Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and beyond

Edited by: Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi ShankarV.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008
This ambitious yet accessible gathering of hundreds of poets from various parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, America, and elsewhere is likely to excite poetry fans as well as those new to poetry. Divided into nine idiosyncratic sections—with titles like [...]

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America & Other Poems

By Ayukawa Nobuo, selected and translated by Shogo Oketani and Leza LowitzKaya Press, 2008
America and Other Poems is the first English translation of a single volume by the Japanese Modernist poet, Nobuo Ayukawa. One of Japan’s most influential yet overlooked poets, Ayukawa was an important voice for peace and probity in the years that followed [...]

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The Blue Sky

By Galsan Tschinag
Translated by Katharina Rout
Milkweed Editions, 2006

Galsan Tschinag is the German name taken by Irgit Shynykbai-oglu Dshurukuwaa, a Tuvan born in Mongolia in the early 1940s. Tschinag studied in Germany in the early ’60s and ended up leading the Tuvan people, dispersed under Communism, back to the High Altai mountain region. This autobiographical novel, [...]

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Wild Form & Savage Grammar

By Andrew Schelling
La Alameda Press, 2003.
These essays are reports from an increasingly important crossroads where art and ecology meet. Andrew Schelling belongs, in the words of Patrick Pritchett, “to a small group of poets who are actively engaged with the rhythms and pulses of the natural world.” He is also the preeminent translator into English [...]

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Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time

By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Viking Penguin, 2007.
Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in [...]

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Azaleas: Poems by Kim Sowol, Translated by David R. McCann

By Kim Sowol
Translated by David R. McCann
Columbia University Press, 2007.
Originally published in 1925, Azaleas is the only collection produced by Kim Sowol (1902-1934), yet he remains one of Korea’s most beloved and well-known poets. Thanks to the elegant translations by David R. McCann, this landmark of Korean literature is now able to speak to people [...]

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