NEWS

REVIEWS

POETRY

TRANSLATION

DOCUMENTARY

BOOKS

BIO

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NEWS

REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL POETRY. TRANSLATION. DOCUMENTARY. PLACE.

NEWS

New poems featured in Still: The Journal.

"Hagar" reviewed by Jeremy Paden in Asymptote.

New poems out in Indiana Review.

New poems out in Ninth Letter.

Rebecca Gayle Howell receives a 2011 Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

"Hagar" ranked by Adam Day as a book to watch for 2012. Memoriousmag's Blog.

Rebecca Gayle Howell featured in Southsider Magazine.

New poems out in the current 32 Poems.

"Hagar" featured in the Lexington Herald Leader's Bluegrass Bookshelf.

"Hagar" chosen as one of five top books for 2011 by the Library Journal.

New poems out in YEW, Issue 2.

Translations featured in Hayden's Ferry Review, Issue 49.

Translations published in Ecotone, Issue 12.

The anthology "Bigger Than They Appear" is released from

Accents Publishing.

"Hagar" given a starred review by Barbara Hoffert in the Library Journal.

Rebecca Gayle Howell receives the Jules Chametzky Prize in Literary Translation from The Massachusetts Review.

Translations featured in Poetry Daily.

DATES

June 25, 2012. Drew University MFA. A lecture and reading with Monica A. Hand. Madison, NJ.

June 20, 2012. The Cornelia Street Cafe. Reading. Greenwich Village, NY.

April 20-21, 2012. Southern Kentucky Book Festival. Carroll Knicely Conference Center. Bowling Green, KY.

April 1, 2012. Carmichael's Bookstore. A reading with Accents Publishing. Louisville, KY.

March 28, 2012. Holler Poets Series. Feature. 8pm. Al's Bar. Lexington, KY.

March 11, 2012. Second Sunday Series. 3:30pm. Kentucky Coffee Tree Cafe. Frankfort, KY.

RECENT

February 16, 2012. 5 pm. University of Kentucky. Guest lecturer. "Documenting Communities." With Arwen Donahue. Lexington, KY.

Jauary 31,2012. Q&A: Translating from a Language You Don't Know. Arabic Literature (in English). Interview with M. Lynx Qualey.

January 4, 2012. 10am (PST). Translated By. World Wide Word Radio Network. Interview with Rafael F J Alvarado.

December 18, 2011. 3pm. The Wild Fig Bookstore. Book release party for "Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation." Lexington, KY.

December 4, 2011. Accents Radio Show. WRFL. Interview with Katerina Stoykova-Kleimer. Lexington, KY.

November 6, 2011. 4pm. Transylvania University. Lecture with Arwen Donahue. "This is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors." Lexington, KY.

October 30-November 9, 2011. Transylvania University. Exhibit. "This is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors." Lexington, KY.

January 2011. West Tisbury Free Public Library. Poetry reading. Martha's Vineyard, MA.

PAST

October 2010. The Literary Festival. Western Kentucky University. Lecture: "Poetry Before and After the Occupation: Introducing Amal al-Jubouri." Bowling Green, KY.

June 2010. A Symposium Celebrating the Life and Work of Maxine Kumin. Drew University. With Mihaela Moscaliuc and Alicia Ostriker. "Damn All Who Do Not Compost: The Apocalypse of Kumin-Ecology." Madison, NJ.

May 2010. Poet-in-Residence. Lake Superior University. Workshop: "Writing Home." Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

May 2010. Poet-in-Residence. Lake Superior University. Lecture: "The Case for Thinking Ekphrasis: A Poet/Photographer's Notes from the Field." Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

May 2010. Poet-in-Residence. Lake Superior University. Sault Ste. Marie Public Library. Poetry reading. Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

May 2010. Poet-in-Residence. Lake Superior University. Kenneth J. Shouldice Library. Exhibit: "Overburden: A People and Place Mined." Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

February 2010. 21C Museum. With Wendell Berry and Erik Reece. "A Requirement for Respect." A Benefit for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Louisville, KY.

November 2009. WEKU for NPR. Interview with Julie Schindall. Richmond, Kentucky.

November 2009. Writing Eastern Kentucky Conference. Lecture: "The Contemplation of Things: A Brief History of Exploitation and Documentary Arts in Eastern Kentucky." Mt. Sterling, KY.

November 2009. Writing Eastern Kentucky Conference. Workshop: "Poetry and Place." Mt. Sterling, KY.

November 2009. TheOral History Association Annual Meeting. With Arwen Donahue. "This is Home Now: A Workshop in Oral History and Community Engagement." Louisville, Kentucky.

