Frozen Earth, Frozen Sky a collaboration of poetry and images.

More poets and translations in our Spring Issue

More poets and translations in our Summer Issue

More poets and translations in our Fall Issue

All poetry and translation in this issue in alphabetical order.

An electronic chapbook from Israeli writer, Mordechai Beck



Poetry from Ecuador:

Ivón Gordon Vailakis

Poetry from Poland:

Sarah £uczaj

Halina Poswiatowska

Poetry from Italy:

Rosita Copioli

Poets from the United States:

Aliki Barnstone

Tony Barnstone

Charles Fishman

Robert Gibbons

Veronica Golos

Renée Gregorio

J.C.Todd

Renata Treitel

 		Poetry – Winter 2000-2001


Aliki BarnstoneAliki Barnstone’s Wild With It is forthcoming from The Sheep Meadow Press in 2001. Her previous collection, Madly in Love, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She’s the editor of Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women around the World from Ancient Sumeria to Now (Shambhala 2000), and A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken/Random House, 1992). This issue contains a selection from her study, A Changing Rapture: The Development of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, is forthcoming from the University Press of Florida. Her poems have recently appeared or will appear in Agni, The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Ploughshares Review, and Poetry. She teaches in the International MFA Program at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.


Tony BarnstoneTony Barnstone is Associate Professor at Whittier College, where he teaches creative writing. He is at work on his second book, Readymades, which is discussed in an e-interview in this issue. His first book of poetry, Impure was a finalist for The Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series Prize, the White Pine Prize, and appeared with the University Press of Florida in 1999. He is the author of Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1996), and Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His poetry, translations, essays on poetics, and fiction have appeared in dozens of American literary journals, from APR to Agni. He has won awards from the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Contest, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Competition (Chester H. Jones Foundation), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and the Cecil Hemley Award of the Poetry Society of America, among others.


Mordechai Beck Mordechai Beck has published fiction in The Literary Review, Tikkun and Ariel. His reviews and essays have been widely published in newspapers and journals in the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel. He is represented in this issue by his e-chapbook, Moonsong which has been published as a work-in-progress in the last three issues. He is also a visual artist, specializing in print-making. He lives in Israel.


Rosita Copioli, poet, teacher, literary critic, was born in Riccione, Italy, in 1948. She graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy, with a Ph.D. in classical studies with a dissertation on “The Idea of Landscape in Leopardi.” Her first collection of poetry Splendida lumina solis (Forlí, Forum, 1979), won the 1979 Premio Viareggio (First Work) and her second collection, Furore delle rose (Ugo Guanda Editore, S.p.A., Parma, Italy, 1989), was awarded the 1989 Premio Montale. She was an editor of the journal of poetry and poetics, L’altro versante, and in 1982 a guest editor for Il crepuscolo celtico (Short Stories by or about W.B. Yeats in Italian translation), and in 1988, Guest Editor for Ganda Editors for a collection of critical essays:Anima mundi. She is the author of two collections of essays, I giardini dei popoli sotto le onde (1991), and Il fuoco dell’eden (1992). Her poetry was included in the anthologies: Care donne (Forlí, Forum, 1980), Poeti dell’emilia romagna (Forlí, Forum, 1983), and Poeti della quinta generazione (Forlí, Forum, 1983). Renata Treitel says of Rosita Copioli’s work: “Copioli’s work deals mainly with myth and nature. She is interested in the dawn of life, of history, of civilizations. Time and history are often compressed in her work. This compression is distilled in lists: enumerations of winds, of cities, of mythological characters, of minerals and flowers, of geographical places. Her world embraces the Mediterranean sea and the effects of modern civilization on the pristine world of the Greeks and the Romans.”


Charles FishmanCharles Fishman is a former Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat and the founding director of the Visiting Writers Program at SUNY Farmingdale. His books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His new collection of poetry, Country of Memory, will be published by Rattapallax Press in Spring 2001.



Robert Gibbons has written five chapbooks of poetry. He has poems in The Connecticut Poetry Review, The Dalhousie Review (Canada), and a prose poem in The Literary Review. He writes a regular column, “Observations,” for wwww.niederngasse.com, an online magazine out of Switzerland. Robert works at Northeastern University Library in Boston. He has two poetry pages in this issue, to allow room for his experimental companion poems, and a prose poem offering.


