Poetry Today: Jennifer Militello and Quintin Collins « Kenyon Review Blog kenyonreview.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kenyonreview.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
POETRY, and
Tin House; she has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award, the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Betty Gabehart Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award. She is currently a faculty member in the MFA program at New England College. Today she takes a moment to talk with us about her new book, which challenges existing notions about the love poem, for “but what are poems for if not to express extremity? If not to both rage about and celebrate obsessions?”
Rosebud Ben-Oni: I
really felt what you had to say about love in your opening poem “Agape Feast,” especially the last lines: “Its mercy is electric, it is storied, it is rank./ Its mercy is a tablet dissolved in a glass,/more invisible the more you drink.” Can you tell us how this breathtaking poem (which is a gift to read aloud!) sets the stage, so to say, for the rest of the poems in
Jhumpa Lahiri headlines the 2020 Society of Authors Awards for her translation of ‘
Trick’ by Domenico Starnone for Europa Editions.
In London’s Bloomsbury, February 8. Image – iStockphoto: Josh Good
Five Winners Newly Announced
In London this morning (February 11), the Society of Authors which annually administers a large collection of endowed awards programs has announced the winners of its suite of 2020 translation awards.
The society, in fact, is a trade union that handles many more prize programs than this, carrying in 2020 alone some £120,000 (US$159,994) in prizes for various competitions in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as translation.
Today’s list brings together £13,000 (US$17,974) in winnings.
The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and
Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her ninth collection,
Ledger, is forthcoming from Knopf in March 2020. She has edited and cotranslated books with Mariko Aratani and Robert Bly. Hirshfield’s honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Literature, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her work has been selected for seven editions of
Among the best fiction from Latin America this year,
Dead Girls by Argentinean Selva Almada (Charco Press) deserves a special mention as being one of the most powerful and necessary. This is an incisive book that deals head-on with the tragedy of femicides in Latin American by recounting the killings of three teenage girls in the interior of Argentina in the 1980s.
The Book of Emma Reyes, by Colombian artist and writer Emma Reyes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is another highlight. An instant classic, the book includes 23 beautifully written letters by the author, who recounts the moving story of a Colombian girl trying to survive extreme poverty, violence, class prejudice and years of abuse in a exploitative and cruel Catholic convent.