A fast-paced evening of poems from Uruguay and Poland
Join our whirlwind world poetry tour: a lively evening of poetry from two new anthologies, América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets and Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets. The editors of the anthologies, Jesse Lee Kercheval and Karen Kovacik, host a reading that will build bridges between countries and languages. The editors, translator Catherine Jagoe, local poets and UW MFA students will read poems from the anthologies. Kercheval and Kovacik will share stories from the front line of translating, of two very different countries and languages—and bring along some food and drink to share too!
America invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets, edited by Jesse Lee Kercheval, introduces twenty-two Uruguayan poets under the age of forty to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Kercheval pairs poets and translators to produce a rich volume based on a multicultural dialogue about poetry and the written word.
“This anthology is a gorgeous bridge to Uruguay. The emerging generation of poets is bold and ambitious; their poems explore and expand the lyric. Deftly curated by Jesse Lee Kercheval, América invertida is an important contribution to world literature.” - Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
“This superbly edited anthology breaks new ground. North Americans and Anglophones with diverse interests will come to this trove of new writing with gratitude. Not only have we lacked access to this era of Uruguayan poetry, but the poems themselves are brilliant—and the translations crisp and surefooted.” - Peter Thompson, translator of Nabile Farès’s Escuchando tu historia
“These poets are mystic, down-to-earth, demanding, reserved, ecstatic, intimate, and prophetic, turn by turn by turn. The poet-translators who bring them into English perform correspondingly modest or audacious sleights of hand. . . . One feels briefly enveloped in these poets’ iridescing wings and is left with keener eyes to trace their rising, particular flights.” - Joyelle Mcsweeney, author of The Red Bird
Scattering the Dark, edited by Karen Kovacik, offers a lively selection of over thirty of Poland's women poets writing before and after the fall of communism.
"Wow! What a book! The tradition of women's writing that flows out of the work of Symborska and Anna Swir—the way this mighty tradition turns in the hands of a younger generation from the traumatic history of their country to a poetics of everyday life, of play, and experiment. An absolutely rich and appealing book." - Robert Hass
"These cosmopolitan, multilingual poets speak to us across the decades, overcoming a great silence, redirecting the myths, reimagining the role of the poet, and the nature of poetry itself. Scattering the Dark is a useful, subversive, even necessary anthology." - Edward Hirsch
