Where can we read some of your recent work?
My new book is Mouth Full of Seeds, published in March with Black Lawrence Press.
The link includes me reading from it. It’s a lyric memoir about single motherhood, translating fairy tales, gardening and foraging, religious conversation, washing machines, etc.
What are you reading right now?
*Ross Gay, The Book of Delights. Who doesn’t need delight right now? Each daily essay is a blend of salt and sweet, and it is one of the very few books I’ve ever read that truly lives up to its title, even surpasses it.
*Judy Halebsky, Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged). Okay, so the books I’m reading right now have the most amazing titles. This book of poetry, in conversation with writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu, transports us across centuries, and it is full of surprises. I’ll add that after I fell in love with this book, Halebsky made my dreams come true by zooming into my workshop (Judy is in California. I am in Tel Aviv. The fact she woke up at 4 am to do this is astonishing).
*Rachel Zucker, Sound Machine. Zucker is so smart, so relentlessly inquisitive about ideas we’ve all in polite society agreed to just accept and shut up about, I always approach her work with a little trepidation (how is she going to unsettle me this time?) and then feel amazing joy and gratitude. Zucker also zoomed into my class (time difference of New York to Tel Aviv).
*Natasha Marin, Black Imagination. Black Voices on Black Futures. It’s such a powerful book, from one of the most lovingly challenging people I know. And this book is no different.
What’s next for you?
I’m hungry to connect through Mouth Full of Seeds. I’ve recently given a literary cooking demo and zoom workshops and readings. I’d be glad to do more of that–invite me! I’d love to zoom into your workshops and classes!
I’m finishing up a book-length translation (from the Hebrew) of Sharron Hass’s Music of the Wide Lane for an NEA grant I was awarded 2 years ago. It’s a wonderfully complex book in which the speaker is giving birth to a son as her father is dying. I love how the genders flow through the body of the language and the speaker.
I have another new book! City of Skypapers, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in March 2021.
BIO:
Marcela Sulak is the author of the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds. Her fourth poetry collection, City of Sky Papers, is forthcoming. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Genres, and translates from Czech, Hebrew ,and French. She’s Associate Professor of Literature at Bar-Ilan University.
My website ( a tiny bit outdated but working on it) is https://www.marcelasulak.com/
and on fb: https://www.facebook.com/marcela.sulak