These Peripheries

In a kaleidoscope of shifting voices, JAMES MAUGHN embraces world poetry in his immensely creative new collection. Maughn's poems unlock new ways for us to think about voice, poetic interactions, and the structures of free verse. Each poem is written 'following' the work of another poet, either a contemporary writer or a recent translation from earlier literature. "These Peripheries" tenderly and with great skill, create a formal and nuanced conversation on contemporary poetics. Maughn's poems, traversing geographies and cultural locations, unsettle the concept of translation as a concrete, fixed mirror and opens it up, like the door of a bird cage, to immense possibilities, infinitely expanding the journey of both the new poems and the source poems. It is a stunning collection which takes a new shape every time I come to read it. —Judy Halebsky