Features & Reviews
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The Inheritance of Grief and Work: Abbie Kiefer’s “Certain Shelter”
Shelter becomes manifest for the speaker through place, particularly in towns devastated by the loss of industry. Through the setting of small-town Maine, Kiefer examines the way life is transformed after the closing of a town mill, and even more…
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The Strangest Sky Home Lost and Found in Leo Boix’s “Southernmost: Sonnets”
In his latest collection of poetry, Boix ushers readers into the halls of his personal museum, inviting us to peer within and peruse the memories and artifacts carefully numbered and ordered into the rhymes and lines of sonnets
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Connections and Community: An Interview with Patricia Henley
“It is a writerly habit to notice all the small and large things that comprise characters or potential characters. By the time they reach the page, I may not even recall the source of a snippet of dialogue or a…
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The Lesbian Erotic Poem: Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein
Whereas queerness itself is the resistance to sexual oppression, queer poetry is an arm, an extension and realization of resistance enacted with language. Employing Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” means that a lesbian poem aimed…
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Integrating Writing into the Pandemonium of Life: A Conversation with Martín Espada
“[P]oetry is not doing what it does in isolation. I don’t expect my poems to magically accomplish anything. I see my poems as part of a movement: That movement is political. It is artistic. It transcends poetry. It transcends politics.…
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Jon Fosse and the Perils of Writing Without Intention
…Vaim’s light touch arrives as a breath of fresh air.
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One Catastrophe Away from Losing Everything: A Conversation with Kim Samek
I like stories because you can take a big swing, you can do anything you can;, you can be experimental. If it doesn’t work out, it really doesn’t matter. When you work in the long form, if you take a…
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Poetics of Space: A Conversation with D.S. Waldman
“I was always, across these various modes of expression, chasing or trying to harness this underlying current of poetry—that thing in paintings or buildings or concertos or in (some) really good prose that makes me, even if temporarily, wholeheartedly invested…
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Rich Text and the Tunnel Vision of Love: An Interview with Seán Hewitt
“It’s not a book in which plot is the central driver. What I was most interested in is how falling in love spurs James into increasing levels of hope or longing, or agony in some cases. It was a very…
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Desire is the engine of magic: An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I wanted to write something inspired by the witchcraft folklore I learned about from my family growing up back in Mexico. But I also lived in Massachusetts for a little while and wanted something related to that locale, which is…
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“Full Throttle from the First Sentence:” A Conversation with Ivonne Lamazares
“Many of us go through similar experiences, where the foundations of our lives and family dynamics collapse. These situations force us to come face to face with the instability of self-narratives, family structures, and personal identities. I’m enormously curious about…
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Clutching to Community Over Contemporary Culture
The ways in which the group will support one another …defines how friendship can stand in direct rebellion to societal status quo