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3 articles
Across the United States and around the world, a generation of poets is turning to verse as an act of cultural survival, composing in languages that may vanish within decades. Their work is at once artistic and urgent, preserving not merely words but entire ways of understanding the world. Poezia examines the writers carrying this extraordinary burden — and the literary communities slowly gathering to support them.
When a poem travels from Japanese or Arabic into English, something profound and often irreplaceable is left behind at the border. Translators and multilingual poets grapple daily with the paradox of their craft: to share a poem with the world, they must first wound it. At Poezia, we explore what survives the crossing — and what does not.
A growing cohort of poets writing in two or more languages is fundamentally redefining what American poetry sounds like, looks like, and dares to say. Drawing on the dislocations of immigration, the intimacies of mother tongues, and the daily negotiations of hyphenated identity, these writers are producing work of extraordinary range and depth. Poezia profiles the voices at the forefront of this transformation.