Riantly - Poetry Readings

Reading Slump? Read Some Poetry Instead. There’s a particular kind of shame that comes with a reading slump especially if you’re someone who identifies as a reader. Having to confess that, well, frankly, I haven’t been reading lately despite occupying my space in a primarily literary world; I’ve been in one of those slumps lately. Sometimes a book doesn’t hit the same when the season changes. Some...

I came to poetry the way most people come to anything that saves them: sideways, without knowing that’s what was happening. I was young, and I didn’t think in straight lines, and the world kept asking me to. Poetry was the first place that didn’t. It met me in the associative, image-driven, non-sequential place where my mind actually lived, and it asked nothing of me except attention. That felt, a...

Riantly, or with Laughter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will continue to post my translated poetry index links here: * A new article on how to get started reading translated poetry * Listings for publications , awards , publishers , and translators. * And general improvements to navigability for searching...

There was nothing practical I could do. So I read poems. That might sound indulgent. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just the most honest thing I know how to do when I don’t have control. Reading feels like a way to stay present instead of spiraling. It feels like a way to honor a place without pretending I understand it completely. I chose Mexican poets because Mexico isn’t an abstraction to me. It’s...

Once a week, I try to take forty-five minutes to simply read poems out loud. That might not sound radical. But for me, it is. It is a refusal of urgency. It is a small act of attention in a culture that trains us to skim, optimize, extract. Poetry has been a source of connection for me for more than twenty years. I started organizing readings when I was sixteen and never really stopped. I’ve worke...

There is a particular kind of calm that comes from deciding, without justification, to read poems out loud. Not to explain them. Not to extract their meaning. Not to turn them into lessons or proofs. Just to read them, one after another, and let the room change. When I read poetry, I am not trying to understand it in the way information wants to be understood. I am trying to be with it. I am tryin...

Reading a poem silently is an act of concentration. Hearing a poem read aloud is an act of recognition. Something in the body leans forward when language is given breath. The ear catches what the eye alone often misses: rhythm before meaning, tone before argument, the subtle choreography of pauses and stresses that turn words into music. Poetry is an oral art that learned to survive on the page. L...

You can purchase "Bloom," by Xi Chuan tr. by Lucas Klein here. Chuan is a pivotal figure in Chinese poetic and literary community. Outspoken regarding political needs and with both a reverence and disgust for literature, “Bloom” is full with poems that seem to simultaneously mock high-brow efforts of pseudo-reality in language, as well as contend with the need to address that a writer necessitates...

You can purchase "Black Pastoral," by Ariana Benson here. One of those older contemporary books at this point. In that odd three years old period where some will have forgotten about it in the quieting of its hype, and others eagerly await the next from Benson. Having only recently read through it, time passing from its popularity, I have to insist: it is not a mistake to read this work, to sit de...

You may purchase "Slow Render," by Jess Yuan here. A book that I think gladly speaks in conversation with other works operating around the metaphysical concept of the photograph like Barthes, Sontag; Yuan’s “Slow Render,” operates on both a scale of the poem as a capture, as well as the capture as a form that can be manipulated or whose boundaries can be flexibly defined. Riantly, or with Laughter...

You can purchase Notes of the Phantom Woman by Iana Boukova tr. by John O'Kane & Ekaterina Petrova here. This work was full and rampant with surprising and innovative poetry. I was interrupted in this reading by my cat, Hazelnut, and lost my focus on reading the poem which is why I ended it halfway through the long poem. That said, I think this is precisely something Boukova would appreciate - to...

You can purchase "Songs Blood Deep," by Gwen Nell Westerman here. I loved Gwen Nell Westerman’s work, and thought the steadfast observational powers on display were the work of a poet truly interested in engaging with what is in front of her. Riantly, or with Laughter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I appreci...

You can purchase Rick Barot's book "Moving the Bones," here. I love this line from Mikal Wix on Barot’s work : “But Barot’s candid poems from Moving the Bones create an intangible space where words can exalt feelings of longing or loss without losing their power to stabilize us in the understatement of rational, epiphanic thought.” Riantly, or with Laughter is a reader-supported publication. To re...

