Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era. As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and it is Not Kenneth Goldsmith”: “poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.” This anthology stands with a significant few who are helping to usher in or marking this renewed time of social engagement through poetry. Up and coming poets are balking at the instruction to stay away from the political, the politicized, and the instigative. We are writing about the body as we have come to understand it, not a version sanitized for comfortable consumption. With two editors–Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith–at the helm who were fully present in their responsibility to broadly represent the politics of identity, this anthology is unafraid. It refuses to apologize and instead insists that it is owed some genuflection. Unified in their disparate realities, these 65 poets sing, perform, and present their versions of life, love, and loss across spectrums and time lines. Listen here for four of these exceptional poets to share their work. This anthology, these poets, and these editors understand that literature has a responsibility to reinforce or establish empathy; it is not merely a mirror or means of self-appraisal, it has a responsibility to act as connective tissue. Pick up a copy of this anthology today. Share it, give it as a gift, teach it–let these poems flex and stretch throughout the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

“Poems of Nomadic Dispersal” This latter phrase in the title of Janice A. Lowe‘s new book–LEAVING CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press, 2016)– has hung around me, following me through my home, around the rural town where I live and have not yet become fully accustomed. The insistence on “landing somewhere” has resonated with me. The notion of understanding that place enough to call it home has altered the way I see myself geographically. The poems themselves have hung around me, in their narrative, in their varied terrain of verse topography. And then I heard the poet read her work, and the lines that had been trailing me rose up to eye and ear level. I understood the many levels on which these poems are operating. my House was small her secrets full of wildflower memory of Hungarian table wines her backyard of mint and rose breath singing through humble cracks a milk chute for bottles no longer delivered her garage a sentry box weary from Black sightings the inevitable advance of Color How fitting that this poet is also a musician, that the open-ended movement through states she sought to capture, is also expressed in the small rooms of a musical movement. These movements, like poems, work separately, but need to be played in succession for the performance to be complete and for totality of expression. At the end of the interview, we feature one of these tracks. Of this process, Janice writes, “When Leaving CLE started to grow, to become an entity of text, the words of the book started to sing and drum. In getting out of the way of the music coming through, I’ve set four poems from Leaving CLE. Resistance Girl T is one of those insistent tunes. Am I composing a song cycle or musical? Parameters don’t matter. There will be more of whatever this flow is.” Track Credits: Resistance Girl T (6:02am) Written, Composed and Produced by Janice A. Lowe Keyboards and flute-Janice A. Lowe Bass-Yohann Potico Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

What is explosion? What does language look like when it mimics a gas leak, a bang, or rubble? What does language look like when it orbits other sounds, mediums, and musicality? How can it then react to and converse with itself? Rodrigo Toscano is a poet who trusts his creative impulse, trusts the place in time, space, and his mind where art is born allows this wave to carry the poet where it will. It is this ceding of will that permits a collection like Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016) to fully realize itself. How can we better understand how a mid-day, multi-structure gas explosion took no lives? But this is isn’t about the explosion that took no lives. This has everything to do with the explosion that took no lives. And everything to do with dialogue, and the cosmos, and ancient civilizations. Interconnectedness is expressed at its most fundamental level. How can we better understand the philosophical impact of each word, each turn of phrase, each image it conjures, and how this language is language? The text casts you out to the furthest reaches of what could possibly be derived, and then reels you back in to “The Friday Evening Gas Explosion in Springfield Leveled a Strip Club Next To a Day Care.” This refrain, this text is artifice. After it has pulled you back into itself, it intersects: The Liberty Box checked to spec as did the Libidinal Lines at the Thought Crossers. Strange thing was the Gonad Gauge didn’t register the Need Switches. Good Thing the Big O Override tripped the Care Breakers right then. I’m sure that’s what kicked the Ego Ventilator, eventually firing up a Poetic Alarm. The Locked Out/Tagged Out American that’s the working title. Toscano treats the line as sheet music, elevated