Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Oxygen: Selected Poems, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

Oxygen: Selected Poems
by Julia Fiedorczuk
translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
(Zephyr Press)

This first book in English by Julia Fiedorczuk, a rising star of ecopoetics and ecocriticism, probes the relationships between the human and natural worlds, exploring the strength and fragility of both realms while forging links between the quotidian and the larger universe. This allusive, imagistic poetry engages with science, ecology, language theory, history, philosophy, and feminism, scaling the highest heights to grab “a handful of stars” and plunging into the depths of the sea where fish swirl. The poems unfold in measured breaths, the supple sounds and oceanic rhythms of Bill Johnston’s English rolling effortlessly off the tongue.