You may know Eliza Griswold from her journalism at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Times Magazine. Perhaps you've heard the buzz around her first nonfiction work The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold is also a noted poet; FSG published her collection Wideawake Field in 2007. There is an unsurprising overlap between her journalism and her verse: both reflect her itinerant nature and an engagement with other cultures. The three poems presented here are all previously unpublished.

As this glimpse at the proofs of my versions of Leopardi’s Canti suggests, a translation, like an original poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And that remains true even after the book is published—I’ve already started collected "improvements" for a future printing. There’s usually a way to say what needs to be said more concisely, more pithily, more beautifully. That’s why I’ve found translation over the years to have been an incredible education in writing.

Daniel Swift is the author of Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War. [caption id="attachment_494" align="alignright" width="120" caption="Photograph © by Deborah Copaken Kogan"][/caption] On October 30th, at a press conference in London, Julian Assange—the founder of Wikileaks—announced the leak of 391,832 secret military documents about the war in Iraq. This represents, he said, “the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.” Here are tortures, newly revealed; here are awful rates of civilian deaths (perhaps 66,000)—and all presented in clipped, oddly formal, occasionally redacted fragments (here, for example, is the record of a friendly-fire incident from January 2008: “CAV REPORTS THAT SMALL ARMS FIRE ENSUED BECAUSE OF A DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CLC AND IA. NO ENEMY INVOLVEMENT”).

[caption id="attachment_621" align="alignright" width="120" caption="Joseph Brodsky © Nancy Crampton"][/caption] We've noticed a surge of interest in Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky centered around the recent New York Times article "Venice in Winter" and the use of poetry as travel guide. The following...

Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's recently published sixth book of poems, is a remarkably moving and, perhaps surprisingly, exhilarating work, given that it is an elegy for the poet's late husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, who died in 2002. In the exchange that follows, I ask Trude to talk about some of the sources and inspirations that inform this complex and deeply beautiful book. -Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG

On February 8th, over a thousand people turned out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Cooper Union in New York. Paul Muldoon and Alice Quinn read selections from the New Yorker correspondence, and twenty poets shared their favorite Bishop poems.

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This newly translated piece by Jorge Luis Borges appears in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. Ilan Stavans, the book's editor and the translator of "Borges and I," stopped by the FSG offices to record the piece in Spanish and English for us: [audio:https://fsgworkinprog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/borges-y-yo.mp3] The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other shares those preferences but with a vanity that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. It doesn’t cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but those pages can’t save me, perhaps because what’s good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and traditions.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose debut book of poetry, The Ground, published this week, recently sat down with fellow FSG poet Lawrence Joseph. We're happy to share with you their remarkable discussion on the craft, translation, mythmaking, and--of course--Phillips' stunning new work. Lawrence Joseph: First of all, I want to say how much I like this book. In fact, I think it’s a masterpiece. Why the title The Ground?

by Dennis Mahoney It’s 1990 and I’m a loser. Becoming a novelist hasn’t crossed my mind. I’m a high-school junior who’s shown some aptitude in art, and by aptitude I mean I’m better than classmates who don’t try at all. My art teacher is just happy I do the assignments instead of throwing Exact-o knives into the ceiling. I had a creative impulse throughout my early life, fueled by supportive parents, Legos, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Relatives raved about my drawings. I got a spaceship illustration printed in the local paper during grade school. And I didn’t really want to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be George Lucas and create something awesome. But I couldn’t be bothered to develop any skills. Mötley Crüe was big in my life, as were the Commodore 64 video games my friends and I swapped along our paper routes. I had bad hair, just shy of a bowl cut. Major cysts instead of zits. A soft, pale, jean-jacketed body. I’d never had a serious girlfriend because girls have standards, and because I kept thinking my luck might change, which is the best way to ensure it never, ever does.

Averill Curdy on What Brought Her to Poetry Wayward: difficult to control or predict; shortened from obsolete Middle English awayward, “turned away.”   I’ve kept a diary, more or less faithfully, for over 30 years. I’ve moved the expanding shelf of filled journals between various apartments in Seattle, and then to Texas, Missouri, Michigan, and finally to Chicago. I’ve copied favorite passages from my reading, noted the rare dream, and jotted down ideas, stray images, or lines for poems; I’ve paginated and indexed them. I mourned when my favorite notebook—an Exaclair sketchbook with 100 pages of 100-gram French paper that loved ink—was discontinued. Writing in one of these was happiness, small, but durable as the cup of coffee my husband makes for me each morning. But I never so much as glance at a single one of those diaries after writing the final words on its last page. The summer I turned 25 my mother was dying of breast cancer. Long after she died, I broke the middle joint of my thumb fielding an easy ground ball at second base during a softball game. The doctor bent my thumb backwards from the break, binding it into position so that the tendon and joint would knit themselves back together, then sent me home with some Tylenol. That night the pain reduced the little vanities and injuries, desire, and self-regard of my identity to kindling. The next day I was able to get a prescription for codeine and the cessation of that pain was an experience of delicious release from bondage. Afterwards, I was able to think of what my mother must have endured without complaint as the cancer colonized her bones and soft tissues.

by Maureen N. McLane What a strange, vital, careening book—what a book for now. Yet also, what a fascinating document of the early 20th century. A Poet in New York, “New York in a Poet,” as Lorca himself glossed it: this is clearly one of the great works of transnational modernism, a cracked Andalucían mirror held up to New York’s crazed, vibrant, and disgusting face. The best poetry is “news that stays news,” as Pound put it. This book seems to me news I can use—registering the skyscrapered canyons of the city, its savage underbelly everywhere humming with reptilian life (all those iguanas and crocodiles running around in the poems), the titanic fraudulence of Wall Street, the vomiting crowds of a Coney Island Sunday. Here’s a book that reminds us, as Sandy violently reminded us, that Manhattan is an island, that Brooklyn and Queens have extensive shorelines, that this is a fragile land engulfable by oceanic waters and estuarial overflow. This is a river- and shore-minded book. It looks for sailors; it loves the contingent arrival, the polyglot port, the lowlife bustle, the glance, the sneer. Like Whitman, Lorca is alert to the rhythms of waves and tides. In this as much as in its more obvious hailing of Whitman as camerado, Lorca is a true heir to the beautiful, at times ornery psalmodist of Mannahatta.

by Harry Eyres While researching Horace and Me, my book on the Roman poet (and a few other things besides), I was astonished time and again by the uncanny prescience of this ancient and some might think antiquated poet; by how pertinent so many of his words remain, two thousand years after they were written. Perhaps it was something like the experience an archaeologist has, pushing a spade into long-dormant earth and coming up with a perfect glittering coin or piece of jewelry: how can this thing still be shining so bright after so long?

Authors on the Books that Helped Them Come Out Reading may be a solitary experience, but for some of us, it let us know that we were not alone. While everyone’s story is different, many of us are united by our love of books and our belief that they have the power to bring us together and to show us that when we’re different, as Nicola Griffith writes, “we can be glad to be so.” Growing up gay can feel like an excruciatingly isolating experience, particularly without the resources to understand what it is exactly that makes you so different. Books gave us not only a sense of who we were, but who we could be. So whether you hid a copy of A Boy’s Own Story under the bed or kept Fingersmith in your sock drawer, between the covers we were able to find a world for ourselves within the world.

Seamus Heaney’s death last week left a rift in our lives, and in poetry, that won’t easily be mended. A Nobel Laureate, a devoted husband, a sharp translator, a beloved friend, and the big-hearted leader of the “Government of the Tongue,” Seamus was a poet of conscience; his close-friend and fellow poet Paul Muldoon said, “He was the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority.” Poetry was a vocation that he dedicated his life to, something he believed had “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they too are an earnest of our veritable human being.” Uncannily attuned to the voices of the world around him, his poems made both the personal and collective subconscious realms concrete in language.

Poet Ange Mlinko has been praised by The New Yorker for writing “intoxicating, cerebral poems [that] display a unique sense of humor and mystery.” She recently caught up with FSG’s Christopher Richards to discuss storytelling, advice for young poets, and just why aging for a poet is like tuberculosis for Keats. Her new collection, Marvelous Things Overheard, is now available.   Christopher Richards: Marvelous Things Overheard feels like a journey through worlds real and unreal. How do you think migration informed these poems? I'm thinking particularly of your background as the child of immigrant parents, and your time living abroad in places like Morocco and Beirut. Ange Mlinko: What I'm really after is—to borrow Guy Davenport's phrase—a geography of the imagination. It's almost a reaction against all this migration—I'm compelled to subsume my autobiography (my parents' immigration to Brazil, then the U.S., after WWII; my travels abroad) within structures. Baudelaire called the poets our lighthouses, mapping this geography for us. Now, I know many modern poets have an allergy to classical references. But these aren't merely references. They're knowledge. For one thing, they provide an account for our relationship with the elemental world. For another, they give depth and resonance to our conception of time. You can't read the works of the past—Keats, Shakespeare et al.—without this knowledge. And if you can't imagine the past, if you have no entree to it, your imagination withers. And your pride groweth.

In the beginning was this surface. A wall. A beginning. Tonight it coaxed music from a Harlem cloudbank. It freestyled A smoke from a stranger’s coat. It stole thinned gin. It was at the edge of its beginnings but outside Looking in. The lapse-blue facade of Harlem Hospital is weatherstill Like a starlit lake in the midst of Lenox Avenue. Tonight I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in And because tonight is curing the beginning let me through. And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that welcomed you.

He still trolled books, films, gossip, his own past, searching not just for ideas that dissect the mountain that in his early old age he is almost convinced cannot be dissected: he searched for stories: stories the pattern of whose knot dimly traces the pattern of his own: what is intolerable in the world, which is to say intolerable in himself, ingested, digested: the stories that haunt each of us, for each of us rip open the mountain. * the creature smothered in death clothes dragging into the forest bodies he killed to make meaning the woman who found that she to her bewilderment and horror had a body * As if certain algae that keep islands of skeletons alive, that make living rock from trash, from carcasses left behind by others, as if algae were to produce out of themselves and what they most fear the detritus over whose kingdom they preside: the burning fountain is the imagination within us that ingests and by its devouring generates what is most antithetical to itself: it returns the intolerable as brilliant dream, visible, opaque, teasing analysis: makes from what you find hardest to swallow, most indigestible, your food.

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals, please come flying, to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water, please come flying.

Leaving behind the country of the dead where he must then return & die himself he set his tired face due East where the sun rushes up the North Atlantic and where had paused a little the war for bread & the war for status has ceased forever, and he took with him five books, a Whitman & a Purgatorio, a one-volume dictionary, an Oxford Bible with all its bays & nooks & bafflements long familiar to Henry & one other new book-O. If ever he had crafted in the past— but only if—he swore now to craft better which lay in the Hands above. He said: I’ll work on slow, O slow & fast, if a letter comes I will answer that letter & my whole year will be tense with love.