REVIEWS

Hagar blurbs

Advanced Praise for "Hagar"

"Poet and translator Rebecca Howell, together with Husam Qaisi, have transported Amal al-Jubouri's moving cri de Coeur across the precarious bridge between Arabic and English, and the cultural, political and ethical chasm separating Iraq and the United States. This is poetry necessary to our times, and we owe the makers of this work in English an enormous debt of gratitude."

-Carolyn Forché

Against Forgetting: Twentieth- Century Poetry of Witness

"Through these poems, Amal al-Jubouri connects us to the earliest known poems, and yet the dialectic tension between them is utterly contemporary. Al-Jubouri writes, 'This is my protest, this is my folly,' yet these poems are neither simple protest nor in any sense folly. These poems are both essential and eternal."

-Nick Flynn

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

"Epigrammatic and riddling, impassioned and furious, crystalline in its irony, Hagar Before the Occupation/ Hagar After the Occupation evokes a woman's body and mind rooted in geography, history, faith, art, and the bitterness of 'All the wars, one war/ One terror.' It is also the most exciting and original book of pure poetry I have read in a long time. The Iraqi poet Amal al-Jubouri, beautifully translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell, will immediately take her place alongside Neruda and Tsvetaeva and Celanpoets of exile, yes, and poets of difficult truth."

-Alicia Ostriker

National Jewish Book Award Winner

"Amal al-Jubouri's poems are essentially about exile, exile from the country of her youth, exile from peace, from love, from normalcy, from hope. They are courageous, honest, bitter, and beautiful. They are as ghosts, wandering over the rivers, looking for a home. I want to ask forgiveness of these ghosts. And rock them to sleep. I bless the Iraqi dead, as she does."

-Gerald Stern

National Book Award Winner

Library Journal

Barbara Hoffert for the Library Journal

Jubouri, Amal al-. Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation. Alice James. Nov. 2011. c.160p. tr. from Arabic by Rebecca Gayle Howell & Husam Qaisi. ISBN 9781882295890. pap. $17.50. POETRY

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Hagar (pronounced with a hard g) is the banished other, but in the Islamic tradition (pronounced with a soft g), she is an honored presence, founder of Mecca in her wanderings. Baghdad-born al-Jubouri knows banishment herself - she fled Iraq for Germany in 1997 after having appeared on the government's list of renegade writers, returning directly after the regime's fall - so it makes sense for her to speak in the guise of Hagar. In spare, vivid, and poundingly heartfelt language, she shows us her country before the occupation by U.S. troops and afterward. Though political observation is inevitable (After the occupation, the Tigris escapes// the Green Zones eyes/ the Palaces eyes/ the invaders grunts), this is no mere polemic but a meditation on how a country and its people change after a momentous event, reflected through observation of the physical (photographs, my mouth) and the less tangible (love, freedom, my grave). 'Loneliness before the occupation arrested our sleep/ our secrets/ our restlessness and afterward escapes from our beds to our bodies.' VERDICT Given Iraq's millennia-long history, it's not surprising that these poems have a timeless, haunting quality, and they offer not just enormous pleasure but understanding.Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal.

Memoriousmag

Countdown to the Books of 2012 with Adam Day

Posted by memoriousmag under Countdown to the Books of 2012

It is time for our annual countdown to the New Year, in which our staff and contributors reveal the books they are looking forward to in 2012. Contributing Editor Adam Day, author of Badger, Apocrypha , selected by James Tate for the PSA Chapbook Award, starts us out with his 2012 list.

Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James) by Amal al-Jubouri, translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Husam Qaisi, forward by Alicia Ostriker (Dec 13, 2011). This contemporary female Iraqi poet portrays life before and after the war using coupled poems that add real nuance to an area of the world that is ever-present in our minds, and yet rarely actually thought about.

Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press) by Anne Marie Rooney (Jan 11, 2012) Rooney's voice and style feel genuinely new. This text handles the body with a wrench, while it does the same to otherwise traditional poetic forms.

The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) by Samuel Amadon (Mar 1, 2012) The author of Like a Sea, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Amadon takes on Hartford as engagingly as his potential stylistic/aesthetic predecessors, Schuyler and Olson handled their own poetic-geographic obsessions.

Deadbeat (Four Way) by Jay Baron Nicorvo (November 2012) These are tense, tight little poems with salt and vinegar, and a sense of humor that center around a central character, Deadbeat. The name stands for all he is, and for the limitations of language, for all that the connotative substance a title alone could never contain.

Collected Poems (Knopf) by Jack Gilbert (March 3, 2012) More than fifty years of poems by the idiosyncratic, and wonderful, if sometimes too tender poet.

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (Fence Books) by Hannah Gamble (2012) This collection was chosen by the phenomenal Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series. It's visceral, thinky and gorgeous, and I can't think of a book of poetry over the last ten years that more engagingly confronts family. Oh, and Bernadette Mayer chose it.

