Shelley Puhak
All the knives. When the baby was brand-new I hid
them. Padded the walls. Hid too the movie reel
of all that could befall my perfect, perfect

child. The doctors don’t know what the ancients did—
that the flawless are the ones the priest
collects to sacrifice. A child too perfect

calls to the knife. Hallelujah the birthmark, the extra digit.
Once when the rains kept coming, 140 children
lined up to have their perfect, perfect

hearts ripped out. Not mine. A tree branch once slit
his cheek, a rock his knee—see the marks? Not mine.
Not me. I don’t do dishes. My house is a perfect

mess. Like the other waiting-room mothers. Who slipped
up and who else loves enough to slip—boiling pot,
narrow stairs? We all mar our perfect, perfect

children. The knives back out on the counter. They glint
in late afternoon light, whetstone-honed. I’m greedy
as any god. More scars.
from the book HARBINGER / Ecco
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The impetus for this poem was the April 2018 discovery of an ancient mass child sacrifice site on Peru’s northern coast. It seems the ritual was a response to a natural disaster, an attempt to appease the gods after the El Niño weather pattern caused extensive flooding in the region.

Shelley Puhak on "Portrait of the Artist in the Pediatrician's Waiting Room"
Black-and-white head-and-shoulders shot of Sharon Olds
"Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate"

"People get so caught up in Olds’s provocative subject matter that they can underestimate the rigorous pleasures of her style. She is, deep down, a showboat. Her opening lines ('You get so soft when you get sick') are sharp little hooks. Her endings are surprising but sound; they make me think, often, of a gymnast twisting off the vault before suddenly, before we’re quite ready, thumping into a balanced landing." 

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover of the poetry anthology, Divining Dante
What Sparks Poetry:
Moira Egan on Franco Buffoni's "The Acne Eruptions of Eleanor of Aquitaine"


"Handling, embracing, paying extremely close attention: these are, I think, ways to describe the kind of close reading that is necessary to translation. To me, translation is an act of affectionate close reading in the original language, and then, 'close writing,' to the best of my ability, in the target language. As translators, we know that reproducing a poem in another language is a sheer impossibility."
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