Since the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second book Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. was published by W.W. Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation of The Aeneid was published by the University of Chicago Press.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This intricate, yearning work from award-winning poet Alison Calder asks us to think about the way we perceive and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene's poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters' fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets--the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman--confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? The poems in Daughters of Harriet: Poems (UP of Colorado, 2022) give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise "official" Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith's book Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991 (Peter Lang, 2020) explores changes to the poetry canon – an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory – to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this episode, co-translators Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan discuss their Korean-to-English translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, 2022). Released as part of The Pride List from Seagull Books, Glory Hole is a fantastical collection of queer poems that are uncomfortable, bodily, fluid-filled, and delightfully puzzling to read.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021), Cambridge professor Stanley Bill offers a profoundly original, fine-grained, and rich interpretation of the poetic œuvre of Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. The book presents Miłosz’s poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish poet saw the reductive “biologization” of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. Stanley Bill argues that Miłosz’s response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body's deeper meanings. For Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The first poem in Sean Singers’ new collection of poetry, Today in the Taxi, published by Tupelo Press, begins with, “Today in the taxi, I brought a man from midtown to someplace in Astoria near the airport.”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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Romeo Oriogun speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “The Sea Dreams of Us,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Romeo talks about his life as a poet in exile from Nigeria, and how that experience of exile appears in his poetry. He also discusses his writing process, the themes he often returns to in his work, and how growing up in Nigeria affects his use of language in poetry.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Farzana Doctor is a Toronto-based author, activist and a psychotherapist. She has written four critically acclaimed novels. Her latest, Seven, which Ms. Magazine described as “fully feminist and ambitiously bold”, was chosen for multiple 2020 Best Book lists and shortlisted for the Trillium and Evergreen Awards. Her poetry collection, You Still Look The Same (Freehand Books), will be released in May 2022 with an audiobook following soon after. Farzana is also the Maasi behind Dear Maasi, a new sex and relationships column for FGM/C survivors.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry