BY DAVID FARRIER Life itself is a form of poiesis, a perpetual world-making. But if eco-criticism also sees the poem as an exercise in world-making, how are we to read it in an age of extinction? Perhaps more than any other environmental crisis, extinction pitches us into deep time: into awareness of the richness of … More Poetry and Extinction in the Anthropocene
BY SETH PERLOWGeorgetown University One book, written by a computer, could have killed us all. What do you do when you’re the only country in the world with atomic bombs? You make them much, much bigger. That was the US strategy right after World War II. The Cold War was beginning, and by 1952 the … More The Most Dangerous Book in the World
BY JAMES P. LENFESTEYExcerpts from the introduction to If Bees Are Few It is said there are twenty thousand species of bees in the world, a genus fifty million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning and no end to bee buzz. As Rilke wrote, poets are … More Let’s hear it for the bee.
In translating and editing the works in The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature (Minnesota 2010), Claude Clayton Smith worked closely with Alexander Vaschenko, another leading scholar in Siberian literature who is based in Moscow. In this second part of our features on this first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English, … More The Way of Kinship, part 2 of 2: The anthology’s early beginnings.
This month, the University of Minnesota Press publishes The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature, the first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English. This stunning volume showcases a diverse body of work—prose fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction—that chronicles ancient Siberian cultures and traditions as well as a dynamic and current … More The Way of Kinship, part 1 of 2: Anthology triggers dialogue between Native American and Native Siberian literary traditions.
BY JOSIAH BLACKMOREProfessor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto ——- “Even reading (António Botto’s) poems a half century after they were written, one feels the flesh burn.”—Henri Cole ——- One early summer afternoon in the early ’90s, soon after arriving at the University of Toronto, I was perusing the astounding collection of … More Rediscovering António Botto, a major voice in modern gay poetry and twentieth-century letters
