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DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi,
The Galleons: Poems by Rick Barot,
Deluge by Leila Chatti,
Catrachos: Poems by Roy G. Guzmán,
A More Perfect Union by Teri Ellen Cross Davis.
DAY: I’m in a unique position in that I have access to so much incredible poetry through my job. The NEA awards grants each year to nonprofit presses to support the publication of some of the country’s best poetry (and prose) books, and we keep a library of those books on our shelves in the office. I also read manuscript excerpts for the Creative Writing Fellowships and often fall in love with a writer’s work that way. And I’m signed up for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, where they send a poem every morning via email. Once I’ve found one or two poems by a poet that I’m really drawn to, I’m compelled to read more of their work to find more poems like the ones I love.
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Book World: Words of wisdom or wishful thinking? The problem with new books that aim to heal us.
Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
April 14, 2021
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Edited by James Crews
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The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who died March 21, wasn t a household name. But there s a decent chance you know one of his poems. And if you lived through 2020, you have a bone-deep understanding of the mood it evoked.
In Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Zagajewski summoned the urge to sound a note of positivity amid death and chaos: you ve seen the refugees going nowhere, / you ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. / You should praise the mutilated world. The bittersweet poem circulated widely after 9/11. The New Yorker printed it on the back page of its first issue after the attacks, where it sat, alone, somber as a tombstone but surrounded by enough white space to feel something like hope.
The book I am currently reading
About 10 years ago I was recommended a Colum McCann’s
Dancer but I never got around to reading it. That is why I was glad to finally read his new book
Apeirogon – and what a book it is. A fiction based on real characters, politics and lives, it is a hybrid that tests the boundary of what a novel can be. What I like about it most is the way in which its multivoiced perspectives hold so much poetry, music and imagery.
The book that changed my life
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange is