New Books in Poetry

Today’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Professor Rosenberg has contributed book chapters to Shakespeare and Hospitality and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Literature and published articles on “The Poetics of Practical Address” in Philological Quarterly and “The Point of the Couplet” in ELH: English Literary History.Botanical Poetics, a wide-ranging study of print culture around poetry between the years 1568 and 1583, investigates the intersection of literary history and horticultural practice. The book includes new interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Romeo and Juliet, as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundred Sundry Flowers and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay. Botanical Poetics offers a variety of fresh concepts for the study of early modern poetry such as “the ecology of small forms” and “slippery poetics.” Not least of all, this book explores what it meant to “read like a pig” in the 1570s.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Since the late twentieth century, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco has been viewed as a triumphant proto-feminist icon: a woman who celebrated her sexuality, an outspoken champion of women and their worth, and an important intellectual and cultural presence in sixteenth-century Venice.In Veronica Franco in Dialogue (U Toronto Press, 2022), Marilyn Migiel provides a nuanced account of Franco’s rhetorical strategies through a close analysis of her literary work. Focusing on the first fourteen poems in the Terze rime, a collection of Franco’s poems published in 1575, Migiel looks specifically at back-and-forth exchanges between Franco and an unknown male author. Migiel argues that in order to better understand what Franco is doing in the poetic collection, it is essential to understand how she constructs her identity as author, lover, and sex worker in relation to this unknown male author.Veronica Franco in Dialogue accounts for the moments of ambivalence, uncertainty, and indirectness in Franco’s poetry, as well as the polemicism and assertions of triumph. In doing so, it asks readers to consider their ideological investments in the stories we tell about early modern female authors and their cultural production.Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Today is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what's in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

A century after being expelled from Portugal, cryptoJews in Mexico, false converts to Christianity, could not speak of their beliefs for fear of becoming embroiled in the imprisonment, torture, and death in flames that characterized the Inquisition. Without written texts, the Jewish liturgy lost, clans of cryptoJews created a unique body of religious poetry, connecting them to the Laws of Moses, seeking redemption from sin, or hoping for an escape from their embittered lives. The Carvajal clan was led by Luis el Mozo, an alumbrado, a mystic, and his Judaizing sisters. Once discovered to be secretly practicing Judaism, years of suffering at the hands of the Inquisitors were meticulously recorded in the transcripts of their long demeaning trials. The Carvajal's friends, spouses, children and grandchildren were implicated as Judaizers, with many being reconciled by the Church to secular authorities to be burned alive at massive public ceremonies. The burning of Luis and his sisters was the main attraction for cheering crowds at the auto de f of 1596 in Mexico City. The cruelty of the Inquisitors was matched by their attention to legal detail and testimonies made at trial. Buried within thousands of pages of transcripts, hiding in library special collections of rare books around the world are the only remnants of the religious poetry that sustained cryptoJews hiding in Mexico. Mark A. Schneegurt's Anthology of Religious Poetry from the Mexican Inquisition Trials of 16th-Century CryptoJews uncovers these hidden treasures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Ellen O'Hara was a young immigrant from Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century who, with courage and resilience, made a life for herself in New York while financially supporting those at home. Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara (NYU Press, 2022) is her story, told by Vona Groarke, her descendant, in a beautiful blend of poetry, prose, and history.In July 1882, Ellen O'Hara stepped off a ship from the West of Ireland to begin a new life in New York. What she encountered was a world of casual racial prejudice that characterized her as ignorant, dirty, and feckless, the butt of many jokes. From the slim range of jobs available to her she, like, many of her kind, found a position as a domestic servant, working long hours and living in to save on rent and keep. After an unfortunate marriage, Ellen determined to win financial security on her own, and eventually opened a boarding house where her two children were able to rejoin her.Vona Groarke builds this story from historical fact, drawing from various archives for evidence of Ellen. However, she also considers why lives such as Ellen's seem to leave such a light trace in such records and fills in the gaps with memory and empathetic projection. Ellen--scrappy, skeptical, and straight-talking--is the heroine of Hereafter, whose resilience animates the story and whose voice shines through with vivid clarity. Hereafter is both a compelling account of an incredible figure and a reflection on how one woman's story can speak for more than one life.Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

For generations, the composition and recitation of poetry has been a key mode of expression among Bedouin populations in the Middle East, reflecting social norms, religious practices, relationships with the natural environment, and tribal histories and politics.In Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin (Brill, 2022), Kobi Peled, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes a corpus of poetry collected among the Bedouin of the Negev Desert over the past 100 years for themes of political resistance, dissidence, and reactions to the political changes facing the Negev Bedouin. The poems reveal how the Negev Bedouin responded to and perceived changes in state authority and rule from the late Ottoman period to the contemporary state of Israel. Peled argues that in addition to being a creative and artistic mode of expression, poetry and a close reading of Bedouin poetry can serve as a lens onto Bedouin worldviews, sentiments, and reactions to and participation in processes political formations and state-building undergone in the Negev region during the 20th century.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Wout J. van Bekkum's The Religious Poetry of El'azar Ben Ya'aqov Ha-Bavli (Baghdad, 13th C.) (Brill, 2022) is a comprehensive edition of Hebrew hymns composed by Eleazar the Babylonian, a prolific composer and scholar who lived in 13th-century Baghdad. His poetic language and style show much affinity with contemporary Sufism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Afsar Mohammad's An Evening with a Sufi (Red River, 2022) is a collection of Afsar's Telugu poems translated into to English by Asfar and Shamala Gallagher. The stunning poems in the collection capture the stark realities of religious landscape of post-partition South Asia and is set against the backdrop of a barren panorama of village life that is reeling from political and social friction. The poems evoke Sufi saints and motherly figures (or ammas) to explore caste dynamics and sectarian differences while striking the readers with themes of exile and yearning of homeland. The poems are followed by reflections on the translation by Shamala Gallagher, an interview with the author, and two essays by David Shulman and Cheran Rudhramoorthy respectively. This provocative collection of poetry will be of interest to scholars who work on South Asian Islam and Sufism and those who think through literary and translation theory, especially from Telugu, but will also be of interest to general readers who are interested in South Asian poetry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this episode from the Vault, Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, moderates a discussion between Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry