"If you are like me, you are always a 9-year-old standing still, all alone and yet not alone, because, look! there are so many drunks in Odessa, and they all smell amazing. And on TV, on every single news channel, a giant birthmark on Dear Leader’s forehead, shining like a miniature map of our country." Ilya Kaminsky • New York Magazine

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"This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be mastered by our species. There is no superhuman way to write poems because we write them by virtue of being what a computer isn’t: human." Carmine Starnino • New Criterion

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"These days, I approach books of poems about grief with personal as well as professional interest; in 2020, my husband died in hospice care after a long illness. Reading Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality (Soft Skull Press, 2022)—a grim, whimsical, necessary oddity of a book about the sudden death of Pollari’s baby—I wanted to know: What does it feel like to lose a child at birth? How is that experience of loss different from my own?" Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"The poet Charles Wright once said he started to translate when he was in between poems, and I think that’s a really great way of putting it. In ways that’s true of me as well. There were a lot of poets, bits and pieces, that I would translate for myself and then living in Italy you just did translation for extra money. But it wasn’t until I moved here and couldn’t find any work that thanks to a series of different things, I ended up doing more and eventually ended up a translator. It still kind of surprises me." Alexander Booth • Minor Literatures

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