immigration

Activist documentary poetics

On Susan Briante’s ‘Defacing the Monument’

Photo of Susan Briante (left) courtesy of Briante.

Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument is a hybrid creative-critical text that explores the possibilities for documentary poetics to interrupt injustice.

Gabriela Portillo Alvarado reviews three poetry titles on immigration, trauma, racism, and America: The Book of Dirt by Nicole Santalucia, Adelante by Jessica Guzman, and Every Day We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera. The Book of Dirt is a guttural, expositional collection of poems rooted in central Pennsylvania, with jarring wordplay, intricate metaphor, and vivid, sometimes-fantastical imagery: “the apples have triggers, / the avocados, bullets, / the extra, large barrel-bananas / are discounted on Tuesday / when you buy two bunches.”

Recently in Jacket2

Launch for The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

with Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Tan Lin, Felix Bernstein, & Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York, Dec. 5, 2024

My thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petelos at the University of Chicago Press. This is my tenth book with Chicago, going back 25 years. Thanks also to Anthony Huberman and Eli Coplan (sound engineer) of GPS for hosting this event.

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The García Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024