Poets and translators reading from recent Lavender Ink / Diálogos releases, featuring:
Indran Amirthanayagam with translator Jennifer Rathbun reading from Blue Window (Ventana Azul):
In our time, it’s rare to find poets still writing about the glory of romantic love. A noble tradition, from Sappho to Neruda, seemed to be exhausted. But the poems in Blue Window read like a gift the Muse has handed down to Indran Amirthanayagam.
—Jaime Manrique, author of Cervantes Street
Rosemary Daniell reading from The Murderous Sky: Poems of Madness and Mercy,
In this searing journey through a mother’s broken heart, Rosemary Daniell’s exquisitely wrought poems transmute suffering into splendor, unspeakable pain into echoing beauty, heralding redemption for both writer and readers.
—Joyce Zonana, author of Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey
Kit Robinson reading from Quarantina:
A secret philosopher who embeds truth in a poetic practice of instants accumulating into something more than whole—like a rainstorm of many tiny drops—Robinson constructs in Quarantina a narrative of thought to keep us all steady within our shared story of a time broken by a virus. Our unexpected suffering and some unanticipated delights are coolly observed and carefully deployed in a celebration of wit and integrity.
—Rodger Kamenetz, author of Dream Logic and Yonder
Aicha Bassry with translator Mbarek Sryfi reading from With Urgency: A Selection of Poems:
Aicha Bassry takes us on a journey of the heart, mapped in deceptively simple language grounded in elemental imagery and sensuous metaphors. The words on the page are also incantation and exorcism, “votive offerings on cold nights,” the last rampart against fear and alienation.
—Hélène Stafford, Oxford University
Norman Fischer reading from There was a clattering as…
“There was a clattering as…”, is a poem about the plague, human condition, world materiality, soul fertility, and the mutual creation of God and human. This poem seems to me a dialog between all of humanity and God. … This book is magnificent and as human as it could get.
—Maged Zaher, author of Early, New and Collected Poems and The Consequences of my Body
Mark Statman reading from Hechizo
The poems in Statman’s beautiful new book Hechizo occupy the thin place between life and death, dream and waking, love and loss. His words cast a spell on the reader; one can hear the music in each line−as if there were a voice emanating from the page. In his work, the Mexican landscape is pulsating with life, but so are the recently and long dead, as well as vibrant memories of life and people left behind.
—Joanna Fuhrman
https://youtu.be/CfHqKu_R1xs