Caroline Hagood is a poet and scholar whose work takes on the strange, transformative moments that make up women’s lives. After two poetry collections, Lunatic Speaks and Making Maxine’s Baby, Hagood is out with Ways of Looking at a Woman, a book-length essay exploring the idea that women are “hybrid forms,” or “mixed genres,” comprising multiple personal and creative categories.

Ways of Looking at a Woman is itself a hybrid work, an exciting mix of memoir and poetry that looks at Hagood’s experiences of writing and becoming a mother through a lens of literary and film theory. It’s also wonderfully funny in places. When I saw Hagood read recently at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City, she and the audience cracked each other up during the Q&A, talking about the inspiring postcard photo of Virginia Woolf that she keeps over her desk and the life-giving necessity of snacks.

Hagood is a lifelong New Yorker who teaches at Fordham University and serves as a staff blogger for the Kenyon Review. She and I recently emailed back and forth to talk about making art while female and how writers of all kinds can take risks and unsettle standard literary forms. (more…)

— 1 week ago