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Café Shapiro is an annual event where undergraduate student writers, nominated by their instructors to participate, read from their creative works.

Café Shapiro began in February 1998 as part of the University’s “Year of the Humanities and Arts” (YoHA). and was originally conceived as a student coffee break. Café Shapiro takes place in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library during winter evenings in March. For many student writers, Café Shapiro is a first opportunity to read publicly from their work.

Café Shapiro features poems and short stories authored by University of Michigan students, becoming an annual celebration of undergraduate student writers as they think creatively and critically, reason, ask questions, and develop the skills that help them understand and participate in our world. 

Café Shapiro is an annual event where undergraduate student writers, nominated by their instructors to participate, read from their creative works.

Café Shapiro began in February 1998 as part of the University’s “Year of the Humanities and Arts” (YoHA). and was originally conceived as a student coffee break. Café Shapiro takes place in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library during winter evenings in March. For many student writers, Café Shapiro is a first opportunity to read publicly from their work.

The first and only single-volume collection of Larry Eigner’s most significant poems, gathering in one place the most celebrated of the several thousand poems that constitute his remarkable life’s work

Larry Eigner began writing poetry at age eight and was first published at age nine. Revered by poets and artists across a broad spectrum of generations and schools, Eigner’s remarkably moving poetry was created through enormous effort: because of severe physical disabilities, he produced his texts by typing with only one index finger and thumb on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter, creating a body of work that is unparalleled in its originality.

Calligraphy Typewriters showcases the most celebrated of Eigner's several thousand poems, which are an important part of the Black Mountain/Projectivist movement that began in the 1950s and which remain a primary inspiration for many younger writers, including those in the Language movement that began in the 1970s. In its two sections—Swampscott and Berkeley, named for the two locales where Eigner lived and worked—the volume traces his fantastic perception of the ordinary and his zeal for language. Eigner’s use of visual space, metaphor, and description provide fascinating insights into both his own life and the world that surrounded him. This volume maintains the distinctive visual spacing of his original typescripts, reminders of his method, aesthetic sensibility, and creative ability to compose on the typewriter.

A collection that reimagines the ordinary, Calligraphy Typewriters is the definitive selection of Eigner’s poems, and will serve well not only poets and students of poetry, but readers and writers of every vein.

Winner of the 2024 ACLA Harry Levin Prize • Honorable Mention MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize 

A bold comparative study illustrating the creative potential of translations that embrace mutuality and resist assimilation

Cannibal translators digest, recombine, transform, and trouble their source materials. Isabel C. Gómez makes the case for this model of literary production by excavating a network of translation projects in Latin America that includes canonical writers of the twentieth century, such as Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Lispector, José Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and Ángel Rama. Building on the avant-garde reclaiming of cannibalism as an Indigenous practice meant to honorably incorporate the other into the self, these authors took up Brazilian theories of translation in Spanish to fashion a distinctly Latin American literary exchange, one that rejected normative and Anglocentric approaches to translation and developed collaborative techniques to bring about a new understanding of world literature. 

By shedding new light on the political and aesthetic pathways of translation movements beyond the Global North, Gómez offers an alternative conception of the theoretical and ethical challenges posed by this artistic practice. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America mobilizes a capacious archive of personal letters, publishers’ records, newspapers, and new media to illuminate inventive strategies of collectivity and process, such as untranslation, transcreation, intersectional autobiographical translation, and transpeaking. The book invites readers to find fresh meaning in other translational histories and question the practices that mediate literary circulation.

Ann Deagon first began writing poetry “vigorously” in 1970, “in some kind of forty-year-old renaissance.” Since then her poems have been published widely and have been received numerous awards. 

“When I came to forty
that three-headed dog love death and poetry
took me in its teeth and shook me…”

Carbon 14 is the result, a counterpoint of serious and ironic excavations into the mythic and the personal past of a middle-aged woman. Although these poems have grown from her lifelong involvement in the Classics and are basically classical in their structure and concentration, their strength is not academic. 

