New Books in 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 alyrical 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 Englanderis the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at:[email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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 Tenseis 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 ofthe archive is all in present tense,winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in theNorth American Review, theKenyon Review, andStoryQuarterly. She teaches in the English Department at Webster University in St. Louis. You can learn more about Elizabeth's workhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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 inCenturies 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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 theÉire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. I am excited to speak with the organizer of this conference, Joseph Nugent, and the co-editor ofÉire-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 eBookDigital 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 ofÉire-Ireland,and is the author ofThe Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House(Syracuse University Press, 1998) and the museum catalogsÉireland(2003),Rural Ireland: The Inside Story(2012) andThe 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 theNew 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 Yargois 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 inEarly Theatre,Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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 inBest 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 Katherinehere.You can find her chapbook Once Read as Ruinhere.You can follow Katherine onInstagramand onTwitter. You can learn more about Megan Wildhood atmeganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The sonnet — a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, conventionally associated with love — was one of the most popular poetic forms in late Elizabethan England. In 1609, Shakespeare published a sequence of 154 sonnets that radically reimagined the question of what love can mean, including the question of who one might desire and what the experience of desire might be like. In the course, you’ll learn about the structure and history of the sonnet, hear individual sonnets of Shakespeare’s performed and analyzed by world-class actors and literary scholars, and discover how gender, status, and race intersect to shape this sonnet sequence.In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a history and overview of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence with commentary by Michael Schoenfeldt, John R. Knott, Jr. Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. You’ll learn about the sonnet form and how it came to England from Renaissance Italy, what attracted Shakespeare to this form, and what attracted audiences to Shakespeare’s poetry. You’ll also discover the literary mysteries surrounding the sonnets that have intrigued readers for centuries, and how Shakespeare took this traditional form in unexpected directions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections,The Altar of Innocence,No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom,Once You’re Inside: Poetry Exploring Incarceration, and a memoir entitledCrash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery(Charing Cross Press, 2022). She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland, and she’s a frequent contributor to Mad in America’s family section. She volunteers as a correspondent for the Justice Arts Coalition, exchanging letters with incarcerated people to foster their use of the arts. Her poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, her work has been featured on Best American Poetry, and she’s been a guest on Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and The Poem radio show. Her advocacy work promotes using the arts to foster paradigm change in the areas of emotional wellness, education, and prison abolition. This interview focuses onOnce You're Insideas well asCrash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery.Crashis the story of Helen Dempsey and her daughter Ann who both fall victim to the same regimen of overmedication at the hands of the mental health system. Helen struggles with intractable depression and initially turns to self-medication with alcohol, but finds herself unable to recover despite numerous drugs, hospitalizations, and electroconvulsive therapy. Ann vows to build a different life for herself, but eventually descends into the pain of a mysterious migraine and intractable darkness lasting for many years. She was severely overmedicated with opioids and psychiatric drugs and thenMethadone, DHE-45 injections, Migrant nasal spray (for headaches)and injecribele Demerol (for really bad days) once she was off opiates.To keep her out of depression (maintenance), she was prescribed Wellbutrin, Elavil, Topamax, and Valium;Ann crashes her car twice. It took her 4 months of energy healing to discontinue the pain meds and two years later, about a year to get off of psych drugs. Because traditional medical treatments have failed her, she challenges her doctors' advice and discovers ways to heal the source of her physical and emotional pain without drugs. The question of why her mother never got well continues to haunt her long after her mother's death until she finds the missing puzzle pieces she'd searched for all her life stashed in a dusty box in her sister's attic. You can find more about Ann as well as her books and other writingshere. You can learn more about Megan Wildhood atmeganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Christopher Spaide speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “Closure?,” which appears inThe Common’smost recent issue. Chris talks about how his curiosity for language and wordplay often lead him into deeper themes in his poems. He also discusses taking his first poetry class at Amherst College, and, now, teaching poetry classes himself at Emory University. Christopher Spaide is the N.E.H. Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of English at Harvard University and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared inThe Nation, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He was a 2022–2023 writer in residence at the James Merrill House, and he currently reviews for the Poetry Foundation at Harriet Books. ­­Read Chris’s poems “Closure?” and “The Yoke’s on Us” inThe Commonhere. Follow Chris on Twitter@cspaideand learn more about him atchristopherspaide.com. The Commonis a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages,The Commonfeatures established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine atthecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter@CommonMag. Emily Everettis managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in theKenyon Review,Electric Literature, Tin HouseOnline,andMississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry