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Ezra Pound professed a "belief" in Confucianism from the early 1930s till the end of his life. His interpretation of Confucianism, however, changed over time, and those changes are reflected in the four translations of Confucian texts he produced between 1928 and 1954. Based on painstaking new research, Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations for the first time traces the evolution of Pound's Confucianism during the historical and personal turmoil of this period. Pound's Confucian translations are less correct "philology" than the "re-creation" of works that he hoped would have a potent influence on the twentieth-century West. What Pound first admired in Confucianism was a respect for individuality simultaneous with a concern for social order. From the late 1930s through the Second World War, Pound developed a "totalitarian" Confucianism whose consummation would be a "harmony" of man, earth, and heaven. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 and Pound's arrest on charges of treason against the United States for his activities in Italy during the war, his Confucianism reverted to an emphasis on verbal precision and the importance of individual integrity. In addition to tracing the evolution of Pound's beliefs, Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations elucidates the Confucian elements in The Cantos and suggests a reading of that epic from the point of view of Pound's Confucianism. Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations will be crucial to students of Pound and will also be read by sinologists, scholars of comparative literature, and anyone studying translation.

Poetry that considers migration and identity through formal experimentation with sonnets.
 
José Felipe Alvergue’s en el norte/soy del sur, which translates to “in the north I am of the south,” is an exploration into the limits of the American sonnet, one that seeks to establish a stable sense of place, while opening vistas at each turn. Stitching together multiple sonnets into what he calls “sonnet essays,” Alvergue rides their turns—or “voltas”—that are guided by memories and photographs of his family’s migratory history between El Salvador and the United States.
 
The resulting text is a story of human geography that considers the coordinates of a long, continuous thought about what it means to be “of a place” as a defining characteristic of identity, when one is also “in a place” that sets strict limits on the political and historical potential of im/migrants. A deeply human documentary work that delves into one family’s migration across the hemisphere, en el norte/soy del sur hopes to give shape to the collective and often amorphous history of migration in the face of narratives that peddle spectacularized distillation and essentialism.
 

A poetry chapbook that reflects on shifting time and tides through the language of the shoreline.

Pattie McCarthy’s extraordinary tides occupies a space in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems reflect on passing time, fluctuating tides, and on our efforts to predict both. Upon a ground that is always in flux beneath us, McCarthy invites us to question if and how we really know where we are. Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral.

McCarthy's extraordinary tides is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Rae Armantrout.