You can find a copy of Commons by Myung Mi Kim here. Part of the necessity of translated literature, translated poetry, is the decentralization of “English,” as an omnipresence and easily-definable language. “English,” is, for lack of a better term, limp and fungible - defined through its constant re-interpretation by those who come to the language secondarily. This poem or this essay comes on the...

You can purchase The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan from Ecco Books here. Alyan’s work is a foray of contemporariness and of navigating. Many of the poems offer more formal explorations of what needs be conveyed — with a series of poems in the form of six columns responding to lines adjusted by a unique subject, or more traditional formal modes like the repetition explored in “Strike [Air]...

You can purchase How Fire Descends by Serhiy Zhadan tr. by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps here. These poems within How Fire Descends are at once spiritual, pleading, stark, and hopeful. They speak of literature and the state and purpose of poems alongside family alongside survival. Zhadan is a tremendous poet, and I believe the reality he manages to versify is both vitally necessary and one full w...

You can purchase études by Friederike Mayröcker tr. by Donna Stonecipher here. I love an author who doesn’t care much for genre definitions. Everything I’ve read from Friederike Mayröcker seems to exude exactly this coolness - it doesn’t much matter if it’s a poem, a diary, prosody, or anything. Here, I offer a reading of this piece that seems to do it all — diary, poem, prose, what have you. I...

If you wish to purchase The Escapades you may find it here. Agniau’s work here is such a treasure of connectivity. The pages tell something of a story together, and yet poem-by-poem I feel something more like the shifting of seasons — the hints toward a change, and then all at once a difference. An immense strength is her commitment to writing toward, speaking toward, this ‘you.’ I find it incredi...

You may purchase For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert here . Translated by Guy Bennett, Pierre Joris, Addie Leak, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio and published by Otis Books - Seismicity Editions. Mostafa Nissabouri seems to be a mountain of literary culture, uplifting and providing support for his fellow writers through journal creation and the establishment of a home for superb writing. This collecti...

From the work Crosslight for Youngbird from Nightboat Books Asiya Wadud’s work is at once mystifying and thrilling. I could very well believe performative recitations of her lyric in the forms of borderline surreal mutterings, to the proud proclamatory verse with bravado. Here, I read just one of the many poems of hers I love and try to explain a bit as to why I love this poem, why I find it works...

An in accompaniment, here is Hilary Plum’s review in the Cleveland Review of Books (I admit, a favorite of mine) : Seeking fertility treatment, the self is in a state of profound need and transformative possibility, of desperation and choice, privileged to be subjected to medical regimes, precarious and generative. In this state, the poet attends to and appreciates “little justices” and forms of “...

And as an accompaniment, this interview from Barely South Review between Jerome Newsome and the author Marianne Chan : Poetry has a lot of forms. Sonnets. Haikus. Odes. How do you incorporate or use form in your poems? Yeah. So, form for me, is extremely generative. I often begin with form as a way to enter a poem. And sometimes I have an idea in mind. For example, in my second collection, Leaving...

And I loved this accompaniment by critic Leo Zausen on Magda Isanos’ Homecoming : Life for Isanos is less a vessel but a burden, a preordained fallout at the incursion of the species. Isanos’ romanticism sediments a dwindling of the human side of any encounter by foregrounding the negative manifestation of something subliminal, abyssal, and subterranean in its wake. Not unlike phosphorus—or the co...

And alongside this wonderful book and poem are these lines from a 2024 interview with author Afrizal Malna from Asymptote Journal : These events gave rise to an obsession, or an agitation: “Can language shake? Can meaning convulse?” It was a new challenge for the practice of writing poetry. … … For me, the structure of the poem and the way the words are placed resemble an earthquake with its prope...

I think of this interview by translator, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, in Numero Cinco , speaking on Cross’s poetics: What struck me about Elsa during our conversation in London was that her poetry reflected her personality: gentle, contemplative, self-assured. It seemed that the mysteries and uncertainties inherent in the world around us, which philosophy constantly probes, rather than cause angst, in...