New PDF release: A Year of Mourning: Poems 271-322 of Petrarch's Rerum

Lee Harlin Bahan delves into the crowded box of Petrarch translations and gives you a classical supplying with a postmodern-cool facelift. A 12 months of Mourning is bold, quirky, and playful, yet with conventional trimmings. the anticipated classical and Biblical references abound, but additionally shiny allusions to popular culture and the modern social scene, together with Madonna, Robert Frost, rock ‘n’ roll, even the Walnettos caramel-walnut sweet. this can be the Petrarch you recognize along the Petrarch you’ve by no means skilled prior to. this can be a Petrarch translation to not be missed.

PRAISE FOR A 12 months OF MOURNING:

Lee Bahan has undertaken a likely Herculean activity, to translate a gaggle of Petrarch’s sonnets whereas taking out nearly every little thing we go together with the note “Petrarchan”; it’s as though her template is a go among Shakespeare’s “My mistress’ eyes are not anything just like the solar” sonnet, and the lyrics of a very pissed off and dissatisfied kingdom singer. this can be emphatically now not our grandmother’s Petrarch, however it is through turns startling, enticing, astounding, beguiling and infrequently demanding . . . mockingly sufficient, no longer not like the originals. If this can be outdated wine, it’s being served from a winningly flamboyant new bottle.
  - Dick Davis, writer of At domestic, and much from Home

What if that lovelorn Italian sonneteer Francesco Petrarca was once a wisecracking man named Frank Petrarch from Indiana who fell in love together with his neighbor’s spouse, Laura, after which became to poetry in sorrow whilst she died younger of an infectious illness? the outcome may be anything like Lee Harlin Bahan’s translations and differences during this sonnet series. the following, the corset tightened until eventually the bones crack has been loosened to permit for a typical diction, syntax, and idiom that permits that previous ghost, Petrarch, to talk to us as though he have been alive this day. the result's readable, profitable, and intriguing. this is often person who belongs in your nightstand.
  - Tony Barnstone, writer of Pulp Sonnets

Lee Harlin Bahan’s A 12 months of Mourning is a journey de strength, translating Petrarch into an idiom and poetics correct at domestic within the twenty-first century. “Translate” isn't fairly the fitting observe as Bahan updates and postmodernizes Petrarch in interesting and exciting style, whereas ultimate on stable scholarly flooring. References to Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Monroe, and the enticements, between others, spark the fondness, whereas allusions to the Bible, Chrétien de Troyes, and vintage Greek mythology soothe the educational brain. A 12 months of Mourning is either a delightful learn and a enormous achievement.
  - Vince Gotera, editor of North American Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lee Harlin Bahan earned her MFA at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her thesis, Migration Solo, received the 1st Indiana Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her moment chapbook is Notes to Sing. Bahan’s personal poetry has seemed in Ploughshares, The Kenyon assessment, and The North American overview, and her translations have seemed in traditional Bridge, Southern Humanities overview, and Flying Island. After receiving an area supply to review Italian, Lee loved a month-long residency at Mary Anderson middle for the humanities, Mt. St. Francis, IN, pursuing her target of translating Petrarch’s sonnets. Bahan lives along with her husband Pat in a hundred-year-old farmhouse outdoors Medora, IN.
  A 12 months of Mourning was once a distinct honoree for the 2016 capable Muse ebook Award.