Hang with Milkweed at AWP
Several Milkweed staffers are packing up and catching flights to Seattle for this year’s Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. Are you heading to AWP as well? If so, here’s is where you will find our books, our writers, and our people. Stop by booth 1904 anytime over the next three days to chat with us, pick up some swag, join our mailing list, and enter your name in drawings for free books.
Christopher Merrill on how his travels inform his writing
As a National Council on the Humanities member and the head of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Christopher Merrill moves around the world more than your typical writer. In his 2011 book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, Merrill expounds on several journeys he took throughout Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East. Merrill visited the Middle East again in 2013 during which time he contributed the following article to The Georgia Review concerning the connection between travel and writing in his life. Thanks to The Georgia Review for letting us rerun the piece here.
A Q&A with Jody Gladding, author of TRANSLATIONS FROM BARK BEETLE
In the inspired new collection Translations from Bark Beetle, acclaimed poet and translator Jody Gladding takes the physical, elemental world as her point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape, and deriving a lexicon for these poems from the rich offerings of the world around her. In some poems Gladding steps into the role of translator, interpreting fragments left by bark beetle or transcribing raven calls. In others, poems take the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—or they emerge from a more expansive space—a salt flat at the Great Salt Lake, or a damaged woodlot. The effect is a collection that reminds us how to see and to listen, and which calls us to a deeper communion—true collaboration—between art and the more-than-human world.
Tagged Bark Beetle, Jody Gladding, translations from bark beetle 02/17/2014 Leave a comment
Malena Mörling on THE STAR BY MY HEAD
Malena Mörling is the author of two collections of poems, Ocean Avenue and Astoria, and the co-editor and co-translator of The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden. Published in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, The Star By My Head is the premiere American anthology of 20th- and 21st-century Swedish poetry in English translation. Here she reading (in both English and Swedish) from the collection and describing her process in putting the book together.
Tagged Malena Mörling, Swedish poetry, the star by my head, video 02/13/2014 Leave a comment
A Q&A with Martha Collins, author of DAY UNTO DAY
Martha Collins is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Blue Front and White Papers. She has also published two books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. Her latest work is Day Unto Day, debuting this March. In the book, Collins offers haunting reflections on time and other subjects. The book consists of six sequences: during one month each year, for six years, Collins wrote a short poem each day. With perfectly distilled lines, she captures the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another. Writing in the tradition of poetic meditation, Collins shows us the full degree of her mastery—a mature voice, poems with tremendous scope, and lines exceptionally controlled. Here is the work of a seasoned poet at the height of her career.
