WHAT DO YOU WANT?

• Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami • The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector • During the Impossible age of Everyone by Ada Limón • Translations by Kathryn Nuernberger • Letters Home by Sylvia Plath •

Translations, Kathryn Nuernberger   

[text ID: I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for.]

Glamour, grammar, and grimoire all share the same root. The inquisitors imagined in one testimonial after another that they saw the transformation from person to demon before their eyes, even as they clung more fiercely to the illusion they held about themselves, that they were not the ones conjuring such nightmares. [...]

Nuernberger, Kathryn. "Titiba and the Invention of the Unknown". The Witch of Eye: Essays. Sarabande Books, 2021.

:: Regarding Silphium, the Birth Control of the Roman Empire for 600 Years, Extincted by Careless Land Management in the Year 200 AD ::

When I was just about done being married and he was a blossomed-out nerve of seeing himself through the ugly eyes of how I had come to see him and myself for letting our lives get so Tupperware-fur-molded, for thinking I could lace and pinprick it back with just the right delicacy, when a good punch in the face was what a mess this bad required. (I know, you’re thinking a punch in the face is never the answer, but that’s the lace talking.) When I was just about done with the lace-throated maybe-violence, our daughter, who is five, told me how he broke—she didn’t say he broke, she said he got really worked up—driving past all the protestors outside Planned Parenthood on Providence Ave., from which the university medical school had just withdrawn funding and also the option for residents to do training there, how he took a hard left into the parking lot and with our daughter by the hand marched in with an urgency that made the young man working the desk say, “Sir?” with some alarm. He took a breath to be more steady and said, “I’m so sorry about all of this—all of that out there— and I just thought I’d make a donation” as he pulled all the money from his wallet, some of it crumpled, a mixture of 5s and 1s, and pushed it across the counter, our daughter watching and looking around the room, studying the faces of timid and nervous young women, I imagine, in those plastic chairs I remember from when I once sat in this exact waiting room myself, so many years ago, feeling embarrassed and ashamed because it seemed that’s what I was supposed to feel, though if I could have felt my way beyond supposed to back then to my actual self, I would have known I didn’t feel sorry at all, only annoyed by the tedium of appointments, the practical necessity of that clean smell, the chilly dustless air of a building with nothing soft except the aspect of the resident, who is the only doctor I have ever had who joked as she put her gloved hand in my body. “I guess this is the most awkward thing you’ll do today, huh?” It was funny and made me feel like we’d been friends a long time. My husband, who is still my husband after all, knew that story and I guess he wanted our daughter to somehow know it too. “Sometimes you’ll feel very alone,” I tell her on a day when I find her pressing her face against the window, watching the children next door play in the grass, wiping tears from her face as fast as they fall. “Other times you’ll be so wonderfully surprised by the strange bridges people manage to build out to you when you never would have expected they could.”

—Kathryn Nuernberger, from Rue (BOA Editions, 2020)

favourite poems of june

chase twichell the snow watcher: "hunger for something"

hester knibbe hungerpots (tr. jacquelyn pope)

jan beatty an eater, or swallowhole, is a reach of stream

sally wen mao the toll of the sea

peter everwine rain

rebecca lindenberg the logan notebooks: "poetic subjects"

john kinsella native cut wood deflects colonial hunger

katie peterson permission: "the truth is concrete"

linda hogan dark. sweet.: "innocence"

jános pilinszky (tr. george gömöri & clive wilmer) van gogh's prayer

david sullivan the day the beekeeper died: sulaymaniyah

sandra simonds you can't build a child

kari edwards bharat jiva: "ready to receive remains..."

george kalogeris rilke rereading hölderlin

philip nikolayev letters from aldenderry: "a midsummer's night stroll"

franz wright the raising of lazarus

erin belieu black box: "i heart your dog's head"

joseph brodsky collected poems in english, 1972-1999: "the hawk's cry in autumn"

jonathan galassi north street and other poems: "may"

stanley kunitz the collected poems of stanley kunitz: "end of summer"

robin blaser the holy forest: collected poems of robin blaser: "a bird in the house"

liu xia (tr. jennifer stern & ming di) empty chairs

wilfred owen exposure

mahogany l. browne this is the honey

diane lockward the uneaten carrots of atonement: "for the love of avocados"

peter balakian ozone journal: "here and now"

(tw: miscarriage) kathryn nuernberger rag & bone: "translations"

ailbhe ní ghearbhuigh conriocht ["werewolf"] (tr. billy ramsell)

craig arnold meditation on a grapefruit

anzhelina polonskaya (tr. andrew wachtel) to the ashes: "a few words about van gogh"

support me

The Feather Fountain is as beautiful as it is deadly and it’s plenty of both.

