A reflection on reflection: An interview with Katherine Indermaur
I did some research on how the vertical slash was used in different contexts, and fell in love with the Sheffer stroke.
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Features & Reviews
A story is like a nomad: An Interview with Geetanjali Shree
We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language
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Language as Possibility: Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences
. . . think of Gladman’s work as engaging the imagination the way an architect approaches three-dimensional space with a two-dimensional blueprint.
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Learning from Grief: Claudia Putnam’s Double Negative
Among the meanings of Claudia Putnam’s cryptic title is a mathematical one, based on the lower left quadrant of graphs; it is a meaning that she chooses, explicates, and explores from many angles. But negative infinity is much harder to get your mind around than the grammatical concept of the double negative, so a reader […]
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When The Pipes Inspired the Poets: A conversation with the Boiler House Poets Collective
The Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.
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Men Haunting Men: A conversation with Richard Mirabella
Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby
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Insatiable Hunger: Wanting, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters
If I could not morph into a rescue dog doted on by childless lesbians, at least I could luxuriate in this anthology.
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Leave what you can, take the rest: An Interview with Idra Novey
Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
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Migration and return: De’Shawn Charles Winslow on going back to West Mills
I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there.
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A Worn Violence: On Gabrielle Bates’ Judas Goat
[T]here is a speaker who will simply persevere, who will, like “the heart trying to leave the chest,” keep going, and by keeping going, will tend always, though it’s sometimes hard, toward human connection. Toward love.
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The View from the Backstretch: Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch
Though this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar.
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Poets make the world huge: A conversation with Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon
I don’t believe we come to nor travel through poetry alone . . . Rather than “social” I would instead encourage the word “communal”; the former sounds a little more performative and exclusive to my ear than does the latter, which sounds more like an invitation.
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The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Stallings
Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important.
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What to Read When Celebrating Black History
The Rumpus editors share a list of books to celebrate Black History Month
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Seas of Discourse: Zülfü Livaneli’s The Fisherman and His Son
people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.
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The page is the stage: An interview with Junious Ward
“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
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Yearning and Wandering: Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral
The earth is fertile ground for seeking one’s roots and connection to others.
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What might my gaze reveal? An Interview with Erica Berry
I suppose I’m obsessed with how we buffer uncertainty.
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Queer Revisioning and Incomprehensibility: Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches
Imbler never fails to demonstrate that a different way of life is possible.
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The Person Is Not The Body: An Interview with Rushi Vyas
I think, as writers, we only have so much choice. Obsessions emerge from our lived experience.
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Science and Symbols: An Interview with Kevin Jared Hosein
I like to say this is a novel about split-second decisions, because either you go for it or you sink into the water and be forgotten.
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It’s Not Cancel Culture, It’s Scam Culture: Jinwoo Chong’s Flux
“Can we separate the art from the artist?” If you’re like me, you’ve been in more than a few versions of this particular conversation. You could even, at this point in the post-MeToo era, write a MadLib of this conversation. It starts out in the abstract. Within the first thirty words, the term “canceled” will […]
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When Craft Becomes an Act of Love: An Interview with Gayle Brandeis
I want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.
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What to Read When: You Want to Think Kaleidoscopically About Place
A stitch that sews both self and world into being.
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Clearing the Bar with Care and Complexity: Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind
The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik [implores] us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.
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This Is All the Time We Get: A Conversation with Felicia Chiao
I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
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Hometown Humbling: Delia Cai’s Central Places
The shame is cumulative.
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All the World is a K-Drama: A Conversation with Matthew Salesses
I wanted to be able to frame the story within this understanding that these are powerful forces and that these are stories we’ve heard a lot before, and that these stories get in the way of, or make it hard to understand or even listen to, a more authentic or more real story about who people are or can be.
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All Storytelling is Nonbinary: An interview with Jennifer Savran Kelly
People who feel safe and able or who have privilege should use the space they create for themselves to make more space for people from marginalized communities. We all need to hold space for one another.
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Languages Within A Language: Camilo José Cela’s The Hive
How do you represent, in a different tongue, the languages within the language of the original text?
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