Veronica Golos is the poet-in-residence of the 14th St. Y , and its Artistic Coordinator for Literary Programs. Her work has been published in Bridges, Rattapallax, Brooklyn Review, Long Shot, Sheila Na Gig, NYCBigCity Lit.com, NYCPoetry.com and other journals. Her poem, Letting Go will appear in the anthology, Ophelia’s Mom, to be published by Random House. She has a chapbook, No Ordinary Women. Ms. Golos’ work has been performed in various venues. Evolving to Skin, a collaborative piece with three other poets, was awarded space at HERE theatre; HER,a poetry drama was performed by a cast of five women at the Pulse theatre. In her most recent project, No Ordinary Women, she performed her poetry in a hour-long piece for Women’s History Month with gospel singer Ayana Lowe and dancer Awilda Sterling Duprey at TNT theatre, in Scranton, PA. Ms. Golos has created a number of workshops and classes at the Y, the NYPL and Poets House. She has been a factory worker, union organizer, editor of a labor newspaper, organizer and performer. She is currently working on a poetry book, The Casting of Stones: The Story of Sarah and Hagar.


Renee GregorioRenée Gregorio Over the past 15 years, Renée Gregorio’s work has appeared in many journals in the United States, including Iris, Exquisite Corpse, Fish Drum, Blue Mesa Review, Heaven Bone, Frank, Nexus, Calyx and American Tanka and in England in The Rialto and Writing Women. She was one of the founding editors of The Taos Review and one of the featured writers in the video, Honoring the Muse. She’s the recipient of a Millay Colony for the Arts residency grant and a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Poetry Open 2000. She earned her master’s degree from Antioch University, London.


Sarah £uczaj is an English poet, who has, after some travels, settled in Poland, where she lives in the countryside with her husband and little girl, Nasim. Her work has been published in, amongst others, the APR, The New Statesman(UK), Cream City Review, and yefief. Translations are forthcoming in the Cider Press Review. She is a training therapeutic counsellor, and teacher of English. In this issue, we have her translations of Halina Poswiatowska.


Halina PoswiatowskaHalina Poswiatowska was born in Czestochowa, a small town in Southern Poland in 1939. When the war front passed through Czestochowa she was forced to hide with her mother in the cellar, and when they emerged, she had a cold on her chest that became a heart condition. She spent much of her childhood lying down at home, and visited sanatoriums several times, in one of which she met her future husband, Adolph Poswiatowski. They married in 1954 despite medical warnings against straining their fragile hearts. Adolph died in 1956, at the age of 26. In 1956 Poswiatowska published her first collection, “Hymn balwochwalczy” (Idol Worship). At this politically crucial time for Poland, it did not deal with, or appear to notice, the social reality in which it was written. In 1958 Poswiatowska travelled to the US for a life saving operation, and stayed on against all odds to study philosophy at Smith. When she returned she taught philosophy at The Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and published “dzien dzisiejszy” (present day) in 1963 and “Ode do rak” (ode to hands) in 1966. In 1967 she died during a heart operation in Warsaw. “jeszcze jedno wspomnienie” (one more memory) was published in 1968.


J.C. ToddJ.C. Todd is a Contributing Editor of The Drunken Boat. She has authored two chapbooks of poems,Nightshade and Entering Pisces, both published by Pine Press. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review and Beloit Poetry Journal. Her translations of poems by the Ecuadorean writer Ivón Gordon Vailakis have previously appeared in Crab Orchard Review. Todd has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has been a fellow in poetry at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Hambidge Center. She teaches in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College and the poetry program of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.


Renata TreitelRenata Treitel, teacher, poet and translator, was born in Switzerland, educated in Italy, Argentina, and the United States. She has published a chapbook of poetry, German Notebook (1983). She has translated Susana Thénon’s distancias/distances (Sun & Moon Press, 1994) and Amelia Biagioni’s Las Cacerías/The Hunts forthcoming from Xenos Books in 2001. Her translation of Rosita Copioli’s Splendida Lumina Solis/The Blazing Lights of the Sun (Sun & Moon Press, 1996) was the recipient of a 1991 Witter Bynner Translation Grant and was the 1997 Oklahoma Poetry Award Winner. Her new translation, see a selection in this issue, of Rosita Copioli’s Furore delle rose/Wrath of the Roses was a recipient of a 2000 Witter Bynner Translation Grant.


Ivón Gordon Vailakis’s collection, Colibríes en el exilio,Hummingbirds in Exile, from which these poems are taken, was nominated in 1997 for the Premio Extraordinario from Casa de las Americas, which gives annual awards, similar to the National Book Award, for the best literary works from Latin America, the Caribbean and Spain. Vailakis has also written two other collections of poems, Nuestrario (Mexico: Impretei Press, 1987) and the forthcoming El viáje de la suela. Her poems and translations of them have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review, Borderlands and journals in Mexico and Ecuador. Recipient of a Fulbright Award, she is chair of the Department of Modern Literature and Languages at University of Redlands in California. A native of Quito, she now lives and works in the United States but continues to write poetry and critical prose in Spanish.