Episode 55 of The CryptoNaturalist Podcast is now live.

Featuring the poetry of Kathryn Nuernberger and the voice of Cecil Baldwin.

Find us in the usual places or stream from CryptoNaturalist.com.

"daughter" by james lenfestey // "the seven prisms of my blood" by khaty xiong // "you can't build the child" by sandra simonds // "rené descartes and the clockwork girl" by kathryn nuernberger

“Of the past, present, and future, the present is the least real. Like the shore, which is nothing. There is no line between sand and water, only sand, only water.”

-Kathryn Nuernberger

Rene Descartes and the Clock Work Girl - Kathryn Nuernberger | Scheherazade - Richard Siken

("Rene Descartes and the Clock Work Girl" is longer than what's in the picture; read the full poem at the link above.)

Hi! Idk if these have been answered yet but 16+22?

(Ps. I love this poem series all of them are so lovely <3)

HI TYTY <33

16. The Sound of Music by Kathryn Nuernberger

I absolutely adoreeeee this poem tbe story she tells is absolutely beautiful and personal

22. The Horse Fell Off the Poem by Mahmoud Darwish

I’m gonna be honest I don’t 100% know what the poem is about but I’m a fan nonetheless lmao

‘Eat Bitterness: Xi Jinping

The ditches at the edge of the field were thick with poke, which I did like, even loved. The poison root of the poke grows down deep and snaggled like a mandrake.(Kathryn Nuernberger, from “A Sense of Belonging,” Poetry, May 2023) There’s video on YouTube of a young Tony Joe White singing his immortal song. For some reason it’s tagged “Polk Salad Annie” everywhere on the platform. Polk? A guy…

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The Sound of Music

By Kathryn Nuernberger

When I tell you I love

the song “Edelweiss”

you have to understand

that even though I too

am a sophisticate

who scorns musicals,

I was once a little girl

who stood in my grand-

father’s living room

singing, Cuckoo!

Cuckoo! while he sipped

his scotch and laughed

at my preciosity.

And when I sing the lyrics

in your ear—Small and

bright, clean and white,

you look happy to meet me

—you have to understand

my grandfather only ever

had one friend, a jeweler

who also drank scotch,

and left his $10,000 Rolex

to my grandfather, who

wore it even though

it turned his wrist green,

wore it to the funeral,

where the daughter sang

in her ethereal voice. Blossom

of snow may you bloom

and grow, bloom and grow

forever. She couldn’t take

her eyes off the casket.

You have to understand that

my grandfather kept spinning

that heavy gold around

his wrist, and when he raised

his voice to join in, he cried

to sing it. Edelweiss, edelweiss,

bless my homeland forever.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/90186/the-sound-of-music

No Audio Included

To learn all of the stories and all of the magic, the great folklorist Zora Neale Hurston would pretend to be in love or pretend to not be. She pretended to be a logger and a priestess and that she was unambiguously eager to be Franz Boas's favorite student. She drank and danced and fasted and crept through dense woods. Though most of the magic involving poison ivy is about how you can use other plants to cure it, poison ivy has its uses as an agent too. Hurston recorded one spell that involves putting the dried crushed leaves, along with some other herbs, into a little sachet you slip under the pillow of a man who has wronged you to ruin his peace and his dreams.

Nuernberger, Kathryn. "Bloodroot". The Witch of Eye: Essays. Sarabande Books, 2021.

If you feel like you’re in love, you have to either remember  or forget that a feeling can only last a little while.  What you should do with your little while, I can’t say.

— Kathryn Nuernberger, from “When We Dead Awaken,” Rue

We’d have to have no idea what a feeling was to take such pleasure. We’d have to think we exist for the sake of something else altogether. Well, I have a feeling, I have an idea, I know a pleasure. Fuck the sky, I say. Burn it down.

— Kathryn Nuernberger, from “A Great Place to Raise Children,” Rue

I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name, because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before.

Kathryn Nuernberger, “Translations,” from Rag & Bone