Archive for June, 2011

If you’re lucky enough to be near Marfa, Texas this Friday, make sure and tune in to NPR’s KRTS 93.5 FM at 10am CST (that’s 11am EST, for us here on the East Coast) to hear BOA translator Deniz Perin give an interview! Don’t live in Texas? You can still listen online here on Marfa Public Radio’s website by clicking the “Listen Now” button at the top of the page. Still finding an excuse not to listen? We’ve got you covered; Perin’s interview will play again at 6:30pm CST, or 7:30pm EST here near the pond.

Perin, who lives in San Diego, is the translator of BOA’s recent Book of the Edge: Poems by Ece Temelkuran, which she translated from the original Turkish. Her work has appeared in numerous national and international journals, including Atlanta Review, The New Review of Literature, Poetry International, Transcript, and Words Without Borders. Perin was recently awarded the Lannan Fellowship, and is currently a Lannan Foundation Resident Writer in Marfa. Her most recent work, translations of Nazim Hikmet’s poetry, cam be found in the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry from HarperCollins.

The Lannan Foundation is a family foundation out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, dedicated to the support and aid of contemporary writers and artists pursuing aims of cultural freedom, diversity and creativity, as well as inspired Native activists in rural indigenous communities. The Lannan Foundation’s generous backing supports translations here at BOA Editions, and our Lannan Translation Series, of which Book of the Edge is a notable part, is named for them. The prestigious Lannan Fellowship recognizes an artist or writer for extraordinary work in their field, and provides time and support in order for to continue with or complete specific projects. The fellowship is also awarded to those who show potential for future outstanding work.

According to Rattle, Madzirov uses a speaker that conveys much by presenting issues that are “shown to the reader rather than described.”  The voice of the poems’ speaker is unique and refreshing as it creates an air of privacy.  The reader becomes a witness as he or she is placed outside the “you” and “we”s of the poetry.  Rather than speaking for the reader, Madzirov invites the reader to watch the scenes he creates.

The theme of “outsiderness” is very present in Madzirov’s collection.  This theme transforms “just those mundane things that the histories of the world ignore” into “what constitutes life.”  Ordinary, everyday things are turned, through Madzirov’s poetry, into things with great emotional ties and value.  In this way, Madzirov creates a voice that speaks with “freshness and power” for the displaced, overlooked, and wandering.

For the full review, follow the link here.

Remnants of Another Age, by Nikola Madzirov. BOA author.

Nikola Madzirov. BOA poet.

Nikola Madzirov’s bilingual Macedonian-English collection of poetry,  Remnants of Another Age (published by BOA Editions), received a glowing review from World Literature Today.  The review comments on the beautiful integration of spiritual and physical, past and future, personal and universal.  Madzirov’s poetry evokes elements of mythology which aids in unifying the variety of themes he addresses.

Nikola Madzirov interlaces all aspects of reality into lyrical and moving work.  His poetry features both the history of the Balkan region as well as his own personal lived experiences and reflections.  Madzirov looks through historical and mythical perspectives to communicate the “migrations, exiles, and wars that were waged in the Balkans” but also “reveals his private and personal mythology.”  Complete with spiritual and physical elements, this collection presents Madzirov’s “superbly modern religious imagination” that bring together the past and the present into “the return home” and “the remnants of bygone ages.”

For the full review, follow the link here.

Deborah Brown, author of recent BOA release Walking the Dog’s Shadow, for which she won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, was selected today by the Academy of American Poets to have her poem “Reprise” showcased on their website as the Poem of the Day. “Reprise,” which is found in Walking the Dog’s Shadow, speaks of love and fame and a history of ourselves as a people in the little things in which we find ourselves. Congrats to Deborah Brown, and points to the AAP for exceptional taste.

Reprise
by Deborah Brown

Better than a lover’s heart, the immortality of a name.
Love versus Fama, the goddess, with her long purple nails,
her sweeping cloak, her memories of Caeser, of Alexander,
the wolves on seven hills.

Even better than love, fame, for as long as there is illness.
I see that if I had discovered Cushing’s disease,
I could have named it for myself.
It’s hard to maintain desire, that’s part of it.

But who first ate a grapefruit or tweezed a splinter
or waved across the pampas at someone else,
initiating the habit of the raised hand?
(If you don’t wave two hands, there could still be a weapon.)

They’re all forgotten, those heroes.
How much do we know of Cushing, or care?
What about Harvey, before whom our blood
traveled uncharted paths? Or so I was told
in seventh grade. I never wanted fame,
so back to love, the desire for love, the one
that costs everything, that shocks you
when someone else casts a shadow on the map
of the earth for the first time larger than your own.

Walking the Dog’s Shadow is available for purchase here.

Adam McOmber, the author of BOA’s This New and Poisonous Air, had a recent discussion with Time Out Chicago’s Jonathan Messinger about the historical elements in his new book. Though all of the tales in his debut collection of short stories are steeped in the uncanny and the macabre, McOmber says that he is “really interested in using elements of the fantastic in a serious way, not the whimsical elements of the fantastic you see in some short stories.” His draw to history is apparent as well, as in his stories “The Automatic Garden,” and “There Are No Bodies Such as This,” both of which take actual figures from history as their principal characters.

In speaking of the historical figures he adopts as characters, McOmber also speaks of his love of history and attention to detail, which combines in his work with his incredible imagination to produce something altogether otherworldly. “I am interested in history, but a lot of my fiction has to do with escaping and the imagination… I do a lot of research so there are authentic details, but that allows for even more escape, even for me as a writer. I don’t have to think about my current surroundings. I have to think of something outside myself.” In speaking of the life of Madame Tussaud, the celebrated creator of the now-famous wax figures which bear her name and the main character of “There Are No Bodies Such as These,” McOmber says “I would say I manipulated Madame Tussaud’s history somewhat, but the interesting thing is that she manipulated her own history… Certainly I did research, but getting inside the dream life was fun for me.”

And everywhere in the tale is found as well McOmber’s “intricate, beautiful and horrifying” prose, a “density of language” which he describes as “difficult to get into [...], but once you get into it, [you] you get swept up in the poetry of it.” Says Messinger, “The story uses carefully gilded elements of psychological horror to explore the depths of the characters’ emotions… [M]any of McOmber’s stories [prove] to be a numinous place, an impassable puzzle box with its own idiosyncratic key. ”

You can read the full article here.

This New And Poisonous Air is available for purchase here.

Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book recently received a glowing review from blogger Tracy K. Smith over at The Best American Poetry. Relating an episode from her own college days when one of her professors spent the first half hour of her first class of the term reading Italo Calvino’s “The Parrot” aloud, Smith unearths the “large, strange order to which even we- in our post-post modern moment- are subject,” and the inexorable draw to fables and folk tales which we all find in ourselves. “I think they speak to a place in us that is very similar to where poems reach us. That spot that is nourished by a different kind of sense- one that often confounds (or acts as an antidote to) the day-to-day nature of things,” Smith writes.

It is this captivating, lyrically poetic quality of Teicher’s short stories which leads her to link his work with that of Italo Calvino, author of such works as Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics. Smith notes the allegorical, fable-like feel of Teicher’s pieces, saying, “[his] prose hits home in a way that is similar to aphorism. There’s a wisdom that feel wholly original and yet familiar on an ur-level. Reading, I was continually struck by the feeling of having stepped into a happy reunion with something that i probably, perhaps, once, without realizing it, knew.”

“Cradle Book is incredibly rich and incredibly slim, incongruously small considering all it contains. To quote Teicher’s story, ‘The Red Cipher,’ it is ‘[l]ike those unusual houses that are much bigger on the inside than their exteriors suggest,’ as if each tale opens up a kind of hall of mirrors, something flickering into the distance in such a way as to suggest a path… This is a book to read aloud, to spend time under the spell of. Like the older fables Teicher must have had in his mind and ears when these were written, the stories in Cradle Book slip easily into the region of a reader’s imagination where a good story is capable of waylaying danger, and where impenetrable mystery is realer and more relevant than what we see, by day, through our actual eyes.”

Cradle Book, published by BOA in 2010, is available for purchase here.

Read the rest of Tracy K. Smith’s review here.

BOA submits all books and volumes of poetry to dozens of different literary contests throughout the year, ranging from awards for individual poems to the Pulitzer Prize. One of these is the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)’s annual National Translation Award. Besides considerable prestige the award carries a $5000 prize with it. This year we submitted two of 2010’s strongest works, Book of Things: Poems by Aleš Steger, which has previously won a 2011 Best Translated Book Award, and Book of the Edge: Poems by Ece Temelkuran.

BOA is proud to announce that both Book of Things and Book of the Edge have have moved from the preliminary round into the second round. The books, translated by Brian Henry and Deniz Perin, respectively, will next be read by the judges in the original Slovenian and Turkish to evaluate the translators’ fidelity to the source material and the success of translation. Congratulations to both authors and translators, and good luck in the next round!

Book of Things: Poems by Aleš Steger, translated by Brian Henry, is available for purchase here.

Book of the Edge: Poems by Ece Temelkuran, translated by Deniz Perin, is available for purchase here.

Peter Makuck, the author of Long Lens: New and Selected Poems, has won the Brockman-Campbell Book Award for 2011. The award is given out by the North Carolina Poetry Society for a book-length volume of poetry published in the previous year written by a native or resident North Carolinian.  Makuck joins 2010 winner Dannye Romine Powell, author of A Necklace of Bees. Congratulations to Peter!

Long Lens: New and Selected Poems is available for purchase here.