In this month’s poetry feature, ZACK STRAIT talks with RICHARD SIKEN about influences, confrontation, readers, accountability, sacrifice, balance, surface beauty, deep meaning, writing, and Waffle House.
By ISMAEL RAMOS
Translated by JACOB ROGERS
Piece appears below in English and the original Galician.
Translator’s Note
Translating “The Hare,” by Ismael Ramos, was a perfect encapsulation of the idea that the hardest texts to translate are not necessarily the most maximalist or technical, but the sparest and most pared down. In his narration, Ramos keeps things moving at a brisk pace with gentle, light-footed prose dotted with sparks of lyricism. His dialogue is similarly effective, with sharp, often curt interchanges between the siblings Raúl and Valeria that maintain a tension that thrums under the surface of their car ride. And therein lies the challenge: if it were only a matter of reproducing sentences as lovely as these, that would be one thing; the hard part is that they need to be both lovely and charged with the electrical undercurrent of the unspoken, they need to lean on a word or intention in some places and lay off in others, just as brother and sister push and pull at each other. Or, as Raúl might put it, they metaphorical ping pong, deflecting and attacking and dissimulating.
New work from ELIZABETH METZGER, MATT W. MILLER, ANNIE SCHUMACHER, and MARC VINCENZ.
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This piece is excerpted from The Math of Saint Felix, a poetry collection by Diane Exavier ’09. Exavier will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
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By SARAH SAWYER
This piece is excerpted from The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer ’97, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
Austin, Texas
1987
A girl leans on a metal guardrail at the edge of a brown field. She will not stand here again. She knows this, so she is trying to notice everything: the tall stalks of grass turning into thick stitches of coral and gold, the sun a dark orange marble rolling past the clouds. When she looks down, she sees her toes curling in the gravel, the dents from the hot guardrail burning the soft undersides of her forearms.
If she stays here, facing the field, she can’t see the bulldozers, perched like yellow vultures in the cul-de-sac behind her.
By KRIKOR BELEDIAN
Translated by CHRISTOPHER MILLIS and TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN
Piece appears below in English and the original Armenian.
Translators’ Note
The pervasive sense of place in Krikor Beledian’s works was forged in the crucible of displacement. Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide that Armenians refer to as the Catastrophe.
The pre-eminent writer of Western Armenian literature, Beledian is a long-time resident of Paris, where he has authored more than 30 volumes, including poetry, a 10-volume novel cycle still in progress, literary criticism, experimental prose, and literary history. And he has done so in the UNESCO-designated “endangered” language of Western Armenian.
“Mantra 5” is one of the 32 extended poems collected in Mantras. Beledian says that Mantra 5 was written from the tip of the Seine isle of Vert Gallant, which looks toward the Louvre and the metallic bridge of Pont des Arts. From this vantage point, the poem brings into its sphere multiple and often contradictory threads which are simultaneously at play, resulting in a fractured surface. Time and geography are superimposed on each other; just as the ruins of Palmyra appear in the Louvre, the shadowy dead of indeterminate origin course through the currents of the Seine and the Euphrates. The poem is both atonal dirge and palimpsest.
In the Preface to Mantras, Beledian writes that “place is exile, and exile is the original catastrophe.” The challenge of translating Beledian’s writing is its radical tenuousness—of place, time, and language itself. This is a complex undertaking because Western Armenian belongs to a culture nearly obliterated in 1915, a Catastrophe bookended by centuries of displacement. English, particularly American English, belongs to the culture of conquest and certainty: How to render into English a poetic language which is acutely aware of its calamitous biography, its indeterminate attributes, and its mandate to give voice to the unspoken, unseen, unknown?
— Christopher Millis and Taline Voskeritchian
Works by JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN and DIANA KEREN LEE
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Archaeological, Atlantic
By Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
A morsel of conventional wisdom: Never use the word
boring in a poem because then they
can call your poem boring. The boring sponge can’t
do everything, but can make holes in oysters, & for the boring sponge, it’s
enough. I miss boring things like gathering mussel shells
for no one. I miss being so bored that time felt physical, an un-
governable cat sleeping over my heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s
heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s soul. An archaeologist’s eye, so
RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.
Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?
Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.
Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.
Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,
the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.
From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was
hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running
is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug
out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall
for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.
Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com
By TINA VALLÈS
Translated by SAMANTHA MATEO
Whenever there’s any discussion of the hunger that marked the years following the Spanish Civil War, I’m reminded of the story about my paternal great-grandmother and the apple. My father says her name, halting at that g that separated her from all the other Annas. Maria Agna. No family dinner passed without mention of that apple. But, after so many years, I can’t quite remember if it’s an apple or a peach. My father always said the basket his grandmother carried back from the field emitted a potent scent, but I don’t think apples smell strongly enough that you could pick them out while driving in a truck a couple of meters away.
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