New Books in 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

Part 3 starts with a discussion of general reading strategies to help you discover the poetic techniques and insights of any individual sonnet. It concludes with a close-reading of three sonnets from Professor Michael Schoenfeldt that show the extraordinary range of tone, emotion, and perspective in Shakespeare’s poems. Speeches and performers: Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (Ashley Byam) Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Jeff Cornell) Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (Amanda Harris) Sonnet 129, “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (Amanda Harris) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Part 2 focuses closely on the two major “characters” to whom the sonnets are addressed: a beautiful young man, and a woman described as black. You’ll learn how the speaker represents his relationship to these figures and his desire for them, and what significance those relationships might have had in Shakespeare’s culture, as Professor Michael Schoenfeldt discusses sexual identity and race in early modern England. Sonnets Included in Episode 2 Sonnet 20, “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted” (Ashley Byam) Sonnet 147, “My love is as a fever, longing still” (Jeff Cornell) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his speech, he explained that the adequacy of lyric poetry spoke to the “‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation,’ from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.”Ten years after his death, we continue to strain with Heaney to hear that pluralizing voice of radiant truth. “Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives” is the subject of an upcoming conference held at Boston College between November 16th, 17th, and 18th, 2023. The four keynote lectures, along with interviews with contemporary poets influenced by Heaney, have been published in the latest issue of the Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. I am excited to speak with the organizer of this conference, Joseph Nugent, and the co-editor of Éire-Ireland, Vera Kreilkamp, about Heaney’s continuing relevance, the conference, the special issue of the journal.Joseph Nugent is Professor of English at Boston College. Joe is the creator of the iPhone app, JoyceWays: Ulysses for You, and the website, The Dubliners Bookshelf. His teaching includes courses on the digital humanities, Joyce, and Irish studies, and he has written the eBook Digital Dubliners, as well as articles on manliness and representations of the Irish saint Colmcill and olfactory domestic identity in rural Ireland.Vera Kreilkamp is Professor of Irish Studies at Boston College. Vera is the co-editor of Éire-Ireland, and is the author of The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse University Press, 1998) and the museum catalogs Éireland (2003), Rural Ireland: The Inside Story (2012) and The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish (2016).Note: Around the 28-minute mark, I quote from Fintan O’Toole’s commemoration of Seamus Heaney, originally published in the New York Review of Books, but the quotation did not record clearly. Here are the uncorrupted lines from O’Toole’s article: “Poetry is language held taut by being stretched between the poles of competing desires. In Heaney’s work, the tensions extend in many directions: the Wordsworthian Romantic at odds with the Joycean realist; the atheist in search of the miraculous; the world-ranging cosmopolitan with his little patch of remembered earth; the lover of the archaic who cannot escape the urgency of contemporary history.”John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. She has attended Tin House's Summer Writing Workshop (2014), Sundress Publications' SAFTA Residency in (2021), and was a scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (2022). Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length collection, Fool in a Blue House, won the 2022 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. She lives and teaches in Champaign, Illinois.Fool in a Blue House (U Tampa Press, 2023) crafts carefully appointed rooms, both interior and exterior, alongside familial and romantic love, loss and near loss of beloveds, selves, and even neighborhood rabbits. Dwelling in contradictions-strength and fragility, humor and heartbreak, safety and threat-this book ponders impossibilities as solutions to its own predicaments, "Perhaps it would be easier to write in a chorus." But these poems know that this is not the cure. These impossibilities are simply "a whole herring" dropped down a throat, a momentary pause before we dare "to defy what the sky tells us" and instead begin to tell "ourselves that we can will the sky to give."You can find out more about Katherine here. You can find her chapbook Once Read as Ruin here. You can follow Katherine on Instagram and on Twitter.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