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“What Voice? Whose Voice?” An Interview with David Wheatley on The President of Planet Earth

The President of Planet Earth is Wheatley’s fifth collection, and his talent for a wide range of poetic styles and voices is on full display. Here we have prose poems, concrete poems, sestinas and sonnets, alongside more experimental forms. Wheatley draws inspiration from Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, Samuel Beckett, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, among others. The result is a fascinating and subversively comedic trek across land and time. In this interview, Wheatley tells us more about his daring new collection and the voices therein.

A Warm Celebration for WFU Press

View photos from our Housewarming Celebration on Nov. 3, 2017

Poem of the Week: “Crows Again” by Frank Ormsby

‘Too many crows in your poems,
blocking the light.’ I can find
only four but, there and then, for her,
I declare a moratorium on crows…

Remembering Gerard Fanning

Conor O’Callaghan remembers colleague and friend Gerard Fanning

An Interview with Frank Ormsby on THE DARKNESS OF SNOW

WFU Press interns gathered to ask the poet Frank Ormsby more about his collection, The Darkness of Snow. Written in five parts, the poems explore vast territory from Ormsby’s childhood in Fermanagh, to life with Parkinson’s, to the difficulty of bearing witness in the face of atrocity. Here, the poet discusses poetic friendships, recurring themes in his poetry, and the anti-muse.

Poem of the Week: “A l’écoute: Receiver / All Clear” by Ciaran Carson

In the final week of National Translation Month, we’re featuring a unique kind of translation act. In From Elsewhere, Ciaran Carson translates poems by the French poet Jean Follain. However, the volume is different in that Carson pairs these translations with original poems inspired by them: “Translations of the translations,” as he explains in the preface….

Poem of the Week: “Rugă / Prayer” by Ileana Mălăncioiu

In today’s selection for National Translation Month, we are featuring a Romanian poem by Ileana Mălăncioiu, translated by Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in her collection titled Legend of the Walled-Up Wife. As Ní Chuilleanáin writes in the preface to the book, “Mălăncioiu’s writing is valued in Romania as a moral force. A courageous critic of the former…

Poem of the Week: “Poète / Poet” by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

We’ve been posting translations to celebrate National Translation Month, and today we’ve chosen a French poem by Vénus Khoury-Ghata from her collection, Au sud du silence. Khoury-Ghata is a translator herself, most notably from French to Arabic  for the magazine Europe, but this poem was translated into English by Michael Bishop for an anthology of French poetry…

Poem of the Week: “A Postcard Home” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Wake Forest Press has published books in translation for a few decades, and we’re proud to celebrate National Translation Month during September by featuring some of these poems over the next few weeks. Of course we offer quite a bit of Irish-language poetry in translation, but many of our poets have also translated from French and other…

Publication day for ANGEL HILL by Michael Longley

Cataract

My eyeball’s frozen. I lie
At the bottom of a well.
Leaves decorate the ice.