Devil's Lake (Tolsun Books, 2020), the debut collection by Sarah Sala, is an amalgam of American life. The poems move deftly within a world that is equal parts dangerous, celebratory, subdued, modern, and rural. Sala uses format and form to bring the spotlight to American violence with just as much care as she does queerness. From the gentle retelling of a brutal murder to the capturing of memories beginning to fade from a grandmother's mind, Devil's Lake honors each of its topics. It is through the collection's three sections readers are invited to look not only at themselves, but each other for the threads that hold in that which makes us who we are.Sarah M. Sala is a poet, educator, and native of Michigan with degrees from the University of Michigan and New York University. She is the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, The Ashbery Home School, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her work appears in BOMB, Poetry Ireland Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southampton Review, among others. The founding director of Office Hours Poetry Workshop, and assistant poetry editor for the Bellevue Literary Review, she teaches expository writing at New York University and lives in Washington Heights with her wusband.Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kathryn H. Ross has found a balance. Between past and present. Between self and ancestors. Between self-discovery and continuous growth. In her hybrid collection, Black Was Not a Label, Ross invites readers into a life unfurling. Through the lenses of natural hair, faith, and microaggressions, she lights a path to what it means to seek self while still honoring the past lives, personal and historical, that connect us all.Black Was Not a Label (Pronto, 2019) is as soft as it is sharp. Ross is a writer of humanness, one who finds more interest in what we feel than theme. Yet, even in this general warmth, she manages to hone in on topics that have rippled throughout generations. Readers are not allowed to look away from the sometimes ingrained expectations of assimilation nor are we allowed to put down the weight of all that came before us. What she gives us in this collection are the means to carry it with grace and the hope it will become a little lighter.Kathryn Ross is a Southern California based writer and editor. Her works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have previously appeared in Sybil Literary Journal, MORIA Literary Magazine, Linden Avenue, and Crack the Spine. She is a columnist at Pasadena Now where she writes about race and culture and a poetry and essay reviewer for Whale Road Review and The Rumpus, respectively. She completed her MA in English and Creative Writing at Azusa Pacific University and loves cats, baths, and rose slushies.Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

This is a book of encounters. Part memoir, part essay, and partly a guide to maximizing your capacity for fulfillment and expression, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press, 2016) taps into the artistic side of what we often take for granted: the stories we tell, the people we love, the metaphors used by scientists, even our sex lives. A folklorist, writer, and cultural activist, Steve Zeitlin explores how poems serve us in daily life and how they are used in times of personal and national crisis. In the first book to bring together the perspectives of folklore and creative writing, Zeitlin explores meaning and experience, covering topics ranging from poetry in the life cycle to the contemporary uses of ancient myths." This convergence of poetry and folklore," he suggests, "gives birth to something new: a new way of seeing ourselves, and a new way of being in the world."Written with humor and insight, the book introduces readers to the many eccentric and visionary characters Zeitlin has met in his career as a folklorist. Covering topics from Ping-Pong to cave paintings, from family poetry nights to delectable dishes at his favorite ethnic restaurants, The Poetry of Everyday Life will inspire readers to expand their consciousness of the beauty that resides in everyday things and to use creative expression to engage and animate that beauty toward living a more fulfilling awakened life, full of laughter. To live a creative life is the best way to engage with the beauty of the everyday.The multiple author It Takes A Pandemic poem can be found here.To hear Steve Zeitlin and Amanda Dargan’s “Double Coffin” bluegrass song, go here.Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the poet Nammalvar’s mystical quest for union with his supreme lord, the Hindu great god Viṣṇu. In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with the translator’s own transformative journey rending into English the meaning, emotion, cadence and kaleidoscopic brilliance proper to this Tamil masterpiece.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The Houston Chronicle’s review of Sarah Adleman’s The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes (Tolsun 2019) praises that the book “dissects the feelings that have been a part of her since her mother's death with the precision and brutality of a poet and all the awful beauty of a perfectly performed major surgery...It's one of the most beautiful things you're likely to read.”Adleman’s collection, a gorgeous hybrid of poetry and memoir, is a journey through grief and forgiveness. The author’s debut book uses both the personal and the informative to examine and preserve the loss, grief, and cleansing set in motion by her mother’s death. She honors her mother not only in the crafting of these shared memories, but also in the actual formatting of the text itself. Adleman gives her mother voice by including her own work interwoven throughout the retelling. The author does not shy away from the heaviness of absence, her personal reaction to the events, and especially not the profound changes to her father. She unfurls these emotions in the light and scrubs away the haze. She leaves us with the “bliss at the core of our beings” and challenges us to walk beside her to the other side.Sarah Adleman was born and raised between the bayous of Houston, the swamps of Louisiana, and the desert of El Paso. