Join us as we count down to ALTA42: Sight and Sound with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s prose judges are Bonnie Huie, Charlotte Mandell, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. This year’s judges for poetry are Anna Deeny Morales, Cole Heinowitz, and Sholeh Wolpe.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Poetry NTA shortlisted title The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn:

The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn
by Tanella Boni
translated from the French by Todd Fredson
(University of Nebraska Press)

Ivorian poet and novelist Tanella Boni’s poems breathe fire in this moving collection. Drawing on biblical and Islamic myths, Boni builds her poems one upon another to create a powerful story that traverses time and geography without disruption. Todd Fredson’s precise yet poetic translations transport us effortlessly through the landscape of searing poems to these haunting last lines:  How to speak the beauty of the world/ when life’s hope/ crumbles like yarrow/ when death no longer presents an odor /of transformation in the fertile loam/where power blooms.