beyond communication to artifice. Musicality, philosophy, composition. He pulls from everything in his reach: musical composition, philosophy, ancient history, and anthropology. This book needs to be experienced as an entity. Allow it to register on all levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Paul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (University of Washington Press, 2015) presents and proposes what it calls a “Buddhist approach to poetry”: rather than focusing on the intentions of the author in reading poetry, it offers a way of thinking about the importance of the way a poem is read. Pt. 1 of the book introduces readers to the history of, and some of the technical issues surrounding, the Hanshan poems: its prefatory material, later debates about its authenticity, arguments in Chinese scholarship about the life and dates of the poet. It also proposes a way that we might think about a “Buddhist poetics.” Pt. 2 of the book looks closely at the overarching themes and rhetoric of the poems themselves, looking at the ways that meaning is made through internal and external juxtapositions, and tracing the tensions between moving and staying, residence and travel, and motifs of “blasted trees,” moons, jewels, beautiful women, and more through the poems. The same year that Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums appeared – 1958 – American poet Gary Snyder published his first translations of Hanshan, and Pt. 3 of Rouzer’s book considers resonances between the Beat and post-Beat writers and the Buddhist rhetoric, imagery, and themes of the Cold Mountain poems. It’s a fascinating book that’s a pleasure to read for both specialist and general readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and acts as a form of “counterpoint,” riffing on and playing off of the work of Pessoa and Augustine and Rousseau and Blake and Heidegger and others. This is a thoughtful and playful book about time, and the sea, and humor, and loss, and slavery, and the importance of unlearning. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Tina Escaja‘s, Free Fall/Caida libre, translated by Mark Eisner (Fomite Press, 2015), is an exceptional example of poetry in translation as artistic collaboration. Poetry exists outside of the margins, and this often creates an insurmountable task for those seeking to relay emotion, realization, and epiphany across language barriers. The nuances and inflections of colloquialism and historical, cultural understandings can be lost. We, as readers of translation often wonder, what is kept of the music and what is kept of the intent? Translations can only bring us to the precipice–language allows us to take the plunge. We must trust our translators to be lovers of verse. Escaja works in an experimental form that is most likened to the cycle inherent in life, death, and rebirth. Even throughout the lines and stanzas, there is a stopping and starting again, a dropping off and returning. Recuperarnos quiero. Aprender a nacerme de otra en ti. Sin vuelta posible. Sin colchon salvavidas, sin suturas. Caidalibre. I want to recover us. To learn to be born of another in you. Impossible to turn back. No life vests, no sutures. Free fall. Beyond translating language, Eisner has taken on the task of translating experience. This is unabashedly a feminist text and a challenge that Eisner understood better as an opportunity. The least likely combination of writer/translator is a woman writer and a male translator (http://womenintranslation.tumblr.com/). These two have also collected, translated, edited, and complied (with the help of other talented folks) an anthology of Latin American Poetry of Resistance, furthering this work of artistic collaboration while focusing on social justice. Find out more information about these writers and projects at www.RedPoppy.net To the poet about to be translated, Escaja offers, “You must be open, patient, and generous.” To the translator about to embark on their first project, Eisner offers, “Think of it as an art and embrace it as a creative challenge.” Listen here for Tina’s readings of her pieces in their native tongue, and Mark’s reading of his translations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Every poet has their obsessions and for James Franco they are childhood, gender, sex, innocence, and the work place he knows best: the film industry. Within these poetic frames we’re introduced to various voices, landscapes nearly worn out with elegy, and a repertoire of imagery that is both tender and violent. Franco is our poet of earnest grotesquerie, favoring clarity to vagueness as he depicts the bizarre zones of early experience that crash against poems of adulthood that occupy spaces most readers do not have access to: film and celebrity. However, Franco’s poems seem to argue that a kinship exists between the world of the adolescent and the world of a movie set. In his poems, we see the intersection of both and the distinctions between sincerity and artifice are blurred and complicated by a speaker who seems simultaneously anchored in both of these perceptual districts. In addition to Franco’s fidelity to the bramble of childhood memory and glittering industrial complex of show