Cities: Ten Poets, Ten Cities

edited by Paul Hetherington & Shane Strange

‘AS POETS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES IN THE CITY, SO THEY HEAR THE CITY’S RUMINATIONS INFLECTING THEIR WORK. THIS IS A PART OF WHAT IT MEANS TO WRITE ABOUT CITIES—IT IS TO LISTEN TO AND INSCRIBE THE RHYTHMS AND MEANINGS THE CITY IS ALWAYS MAKING.’

Cities are as complex and unknowable as they are familiar and unsurprising. We can feel as if we know a city intimately, or merely indicate its mysteries to our fleeting perceptions. Or its mysteries can appear in and through the mundane. Cities reveal their collective ghosts through their landscapes, their histories, their people, their sounds and smells. Cities ask us to invent not only ourselves, but a view of ourselves within the cityscape we imagine.

In this Recent Work Anthology, we asked ten poets to write about cities around the globe, to construct new perspectives on these cities and, if only for a moment, hear their rhythms, and find their meanings.

The Cities & their poets:

Sydney- Ross Gibson

Capetown – Jen Webb

Singapore- Alvin Pang

New Orleans – Cassandra Atherton

Kyoto- Shane Strange

Haifa – Niloofar Fanaiyan

Moscow – Subhash Jaireth

Mumbai – Pooja Nansi

Rome – Paul Hetherington 

Anonymous – Paul Munden

Read a review of Cities by Michael Tsang in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal from Hong Kong here.