Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and translator Dan Bellm, Deep Well, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Waiting for the Light.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker's latest book of poems is Waiting for the Light. Daisy Fried says, "Ostriker so loves the world, its griefs, traumas, praises, mysteries, and joys, that she teaches us to love the world with her—sometimes desperately, heartbrokenly, never despairingly. Ostriker is an essential poet, writing at the height of her powers." Both poet and critic, she is the author of many previous collections, most recently The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011, and The Book of Seventy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Among other honors, she's received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Her forthcoming collection, The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019, will be published in September.
Dan Bellm is both poet and translator. He's published four books of poems, One Hand on the Wheel, Buried Treasure, winner of both an Alice Fay DiCastangnola Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, Practice, which won the 2009 California Book Award, and Deep Well. David St. John says, "These lyrics of memoriam and these deep songs (in Lorca's sense) of mourning seem almost to etch themselves onto the air. Keep this book at hand; hold its passages close. This is an essential collection of poetry." His latest translation is Central American Book of the Dead, by Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo; others include Speaking in Song, by Mexican poet Pura López Colomé, and The Song of the Dead, by French poet Pierre Reverdy.