Fleurs du Mal Magazine
From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.
Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.
In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community—and seemingly life as we know it—becomes more and more uncertain.
Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.
Heather Sellers is the author of four poetry collections: Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA, 2022); The Present State of the Garden (Lynx House Press, 2021); The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press, 2007), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Ahsahta Press, 2002). She is also the author of the memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead, 2011), which was an O, the Oprah Magazine Book of the Month Club Choice and an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times, and the craft book The Practice of Creative Writing (Macmillan St. Martins Bedford, 2021), now in its fourth edition.
Her writing has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, including Best American Essays, Creative Nonfiction, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Reader’s Digest, The Sun, and Tin House. She has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at The MacDowell Colony. She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. A native Floridian, she divides her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, and Manhattan.
Field Notes from the Flood Zone
By Heather Sellers
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (April 26, 2022)
Language: English
Paperback: 80 pages
ISBN-10: 1950774570
ISBN-13 : 978-1950774579
$ 17.00
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The author’s address to
The Town Council of Edinburgh
Your poet humbly means and shaws.
That, contrair to just rights and laws,
I’ve suffer’d muckle wrang.
By Lucky Raid * and ballad-singers,
Wha thumb’d with their coarse dirty fingers
Sweet Adie’s funeral sang.
They spoil’d my sense, and staw my cash.
My muse’s pride murgully’d ;
And printing it like their vile trash.
The honest lieges whilly’d.
Allan Ramsay
(1684-1758)
The author’s address to The Town Council of Edinburgh
* A printer’s relict, who, with the hawkers, reprinted my pastoral on Mr. Addison, without my knowledge, on ugly paper, full of errors.
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No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: “I, too, dislike it,” wrote Marianne Moore.
“Many more people agree they hate poetry,” Ben Lerner writes, “than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.”
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato‘s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others.
Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard, and MacArthur Foundations. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry),and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben Lerner
Publisher: FSG Originals
First Edition (June 7, 2016)
Language : English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10 : 0865478201
ISBN-13 : 978-0865478206
$ 8.99
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2007 – 2022 • fleursdumal.nl • 15 years
Magazine for art & literature
More in: Art & Literature News, PRESS & PUBLISHING, The talk of the town
Soldaten
Alle haben diesen müden
seltsamen Zug in den bleichen Gesichtern:
In ihren Augen zittert ein schüchtern
taumelndes Ahnen von Heimat und Frieden . . .
Alle tragen sie an den müden
Füßen den Staub von zerwanderten Jahren:
Durch viele Länder sind sie gefahren
und haben noch nicht nach Hause gefunden . . .
Manchmal nur röten sich ihre Wangen,
wenn sie frohe Kunde erlauschen,
und sie sitzen zusammen und tauschen
flüsternde Reden von süßem Verlangen . . .
Ihre harten, zerrissenen Hände
faltet die Demut, und kindheitsverwehte
Worte fassen sie still im Gebete:
Herr, mach ein Ende! O Herr, gib ein Ende! . . .
Joseph Roth
(1894 – 1939)
Soldaten
Prager Tagblatt – 10.2.1918
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Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.
Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?
Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers—John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust—to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith, recipient of the 2020 North American Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, and the Paris Review, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder
by Maya C. Popa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 8, 2022)
Language: English
Hardcover: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1324021365
ISBN-13: 978-1324021360
Price $26.95
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Orphée
. . . Je compose en esprit, sous les myrtes, Orphée
L’Admirable ! . . . le feu, des cirques purs descend ;
Il change le mont chauve en auguste trophée
D’où s’exhale d’un dieu l’acte retentissant.
Si le dieu chante, il rompt le site tout-puissant ;
Le soleil voit l’horreur du mouvement des pierres ;
Une plainte inouïe appelle éblouissants
Les hauts murs d’or harmonieux d’un sanctuaire.
Il chante, assis au bord du ciel splendide, Orphée !
Le roc marche, et trébuche; et chaque pierre fée
Se sent un poids nouveau qui vers l’azur délire !
D’un Temple à demi nu le soir baigne l’essor,
Et soi-même il s’assemble et s’ordonne dans l’or
À l’âme immense du grand hymne sur la lyre !
Paul Valéry
(1871-1945)
Orphée
Poème
Album de vers anciens
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Heterdaad
Avondgrauwen glijdt over omfloerste bekentenissen
van lijdzame biechtelingen. Op de zolders hunner
zielen zullen spijt noch verwijten verstoffen. Er
klinken vermaningen aan de bedeesde teugels
van de nacht maar er zal, hoe traag ook kousen op
worden getrokken, tegen ochtend geen verweer zijn.
Bert Bevers
Heterdaad
uit de bundel in voorbereiding Bedekte termen
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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Always the coolest of doorway
It wasn’t necessarily the best of times
or the best of me, the best of wines
or the best of you, the warmest of nights,
the brightest of moon, the nicest of streets,
the trendiest of bars in the smart part of town.
We didn’t have the cleverest of talks,
sit at the best of tables, with the cleanest of napkins.
My pockets weren’t the fullest, as the moths attested.
I wasn’t at my wealthiest, or my smartest,
or wearing the shiniest shoes with the strongest of laces,
chewing with the whitest of teeth in the kindest of moods.
We certainly weren’t coy about our agenda that night.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t know you or I didn’t want you,
or I wouldn’t try or hadn’t had; I wanted what I wanted
and slowly the alcohol took hold and awoke the desiring,
and you could’ve imagined a better seduction,
as the night could’ve been the dullest ever
without wanting to or trying the making of love to you.
But wasn’t the moon the fullest, and weren’t we the closest,
didn’t we feel the passion and violence of the kissing, the biting,
struggling in a moment of an explosive erotic experience.
Didn’t we search for privacy in the dirty streets that night?
Weren’t we two bellyfuls of red wine in the emptying city,
swaggering and swollen, swaying in a London doorway,
hidden from the pace of hectic pedestrians.
Hadn’t we become the most romantic of couples
in our boozy, breathy pairing, as we locked tight together
and vanished completely in a haze of shaky memories that night.
Vincent Berquez
Always the coolest of doorway
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Photo: VB – The artist and his son
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Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language.
The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain.
At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea—Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Deaf Republic
Poems
by Ilya Kaminsky
Publisher: Graywolf 2019
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10 : 1555978312
ISBN-13 : 978-1555978310
Paperback $10.79
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Schemerlamp
In een ver verleden onder deze schemerlamp
bedacht hij hoe zijn moeder samenspande
met de avondval. Uit radio beneden geluiden
die hij nauwelijks kon duiden. Van alle eeuwenoude
sprookjes in dat bed rook je de oorsprong.
Onder die lampenkap kwam haast vanzelf
een stil geloven. Door het heden schippert hopeloos
versnipperd vroeger, laverend als een oude schuit.
Hier kijk ik aan tegen een wand die alles weigert.
Bert Bevers
Schemerlamp
Eerder verschenen in Eigen terrein, Uitgeverij WEL, Bergen op Zoom, 2013
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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