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" |
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"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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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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