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bangladesh, studied yoga in India, and taught English in China. Sarah earned her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso and works as a Certified Yoga Therapist specializing in Traumatic Brain Injury survivors. Her work has been published, acknowledged, or is forthcoming in Kindred Magazine, Terrene, Glimmer Train, and America Writers Review. Sarah’s first book The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes is a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction and for the Eric Hoffer/da Vinci Eye Award. She lives in Denver with her husband, almost two year old son, and their thirteen year old dog.Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The British romantic poet William Wordsworth is best known for his moving evocations of nature, his celebration of childhood, and his quest to find a shared humanity in his poetry. He’s also widely considered the first modern poet because he turns his experiences, memories, and the workings of his mind (earlier "spots of time") into the main subject of his accessible poetry. That hadn’t happened before, and all of us, who today are either committed to rational thought, sober analysis and reflection or are deep in our feelings, are ultimately Wordsworthians.But what Wordsworth may really be about, I discussed with the brilliant poet and critic Maureen McLane, is whether with knowledge truly comes wisdom, and whether we trade in the ecstasies of youthful exuberance and immediate experience for a more measured but diminished way of living life. Is there really "abundant recompense," as Wordsworth wrote, in recalling earlier "fits of passion" that roiled our lives? Are "our minds [...] nourished and invisibly repaired" when we look back upon earlier experiences of joy and suffering? "What I'm looking for is a golden bowl, carefully repaired," writes McLane in one of her poems in This Blue - but can we trust that things will be repaired after having been lost to the passage of time? (Incidentally, I talked with Jessica Benjamin in another podcast about the human capacity for "repair," and whether we can trust that things can be restored once broken).This question is also at the heart of the Enlightenment itself: whether knowledge frees us from superstition but at the cost of sacrificing the immediacy of experience. Can we turn fights, arguments and turmoil into something larger by placing them into a wider context: do we have the "power to make/our noisy years seem moments in the being/of the eternal Silence"? Or are some things broken by humans never fully recovered, and we are left with grief, and loss, and silence, but nothing eternal?It's an urgent question for our age, when reason, argument and truth themselves seem so easily upstaged by spectacle and the fire and fury of immediate action.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves.The monster has no heart.Mary has two.There is the one she keeps in her bureau—wrapped up in silk and parchment,burnt about the edges and stinking of salt.It is the heart of the man who was her loverand it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest.That is a mangled and un-pretty thing,but she takes it out of her chestsits it beside the other:two hearts on a writing desk.The vibrations send the papers flying.Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She's sold nearly 50 short stories to markets like Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons. Several novellas and a collection of essays on food and horror have sold to various small presses. She is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University, and Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is her second poetry collection. The first, Chemical Letters, was written while studying for her PhD (in science communication) and is about a woman who spends her afterlife in the periodic table.Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter/Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Paul Celan's poetry marks the end of European modernism: he is the last poet of the era where the poetic "I" could center a subjective vision of the world through language. Celan bears witness to the Holocaust as the irredeemable rupture in European civilization, but he does so in German, the language of the perpetrators who murdered his parents along with millions of others. How do you bear witness to suffering, murder and loss in the language of the murderers? How can poetry account for the inhumanity of the Holocaust without aestheticizing it? How can language prevail when words fail to express what really happened to millions upon millions at the hands of a people who claimed to be the height of civilization?I spoke with Amir Eshel, a critic and poet who is also Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His books include: Poetic Thinking Today (forthcoming with Stanford University Press in 2019); Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (University of Chicago Press 2013); as editor, The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018), and with Uli Baer, an edited book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen. He's published several books on poetry after the Holocaust and on writings about the Palestinian expulsion. In 2018 Amir published a book with the artist Gerhard Richter, called Zeichnungen/רישומים, a book which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the cycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German.Eshel first encountered Celan in Hebrew translations before learning German himself. I read Celan in (my native) German but not until I have moved to America and started writing and mostly speaking in English. Amir and I met, in a way, as an Israeli and a German, via Celan's poetry. We talked about the experience of reading Celan, how being estranged by language can come close to grasping another's experience that we will never know, and why poetry never quite lives only in a familiar idiom.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry