stands like an empty Norman monument
of conquest and defense.
There is a girl who climbs with diffidence
the icy road, balancing on a clump
of snow with such intent
that her whole body from the knees is bent.
She keeps herself in temporal suspense
from falling on her rump.
Just as she executes an awkward jump,
I swing my camera, catching her descent
and its small consequence.
–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing
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).