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Podcast: Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
Episode: Diana Arterian : Agrippina the Younger & Smoke Drifts
Description: As an artist, how does one dive into the wreck of an archive, a canon, a shared collective memory, a history—one filled with silenced voices, distorted accounts, erasures and elisions—on behalf of those wronged by it? Poet Dionne Brand says “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck” and Diana Arterian’s work seems animated by this work of salvage and recovery. We look at her new poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, about a Roman Empress who, today, is only known as the “daughter of,” “sister of,” “mother of,” “wife of ” various men of history; and also at Diana’s new work o...