Celebrating National Poetry Month with the Calico Series

Since the Two Lines journal’s inception back in 1993, we’ve championed poetry-making across borders, languages, and lineages, and the Calico Series, which launched in March 2020, is an extension of that work. What makes the Calico Series special, at least to me, is that it’s a moving target. Never just one thing, it is poetry; it is prose; it is reportage; it is illustration. It is stuff our editors haven’t even dreamed up yet. Sometimes it is all of these things together vibrating against one another. It is a series that teaches you how to read as you read it. Not unlike a good poem. Which brings us to National Poetry Month 2022! Let’s take a moment to revisit some work from the first three years of Calico, shall we?

The first poems in the Calico Series arrived via Home: New Arabic Poems(opens in a new tab). Published in September 2020, Home collects nine contemporary Arabic-language poets in a fully bilingual edition to explore the intimate worlds of the everyday. The Paris Review called it “unbelievably exciting.” We nod in full agreement. You can read “The Key” by Ines Abassi, translated by Koen De Cuyper and Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, on Literary Hub(opens in a new tab). Over at Poetry Society of America(opens in a new tab), you can read a few poems by Mohamad Nassereddine, translated from Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine.

In September 2021 we published CuÍer, an ambitious survey of queer literature from Brazil featuring writers such as Caio Fernando Abreu, Raimundo Neto, Angélica Freitas, and many others. Described by John Keene, author of Punks, as “a concise and enlightening overview of the last fifty years of LGBTQ literature from South America’s largest country,” Cuíer necessarily collects writings in many forms, including poetry. Marcio Junqueira’s “saturday,” translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz, is an incredible introduction to the collection. Literary Hub(opens in a new tab) published the full poem, plus an evocative video piece featuring a reading by Lorenz. “the sweet fragrance of the detergent / and the reminder (imprinted into the kitchen) / of a cigarette.”

Most recently, we’ve had the opportunity to publish This Is Us Losing Count. The fifth Calico, TIULC makes space for itself in its specificity, gathering, in the words of poet Boris Dralyuk, the “bold and forthright yet bracingly controlled” works of eight contemporary Russian poets, including Galina Rymbu, Alla Gorbunova, Olga Sedakova, and others. It’s telling (and affirming) that even when the call is focused, the work is wide-ranging. As Shelf Awareness said in their starred review of the collection: “Despite the remarkably distinct stylings of the eight individual poets, the collection carries a level of cohesiveness and unity that is rarely found in even the most meticulously designed novels.” We invite you to read “The Water Freezes” by Alla Gorbunova (translated by Elina Alter) at Words Without Borders(opens in a new tab), which begins “The water freezes, / becoming a heavenly body.” And “Beads” (Poetry Daily(opens in a new tab)) and “Night Sewing” (Literary Hub(opens in a new tab)) by Olga Sedakova, translated by Martha Kelley.

Though April may be nearly over already, we’ve only just begun our work on the Calico Series. Which is to say, see you next year, poetry lovers, and keep an eye out for Visible, another cross-genre offering from your friends at Two Lines Press, out this September.