Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection
Agrippina the Younger and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series.
Her first collection,
Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in
Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in
BOMB,
The Harvard Review,
Los Angeles Review of Books,
The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.
At Electric Lit the author tagged ten books that "attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today." One title on the list:
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
This memoir is an extended meditation on Ní Ghríofa’s relationship with a keen poem from the late 1700s written in Irish alongside her modern experiences of love and motherhood. The keen is by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in response to the heinous 
murder of her beloved husband, whom she realizes is dead when his horse walks to their home with his “heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” The horse carries her to her husband’s corpse. “In anguish and in grief,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood.” Ní Chonaill’s husband was shot at the order of a magistrate, illustrative of the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland. Though Ní Chonaill’s voice burns through the centuries, we know little else of her life beyond her entrancing descriptions of love and abject grief. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s life whizzes around us as she raises four small children, her ratty copy of Ní Chonaill’s keen in her hands during late-night breastfeeds. Through the book, Ní Ghríofa never stops probing—the archive, the poem’s lines.
Read about
the other entries on Arterian's list at Electric Lit.
--Marshal Zeringue
Her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in BOMB, The Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.
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