Southsider

Found In Translation

Lexington writer Rebecca Gayle Howell brings a contemporary Iraqi poet to English-speaking readers

by Robbie Clark

December 16, 2011

Source: Smiley Pete Publishing

Lexington, KY - As an author, Lexington poet Rebecca Gayle Howell is fully cognizant of the struggle writers have with language, but at least they are working in a language with which they are familiar. Howell also is acquainted with the formidable challenge of translating foreign verse without the aid of fluency.

Howell recently released her first collection of translations, Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation by Iraqi poet Amal al-Jubouri, which was selected to inaugurate the Alice James Books Translations Series. Howell, a former director of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, is the recipient of the Jules Chametzky Prize in Literary Translation from The Massachusetts Review and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. She currently teaches at Morehead State University.

Though al-Jubouri is the author of five collections of poetry in Arabic, Howells version of Hagar is the first of her volumes to be translated into English. Howell was drawn to al-Jubouris work and background as an Iraqi who has sought refuge in Germany since 1997.

I wanted to translate a contemporary Iraqi poet, she said. My theory, in general, is in any area of conflict there are poets in those areas writing about the conflict we just have to find them.

When Howell found a faithful translation of the poem The Veil of Religion, which is about the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2011, she realized the full potential of al-Jubouris writing. After I read that poem, I thought, I want more.

Howell isnt fluent in Arabic, and she turned to her friend Husam Qaisi, a Palestinian-American, to help with the translations. Qaisi and his family live in Elizabethtown, so he and Howell used Skype, an online communication program, to collaborate on the project. Wed work at night after their kids were asleep, just about every night for a year, Howell said. They started in the fall of 2009.

During the beginning process, Qaisi would create lexicon tables, taking the original Arabic poem and presenting Howell with what he considered to be the closest English equivalent for each word, while also making notes about potential synonyms, puns, and historical or religious references al-Jubouri may have employed. Howell would then draft the English version, and the two would return to each draft Qaisi revising for meaning, Howell for poetry. Slowly the poems, in their new iteration, began to take shape, as did al-Jubouris treatment of the language.

I could see how she was making plays on words, Howell said. Arabic is an extremely concise language, so one word can have double, triple duty in a sentence. And Amal is a remarkable free verse poet. She really knows how to get the most out of her language. ... In this way, I got to know her as a poet one poem, one line, one word at a time.

Even though al-Jubouri fled Iraq in the 1990s, she returned to Baghdad two days after Saddam Husseins Baath Party fell in 2003 and lived in Iraq during the ongoing American occupation before returning to Germany. This collection of poetry (which was originally published in Arabic in 2008) is, in part, the authors comments on her home country, using the differences before and after foreign involvement as the crux of her observations.

Howell said the collection isnt an overtly political protest of the foreign, namely American, occupation, but that it is a lament for her country and for how it has become bound to the resolve of outside influences.

What she winds up with is the fate of Iraq and the fate of America were all in this together, Howell said. I think many Americans, now, would agree with her.

To ensure that her translations were an authentic reflection of the authors original work, Howell invited al-Jubouri to be involved with the process. The two spent a week together finalizing the manuscript at the Kentucky Foundation for Womens Hopscotch House in Louisville.

Although some of the subjects and images of Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation are going to be foreign concepts to some English-speaking readers, Howell says that the collections themes are universal.

I think Amal (al-Jubouri) has written poems that are very accessible, while they are also true to their time and place, she said. The story thats being told is deep grief Hagar is an elegy, and I think we can all relate to that.

POETRY

Article 2

How to Kill a Rooster

Because he’s spurred you

Grab him by his neck and his legs

Hold him in both your hands

Look him in the eye

Let him ask

if you are to kill him today

then tell him yes – say yes

with your own eye

just before you take him

watch his wings spread

and flap and flap and

while you watch this desperate bird

and think to yourself

I will never be like him

remember in the end you will

drop him in boiling water—pluck

each of his oily feathers

How to Kill a Hog

First light the fire

A scalding vat

to loosen the hair

from her skin

She is hitched to a team of mules

She is slung over a high branch

She is raised

Hang her by her hind legs

The hardest part to clean is the head

A man has to do it

His strength at work

His neighbors help each other

His women watch

After the guts are gone

haul cold water from the cistern

Wash out the body

like a shed

Lay it down on the wagon

take the sharp axe

hack the feet off

split the skull

It is 9am now

the women come with coffee

cold biscuits red eye

everything stops

No it doesn't

The women circle the wagon

with their secret knives

Their sewing machines

Their tearing sacks

The bladder is given

for the children to play

They kick it like a ball

(forthcoming in the Indiana Review)

