All Under One Roof by Evelyn Schlag

Abstract

of Bruce, the ultimate self-actualized man of czarist Russia. Besides this and a couple of other poems with direct Soviet themes, Maxim’s verse tends toward the universal and timeless —it is the poet’s long lens for processing present developments. In “The Hulking Carcass of a Dead Orca” (2010), for example , “The choking scent of rancid fat, / foul and ineffable, will all / but replace the surrounding air. // Weeks will pass, months or years / perhaps, before dwellers from distant climes / discover its bare skeleton. // They will saw it down to small // ornaments , then write on these white / shards about the frailty of living.” He sometimes calls up historical comparisons as a way to characterize our present fraught state, such as in the poem “Homer’s Been Shredded to Quotes”: “Homer’s been shredded to quotes for the billboards: / his scrolls unfurl and spread / to paper the walls, his hexameters bobbing —balloons / we tied to silk threads.” As well, Amelin seems never too far from spiritual awakening. In “Vindictive Goddess, Statue Now Woken,” and giving a nod to the verbose nineteenth-century Russian classicist poet Dmitry Khvostov, he traces the strained trajectory of the poet from the vulgar to the spiritually profound: “How, without breaking into Pindaric odes, / can I stand by on the sidelines? / I’d blow my poetry’s fiery load / on the few years I’m resigned / to. Having removed this pearl—iridescent, / smooth—God gathers it in.” The translations into English collected here have been a decade-long labor of love by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher. Their exquisite care with these gems has not gone unnoticed—earlier this year, they won the Cliff Becker Book Prize of the American Literary Translators Association for this volume. As the ALTA commendation notes, “There are even places where these translations equal or, perhaps, surpass the original in their crispness and linguistic innovation, making this collection not only a remarkable accomplishment of poetic translation but truly a pleasure to read.” What more do you need to know? This is a volume to treasure. Andrew Singer Trafika Europe Evelyn Schlag All Under One Roof Trans. Karen Leeder. Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2018. 104 pages. When I was very young and growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was sure that the mountains I saw every day were a massive painting on the side of the universe rather than an actual formation of rocks and dirt. The moment I understood the geology of the place, the world in my mind quickly Omar Pimienta Album of Fences Trans. Jose Antonio Villarán Cardboard House Press This collection is a fascinating combination of poetry (presented in both Spanish and English en face) and photography portraying the duality of living on the US/Mexican border through personal anecdotes and photos. With little punctuation or capitalization, the pieces feel dusty yet hurried, as if rushing to convey meaning against a backdrop of transnational urgency. Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets Ed. David Baker Stephen F. Austin State University Press Bringing together twenty-five “poetcritics ” of the modern era, this collection seeks the heart of lyric poetry’s seven most prominent writers from England and the US: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin. Spanning from the erudite to the everyday, these essays give readers access to the underpinnings of an oftenobtuse art form and, while academic, can give readers a deeper dive into this form and the writers who embody it. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 85 took new shape. The experience of reading Evelyn Schlag’s All Under One Roof follows a similar pattern of discovery, with childlike observations of the situations and places as the speakers of her poems grow in their own personal revelations. The careful translation by Karen Leeder of every aspect of Schlag’s writing is essential in understanding the depth of each image and metaphor, and where some line breaks or punctuation choices seem to clunk with the hammer of language in translation, the overall effect is that of one seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time. In the afterword to this book, Schlag herself writes of an...