Celebrating National Poetry Month with virtual readings mercercluster.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mercercluster.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
New & Noteworthy Poetry, From Sign Language to Robot Saints
April 20, 2021
Recent poetry books of note:
INDEX OF WOMEN, by Amy Gerstler. (Penguin Poets, paper, $20.) Gerstler’s witty collection channels various characters the tooth fairy, a lost doll to celebrate “shrewd, / ingenious, difficult women, prodigal daughters / and wisecracking wives.”
THE PERSEVERANCE, by Raymond Antrobus. (Tin House, paper, $16.95.) Intimate and searching, the poems in this lively debut probe the author’s identity as a deaf Jamaican British man; sign language illustrations appear sporadically, and one poem is a scornful riposte to Ted Hughes’s “Deaf School.”
CLEAVE: Poems, by Tiana Nobile. (Hub City, paper, $16.) Harry Harlow’s famous study, raising baby monkeys with wire or terrycloth “mothers,” runs as a motif through this collection about the poet’s experience as a Korean-American adoptee. “Call me Rhesus,” she writes, “monkey without a cloth.”
Event Description
In this black and white photo, the poet is visible from the shoulders up and looks to the side.
Poet Rebecca Morgan Frank will read from her collected works virtually on Sunday, March 14 at 7:00pm Central. The reading is free and open to the public.
Rebecca Morgan Frank s fourth collection of poems is Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon UP). Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Women s Review of Books, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is co-founder and editor of the online literary journal Memorious.
Poets and readers from the community will precede the feature.
NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS
An award for immigrant writing, an essay contest devoted to tales of Black joy, and new poetry from a longtime Boston resident
By Nina MacLaughlin Globe Correspondent,Updated February 25, 2021, 1:29 p.m.
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Laurels for Mohabir
Restless Books, founded in 2013 as antidote to a myopic and homogenous American literary landscape, recently announced that Rajiv Mohabir, poet and assistant professor at Emerson College, is the winner of their annual Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Mohabirâs memoir, âAntiman,â which will be published in June, moves across countries â India, Guyana, Canada, the U.S. â and genres â poetry, prose, myth, and family history â to tell the story of his experience growing up across cultures and wanting to learn more about the Hindu history his family, living as Guyanese Indian immigrants in Florida, left behind. He reckons with racism, with homophobia (the title is a Carib
Memorious.
INTRODUCTION
My formal study of poetry came somewhat late, and in Boston, a city of poets. I had the good fortune of working with Andrea Cohen at the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, a series that my teacher, Gail Mazur had founded thirty years earlier. I took tickets, sold books, turned the lights on and off, and sat in the darkness with poets listening to other poets. Sometimes the well-known poets were on the stage, sometimes they were the ones in the audience listening to first-book poets. There were also memorable tribute readings. We were all in it together, in this magic realm of poetry in a small room that held the history of so many great poets. I learned that poets need one another and learn from one another at all stages of life and career. I learned poetry from listening, from the rhythms of different poets washing over me every Monday night. I learned to contribute. Poetry should be a world where any of us can live.