"A Poet’s 'Almost Obscene' Devotion to Beauty"
"The poems of Almost Obscene—by turns agile, charming, intimate, and dark, as precarious and hypnotic as a candle flame—have long been pushed out of sight; now, thanks to translators Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott, they are coming back into view. Colombian poet Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), their author, was of Syrian descent; he was also queer, mentally ill, frequently incarcerated, and, since he lived on the streets, literally adjacent to upright urban life."
via HYPERALLERGIC |
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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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