Leatha Kendrick reading “What I Wanted but Couldn’t Tell…” by Mirela Ivanova.

Poem’s full title:
WHAT I REMEMBERED, BUT COULDN’T TELL MY SIX-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, WHILE WE WERE STUCK FOR 11 MINUTES IN THE ELEVATOR AND SHE TUMBLED, BOUNCED FROM CORNER TO CORNER LIKE A BLAZED AND CRAZED, SPARKLING FIREWORK AND HER TEARS ROLLED GIANT, APOCALYPTIC BEHIND THE LENSES OF HER GLASSES, AND I WAS TRYING TO YELL OVER HER HORROR, TO PET HER SCARLET CHEEKS AND FOREHEAD, TO EMBRACE HER AND GATHER HER BACK INTO MYSELF AND SING TO HER CONSOLINGLY, BECAUSE I ALREADY KNEW THAT CHILDREN RECOGNIZE THE VOICES AND THE PULSES OF THEIR MOTHERS FROM AMONG 3000 NOISES

from The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry

To see more from Leatha Kendrick, don’t forget to check out Stars with Accents this Sunday at 7PM at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning where she’ll be reading with Paulette Livers and Lisa Williams in an event hosted by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer.

Mirela Ivanova was born on May 11th, 1962 in Sofia. She holds a degree in Bulgarian philology from Paisii Hilendarski University in Plovdiv. She is the author of seven books of poetry, among which are Stone Wings and Memory for Details. Her poetry has been translated and published in many languages, and a collection of selected poems, Lonely Game, was published in Germany in 2002. Mirela has received a number of Bulgarian literary awards, as well as the 2002 Hermann Lenz Prize for modern poetry from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. She currently lives and works in Sofia.