Article 3

How to Build Trust

See how she rakes against

the fence, the other pigs,

her straw how she's tried

she really has

and what a simple thing

for you to stop

stacking hay, hosing

away her filth, stop

what? maybe to smoke

your hands already out

of your pockets,

your teeth already clenched

what a simple thing

her head wrenching toward light

your fingers thick with her wire

hair as you think about

the work ahead

its musk and hazard

how this is not about love

as she comes to you

her whole muzzle

inside your coat

her breath

probing your chest

how she roots you

the yellow sky, smoldering

how she asks for more

(forthcoming in Ninth Letter)

Articles

A Brief Atlas for Leave-taking

The tree of knowledge

of touch and age

grows in the perfect orchard

of your lungs

And loneliness

like black snakes dropping

like roads

dropping from every limb

(forthcoming in The Louisville Review)

Articles01

A Brief Atlas for Return

This foresworn field,

this dust of your dust,

let it become to you

just as it is for them

and their giant eyes,

this jersey herd born

into an earth ignited,

seeing all as tinder,

all as ember shine

Your eyes a light-letting

of all you witness—

fescue, axe, the barbed-

wire fence rusted—

now: suns to you

now: flax, wheat

If you do this,

if you open your eyes,

when they come

you will be lost,

sitting in this center

without the cover of trees,

days wet and natal

in that wide heat,

your sense and seed absent,

your drought throat—

Silence of their silence,

behold their approach

How they rend the soil

with their hooves

like bullocks who smell blood-

guilt seeped underneath and cannot leave

what was once abandoned

what we kill to forget

See how they circle you

Mother tongues

upon your forehead

your neck

your back and bold chest

anointing you

new and without scent

without name

(forthcoming in The Louisville Review)

from Render, forthcoming.

TRANSLATION

Article 1

Loneliness Before the Occupation

Living prey into a stomach

The agonizing light

About

Loneliness After the Occupation

escapes from our beds to our bodies

from eyes that reveal what no human knows

to liberated lips strong in allure

Loneliness of my breast

of borders

of alleyways

of my confusion

in this market of conscience,

Soccer Before the Occupation

was torture

We were scared to cheer

but terrified we might lose

Moaed al-Badry, silenced

The daring of Raed Hmoudy, gone

How would we celebrate?

Even our thrill was controlled

Only the President’s sons were cheering:

brother sponsors of our game, our rage

Article 3

Soccer After the Occupation

humiliates politicians

jails them inside their own slogans

abolishes

Shi’itistan

Sunnistan

and free kicks our divisions

One voice—

we cheer and cheer and cheer

About01

Bones Before the Occupation

—an everlasting war

between Cleopatra's charms

and her stone-still bones

How she flirted with night

her large black eyes

her flush lips absorbing men's lies

her long hair swaddling the world

And while she crowed, her lust

undying in its combat against age,

the Empire wasted her marble

casting shadows to the wind

as if a rock could keep the grave from gloating

And the bones, mocking all of it, said:

Take me, instead—I will never break or tumble

Take me instead of illusory towers

instead of your wars

I am your inheritance

I am your ancestor

Nothing, no one remains but me

The sun fears me

The moon runs scared of my clacking

Air gusts

And I am washed clean of dust and the breath of strangers

Follow me I am the goddess of the infinite:

Gather me, take me

I will point you toward your poor investment

I will count for you how, in forgetting unity,

you let death come and take you

How many, how many for whom death came

About02

Bones After the Occupation

—a wail in the Valley of Peace:

Do we die for nothing?

—Don't go far, Iraq A cemetery is approaching

Don't die there The homelands are coming to you

About03

Hagar Before the Occupation

About04

DOCUMENTARY

OVERBURDEN

OVERBURDEN: A PEOPLE AND PLACE MINED Photographs and oral histories by Rebecca Gayle Howell

HOME NOW

THIS IS HOME NOW: KENTUCKY'S HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS SPEAK Oral histories by Arwen Donahue Photographs by Rebecca Gayle Howell

BOOKS

HAGAR

HAGAR BEFORE THE OCCUPATION/ HAGAR AFTER THE OCCUPATION Poems by Amal al-Jubouri Translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell with Husam Qaisi, Foreword by Alicia Ostriker Alice James Books, 978-1-882295-89-0. $17.50.

PLUNDERING

PLUNDERING APPALACHIA: THE TRAGEDY OF MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL COAL MINING Edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner. An anthology with photographs and oral histories by Rebecca Gayle Howell. Earth Aware Editions, 978-1-60109-050-8. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $39.95.

HOME NOW

THIS IS HOME NOW: KENTUCKY'S HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS SPEAK Oral Histories by Arwen Donahue Photographs by Rebecca Gayle Howell Foreword by Joan Ringelheim University Press of Kentucky, 978-0-8131-2547-3. Cloth or ebook, $40.00.

HATCHET

THE HATCHET BUDDHA A ltd edition letterpress chapbook Poems by Rebecca Gayle Howell Drawings by Arwen Donahue Larkspur Press. $24.00.

BIO

CONTACT