conversations from empire
Now, I have always loved the sea. I save whom I can. A baby be damned without a mother. A mother be damned without her child. A man be… More
Bon Voyage to Guest Editors TC Tolbert, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Brian Blanchfield
Today the PEN Poetry Series busts out the noisemakers and tissues and sends up a wail of booming thanks and gratitude to poets TC Tolbert, Dawn Lundy Martin, and… More
You Are Already Doing It
Every day my body more angry / Waiting for some part of the mystery / To dispense itself / On the bus, buying groceries / Saying small lies /… More
Elegy for the Police State
Who to call when you get robbed // or hit with a bat. Who else to feed the dogs / of entropy & personal choice, the price // we… More
The PEN Ten with Ishion Hutchinson
"You are naturally paying tribute to the dead and the living, because a poem is the vehicle of reciprocal tension between what came before and what is present." More
A Poet’s Return: Pavel Šrut’s Worm-Eaten Light
"For 10 years after Worm-Eaten Light was banned, Pavel couldn’t write poetry even if he’d wanted to because it had lost its meaning in new reality of normalization. Through… More
Four Poems by Gala Mukomolova
What this poet calls slippery, what I call smart. Like it matters, like I’m not / pulling rent money out of a dog’s ass. // I was wrong. I… More
Economy of Means: On Translating Gemma Gorga
Based on the concept of a medieval book of hours, Gemma Gorga's award-winning collection of poetry, Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes) distills the devotional and quotidien aspects of… More
Morocco’s Forgotten History: On Translating Ahmed Bouanani
Les Persiennes, by Ahmed Bouanani, a volume of prose poems that arc across geography, history, and folklore to rescue Moroccan cultural memory, an act of remembering in the face… More
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