Winner of the UMass Press Juniper Prize for Poetry creates intergenerational text In “Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive,” winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry awarded by UMass Press, poet Jennifer Tseng lets lines from letters from her late father intermingle with her own words, creating a combinatory, deeply intimate, intergenerational new text. “With each letter/ I disappeared/ A little further/ From the world/ Into my father.” The lines from the letters are an archive of longing and regret. To open a letter, to touch with fingertips a piece of paper a person, a beloved, has also touched, can be overwhelmingly intimate, erasing distance and time, the absent person present in the words written on the page, the poignancy made particularly acute after one of the letter writers is gone. There is grief here, the stickiness of family, of the terrors and comforts of love, of her father “de-siring” himself with each letter, “a little more each time.” Mandarin was Tseng’s father’s first language; he writes to her in English. These are poems about what it is to share language, to share blood, the complexities, the limits, of what it is to share a connection that defies language. “Haunt me,” Tseng implores. “I want to re-/ Member you.” Advertisement AGNI Magazine offers “Dispatches from Palestine” online “How will we live after we have lost everything?” asks Basel Joudah, a writer and translator living in
Gaza in a post published as part of “Dispatches from Palestine,” a series that AGNI Magazine is running on their website. “We believe that all who bear witness to the ongoing violence in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including
Palestinians under siege and in diaspora as well as Israelis and diaspora Jews intent on peace, need space to speak,” the editors write. Eleven writers, writing from Gaza and from around the world, have reflected on the horrors they’re witnessing and hearing about, the challenges of being caught between two worlds, the terrifying surreality of war. “We bid farewell to each other before we sleep, expecting not to wake up the next day, and we sleep huddled together so that we could die all together with no one having to grieve another,” reports Ali Alalem, a PhD student from Gaza studying at the University of
Alabama, of what his brother at home told him. “Like them,” he writes, “I am living death, but a different sort of death that I experience solitarily and silently, with no one to huddle with nor bid farewell to.” Haya Abu Nasser, a writer and NGO fund-raising officer, writes from Gaza how “death was once a philosophical quandary, an exquisite debate over coffee in a cozy café,” but now, death is “an unwavering companion . . . a relentless force.” To read these dispatches, visit agnionline.bu.edu . Advertisement Exeter LitFest takes place first weekend in April The Exeter LitFest unfolds this weekend, kicking off with a concert with Sharon Jones on Friday, April 5. Saturday brings a full schedule of readings, workshops, and events, capped off with the keynote address by Andre Dubus III in conversation with Matt Miller. Ilyon Woo will discuss her acclaimed book “Master Slave Husband Wife.” Exeter High School students will read their poetry. Authors Katherine Howe, Caitlin Shetterly, and Adam White discuss “New
England and the Fiction It Inspires” with Amy Grace Lloyd. Local poets Michael Brosnan, Kristen Lindquist,
Chelsea Woodward, and Ralph Sneeden will read. Amanda Gokee will lead a conversation with Rachel Slade, author of “Making It in America,” and journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, author of “If It Sounds Like a Quack,” about “America Today Non-Fiction.” Marie Miller, Wickie Rowland, and Peg Aaronian will talk about “How to Write a Children’s Book.” There’s a Crime and Mystery Brunch at Sea Dog Restaurant (tickets required), and a family event called “The Curious Kid” with Matt Tavares and Suzanne Slade. Events are free and open to the public, and the festival is a good excuse to wander into the Water Street Bookstore while you’re there. For more information, visit exeterlitfest.com . Advertisement Coming out “Being Reflected Upon” by Alice Notley (Penguin) “Death Styles” by Joyelle McSweeney (Nightboat) “Traces of Enayat” by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger (Transit) Pick of the week Josh Cook at Porter Square Books in Cambridge recommends “Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen” by Rebecca May Johnson (Pushkin): “Cooking as philosophy, as literary criticism, as the ‘again-writing’ of translation, as performance art. This is a scintillating exploration of what it can mean to create meals out of ingredients. For anyone who loves to cook, loves to eat, loves to play with their food, loves to leave their kitchen splattered with sauce.”