A new book of poems, Running Out of Words for Afterwards, by poet and translator David Hargreaves, released on October 15.

Hargreaves was born in Detroit and has lived in Oregon since 1979. His translated collection The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets by Nepal Bhasa (Newāh) poet Durga Lal Shrestha was published in 2014 in Kathmandu, Nepal, in a dual-language format. He is a professor of Linguistics at Western Oregon University.

Lush and allusive, tuned to a background in translating Nepal Bhasa poetry, Running Out of Words for Afterwards gives voice to cycles of desire, loss, and renewal. Like the many rivers that flow through this book, David Hargreaves’ poems, in various turns, can be urgent, expansive, unpredictable, or calm, conveying the reader through landscapes both mystical and mundane, through illusions of selfhood, and the struggles of language to accept its own limitations.

Praise for David Hargreaves & Running Out of Words for Afterwards:

“Moving deftly in and out of lyric, narrative, and meditative modes, Hargreaves’s poems proffer a world that, like his speaker, ‘thirsts for release’ — a world that is constantly, perhaps even ecstatically, ceasing to be itself and, in so doing, revising the lives of all who dwell in it.” – Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Philomath

“Hargreaves brings to his poems a critical intelligence as a translator and linguist as well as a musical and emotional dexterity; the poet and the figures of these poems pursue their exchanges in a charged atmosphere of personal, cultural and ecological crisis. Still, the book’s quietest moments show how it is possible to find a sensibility and vocabulary responsive to upheaval and change.” – Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving the City