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Marilyn Chin is a frank and feminist poet who continues to enlarge the Anisfield-Wolf canon.

Like Peter Ho Davies, she is a master of the hyphenated identity, writing, “ I am a Chinese American poet – born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. My poetry both laments and celebrates the ‘hyphenated’ identity.”

Chin, a professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, has a new poem reaching the 350,000 subscribers to the American Academy of Poet’s digitally delivered Poem-A-Day. Her new work is called “Love Story,” a perennial focus of Chin’s work. Her Anisfield-Wolf winning collection is called “Hard Love Province.”

Of her new poem, the 62-year-old Chin says, “The immigrant couple’s entire life history is told in just five triplet stanzas . . . This might be a typical American story: an immigrant couple gets married, the husband gets a good job (an iron rice bowl), they conceive children, grow old, die peacefully in their new nation. However, their story does not quite end in harmonious resolution. A love story is a never-ending drama.”

Love Story
by Marilyn Chin

The aerogram says come   the photos show bliss
Another felicitous union    a fresh beginning
He’s so handsome fat    she’s so new world slim

The envelopes are red    the writing vermeil
He’ll get a good job    an iron rice bowl won’t break
She’s caught a princely man    a silent one    like her father

Sister dyes pink eggs    Auntie boils cider knuckles
The Great Patriarch is happy    a bouncy grandson
A bundle of joy    from a test tube in heaven

Thank you for your blessings   for your lucky lycee
A young nurse cares for her now    in a small hospice near the sea
He’s alone on Silicon Hill    that’s where he’s happy

Emails turn silent    Instagrams    remiss
Thank you for the white gardenias    they’ll sweeten her soul
The joss paper boats    will net fish for her in the next world

At the tail end of Cleveland Book Week, Adam Sockel and Jill Grunenwald, hosts of the “Professional Book Nerds” podcast, interviewed Karan Mahajan, our 2017 co-winner for fiction. Their conversation centered on Mahajan’s award-winning “The Association of Small Bombs,” the difficulties of writing about terrorism, and the proliferation of books on the subject after 9/11.

The podcast is a production of OverDrive, the leading app for eBooks and audiobooks available through public libraries and schools, headquartered in Cleveland. In the weekly podcast, hosts Sockel and Grunenwald chat about the best books they’ve read, give personalized recommendations, and share about upcoming releases across genres.

Dive into their 30-minute conversation with Mahajan here below.

One idea to make the morning commute more bearable for Clevelanders? Add a bit of poetry.

That theory was tested this past September as local poets from Twelve Literary and Performative Arts set up shop on RTA platforms across the city to perform samples from Anisfield Wolf authors for the duration of Cleveland Book Week.

Riders heard snippets from Jericho Brown‘s “The New Testament” and Marilyn Chin‘s “Hard Love Province,” along with five other authors and original works from the local poets. These informal poetry readings were an expansion of the Inter|Urban public art project, a 19-mile stretch of vibrant literary-inspired murals and photo installations along the RTA’s Red Line. Recently, the project expanded into University Circle with a mural inspired by Tyehimba Jess’ “Olio.”

“There’s such a difference between reading a text and hearing it performed—we wanted to capture the emotion within the literature in a way that made it accessible and real,” said Tiffany Graham, project director for LAND Studio.

Take a peek at this four-minute video, produced by LAND Studio, that is guaranteed to put you on the ground, in the poetry, and in the mood for more:

 

Land – Poetry from New Departure Films on Vimeo.

Tyehimba Jess is a strikingly architectural poet.

It makes sense that his 14-line poem, “Blind Tom Plays for Confederate Troops, 1863” inspired the new Anisfield-Wolf InterIUrban mural from the artist Mike Perry.

The new work braids along the right angle of two walls at Ford Drive and Hessler Road in Cleveland, Perry’s first project in this city. He created the 2015 wraparound mural at the Facebook offices in New York City and is probably best known for his colorful animation on “Broad City,” the Comedy Central series.

While navigating a week of Midwestern October weather, Perry dropped in on the Cleveland School of the Arts, where he spoke to a morning class on street art. Wearing a bright blue sweatshirt with his motto “Don’t Give Up,” Perry brought a relaxed, coffee-sipping presence. He is partial to creating flowers with a surrealistic bent.

“I kind of call B.S. on this notion that you have to choose to be an artist,” the 36-year-old said. “Some people can’t help but be weirdo creatives.” He encouraged students to sketch while he chatted about his own path from Kansas to Minnesota to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., the same borough that, incidentally, is home to Tyehimba Jess.

Kelly likened his complicated art to meditation: “I can’t not do this.”

Jon Sedor, a second-year teacher at the School of the Arts, observed that “street art is a way to reach a lot of people without being too in-your-face.”

Kelly, his jeans splotched with paint, delivered this advice: “Make the work, put it out there, let people see it. Murals are a public forum for people to accidentally discover what you do – like the internet.”

The artist/animator read a brief from LAND Studio about Jess and soaked in several poems. “I felt inspired and tried a couple of drawings,” he said. “I don’t know what this mural is about yet; I haven’t finished it.”

Now it commands one of the most heavily-trafficked pedestrian corners of Cleveland. One source, “Blind Tom,” was the nickname for Thomas Wiggins. He was a musical prodigy, a slave, and one of the best known touring pianists of the 19th century. Kelly’s mural features a snaking keyboard.

Here is “Blind Tom Plays for The Confederate Troops, 1863”:

The slave’s hands dance free, unfettered, flying
across ivory, feet stomping toward
a crescendo that fills the forest pine,
reminding the Rebs what they’re fighting for –
black, captive labor. Tom, slick with sweat, shows
a new trick: Back turned to his piano,
he leans like a runner about to throw
himself to freedom through forest bramble –
until he spreads his hands behind him. He
hitches fingertips to keys, hauls Dixie
slowly out of the battered upright’s teeth
like a worksong dragged across cotton fields,
like a plow, weighted and dirty, ringing
with a slaver’s song at master’s bidding.