by Terese Svoboda n honor of National Poetry Month, I would like to celebrate the poetry of Nebraska’s newest arrivals, the Nuer. When I lived with the Nuer in the Sudan in the seventies, collecting and translating their songs, I was surprised to find myself in a landscape very much like western Nebraska, surrounded by cattle. Now, so many decades later, I’m truly astonished that in the wake of the terrible fighting in the Sudan, many Nuers have moved to Nebraska, primarily to Omaha, but there is also a community within a hundred miles of Ogallala, where I was born. … Continue reading Songs of the Nuer

Select Ted Kooser Titles are on sale now through April 27, 2007! The Blizzard VoicesBy Ted KooserWith a new introduction by the authorIncluded in the 2007 Book Sense Poetry Top Ten Picks The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning PoetsBy Ted Kooser See other poetry titles for sale during our April Poetry Month Sale! Continue reading Ted Kooser Titles On Sale

f anyone is guilty about not celebrating The National Poetry Month enough, do not worry — you probably didn’t even know there is a World in Translation Month as well. Or, at least, a celebration of that, according to PEN American Center for Translations. It’s in May. It is still April, but I thought I’d let the two overlap the calendar month boundaries, sort of like Zodiac signs, and let this post pass from the sign of Poetry into the sing of Translation. I have been translating a lot of poetry lately — a secretly pleasurable and highly frustrating pastime, … Continue reading The Poetry Month – in Translation

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson was signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball’s color line. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious GentlemanBy Lee Lowenfish Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ manager at the time, was brave enough to sign Robinson. Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring TrainingBy Chris Lamb A Year earlier, Robinson trained in segregated Florida while he was a prospect for the team Montreal Royals. Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball HistoryBy Jules Tygiel "[T]he essays about Jackie Robinson and Jim Crow baseball, Tygiel’s specialities, are small gems that are worth the price of this … Continue reading It’s Been Sixty Years and One Day

The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 By Christopher R. BrowningWith contributions by Jürgen Matthäus "Christopher R. Browning firmly ties what the Nazis called their ‘war of destruction’ against the Soviet Union to the Holocaust. In Mr. Browning’s view . . . Germany’s mass murders of Jews and non-Jews alike on the Eastern Front crystallized Nazi policy regarding the eradication of European Jewry."—The New York Times. Women’s Holocaust Writing; Memory and Imagination By S. Lillian Kremer "Though similar in terms of hunger, cold, fear, and mistreatment, women’s ordeals in the camps and … Continue reading National Days of Remembrance

By Cortney Davis

can’t believe it’s April again.   

Here in Connecticut, patches of stubborn snow still pattern our front yard, a square patch of grass hidden by trees.   In the basement corner where I do my writing it’s also pretty chilly and dim—not because of a lack of sun but because of a general lack of poems.  April is National Poetry Month, for goodness sake.  So why am I suffering such profound writer’s block?   

This is a question I ask myself every year when Poetry Month rolls around.  The answer is always the same:  I’m just not a springtime writer.  I’m an end-of-summer writer, an autumn writer, a winter writer.  I write in the months of involution and change, in the dark months, because I’m a poet who also happens to be a nurse.  Or maybe I’m a nurse who also happens to be a poet.  In any event, suffering, death and transcendence are my daily fare; the laying on of hands is my daily task.  Friends ask me, Can’t you ever write a happy poem?   

My hospital world is a place of both safety and pain, a microcosm, if you will, of each of our lives.  It’s a world with an undercurrent of mystery, sensuality, spirituality, and a primal love that mimics the bond between parent and child or between lover and loved, with all the fear, longing, difficulties, tensions and joys of those relationships. 

Continue reading “Praise for the April Poems, the April Poets”

ast year when I was in London I went to visit my favorite bookstore, Books for Cooks. I marveled at the collections of books by authors who are not so well-known in the United States. The section devoted to Jane Grigson was particularly impressive. There was a book on mushrooms, on charcuterie, on fish, on fruit, on vegetables, on English food, even a book about famous figures in history and their food habits. I was overwhelmed. Where to start? Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book and Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, both available as reprints from Bison Books, are two of her more … Continue reading Grigson’s Pleasures of Fruits and Vegetables

STARRED REVIEW Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street by Paul S. Powers, edited by Laurie Powers “This is a real gem. . . . [A] lively, outspoken, hugely entertaining chronicle. . . . Although the memoir was written more than half a century ago, much of what Powers says about getting started in the publishing game still holds. In addition, editor Laurie’s introduction offers a concise and informative history of the pulp era. . . . [R]ecommended enthusiastically to writers of all stripes and to anyone interested in the history of pulp publishing.”—Booklist _________________________ More praise for … Continue reading Praise for Pulp Writer