Poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves discuss the underworld, grief, and communication with the dead in their poetry. They explore themes of loss, heroism, and cultural reflections, drawing parallels to ancient myths and modern experiences. The podcast delves into the power of words, silence, and poetic imagery to convey deep emotions and confront personal struggles.

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems (Rare Bird, 2024). When the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father's spirits. As a prolific novelist who began writing in his twenties, Herbert Gold's incredible oeuvre included twenty-four novels, five collections of stories and essays, and eight nonfiction books. So, Ari mailed his father a poem, asking for one in return. Later, Ari's twin brother, Ethan, also got into the game. Thus was launched a lifesaving literary correspondence, and a testament to the bonds of family. The resulting poems are playful, honest, funny, and moving. Secrets are invoked alongside personal - and often painful - history. Ari and Ethan's mother, Herbert Gold's second wife, died in a helicopter crash alongside the famous rock promoter and impresario Phil Graham in 1991. Her ghost roams through the poems and the wonderful archival photos included in full color throughout. In Father Verses Sons, a lushly illustrated "correspondence in poems," ranges across the life, family, and death of a remarkable father. The father and his sons write tenderly of their hunger for connection, about the woman that all three men have lost (a mother, a wife), and about the passion that all three seek. Ultimately, these poems tell a singular story of men bumbling their way towards love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Only More So (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and Quarantine Highway (FlowerSong Press). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant), Yaddo, Portuegese National Cultural Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Foundation, "Money for Women." She lives in Topanga canyon.From re-definition to re-calibration, the poems in Quarantine Highway are artifacts to the early and mid-days of the pandemic. Though not specifically labeled as "Covid poems," they strike to the heart of the universal yet individual struggles of solitude, confinement, justice, isolation and, ultimately, self-reckoning. The poems push and pull between the constantly knocking global news cycle to the stillness of a surreal inner world.Find more of Millicent's writings here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

After her prize-winning debut, Karen Rigby returns with a beguiling ars poetica and tribute to the dazzling. From Dior to Olympic figure skating, Bruegel to British crime drama, Rigby’s poems revere memorable art, where “performance masks the hours.” Here, thread galvanizes air. A poem is a diamond heist. And menace and elegance are twin gloves directing each cinematic moment. A book of feminine ardor, teenaged MDD and survival, Fabulosa (Jackleg Press, 2024) embroiders beauty out of ache, raises culturally difficult topics with poise, and helps readers feel seen with elegance and originality.Born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, Karen Rigby now lives and writes in Arizona. Her latest poetry book, Fabulosa, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2024. Her debut poetry book, Chinoiserie, was selected by Paul Hoover for a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize.Karen’s work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. She is a 2023 recipient of an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her poetry is published in journals such as The London Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Oxonian Review, and Australian Book Review. She is a freelance book reviewer and lives in Arizona.Preorder Fabulosa here.You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Exploding Head (Persea Books, 2024) chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems’ speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace. Whether or not you have a diagnosis of OCD, these poems will make you feel seen at a deep level that's rare in today's world.Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Exploding Head (Persea Books, 2024), Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones (Persea Books, 2018), Paper Doll Fetus (Persea Books, 2014), and Sightseer (Persea Books, 2011). Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Lake Effect, Blackbird, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.To pre-order Exploding Head here. Find Hoffman's writing here.You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Jessica Romney's book Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of self for their groups, focusing in turn on the construction of identity in martial-themed poetry, the protection of group identities in the face of political exile, and the negotiation between individual and group as seen in political lyric. By conducting a close reading of six poems and then a broad survey of martial lyric, exile poetry, political lyric, and sympotic lyric as a whole, Romney demonstrates that sympotic lyric focuses on the same basic behaviors and values to construct social identities regardless of the content or subgenre of the poems in question. The volume also argues that the performance of identity depends on the context as well as the material of performance. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that sympotic lyric overwhelmingly prefers to use identity rhetoric that insists on the inherent sameness of group members.All non-English text and quotes are translated, with the original languages given alongside the translation or in the endnotes.Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The poems in the book  I Am Your Father (Pardes Press, 2019) were written during a period of great confusion and pain, culminating in the moment when the poet discovered that the person he had until then referred to as his daughter was actually his son, in other words, that he had a transgender son. This revelation was not a single moment but evolved through an ongoing process of listening, understanding, loving, and increasingly close father-son bonding. The poems in the book capture this discovery with sharp precision and heartfelt wisdom, and importantly, in real-time. The book began to be written about six months before the poet's son came out as transgender and continued to be written for about four more months thereafter. These are not poems written from a distance in time, but right in the eye of the storm, and through them, we learn to appreciate the depth and beauty of the father-son relationship, as only poetry can reflect. I Am Your Father is Adi Wolfson's sixth book of poetry.I Am Your Father includes the English language poems as translated by the American poet Michael R. Burch.Adi Wolfson is a poet, environmental activist, expert on sustainability and a professor of chemical engineering. His poems have been published in a number of Hebrew literary journals and anthologies, and have been translated into several languages. He has published six poetry books in Hebrew, a nonfiction book on sustainability in both Hebrew and English, and have won several awards, including the Levi Eshkol Prime Minister’s Prize for Creative Work in 2017, one of Israel’s most prestigious literature prizes.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

From his home in Connecticut, Ran Oron observed and drew a pair of ospreys, a couple of birds of prey that return each year to the same nest.With a delicate line, in a series of drawings, in a narrative that straddles poetry and prose, he wrote and echoed the construction of his own family nest, its dismantling, and the departure of the children from the home, while reflecting deeply on the dynamics between the pair of birds.He Could See a Bird Outside if He Looked Through His Window (In Hebrew; Persimmon Books, 2023) is a lyrical and tranquil book about partnership, parenthood, and children. About the changing seasons of nature and the soul, a parable of pain and optimism.A story that bridges art and poetry about the intimate space of each and every one of us. A beautifully crafted book that is both inspirational and a gift.Ran Oron was a helicopter navigator prior to studying architecture at the Cooper Union. In 1996 he founded ROART, an architecture studio in New York City. For two decades he was a design professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. An Israeli born architect and artist Mr Oron exhibited and lectured around the world.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The Archive Is All in Present Tense (Barrow Street Press, 2022) attempts to capture the feeling of archival research, which, despite being an attempt to access information about the past, has a way of infusing the present; research unfolds in real time as you touch and handle objects that radiate with presence. In the archive we follow a researcher who is exploring a fantastical, limitless archive and though she attempts to research the history of war crimes, she keeps encountering objects from her personal past and memory. Ultimately, it explores both the falling in love with big institutions of learning (libraries, archives, museums) and the exhilaration of discovery, but also the ways these institutions violently exclude and how to reconcile that love with the past wrongs these institutions have committed. The Archive Is All in Present Tense is an intensely cinematic collection of poems, intensely erotic and equally cerebral, where you will descend into archival folds making the body negative space in a restless, inescapable, eternal now. To write is to rewrite with alphabets of the past, surging into the present, being remade, where the self is both trapped and sublime.Elizabeth Hoover is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, and StoryQuarterly. She teaches in the English Department at Webster University in St. Louis.You can learn more about Elizabeth's work here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented in Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Academic Studies Press, 2022) are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry