Hélène Cardona

• Woodwork
  

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If I could gather all the sadness of the world,
all the sadness inside me,
into a gourd,
I’d shake it once in a while,
and let it sing,
let it remind me of who I used to be,
bless it for what it taught me,
and stare at it lovingly
for not seeping out of its container.
 
 
 
From Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry)

Hélène Cardona is a poet, translator, and actor, the recipient of over 20 honors & awards, including the Independent Press and International Book Awards, Naji Naaman Prize, Hemingway Grant, and Goethe-Institut and Andalucía International University fellowships.
She authored, more recently, the collections Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry) and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona, Salmon Poetry), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press), Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux, Editions du Cygne), and Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb.
Her work has been translated into 16 languages. Fluent in six languages, she holds an MA in American Literature from the Sorbonne, worked as an interpreter for the Canadian Embassy, and taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University.
Acting credits include Chocolat, Star Trek: Picard, Ford V. Ferrari, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Happy Feet 2, and Serendipity among many.

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