.                              for Martha
. . . gone now, and I,
a fox startled late
when the flushed grouse burst
from snow underfoot,
paw frozen leaves,
worry a lost feather,
go on, hungry.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds (2010)
Accents Publishing

More from Metes and Bounds and J. Kates:

• “A Lake in the Woods”
• “How Can There Be a War Going On”
• “The Dead”
• “Statement of a Refugee from Babel” from Bigger than They Appear
• Jim Kates’ “Most Important Thing”

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).