Lisa Richter - Nautilus and Bone

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August 16, 2022) featuring Canadian poet Lisa Richter who reads from and discusses her poetry collection Nautilus and Bone, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s endlessly interesting and erudite Poet-At-Large, also joins us on the show!  Lisa Richter is a Canadian poet, writer and educator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Closer to Where We Began (Tightrope Books, 2017), and Nautilus and Bone (Frontenac House, 2020), winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a National Magazine Award, and appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Literary Review of Canada, CV2, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Rogue Agent and Crab Creek Review. She lives and writes in Toronto.  Canadian Jewish Literary Awards: "Nautilus and Bone (Frontenac House) by Lisa Richter is a poetic tour de force. It is a reclamation project of Jewish literary history as well as an act of radical empathy. A reimagining of the unconventional life of the celebrated Yiddish poet, Anna Margolin, this collection has all the ambition, romance, and ferocity of its subject, a moving exploration of how a wild spirit searches for beauty and love. We return to it with pleasure and admiration."  National Jewish Book Award for Poetry: “In Nau­tilus and Bone, Lisa Richter races around the life and work of Yid­dish-lan­guage poet Anna Mar­golin (1887 – 1952) until her “words are wild­ing.” The poet­ry super­sedes the mere bio­graph­i­cal and show­cas­es the tri­umphs of the genre: in forms includ­ing son­net crowns, cen­tos, and homo­phon­ic trans­la­tions, Richter keeps up with Margolin’s escapades from Brisk to the Low­er East Side. Poems such as “Flew the Pea­cock Off-Gold­en” com­bine icon­ic themes of Yid­dish poet­ry with Richter’s exu­ber­ant syn­tax: “above sleep I became the peacock/my rest­less eye flew away you bow.” Lan­guage flaunts itself across his­to­ry — with epigraphs rang­ing from Lor­ca to Liz­zo, the col­lec­tion memo­ri­al­izes Margolin’s lega­cy across time. Richter’s exhil­a­rat­ing achieve­ment doesn’t mere­ly bring Mar­golin to life — it dares the read­er to live as ful­ly as Margolin.”