Ann Deagon's poems interweave past and present, person, place, and event, with unexpected and often violent insights. In “The Sybil's Bath,” for example, the sacrifice of a young girl to a god leads to unprecedented counterviolence and to questions which are both contemporary and absolute. 

According to Deagon, “All identity is in some sense a translation from the Greek: it cannot be defined except with hyphens. The meaning hovers precisely at the hyphen.” in Carbon 14 Deagon proclaims her identity as poet-woman, woman-teacher, teacher-poet.

An arresting, musical ode to the forgotten voyages and resilient identities of indentured peoples.

Cargo Hold of Stars gives voice to the millions of indentured men and women, mostly from India and China, who were brought to Mauritius between 1849 and 1923. Kept in close quarters in the ship’s cargo hold, many died; most never returned home. Here, Khal Torabully introduces the concept of “Coolitude,” echoing Aimé Césaire’s “Negritude” to imbue the term with profound dignity, pride, and a resilient cultural identity. Stating that ordinary language could not capture these diverse voices, Torabully develops a new “poetics of Coolitude”: a French peppered with Mauritian Creole, brilliant wordplay, and neologisms.

The humor in these linguistic acrobatics only underscores the violence in which these poems are steeped. Deftly translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Cargo Hold of Stars is the song of an uprooting, destruction, and reconstruction. Yet it also celebrates setting down roots, conjuring an ideal homeland of fraternity and reconciliation in which bodies, memories, and languages mingle—a compelling odyssey defining the essence of humankind.

In Castings, Guy Rotella examines the work of five important poets who have engaged in that effort: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Considering their wider careers as well as particular poems--including Bishop's "The Monument," Lowell's "For the Union Dead," Merrill's "Bronze," Walcott's "The Sea Is History," and Heaney's "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge"--Rotella argues that these writers are less concerned with defending or condemning monuments than with pursuing ancient and current debates about the political, aesthetic, and broadly cultural issues that monuments condense. Among these concerns are the competing claims of life and art, persistence and change, meaning and meaninglessness, the self and society, and the governing and the governed.

Original and provocative, Rotella's readings will make us ponder how the human impulse to build to last, to reify our culturally derived and ideologically driven faiths, might coexist with those other creeds of our place and time: relativism, multiculuralism, and diversity.

In this striking debut collection, Michael Carlson offers poems that combine the concrete and the musical, while embodying a tendency toward contradiction. He writes by working with rhythms, structures, images, associational leaps, and an obsession with the sound of words, as opposed to narrative. The book begins, “A thing wants to pounce but can't,” and this spirit of hesitation continues throughout the volume. 

The first section of the book contains heavily rhythmic poems measured sometimes by syllable, sometimes by stress, dealing with rural landscapes, a struggle with disillusionment, and a reconciliation of knowledge and belief. The second section confronts the terrain and people of Carlson's childhood in Rhode Island, using longer sentences, riskier enjambments, and a more colloquial and emotional language. 

The poems in the third section—which range from Manhattan to Florida, Vietnam, and Paris—share a tendency to be more fantastic and are formal in weird ways. They include an homage to Ezra Pound borrowing the vocabulary of his first book and the syntax of his last, a nod to John Donne borrowing some of his stanza shapes, a sonnet whose constraint is that each of its fourteen lines contains a piece of armor, and a sestina composed of four syllable lines with four end words that rhyme. In the fourth section, Carlson returns to Brooklyn, speaks from the present, and resolves his stances in a brief notational way that is reminiscent of Chinese poetry.

Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation—both physical and emotional—as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind. In China, she begins to see America—and herself—clearly for the first time, and in doing so discovers that both her cousin and her country are inextricably woven into

[her body] part             that never sleeps            the blood
and chambered meat      that’s like a rock squeezed
in a fist             rapping its knuckles
on the sweet door             of the body.