, while you’re there, check out the amazing Arabic translation portfolio of stories from Sudan, the beautiful sonnet “Nocturne” by Ricardo Pau-Llosa, and so much more. It’s a great issue, all available for free online, for now!
The Literary Review has adapted to these strange times by slowly rolling out their July issue, “Contents May Shift,” online. Much gratitude to editor Minna Proctor for including my translation of Krystyna Dąbrowska’s fabulously biting poem “Judith.”
I’m very happy to share a number of new translations that have appeared recently, all from Tomasz Różycki’s Litery (which I am working my way through translating in its entirety–all 99 poems!). The Center for the Art of Translation presented an online exclusive of three poems as part of the launch of Two Lines 31: Hauntings. The fabulous new journal Cagibi featured the poem “Wind” in it’s July issue. And the October issue of Asymptote includes four poems, along with Tomasz reading the poems in the original Polish. Thanks to the editors of each of these journals for sharing this work!
