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“Thirteen Maqams” from Fady Joudah (a Palestinian lament)
I’m linking to this extraordinary rage-meditation before it gets taken down for whatever “national security” reason: A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation: Thirteen Maqams for an Afterlife, by the magnificent Palestinian-American poet/translator and physician Fady Joudah. Thanks to LitHub for making it available, and thanks to Louise Glück, wherever she’s traveling these days, for choosing Joudah’s first book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007. For anyone interested in the title of Joudah’s lament, here’s a good place to start exploring maqam.Read More
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Exciting News about Under Sleep’s New Moon
Thanks to the judges at the Colorado Authors League for choosing Under Sleep’s New Moon for the 2022 Book Award for poetry. Very exciting! And more than a little surprising, given the puzzlement some folks have registered upon reading the title. More than one person has asked me a simple question: “What does it mean?”—my somewhat mysterious title. I get it.Read More
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Nikky Finney’s National Book Award Acceptance Speech (2011)
A colleague shared the video below with me many moons ago, thinking (rightly) that I might appreciate it. I decided to post it but apparently got interrupted, and lingered in my “drafts” folder until today. I remembered it today when I ran across a video of a reporter at an NRA rally in the South interviewing a gray-haired old fellow wearing a confederate flag tee shirt. The reporter remarked that some people viewed that flag as a racist symbol.Read More