José Vergara

José Vergara is assistant professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. His book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature, was recently published by Cornell University Press.

Photo by Aaron Windhorst.

By this author

Violent holidays in Russia

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Excavating intimacies

A review of Siwar Masannat’s ‘cue’

Georgiana de Rham

From left to right: the cover of “cue,” Siwar Masannat.

Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer, poet, educator, and editor currently based in Milwaukee. cue, Masannat’s second book of poetry, emerges from her engagement with Akram Zaatari’s project Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, which brought El Madani’s compelling photographs of community members in Saida, Lebanon, to a global audience.

cue
Siwar Masannat
University of Georgia Press 2024, 82 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9780820365978

Your voice in my mouth (PoemTalk #201)

Trish Salah, "The Voice" & "Detoured Come Tomorrow"

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Kay Gabriel, Syd Zolf, and Levi Bentley joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House to discuss two poems by Trish Salah. The poems can be found in Lyric Sexology Volume 1: “Interlude 4: The Voice” and “Detoured Come Tomorrow.” Lyric Sexology was published by Metonymy Press in 2017. The poems can be read HERE. Our recordings of Trish Salah performing these poems comes from an interview conducted by Christy Davids in the same Wexler Studio February 10, 2017. You can hear the poems and the entire conversation at Salah’s PennSound page. This episode of PoemTalk was co-curated by Al Filreis and Syd Zolf.

October 22, 2024

Our language is loaded (PoemTalk #200)

PoemTalk

200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.

October 11, 2024