business, his poems are deceptively musical, employing internal rhymes and capturing the tiny voltage of music inside every syllable, creating a sonic landscape one might miss if you don’t read the poems aloud. When the book Directing Herbert White (Graywolf Press, 2014) was first published, it made a big splash in the otherwise small pond of the poetry world, and it reminded me of what Franco does best: challenges society’s notions of the artist and the dynamic – and at times rigid communities – they inhabit. During out chat we talk about the relationship between childhood and violence, the creative writing workshop as a site of instruction, his various poetic influences, and so much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Lady of the Moon (Headmistress Press, 2015), the reader is graced not only with the poetry of Amy Lowell, but with sonnets in response and a scholarly essay on the poet’s life, love, and work. Amy Lowell lived and wrote in a time when she could not be entirely herself, could not fully claim her rightful space among the great writers of love poetry and celebrations of the beloved. She had to reveal her truths by hiding them. As much as she cloaked her work, shifted genders of speaker and beloved, the truth of the poems resonate now as unabashed declarations of love and desire for her partner, Ada Russel. This collection places the relationship with Russel at the forefront in such a way that it honors what could not be honored before. But this is true of most of the work published by Headmistress Press: necessary voices are given the mic before it is too late, a safe space is offered for rumination on gender, sexuality, and all spectrums of identification, and the work of poets like Amy Lowell is given the truthful and critical analysis it deserved while the poet was living. We know that Amy Lowell wanted to be understood better as a poet. She did not want to hide her love, her body, or her desires but knew that it would only be safe to be fully realized after her death. She left the door open for us, as readers. You will sit here, some quiet Summer night, Listening to the puffing trains, But you will not be lonely, For these things are a part of me. And my love will go on speaking to you Through the chairs, and the tables, and the pictures, As it does now through my voice, And the quick, necessary touch of my hand. (From “Penumbra” by Amy Lowell) As scholars and poets, Mary and Lillian came together to create this homage not only to Amy Lowell but to her long-time relationship with Ada Russel. So much care was paid to this union that it is Ada’s photo that graces the cover. In Mary’s 27 response sonnets, the reader is offered an opportunity to have the veil lifted somewhat– maybe even to afford Lowell the transparency she craved. Who among us does not want to celebrate our love for another person? Who does not want to jump up, yell it from the rooftops? Maybe Lowell trusted that her poetry memorialized their relationship and that her declarations of love would truly be understood long after she and Russel were gone from the physical world. And even in the daylight sky, your streams Of light show through the ruling blue, and give, Making the world more hopeful than it seems. Inside my lines, your love and beauty live, Etched in my books, with nothing to forgive Or be forgiven for, an ancient light That lasts forever. You should know, I give My fortune, house, and heart, to keep you bright When I am gone. (From “Sonnet 27” by Mary Meriam) For any who wished to understand more about Amy Lowell and her work, who felt the gaping holes in the teaching of her writing and life, should pick up this collection. The poet is honored by showing plainly her reverence and desire for Ada Russel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Winner of the Gazing Grain 2015 Chapbook contest, BIG BROWN BAGby Marisa Crawford is our final Chapbookapalooza installment. And what a way to end a glorious month of celebrating this small form. Set within the behind-the-scenes confines a fictional department store that rings true as a multitude of department stores, Crawford brings us an inner monologue in conversation. Does this seem counterintuitive? Think of the way we engage with society and community. Think of the struggles we endure to locate ourselves within and without those groups. “Goody’s” is less setting than state of being. There is a long history of poets as cultural critics, poets as clear, focused lens and Crawford has learn to trust her subjectivity or at least quiet her mind enough to understand it. Her speaker grapples with the things we need to do in order to survive while remaining clear-headed about boundaries and priorities. By internalizing criticism, the world I processed in bits and pieces. The poems have a colloquial ease that the trained reader knows as hard-won. The content leaps fuse together through the life of the poem and of the collection. Who do we call out to when we are the only person in the room who understands our perfectly human and flawed selves? Or is it the duty of the poet-as-observer to issue warnings against what we have been enacting on each other for millennia… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry