“Our Favorite Things”: Katherine E. Young and Natalya Sukhonos Discuss New Poetry Collections
Russophone-connected writers Young and Sukhonos present alternating interviews in this fascinating piece from literary blog, Punctured Lines.
Watch or read this alternating interview between poet and translator Katherine E. Young and Natalya Sukhonos both of which release new collections of original poetry this year. The interview is published by literary blog Punctured Lines.
Young's Woman Drinking Absinthe was launched last Saturday and has since been garnering rave reviews across the web. WDA explores experience, specifically female experience, through a folkloric and impressionistic aesthetic utilizing at once the paintings of Manet, the classic horror tale of Bluebeard, and Euclidean geometry to draw complex portraits which transcend period, region, and genre. Read some of her poems here.
Sukhonos brings her immense poetic and empathic talent to themes of motherhood and loss in her newest collection, A Stranger Home published by Moon Pie Press. She also draws a strong sense of place by exploring "locales ranging from Odessa to San Francisco."
Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari
Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy…
Listen to Grace Cavalieri Interview fmr. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Grace Cavalieri is known widely for her stirring and empathic poetry, collected in her Legacy work Other Voices, Other Lives, but did you know that she is also an impressive interviewer? On her NPR show, The Poet and The Poem, she interviews significant poets from the US and around the world, with an aim of interpreting their lives through their poetry. In her tenure on the program, she has interviewed 9 US Poets Laureate (you can find a list with these archived interviews HERE), including the incomparable Robert Pinsky.
Featured Poetry: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”