New Books in Poetry

Is it just a coincidence that three books by the major Russian writer Maria Stepanova have appeared in English in 2021? Why does Maria Stepanova deploy such a rich variety of voices and forms? What are the challenges of translating her poetry? Who are the pantheon of deceased writers who seem to haunt her every line? In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work.Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.(US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize. Her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was published by Bloodaxe Books, also in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards.Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Additional translations are by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva.For a video of the May 2021 launch event for The Voice Over, featuring Maria Stepanova and several of the translators, see Book Launch of Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over: Poems and Essays – A Reading and Conversation – CREECA – UW–Madison (wisc.edu)Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Green River Valley, Robert Lashley's third book of poetry, is a moving and complex tribute to the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington. Whether writing about finding love in the aisles of Value Village, the ex drug runner who now feeds pigeons in the park, or the pain of being mocked for expressing emotion at the barber shop, Lashley unites exacting attention to detail with universal themes of trauma and survival. Lashley's Tacoma comes alive in this book like Wilson's Pittsburgh, Borges' Buenos Aires, or Gornick's New York.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

Poet Ariana Brown searches for new origins in her debut book We Are Owed. (Grieveland Press, 2021). Brown has had over ten years of experience writing, performing, and teaching poetry that struggles towards freedom for all Black peoples. She identifies on her website as a “queer Black Mexican American poet” whose lived experiences within anti-Black cultures and societies have forced her to spin language into liberation. We Are Owed. achieves that goal by centering scenes of Black Mexican American life, history, and feeling. The title is a call to action, a demand, a recognition, a reparation, a reorientation, and a reclamation. Brown ushers in a new grammar that reaches beyond nation and builds from the foundational understanding that colonial and neocolonial nation-states, and the theory of borderlands set forth by Anzaldúa, are limiting to Black peoples.Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

A Camera Obscura (Red Hen Press, 2021) by Carl Marcum is a lyrical exploration of external and internal worlds. The heavens described in these poems could be the stars glittering above our heads, the pathways of faith, or the connection between human beings. Playing with scientific understandings of the world, along with the linguistic conventions of the poetic form, A Camera Obscura is a compelling journey that simultaneously drifts through the cosmos while being rooted to the ground beneath our feet.“When the sun rose it was smallerthan in my dream. I had been asleepfor what felt a long time, and wokeconfused and claustrophobic.The texture of the sky still magnetized me,a desert bright day. But the light is streakedlike too much everything pulled to the edgesof a window in storm.”— from “A Science Fiction”Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the collection Cue Lazarus, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry and Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction & Fantasy. Carl has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers Conference. And he has also served as a Canto Mundo Fellow from 2011 to 2015. 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

Wyatt Townley speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “Instructions for the Endgame,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Townley talks about experiencing poetry in all parts of her life—in dance and yoga, in astronomy and physics, and in nature. She also discusses her time as Poet Laureate of Kansas, the pleasure of revising poems, and what it’s like seeing her work performed as an opera.Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her books include four collections of poetry: Rewriting the Body, The Breathing Field, Perfectly Normal, and The Afterlives of Trees. Wyatt’s work has been read on NPR, featured in American Life in Poetry, and published in journals ranging from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Formerly a dancer, Wyatt has developed and trademarked her own yoga system, Yoganetics, now practiced on six continents.Read Wyatt’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/wyatt-townley.Read more about Wyatt Townley, her poetry, and Yoganetics at wyatttownley.com.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Duke University Press, 2012), Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.Dr. Kevin Quashie (he/his) is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. He is the author or editor of four books, including Black Aliveness and The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012). His studying now is organized by the phrase "a book of black ideas."Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee 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 Anahid Nersessian, professor of English at UCLA, about her book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press, 2021).In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between [Nersessian] and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and she, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.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

What more can we learn about legendary American writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), dubbed by Bethany Hicok “the most stunning poet of the twentieth century”, by exploring the wonderful archives of her life and work at Vassar? Why are literary archives coming back into vogue? How do new techniques in digital humanities create novel possibilities for archival-based research and publication? And how can we develop collaborative methods of studying and teaching in literary archives?In this lively, well-crafted podcast, leading Bishop scholar Bethany Hicok of Williams College completely fails to control her infectious enthusiasm for Elizabeth Bishop’s writings. She explains to Duncan McCargo why Bishop has become for her the poet of the pandemic, and above all what happened when she spent three weeks embedded in the Vassar archives with sixteen other scholars and poets – a project that resulted in this beautifully produced and copiously illustrated edited volume.Since Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive is an Open Access publication, you can and should download it (free of charge), so you can read along here.  Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

For as often as it may seem to be the case, life doesn’t exist in extremes. Whatever pain, love, desire, or hurt, moving through life is a balancing act. We learn to hold onto what is important for our own growth, but we also learn that sometimes we must carry bits of the world for those who walk beside us and those yet to come. This balancing act teaches us to jettison what no longer serves us just as much as it teaches us to grip tightly to what matters most.In a collection that is equal measures an exploration of pain after her uncle’s passing and an honoring of her own heart, Nicole Danielle’s book Broken Ballads (2019) asks who gets to be innocent? How do we move towards the life we want? What legacy do we leave for future generations? In her debut book, Nicole Danielle finds a way to unearth joy without using blinders to hide the tender spots of the heart that need to heal. She mosaics together the shattered bits of life and shows they can still be beautiful. They can still be a reflection of who we are, what we want, and where we are headed.Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Nicole Danielle is a writer, singer, and educator. She currently resides in New Jersey with her family.Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

KC Trommer speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “The Couple,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Trommer discusses writing about artwork she finds compelling and sometimes disturbing, like the Louise Bourgeois sculptureexplored in this poem. She also discusses her Queens-centered poetry project QUEENSBOUND, her work as a visual artist, and her experience living a block and a half from Elmhurst Hospital in Jackson Heights, the epicenter of the early pandemic.Poet and essayist KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) as well as the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. She is 2021 poet in residence at Works on Water on Governors Island. With Spencer Reece, she co-curates the weekly Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights.Read KC’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/kc-trommer.Explore the QUEENSBOUND map and listen to those poems at queensbound.com.Read more by KC Trommer and explore her visual art at kctrommer.com.Follow KC on Twitter at @kctrommer.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry