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Reading the World Podcast #9: Martha Collins

Erica Mena and special co-host Mike Schorsch talk with translator and poet Martha Collins about translation as political action, and translation of Vietnamese poetry. Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with Suzanne Jill Levine, Bill Johnston, Esther Allen, Lawrence Venuti, and Susan Harris), ...

Reading the World Podcast #8: Mark Schafer

In this Reading the World podcast, Erica Mena talks to translator Mark Schafer about his two latest translations, Before Saying Any of the Great Words by David Huerta (Copper Canyon, 2009) and The Scale of Maps by Bélen Gopegui (City Lights, 2011). Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with ...

engulf — enkindle

engulf — enkindle is a stunning book of poetry. It literally stunned me into absolute submission; it is the book of poetry I’d been wanting to read for years. It’s a small volume, and I read it in one sitting, faster than I normally read poetry, because I couldn’t slow down. The language sunk its hooks into me and ...

Latest Review: "engulf–enkindle" by Anja Utler

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erica Mena on Anja Utler’s engulf—enkindle, which is translated by Kurt Beals and came out in December from the admirable Burning Deck. The best source for info on German poet Anja Utler seems to be this site (which, for those of you into poetry of the ...

Reading the World Podcast #7: Fady Joudah

This episode of the Reading the World Podcast features a conversation with Fady Joudah, Palestinian-American poet, physician, and translator. He won the Yale Younger Poets Competition in 2007 for his collection The Earth in the Attic (Yale) and was just awarded the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation for his rendition ...

Birds for a Demolition

Birds for a Demolition is a deceptively slight book of deceptively simple poems. Poems that at first glance seem embedded in the natural world, in the landscape of Brazil, in the language of the wetlands. But this is in fact an expansive collection, spanning more than forty years of Manoel de Barros’s illustrious career ...

Latest Review: "Birds for a Demolition" by Manoel de Barros

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by BTBA judge Erica Mena on fellow BTBA judge Idra Novey’s translation from the Portuguese of Manoel de Barros’s Birds for a Demolition, which came out from Carnegie Mellon University Press earlier this year. Erica Mena is a poet, a translator, and visible. ...