
Where Are the Trees Going?
Paperback
Description
Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Where Are the Trees Going? brings together some of the latest work of the poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata in a manner that showcases her central concerns in a wholly novel and provocative format. Renowned translator Marilyn Hacker interleaves a full translation of Khoury-Ghata’s volume of poetry Où vont les arbres.with prose from La maison aux orties. The resulting interplay illuminates the poet’s contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative exposition.
Khoury-Ghata takes on perennial themes of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict. Characters take root in her memory as weathered trees and garden plants, lending grit and body to the imaginative collection. As bracing as the turn of seasons, Where Are the Trees Going? highlights a writer who has approached her most recent work with renewed urgency and maturity.
Praise For Where Are the Trees Going?…
"Venus Khoury-Ghata’s poetry in Marilyn Hacker's excellent translation grants us entry to a fierce, surreal world where mothers and trees, birds and stones, indeed flesh in its multifoliate forms coheres and splits into exquisite words, reclaiming a spiritual homeland, a mythic stay against chaos." —Meena Alexander, Author of Birthplace with Buried Stones
"Taken together, these stunning, at times surrealistic poems amount to an elegy of survival that takes the reader to new ontological depths." —World Literature Today
Curbstone Books 2, 9780810130081, 128pp.
Publication Date: October 30, 2014
About the Author
Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve collections of poems and twenty translations of books of poems from the French. She received the PEN Voelcker Award for her own work in 2010, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne in 2009.