Amanda Berenguer invokes a mysterious limestone sculpture in the title of "The Lady of Elche." Yet I see the self-portraits in this book reversing themselves, emptying out, to evoke something larger than one person. Here in “Avec les gémissements graves du Montévidéen”–a poem titled with a quotation, literally someone else’s words–Berenguer seems to provide her most individualized self-portrait. Take a look at the closing lines, though. They hint at the state violence that haunts the book as a wholeKristin Dykstra on "Avec les gémissements graves du Montévidéen" |
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"Short Conversations with Poets: Paisley Rekdal"
"You would clearly call most medieval poems 'poetry,' of course, but what drew me to work like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was the sense of English itself—the language and its prosody—staggering to its feet, trying to figure out its own poetic rhythms as a newly evolving language."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jennifer Kronovet on Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony
"'Cruelty and beauty—how do they coexist?' Don Mee Choi asks this question in the middle of her book DMZ Colony. To say that she answers that question is not quite right. What Choi does is harder: she gives us new ways to think it through—she creates a vocabulary, syntax, multiple codes, maps, and sounds so that we can enter specific devastations, see how they weave, like all colonial disasters, backward and forward in time." |
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