This excerpt comes from my translation of Samira Negrouche’s "Traces," the second book contained in "Solio" (Seagull Books, 2024). Oriented around the general theme of movement, "Traces" was collaboratively conceived with Senegalese choreographer Fatou Cissé. The “you’s” and “I’s” are left intentionally fluid and vague, rendering them more universal. Here, a finger can both flit and engage in an action as intimate as covering a nursing baby’s cheek with fabric.
Nancy Naomi Carlson on "Traces" |
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"Once or Twice: On James Longenbach"
"Jim wrote in The Resistance to Poetry of how a lyric poem seeks to make itself listenable, how its sounds seek to invite us into it, making us feel that we will be listened to in return. His poems make good on those claims, which bear repeating because we want to relive and revise (not merely to remember) a dream of connection. In listening and being listened to by poems, we hear how our need for intimacy—and our intimacies themselves—cannot quite rest in peace. "
via RARITAN QUARTERLY |
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What Sparks Poetry:
G. C. Waldrep on Ecopoetry Now
"For me as a poet there’s a joy in sheer description, as there is also an excitement in the act of address....Description is always an act of translation. And in so doing propose, to some notional reader, that something could be shared. To address, meaning to conjure that notional reader (or auditor) explicitly, via deixis: you. You there. Not you, but you. You, defined as whatever or whomever the poem is addressing. Sometimes I think 'you' is the most complicated word in the English language. 'You' is always a revelation to me." |
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