Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
Celan
There,
the whisper:
gradual breath
fattens
a word, bud
of stem form—
never before
this one,
the return of
the recognizable.
James Brasfield has published two collections of poems—Ledger of Crossroads (2009) and Infinite Altars (2016), both from Louisiana State University Press—and received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His translation, with the author, of The Selected Poems of Olea Lysheha (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications, 2000) received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. (updated 2018)