Description
In No Other Rome, the title’s “o”s are islands (wholes) or holes, lacunae, apertures through which we view the past or future. The poems in this collection engage contemporary art and Modern literature, alongside texts from Classical Greece and Rome, in an embodied, intertextual worry. The poems ask what lasts–“please last”–and what might be the last (or, with an “o,” “lost,”) “time,” “auk,” or “breath” as we move away from twentieth-century concerns into an unpredictable future. When there is no Planet B, no other Troy to burn, these elegies, love poems, and meditations seek a song that could “in singing, change the seen.”
About the Author
Heather Green’s poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Bennington Review, the New Yorker, Poetry International, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books) and Guide to the Heart Rail (Goodmorning Menagerie). She teaches in the School of Art at George Mason University.
Advance Praise for No Other Rome
To her great traditional subject, the limits of human life, Heather Green brings an impassioned, distinctive and sometimes rowdy lyricism that explores the limits of language and the joys of that exploration.
—Robert Pinsky
Heather Green takes art seriously, not as mere object or escape or enrichment, but as the light that allows us to see our world & ourselves. No Other Rome emanates into conversation with artists & artworks, & with the artifices & articulations of the self’s always still-forming interiority. Green explores the ways art, others’ & our own, accompanies us through griefs & loves, through illness & recovery, through despair & hope & the terrors of pleasure, documenting the ways meaning constellates out of so many distant ames, all either dying or dead. It is a book of beauty & of mourning & of ecstasy, a book to read deeply & repeatedly over a lifetime. No Other Rome gives me hope that if we are good enough, art may make the world a better place, may halo us, may allow the light, as Green says, under our skin.
—Mathias Svalina
