Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2023 - Poetry After 2003 - Translations
- Mahogany S.
- Friday, January 13, 2023
Collection
Check out one of these titles and fulfill the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge prompt "read a collection of poetry published since 2003".
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2023 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Poems from Gaza
Published in 2022
"In this poetry debut, the first collection from any Gazan poet to be published in English, Mosab Abu Toha writes directly from the experience of growing up and living one's entire life in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison camp. These poems emerge from Mosab's life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is infused with a profoundly universal humanity. In direct, vivid language, Abu Toha writes about being unwelcome in your own land, and even outside of it. He writes about being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16, and then, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by Israeli warplanes in an attack that killed two of his close friends. Books are buried in rubble and electricity is often limited to 2 hours a day, and yet, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins. These poems are filled with bombs and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones, as well as the smell of tea and roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. They present an almost surrealist/absurd viewpoint, based in a sense of rational and profound perplexity as to why these conditions continue, and how the people of Gaza go about their lives, even creating beauty as they find new ways to survive. Abu Toha writes, "It's not only about narrating things. It's about keeping things alive in us and for the generations to come. It's about how life crumbles, but also how it tries to stand." If we don't begin understanding what has happened there--and is still happening--Gaza might be our future as well. We all need to grasp what it means to still be human in such a situation"-- Provided by publisher.
Breathturn into Timestead
The Collected Later Poetry
Published in 2014
"Haunting poems from one of the twentieth century's groundbreaking poets Paul Celan, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth century, created brilliant works of pure musicality and stark imagery in tension with the haunting memories of his life as a Romanian Jew during the Holocaust. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris. This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" (die "Wende") of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan wrote, the language of poetry has to become "more sober, more factual. 'grayer.'" He abandoned the richer music of lyric poems, paring his compositions down to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render 'poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world that held the memory and anguish of that history, Celan experimented with a bold new poetics. Breathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing one of the most profound artistic reinventions of the twentieth century--creating a poetry grounded in his painful personal history and the ravages of postwar Europe"-- Provided by publisher.
Antes Que Isla Es Volcán
Poemas = Before Island is Volcano
Published in 2022
"In sharp, crystalline verses, written in both Spanish and English versions, antes que isla es volcán daringly imagines a decolonial Puerto Rico. Salas Rivera unfurls series after series of poems that build in intensity: one that casts Puerto Rico as the island of Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, another that imagines a multiverse of possibilities for Puerto Rico's fate, a 3rd in which the poet demands his right to a future and its immediate distribution. The verses are rigorous and sophisticated, engaging with literary and political theory, yet are also hard-hitting, charismatic, and quotable ("won't you be sorry? / won't you wish you had a boss? / won't you get restless / with all that freedom?")."-- Amazon.
Wild Beauty = Belleza Salvaje
New and Selected Poems
Published in 2017
Collects more than sixty original and selected poems that frequently deal with such difficult subjects as rape, abortion, suicide, and domestic violence, with Spanish translations on facing pages.