poem

Cecco Angiolieri (c. 1260 – c. 1312), the son of a banker father and noblewoman mother, lived in Siena and wrote roughly 110 sonnets. He sometimes found himself in legal and financial troubles, and upon his death he left an indebted estate to his children. At some point he met Dante, possibly when both were involved in Siena’s and Florence’s alliance against Arezzo in the Battle of Campaldino (1289). Three of Angiolieri’s sonnets to Dante exist, perhaps as a part of a tenzone or poets’ exchange.

Brett Foster is the author of two poetry collections, The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) and Fall Run Road, which was awarded Finishing Line Press’s Open Chapbook Prize.

José Corredor-Matheos (b. 1929) graduated with a degree in law, but never practiced, working instead as editor for the publishing house Espasa-Calpa. He is known as a poet and art critic. He has published multiple books of poetry, most recently Desolación y vuelo, Poesía reunida (2011), and has received numerous awards: the Premio Boscán de Poesía for Poema para un nuevo libro in 1961, the Premio Nacional de Poesía for El don de la ignorancia in 2005, and the Cuidad de Barcelona prize for Un pez que va por el jardín in 2008.

Claudia Routon is Associate Professor of Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures at the University of North Dakota. She works with and translates the contemporary literature of Spain. Her work appears in Absinthe: The New European Writing, Romance Studies, Hunger Mountain, North Dakota Quarterly, Metamorphoses, and International Poetry Review.

Heidi Czerwiec is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Dakota, and is the author of Self-Portrait as Bettie Page (Barefoot Muse, 2013). Her poems and translations are published or forthcoming in Angle, storySouth, Crab Orchard Review, and International Poetry Review.

C.P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933) is the most famous and arguably greatest of the Modern Greek Poets. He was born and died in Alexandria, but spent part of his childhood in Liverpool (his first poems were in English and he is said to have spoken Greek with an English accent), and he lived for a time in Constantinople. His subjects range from homosexual love affairs to arcane Hellenistic history, but his treatments of them share a remove in time, a distance or irony. His poems were collected only after his death. Many celebrations this past year have marked the sesquicentennial of his birth.

Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374) is the great Italian master whose work helped to create the Renaissance sonnet craze in England. He was a priest, a scholar of the Classics, a friend to the great poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and an immensely popular poet in his day. Although a religious professional, he had two children out of wedlock, and is best known for his sonnets professing his intense love for a woman named Laura.