A Technique for Operating on the Past

Caption: 

“My great-grandfather held a brain and studied it for signs of music.” In this video, Maya C. Popa reads her poem “A Technique for Operating on the Past,” which won the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Popa, the author of American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 

A Christmas Carol

Caption: 

Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 holiday novella, A Christmas Carol, has been adapted into a new BBC television drama. The three-part fantasy miniseries is directed by Nick Murphy, and stars Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Jason Flemyng as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge, Charlotte Riley as Lottie (the Ghost of Christmas Present), and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Genre: 

Keith S. Wilson

Caption: 

In this PBS Books interview at the 2019 AWP Conference & Book Fair, Keith S. Wilson speaks about his love of video games, Affrilachian poetry, and his debut collection, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Wilson is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 

Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera

Caption: 

“What streams of light might escape me and reveal / about the things I collect and hide...” This Motionpoems film directed by Tash Tung features Natalie Diaz’s poem “Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera,” which was first published in Spillway and will be included in her second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2020. 

Genre: 

Chad Bennett

Caption: 

“That is a vapor at day’s far edge. That’s Lauren Bacall in a penny / arcade. That’s a streaming video but will not load.” At the 2012 TILTS Summer Workshop at the University of Texas in Austin, Chad Bennett reads “George Dyer” and “Other Weathers” from his first poetry collection, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era (Sarabande Books, 2020), which is currently featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 

Marwa Helal

Caption: 

“if you ask me where i come from i have to converse with broken wings.” Marwa Helal reads two poems from her debut poetry collection, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), at the Bronx Museum of the Arts for the Poets for Puerto Rico benefit reading series. Helal is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 

Robert Hass

Caption: 

In this video, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and translator Robert Hass reads “Okefenokee: A Story,” “Pertinent Divagations Toward an Ode to Inuit Carvers,” and other poems from his book Summer Snow (Ecco, 2020) at the 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. The book, Hass’s seventh poetry collection, is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 

Camonghne Felix

Caption: 

“Today, today I said I would write my own healing.” In this 2015 video, Camonghne Felix reads her poem “Presence” at the Strivers Row’s Poetic Soul live performance series. Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, 2019) and is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Such a Fun Age

Caption: 

“I hope that people can take away that these racial biases, these class biases, exist harmoniously within really kind gestures and authentic love for someone.” In this video, Kiley Reid talks about the characters in her debut novel, Such a Fun Age (Putnam, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 

Pages

Subscribe to Poets & Writers RSS