Bijan Elahi
Translated from the Persian by Rebecca Ruth Gould & Kayvan Tahmasebian
All these roads would end in white
if they replied to you.

Your birthplace, you knew, was a town
bigger than your heart
that left you without reply.

A woman’s lips blossom
in a town smaller than hearts.
A woman’s lips end in white,
to the cold cheeks of the year’s martyrs,
my cold cheek was a sun
that did not reply.
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Photograph of Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

"Sonia Sanchez's work as a groundbreaking poet will be honored in Cleveland Thursday night with the lifetime achievement honor from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The prize was created in 1938 to celebrate literature that explores issues of race and diversity. Past winners have included such notables as playwright August Wilson, novelist Toni Morrison and civil rights leader Rev Martin Luther King, Jr."

via WOSU
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Cover of Bei Dao's book, Endure
"[O]nce a poem is out in the world, there’s no way to predict the different uses, appropriations, misappropriations, readings and anti-readings to which it might be put, nor the places and times where it might emerge, uncanny, as if with fresh meaning.  Bei Dao’s 'The Reply' ('Huídá,' sometimes also translated as 'Answer') is one such poem, with an intense career all its own.”
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