Cover reveal for book of translations to be published this fall with Action-Spectacle. Cover art by Edwin Rojas.

New issue of SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW is out and I’ve got a poem there thanks to editors Rose McLarney and @jdpaden.bsky.social. Please consider supporting with a purchase. I’m so grateful to be next to writers I love and admire in this issue! www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/581-hunters-...

This July, Accents Publishing will put out a book of mine that I started writing 9 years ago with zhe/hir pronouns. This January the government has gone through scrubbing any pronoun that is not she, he, it from its websites. Funny how that is. jpaden4.wixsite.com/jeremypadenp...

Disponible de venta ya en valparaisoediciones.es/tienda/poesi...

No. Nations do grow, not in virtue or anything else... but their people should. No. Not in that my kids will be more virtuous than I and I than my parents. We each have our own growth to tend to in a never finished project. Yet, and yet. Such sadness when I look at those who are leading this country

an interview with the Chilean poet Mario Meléndez, two previously unpublished, untranslated poems, now published, now translated, at the end of the interview. www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/intervi...

Fingers crossed. The illustrations for the Abecedarian Bestiary of Central America are hopefully back on a schedule and will be done by end of spring. And then, well, there will be book news upon book news shortly. Cover reveals and announcements. Waiting is the hardest part.

The good people over at Hindman have put together a smorgasbord of poems and stories and art from lots of great people, including: @mworthington.bsky.social @kymtnwriter.bsky.social @karigunterseymour.bsky.social @thecosmicpossum.bsky.social hindman.org/untelling/is...

Rereading Felstiner’s classic book on translation. He’s such a good reader of poetry and such a generous reader of other translators. A master class in how to read poetry and in how to disagree with the aesthetic choices and mistakes of other translators in a kind and generous way.

And it’s off to the presses. The first of many that will supposedly come out this year.

20 books / 20 days 18:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

When we moved to the Dominican Republic in 1987, my Puerto Rican grandmother was 65. She had always told us that she couldn't remember when she was born, something my parents took as vanity--and it could have been.

20 books / 20 days 17:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Este otoño trabajé con una poeta de cierto renombre que cada dos por tres me mandaba un poema traducido por IA y agregaba, para hacerte la vida más fácil. Por fin le dije que tener que corregir a un chatbot me era mucho más difícil que traducirmelo todo yo mismo.

El libro más reciente... tan pronto la pongan de venta en Alcorce Librería la subo de nuevo... hasta el momento sólo se consigue en Profética jpaden4.wixsite.com/jeremypadenp...

20 books / 20 days 16:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Poemas de Jeremy Paden (Milán, 1974). Textos pertenecientes a su libro "Autorretrato como una iguana" (Valparaíso USA, 2021) letras.mysite.com/jpad151224.h... no el nuevo par sin estrenar, no el par que cuelga de cables como suicidio colectivo, grafiti urbano sumido en mitos y leyendas

20 books / 20 days 15:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

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Me: Hey Thursday, I am going to grade the papers that came in last night. I will get half of them done today. I am so glad you came. Thursday: Oh. You thought you were going to grade today! Sucker!!

Why read Shakespeare? We live in a King Lear world & are about to enter a Macbeth & a Richard III world without yet having left the madness of King Lear.

20 books / 20 days 13:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

20 books / 20 days 12:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Let there be a constellation A galaxy of snowflakes & may she be there arms Around them all, pulling Them close & tight Until Nikki & galaxy Victory & constellation Are but one bright flower #nikkigiovanni #restinpeace

20 books / 20 days 11:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Fu Xuan, courtesy name Xiuyi, poet from Cao Wei during the Three Kingdom period.

20 books / 20 days 10:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

"Did I really say that? I must have been having a moment." Said a poet who used to read on Prairie Home Companion. He also said poems on family members & he's out. He so desperately doesn't want to be trite that he's a parody of trite. Then again, the questions themselves begged for trite answers.

While this is not how to social media & influence people, we are moving again into a time of madness, of concocted craziness, of an administration addicted to attention & a citizenry more interested in scandal & opining than living & loving IRL. www.livedtheology.org/wp-content/u...

20 books / 20 days 9:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

This is not a complaint, just one of those things they never tell you until someone wins a major, national award and they say, I don’t have to wait to be published anymore. But publishing is a lot of waiting around. Currently I am waiting on: A book of translations to English to appear in India.

My BA was English, largely from professors trained as close readers & lit historians. My MA & PhD was in Spanish. The MA, largely philologists & anthologists. My PhD was by Yale-trained deconstructionists. Where I teach, kids have fled English, except for Creative Writing. The academics wonder why.

The last part of Cracking the Safe, from The Way of Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton's translation of Zhuang Zhou.

20 books / 20 days 8:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Here is a somber truth of creative life. If it goes well, people will begin to ask you for things. Each of those things, no matter how kind or flattering or genuine or even beneficial to your own career and finances as well as someone else's, will pull you from your true purpose.

"One of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky...and he said 'look,' he said, 'you Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.'"

20 books / 20 days 7:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

This past semester we had writer on campus. A big name. & I’m glad we did. They charged what seems the going rate. & they should. But it’s a hefty rate & they insisted on not meeting with students. I wish they would’ve. Their rate was high enough that they should’ve.

I spend much of my time amazed that businesses think AI is a good investment. It mostly tells me the people who makes these decisions neither read nor write. And equally troubling they seem to ignore the fact that writing and reading are transformative acts.

20 books / 20 days 6:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

"A country is only as good as-I don't care now about the Constitution and the laws, at the moment let us leave these things aside-a country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become..." James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“Nobody in the world, nobody I history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” —Assata Shakur

20 books / 20 days 5:20

While the Virginia Colony was the first English colony, we celebrate the Pilgrims—a sleight of hand that covers over the nation’s capitalist foundation. Yet, it’s all there in the Mayflower Compact: a religio-political document for the economic survival of a community that sets up oligarchic rule.

20 books / 20 days 4:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Tactics for the next four. And yes, as with everything in life, all tactics are provisional and contradictory. Live as an exile and set down roots where you are are both true. Do not desire to be listened to and speak up for injustice are both true.

20 books / 20 days 3:20 #bookchallenge #booksky

Denise Levertov. To One Steeped in Bitterness. Breathing the Water, City Lights, 1987.