In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide

by Ilya Kaminsky (Editor), Dominic Luxford (Editor), Jesse Nathan (Editor)

Overview

From Rae Armantrout to Adam Zagajewski, In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth is a chorus of voices from around the globe and across generations. A compendium of some of our beloved poems from our favorite poets, this slim anthology is the perfect companion for cafés, road trips, bathtubs, shuttle expeditions, and any other situation in need of the genuinely human. Included are freshly translated masterpieces–originally published in Poetry International–from poets such as Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Charles Baudelaire, along with new work from contemporary practitioners such as Kay Ryan, Jane Hirshfield, Derek Walcott, Kwame Dawes, Valzhyna Mort, and James Tate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944211073
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	09/19/2017
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and currently lives in San Diego. He's the author of Dancing In Odessa, and the co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. With Jean Valentine, he has co-translated Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva.

Dominic Luxford was raised on a sheep farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and currently lives in San Francisco. He edited The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets, has been the Believer magazine's poetry editor since 2007, and co-founded the McSweeney's Poetry Series.

Jesse Nathan was born in Berkeley, grew up on a farm in Kansas, and lives now in San Francisco. He's the author of several chapbooks, including Cloud 9, and is a co-founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. He's completing a PhD in poetry and poetics at Stanford.

Table of Contents

Malena Morling, Visiting

Valzhyna Mort, Grandmother

Jacek Gutorow, Child

Federico Garcia Lorca, Infinite little poem

Tomas Tranströmer, Tracks

Francis Ponge, The Pleasures of the Door

Mahmoud Darwish, A LONGING FOR FORGETFULNESS

Jericho Brown, Hustle

Jane Hirshfield, A Roomless Door

Seamus Heaney, Tankas for Toraiwa

Michael Dumanis, Autobiography

Jean Valentine, Earth and the Librarian

Gloria Fuertes, Nesting Birds

Alissa Valles, Wagner's Dreams

Tia Forsström, Untitled

Avrom Sutzkever, Firefighters

Ishion Hutchinson, Fitzy and the Revolution

Zhang Shuguang, To Xuefei

Eugenius Alishanka, Curriculum vitae

Marin Sorescu, Shakespeare

Carol Ann Duffy, Anne Hathaway

Susan Rich, The Women of Kismayo

Anna Swir, from "Building the Barricade"

Eleanor Wilner, Magnificat

Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing

Yves Bonnefoy, The Garden

Adam Zagajewski, Kings

Edward Hirsch, God's Insomniacs

Kay Ryan, Fatal Flaw

John Glenday , Etching of a Line of Trees

Antonio Machado, The Eyes

Ani Ilkov, Like Homer

Alicia Ostriker, Love III

Xi Chuan, A 00000

David Gewanter, The unspeakable

Anonymous Navajo Poet From The Night Chant

Yu Jian, 96

Adrienne Rich, Fire

James Tate, The War Next Door

Yusef Komunyakaa, Fata Morgana

J. Hope Stein, Just Married

Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard

Geoffrey Brock, The Star Frago Mashup

Osip Mandelstam, You

Pandora, The Sniper

Carolyn Forche, Fisherman

Kathleen Ossip, On Giving Birth

Jericho Brown, Track 5: Summertime

Nazim Hikmet, On Living

Tracy K. Smith, Field Guide

Kary Wayson, More of the Same

M.A. Vizsolyi, from Lamp with Wings

Rachel Galvin, Village of Pulleys and Locomotion

Derek Walcott, No opera

Ana Blandiana, Soot

Mark Irwin, Shoes

Constantin Acosmei, Cardiac Weekend

Paul Celan, Memory of France

Kwame Dawes, On Deck

Nikola Madzirov, The Cross of History

Tomaž Šalamun, Veronica's Veil

Yan Li, The Chinese Drawers

Rachel Hadas, Under the Floorboards

Israel Emiot, A Prayer in Nineteen Forty-Three

Zubair Ahmed, Hello, Brother

Victoria Chang, [I once was a child am a child am someone's child not my mother's not]

Rae Armantrout, The Craft Talk

Peter Campion, At the Seoul Writers' Festival

Eleni Sikelianos, Kinesthetic Sketches of the Dead

Marina Tsvetaeva, I know the truth

Tristan Tzara, Bare Feet

Ikkyu Sojun, from a love note to a brothel

Jacques Prévert, Barbara

Yannis Ritsos, Multiple Perplexity

Roberto Juarroz, The Snow Has Transformed the World Into a Cemetery

Eric McHenry, Crying With Glasses On

Daniil Kharms, Symphony No. 2

Paul Celan, With a Key That Keeps Changing

Francesc Parcerisas, Act of Gratitude

Jericho Brown, I Corinthians 13:11

Sigurdur Pálsson, Wild Youth

Osip Mandelstam, The Necklace

Georg Trakl , Psalm II

Steve Scafidi, The Cradle Autumn 1901

Katie Ford, Flee

Jacqueline Osherow, Whitethorn

Yousif al-Saigh, Supper

Lluís Roda, "The poet said to his soul..."

Brenda Solis-Fong, #44, #55

Shadab Zeest Hashmi, The Stonemason's Son Contemplates Death

Vera Pavlova, Three Poems

Leonte, Ways of Loving (IV)

Fred Moramarco, Elegy for Kenneth Koch

Charles Baudelaire, The Game

Sandra Alcosser, The Trap

Christian Wiman, All Good Conductors

Malena Mürling, For the Woman with the Radio

Eugenius Alishanka, Curriculum vitae

Fady Joudah, PASSAGE [I'm more exhausted!]

Yu Jian, 100

Don Share, Strange Things

Carol Frost, It was August, it was August

Jaroslaw Mikolajewski , My Wife's Spine

Hasso Krull, [All people are pregnant, said Diotima,]

Yaqui, From Flower World Variations: Song of a Dead Man

Leonardo Sinisgalli, Autumn

G.C. Waldrep, Caynham Camp

Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn Day

Zhang Shuguang, Snow

Bruno K. Öijer, 6th Floor

Leonardo Sinisgalli, Old Grief

Pablo Neruda, Keeping Still

Preface

In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide features a completely subjective, but, we hope, valuable swath of poetry from near and far. Our aim was to curate a small but sharp collection—an assortment of poems with teeth, in the hope that every poem cuts deep (as they have, with gratitude, for us).

English has always been a particularly absorbent and ravenous language, informed by the cadences and grammars of other tongues since its inception. Latin, Nordic, Saxon, French, Irish, Welsh, and Italian poetries seeded the ground upon which English verse has grown. These influences became prominent again when modernist sensibilities swept poetry in English in the early twentieth century, a movement sometimes driven by direct (if often quite loose) translations of poetry from other languages.

Despite that internationalist turn, readers in the United States today remain all too unaware of the contemporary and historical writings of their peers from other language-cultures. In this country, many readers learn about foreign-language poets after they turn eighty-five and win the Nobel Prize. But the most valuable, potent conversation between literatures happens more naturally—continuously and organically—and not from a museum-like retrospective. Our thought was to provide a smattering of both the known and less-well-known, the contemporary and the historical, in a cocktail of topics, tones, and aesthetic orientations, a cocktail we hope may produce pleasing and surprising new experiences for you, reader.

The challenges of creating any poetry anthology are, of course, many, and those challenges become exponential when one may include any poem written by any poet at any point in history. We chose, if not exactly to ignore these challenges, then to take them with a Parnassus-sized grain of salt. Perfection or anything resembling —flawlessness—in art—much less in a multi-author selection of poetry from around the world, over centuries—is as inherently impossible as flawlessness in translation.

Our goal instead became something like the opposite of comprehensiveness. In order to make what you hold in your hands as readable as possible (as opposed to yet another guilt-inducing door-stopper), we gradually honed the available material until we arrived at a collection that we felt was wide in its reach, but still elegant; unpredictable, yet cohesive.

In short, we aspired to create the book that we ourselves most wanted to read. We hope these pages provide you with some of the pleasures and edifications that we experienced while putting it together.

—Ilya Kaminsky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan
San Diego and San Francisco, 2017