All posts tagged: Poetry Feature

June 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems from Pedro Poitevin, Aiden Heung, and Ellie Black

This month we’re pleased to bring you poems by PEDRO POITEVIN translated from Spanish by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV and new work by 2025 Disquiet Prize finalists AIDEN HEUNG and ELLIE BLACK.

Table of Contents:

  • Pedro Poitevin (trans. Philip Nikolayev), “Sonnet from the water before dawn” and “Self-Portrait as a Dog”
  • Ellie Black, “The Confessional” and “Revelator”
  • Aiden Heung, “The Theory of Evolution”
June 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems from Pedro Poitevin, Aiden Heung, and Ellie Black
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May 2025 Poetry Feature: Dante Alighieri, translated by Mary Jo Bang

This month we’re honored to bring our readers an excerpt from MARY JO BANG’s new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, out soon from Graywolf Press.

 

cover of paradiso

 

From Paradiso: Canto XI

The first eighteen lines of this canto are Dante’s elaboration of human difference, his lament over the failure of some humans to realize their gifts, and an exultation for the opportunity he’s been given—which is to enter Heaven before he has died.

Thomas Aquinas’s clarification of “where they fatten up” begins at line 22 and continues without interruption until the end of the canto. In lines 124 to 126, Thomas complains that Saint Dominic’s flock, the Dominican friars, are showing signs of ambition and greed, seeking honors and offices. They are wandering away from the tenets of the order, which are to live a life of humility and self-sacrifice. In lines 137 to 139, he says, “You’ll see what has splintered the tree, / And how the remedy for that can be deduced from // ‘Where they fatten up, if they don’t lose their way.’” The tree is the Dominican order, and it has been scheggia (“splintered” or “chipped away at”) because so many of the sheep have strayed. If the monks and clergy remain true to the principles set out by Saint Dominic, they will be enriched with the “milk” of spiritual nourishment and “fatten up” the way sheep are meant to. 

Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante is concerned with the ways in which selfishness destroys the social fabric. He details how people pay for that selfishness in Hell or by having to trudge up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory. But Dante isn’t only interested in what happens after death, he is also talking about how we live while on earth. His life was destroyed by the petty grudges of partisan politics. As an exile, he was under constant threat of death. He takes great risks in writing his poem because he hopes that by addressing the greed and megalomania that is destroying Italy, he can help put a stop to it. He also knows that this is not a time-limited problem but a timeless one, which is why he wrote the poem in the vernacular—so that, unlike poems written in literary Latin, it would change over time. He said he was also writing his poem in the vernacular so that it could be read by everyone. That is why I translated the poem into the American vernacular. 

—Mary Jo Bang

May 2025 Poetry Feature: Dante Alighieri, translated by Mary Jo Bang
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March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

Poems by CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE

Having made both poetry and fiction contributions to TC, the multitalented Catherine-Esther Cowie returns to us this month with highlights from her debut poetry collection Heirloom, forthcoming from Carcanet Press on April 24, 2025.

cover of HEIRLOOM

Publisher’s Note

Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny, and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.

Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegize and celebrate her subjects. 

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom
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January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

Poems by RAFAEL ALBERTI
Translated from the Spanish by JOHN MURILLO

From Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels, forthcoming in March from Four Way Books.

Book cover of Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti

Poems appear in both English and Spanish.

Table of Contents:

  • Introduction by John Murillo
  • LOS ÁNGELES VENGATIVOS (The Vengeful Angels)
  • CAN DE LLAMAS (Hound of Flames)
  • EL ÁNGEL TONTO (The Foolish Angel)
  • EL ÁNGEL DEL MISTERIO (The Angel of Mystery)
  • ASCENSIÓN (Ascension)
January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation
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December 2024 Poetry Feature #2: New Work from our Contributors

New work by LEAH FLAX BARBERROBERT CORDING, PETER FILKINS

 

Table of Contents:

  • Robert Cording, “In Beaufort”
  • Leah Flax Barber, “School Poem” and “Cordelia’s No”
  • Peter Filkins, “Trains”

 

In Beaufort
By Robert Cording

At a rented air B&B, I am sitting on a swing
placed here just for me it seems,
or just to carry off my worries and sorrows
as I rock slowly, back and forth, taking in
the shifting colors of the Broad River that circles
this marsh pocketed with cut-outs of water
and long inlets that circle round and round
as if it were one of those spiritual labyrinths
that bring calm as the center is reached.

December 2024 Poetry Feature #2: New Work from our Contributors
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December 2024 Poetry Feature #1: New Work from our Contributors

Works by JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN and DIANA KEREN LEE

Table of Contents:

  • Jen Jabaily-Blackburn: “Archeological, Atlantic” and “Velvel”
  • Diana Keren Lee: “Living Together” and “Living Alone”

 

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

December 2024 Poetry Feature #1: New Work from our Contributors
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November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

Poems By G. C. WALDREP, ALLISON FUNK, and KEVIN O’CONNOR

Table of Contents:

  • G.C. Waldrep, “Below the Shoals, Glendale”
  • Allison Funk, “After Andrew Wyeth’s Snow Hill
  • Kevin O’Connor, “The Other Shoe”

 

Below the Shoals, Glendale
By G. C. Waldrep

I am listening to the slickened sound of the new
wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness.
It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks.
Mural of the natural, a complicity epic.
The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear—
Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage,

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors
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October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.

 

Table of Contents:

    • Nathaniel Perry, “34 (Song, with Young Lions)” and “36 (Song, with Contranym)”
    • Tyler Kline, “Romance Study” and “What if I told you”                  

 

34 (Song, with Young Lions)
By Nathaniel Perry

All the young lions do lack

bones. They lie wasted on grass,

cashed out, exhausted and un-

delivered. A poor man cries

eventually. A troubled

friend cries eventually.

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors
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