Gary Barwin : Recommended Reading : Simina Banu + Margaret Christakos

Our pal (and above/ground press author) Gary Barwin was good enough to mention a couple of above/ground press titles--Simina Banu's Tomorrow, adagio (2019) and Margaret Christakos' Retreat Diary 2019 (2019)--as part of a list of "Recommended Reading" over at The Fiddlehead; thanks so much! You can see his original post and list here (including titles by Derek Beaulieu, Anthony Etherin, Gregory Betts, Mark Laba and Tanis MacDonald). As he writes:

Simina Banu: Tomorrow, adagio (above/ground press)

Mesmerizingly preternatural, strange and in the uncanny valley between senselessness music and touchingly lyric, Banu’s chapbook is a series of phonic, visual, and sometimes literal translations of Mihai Eminescu’s poetry. Set in the present and in an oblique literary past, these poems are resonant, surprising, and inventive.

Margaret Christakos: Retreat Diary 2019 (above/ground press)

This suite of poems pulsates with the vibrant intelligence, music, tactility and sense of being-in-the-world that is characteristic Christakos. The lines are energized and self-aware. We are always/already writing/reading/poeming, retreating and advancing through language. And we communicate and wrestle and dance with communication and the problem/possibility of communication through (social) media, language, received notions of self, our culture and the world.