Stephen Vincent reads from Sleeping with Sappho and The Golden Book.

Michael Wolfe reads from Cut These Words Into My Stone.

Sleeping With Sappho is the enigmatic title of Stephen Vincent’s poems that imagine and explore the dramas that emerge from a radical re-making of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho, If Not, Winter. 

Peter Manson, the Scottish poet writes, ‘I love the way you seem to load all the dice against the possibility of this being a personal, expressive work, by foregrounding the process and the workings against the source text, and I also love the way that leads to it ending up as personal and expressive a book as anyone could have made.  The most fragmentary poems often have a great goofiness about them, and that gives a real zest and leavening to the whole thing. It’s such a complex act of overlaying of your present perceptual field, your memories and desires, the deep time of Sappho’s world and the tendency of all of these things to explode into fragments when you try to grasp them.”

Cut These Words Into My Stone comprises Michael Wolfe’s translations of over a hundred tiny poems, some dating back to the dawn of Greek writing, collected in five historical sections. Wolfe’s spare introductions offer a context for these delicate, intimate bits of tombstone verse, one to a page with the Greek and the English, each summing up in a handful of words another ancient life. These epitaphs are anything but morbid: they form a vivid mosaic, tile by tile.

“Simply stunning.” Richard Wilbur

These translations are alive and potent. They are something very special. Funny, moving, cutting, ferocious.” Philip Levine

“Exquisite, economical proof that nothing ever changes. A wonderful book!” Kay Ryan

“A book Keats would deeply appreciate. A book to keep handy by bed or bath.” Bill Berkson