A Meteorologist in the Promised Land

Poetry. In these poems, the reader carries her "lone heartbeat" while sifting through the confusion of a psychically, physically rubbled world. There is loss, transcribed literally as spaces in the poems, because in truth there is no "word-/for-word translation." But in this stark landscape there is the "body's strange persistence"; there are meanings made and held close, words collected "in secret". Language equals transcendence and the bridge on which all other things are built: "tell me// your name."

Becka Mara McKay teaches translation and creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Her translation, from the Hebrew, of the novel Laundry was published by Autumn Hill Books in 2008. Blue Has No South, her translations of the short fiction of Alex Epstein, is forthcoming from Clockroot Books. She has received awards and grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the American Literary Translators Association, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006. She has published her work in American Letters and Commentary, ACM, Third Coast, The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Rhino, Natural Bridge, Rattapallax, and elsewhere.