Alireza Roshan was born in Tehran and now lives in Hamburg, Germany. The author of 10 books of poetry and fiction, he made his literary debut in 2011, posting one brief poem a day on the internet. | Gary Gach & Erfan Mojb: “Amidst the thousands of his followers he attracted, we were struck by the timeliness of his poems, and their uncanny wedding of classical Persian poetry with Modernism, like Sufi haiku.”
Hayden Saunier: “I am an actress and theatre is always sending me to poetry and poetry to theatre. ‘Self-Portrait With the Smithfield Ham…’ evolved from that intersection. I was interested in the self-portrait less as image and more as inner monologue, a kind of private soliloquy.” (web)
Karan Kapoor: “Dida (my paternal grandmother) was sick for six months before she died, three years ago. In that time, I moved between weeping, massaging her feet, and writing. That death inspires poetry is not new. Whether as journalistic expression, ritual purgation, or literary experience. When I began working on my collection of poems for Dida, I found myself shifting through these three states. I wrote to survive her death. The strict form of the ghazal allowed me to channel (and give structure to) the chaos that severe inexplicable illnesses bring to a house. I started with 21 couplets and brought them down to 14. While traditionally a song of longing and love, and at times political advocacy—the ghazal—mastered by Agha Shahid Ali in English—is a form that defies what we think is possible in poetry today. At once dramatic, self-aware, subtle, musical, excessively emotional, and then quietly metaphysical—it is emblematic of poetic community. Death, too, does not happen alone. Especially in India—it brings together families, beliefs, doubts. Nor is writing truly a solitary act. All poems remain unfinished if unread.” (web)
Wheeler Light: “Aaron Carter died last week, which is tragic. Aaron Carter was a musician, addict, and my first celebrity crush. When I was a child, his music opened up a world of love to me and began my personal exploration/discovery. His story is a story of exploitation and neglect, but his effect was a ubiquitous joy that befell many millennials. I wrote a chapbook about him called I Want Candy, which was accepted for publication by two presses, but I pulled the chapbook both times, because I didn’t feel comfortable with anyone having access to it. This poem is elegy, a follow-up, a tabloid about a musician’s work the world was lucky to have.” (web)
Avery Yoder-Wells: “I like to write poetry because it’s such a dance between writer and reader. I imagine poetry as a wine glass, beginning broadly, then narrowing until the poem reveals what it’s really been about this whole time. Poetry has so few rules—grammar, structure, and even punctuation are subjective. All that matters is enjoying what you’ve created, and leaving the reader in a different place than they began.”
Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with initiating the Italian Renaissance and the founding of Renaissance humanism. | A.M. Juster: “This translation comes from my complete translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere due out next year from W.W. Norton, in which I closely match the exact rhymes, meter, and line lengths of all 366 poems, and try to do so in clearer, more colloquial language than has usually been the case in the past. This poem, part of angry three-poem sequence against papal corruption, shows the more political side of the poet; it was banned by the Vatican for more than a century.” (web)
Reeves Keyworth: “I’d been thinking about this subject for a long time, although I’d never considered writing about it. Then one day the title and the first line arrived together, along with a sardonic narrative voice which I could ride to the end of the poem. The appealing idea that the dying may experience visions from their past came from Oliver Sachs’s essay, ‘Passage to India,’ which discusses a phenomenon called ‘involuntary reminiscence.’”
