“The translator does not ‘capture the spirit’ of the foreign text, as translators are so often told, but is affected by the foreign text. Searls’ best advice is to remain open to the experience of reading the text, not to capture it.”
“I think rereading is an act of hope, a way of seeing if the past is truly present, or could be, or should be. As I get older, I find I return to the things that first made sense in poetry, before I was hardened into opinion, or career …”
“An elegy reveals the current / state of the grief. Therefore, // I cannot write an elegy. / Grief is a shape-shifter.”
“The pleasure of the novel derives from its tension between the narrator’s urge to organize — she makes lists, fills notebooks, takes classes — set against Moschovakis’ determination to question the meaning of that organization, to mess with language and existence.”
“The ghost of Hamlet and Keats’s living hand steer Albergotti through a world at risk, its chaos echoed in the play between established forms and rougher music.”
“Immersion in the history of his tribe and its struggles helped La Tray understand his father’s rejection of heritage as a self-protective strategy, a shame response, and a way of protecting his children.”
“I’m made up wholly of inertia / from which I suck the strength // of the stump / of a phantom / tree”
“It is a rite of passage / to learn the game, to take your seat / and study your partner across // the folding table. Inheritance / of how to lose, how to sneak a win.”
“I am hard-pressed to think of another contemporary poet who incorporates both contemporary and ancient sensibility so memorably in poetry that resonates as post postmodern and mythological, both comedic and highly serious.”
“In the cemetery, look for the husband’s name. / I finally find you, Lila — stone letters / freshly carved, marble bench facing a pond for / serenity.”
“But there is no resolution to unknowing, pain; / There is the pale smoke that drifts above the charnel ground. / Shadow men and women bring corpses of their forbears, / bring firewood. Light flames. Tend fires …”
“If there is a throughline connecting these five investigations — of what we know and how we know it — it is what underlies all realizations: that what we are told is often a painful lie.”
“Amelia, the young girl I clean houses with, / bites her nails down to the skin, / comes to work on a bus from rehab. / Dusts around orange pill bottles she didn’t / expect to see there, pale moons calling out to her / from inside their powdered wells.”
“Even as one is struck by Wideman’s compulsive originality and freshness of expression, the reader isn’t allowed to settle into the comfort of morally-charged epiphanies.”
“The train has stopped in a sleepy, quiet time, / this is the time of memory, / of waiting. / Mother says we will come back soon / to this land where my navel was buried, / where the / morning cicada sings and where flowers / never die.”
“The year 2003 was a challenging one for Ernaux. The previous October, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer; in January, her infusions began, which coincided with the first of the photographs.”
“Schnackenberg breaks a fourteen-year silence with a paean to sound: the collection does not so much meditate on Bach’s sacred oratorio as levitate from it.”
“The peculiar smell in the back / of a cop car is not old cum or stale perfume. / It’s Fear 101 or Advanced Fear, or both. / How many hands against how many / cars, how many cuffed, how many heads / shoved down into that seat?”
“… elegantly twisting structure and vocabulary to tell a story of acceptance and openness and hope among chaos. A culmination of the skills of a queer poet and a queer translator …”
“… a Target parking lot’s grey order punctured / by the aquiline nose of an unhoused man / late in his seventies, belted neat in khakis, pulling // a carry-on …”
“but we / do nothing but follow / traces / we ourselves are / nothing but traces / of life / that is why we need so profoundly / to hold on to ourselves …”
“Panaeva was 27 when she penned the manuscript in 1847. It was slated to be published — under a male pseudonym — in Sovremennik, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary journals of the era … The future was not to be.”
“Someone is burning chaff, / someone is burning garbage, someone / is singing to a radio ranchera. / Animals are crying in a far corral // as they do before an earthquake.”
“Late teenaged serving assistants who could be first trusted to simulate an uptight mathematical rigor without too much cologne on the lunch shift wore blue Oxford cloth shirts with dark blue armpits on the patio in the bright sun moving under umbrellas whenever they could.”
“There’s a continent inside our bodies / built from the attar of Eve, a small boat in the river / of our veins & a burned-out church at the fourth fold // in the wrist.”
“Do your best to say things in such a way that the reader will always feel that, deep down, he is as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, you. From time to time, he will be more intelligent than you are in earnest; but in order to convey this to him, you will need to be more intelligent than he is.”
“… a classic police procedural before turning its focus squarely onto the financial inequality, shifting morality, and desperate alienation that arose after the initial euphoria of Croatian independence had faded.”
“We have staked out this grass to save us / from certain death. We crush / our crime-scene-outline backs against it weightfully.”
“She saw the American people as more principled than the more sordid aspects of its history. Even so, she told everyone one of us to beware of the allurements of power …”
“The panties arrived by mail, // flat and overlapping on blue / cardboard like four open-winged birds // on a rectangle of sky.”
“Small groups of children gather / in the colors / of song and tattered flags.”
“Galeano, obsessed with actual facts, concludes about America: insofar as Latin countries remain underdeveloped, it’s because of centuries of looting and exploitation by Europe and the U.S.”
“they say my name was encoded with a disaster / in fact all names are given / and intended to carry blessings or misfortunes”
“Ultimately, she calls for limits on ‘the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our technoenthusiasts,’ not by stifling innovation but rather through ‘a commitment to our shared humanity.'”
“The swimming pool lies under its moldy, canvas top. / Faded poinsettia leaves, brown over white, / struggle into a February that sees / roses bend their necked stems in silent death throes.”
“Is that where your boyfriend’s body bounced // from the car into a patch of bushes? / You say, I wasn’t even drunk, but blinded, // stated mildly, matter of fact and of record.”