Mirza Ghalib is one of the most celebrated poets in the Urdu literary canon. Yet, at the time, Ghalib was prolific in both Urdu and Persian. His output in Persian output dwarfs his Urdu writing (at least in its published form), and he often openly dismissed his Urdu works, once writing:Look into the Persian so that you may see paintings of myriadshades and hues;Pass by the collection in Urdu for it is nothing but drawings andsketches.Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep: A Critical Biography (Allen Lane, 2021) by Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi explores the work of Mirza Ghalib to perhaps explain why the power made the switch from Urdu to Persian and back to Urdu.In this interview, I ask Mehr to introduce us to Ghalib and his work. We explore Ghalib as both a poet and a person, and why he made the switch from writing in Urdu to Persian and back again.Mehr Afshan Farooqi is currently an associate professor of Urdu and South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia. Her research publications address complex issues of Urdu literary culture particularly in the context of modernity. A well-known translator, anthologist, and columnist, she is the editor of the pioneering two-volume work The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature. More recently, she has published the acclaimed monograph The Postcolonial Mind: Urdu Culture, Islam and Modernity in Muhammad Hasan Askari. Farooqi also writes a featured column on Urdu literature of the past and present in the Dawn. Mehr can be followed on Twitter at @FarooqiMehrYou can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ghalib: A Wilderness At My Doorstep. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020), esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus’s whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our current times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt’s renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Eleni Kefala's book The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021) probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Alina Stefanescu posits that At First & Then by Danielle Rose is a collection in which “the feminine is reclaimed.” And it is. It is also a collection of lushly and cleverly crafted poetry that sees the self and the body as a multi-faceted state of being. One that is unafraid to dissect and question what makes the speaker who she is, what she is willing to let go of, and ultimately what moves her forward. Rose writes of expectation, experience, longing, violence, and possibility through the lenses of nature and society and marks her transition both internally and externally via poems which ask to spoken aloud.Danielle Rose is the author of At First & Then, available now from Black Lawrence Press, and The History of Mountains, forthcoming from Variant Lit. Her work can be found in Palette Poetry, Hobart & Sundog Lit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Owed (Penguin, 2020) is the second collection of poems by Dr. Joshua Bennett, poet, professor, and artist. This volume is a wide-ranging, celebratory book focused on what Bennett calls "the Black quotidian," including the poetry of the barbershop, plastic slip-covers on couches, and the benign struggle between a father and a son over a pair of long johns. Throughout the book, Bennett's attention to detail and gift for both sound and sense are on dazzling display. In this conversation we discuss Owed, as well as Bennett's evolving relationship to spirituality, his process of learning to write out loud through poetry slams, and his experience of being a new father. Bennett is also the author of the poetry volume The Sobbing School, the monograph Being Property Once Myself, and the upcoming Spoken Word: A Cultural History. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books) is a book-length erasure of Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems. Here, "joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way." Here, sleep is “a circle whose diameter might be small," a circle "pitifully small," a "wrecked and empty hypothetical circle." Paired with Sloat's stunning mixed-media collage, each poem is a miniature canvas, a brief associative profile of the psyche―its foibles, obsessions, and delights. (Description by the publisher.)“When I was doing [Hotel Almighty] and even now when I work on projects, a lot of what I find I’m doing is just expressing a love of reading and of books themselves,” says Sloat in discussing her new book. “I mean, I just love paper. To take a book and be able to make it into something — that was really fun and exciting for me."Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection of visual poetry published in September by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived in Kansas, China, and Italy, and now splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works as a news editor. She has spent most of the pandemic in Germany with her husband and son, eating take-out schnitzel and working in her pyjamas. Her favorite poets include Federico Garcia Lorca, Vasko Popa, Natasha Trethewey and Charles Wright. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura's 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan. Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document. As the translators, James Hadley and Nell Regan, note in A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (Dedalus Press, 2020), "these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers". 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, I interview Anna Veprinska about her book Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) recently published by Palgrave Macmillan. In it, Veprinska examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry that responds to moments of traumatic crisis, focusing specifically on the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. Rather than taking a straightforward approach that uncritically heralds empathy, Veprinska explores the various techniques poets use that invite and refuse empathy, thereby displaying empathetic dissonance, a term that Veprinska coins to describe the struggle poets and poetry have with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which they respond.Veprinska’s text is anchored by a tripartite structure of negation in which she explores the unsaid, the unhere, and the ungod, all of which deal with the internally fractured and dissonant nature of poetic empathy. By mingling textual analysis with philosophy, psychology, history, and trauma studies, Empathy in Contemprary Poetry after Crisis seeks to sketch out and approach the limits of empathy and to show how poetry is uniquely situated as a medium through which we can be with each other in the aftermath of world-altering events.Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Juliane Okot Bitek, of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, has written a terrific book of poetry on the 1994 Genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. Published in 2016 by the University of Alberta, and simply titled, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), Okot Bitek’s poetry is a form of witnessing violence that records the senseless loss of life in a way that reminds us violence is human and universal. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of (white, foreign) producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This episode covers a range of topics from Old’s use of line breaks (enjambment that runs contrary to the tedious, end-stopped rhyming lines of hymnals) to the degree to which any art work can be really considered to be autobiographical as artists work from intuition. The episode features Olds reading from two of her poems in Arias (Knopf, 2019).Sharon Olds is the author of twelve books of poetry. Arias was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize and her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds is the Eric Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry