Four New Amelin Poems in Reunion: The Dallas Review (Vol. 4) - December 19, 2014

Get your hands on the current issue of Reunion: The Dallas Review for four new translations of Maxim Amelin’s poetry from Annie and myself. These include some our favorite of his poems, and are also among the very first we translated. I remember workshopping “Teach Me to Beseech You”–our very first collaborative translation–at an AATSEEL conference in early 2010. And then Nicole Monnier brought us out to Mizzou where we discussed it at the Translatio Conference in April of that year.

The other poems are “The Hulking Carcass of a Dead Orca,” “I Wished I Owned My Own Home,” and “In August the Stars Shoot through the Night Air,” a poem where “the flies go buzzerk” and Maxim declares himself “the author of incorrigible poems, / [and] some muddled epics.”

And for those of you looking for a holiday tie-in, one poem reminds us that Amelin’s “birthday’s on Christmas; / I hope to reach thirty.” Rest assured folks, he does, and we can all wish him a happy 44th next week.