Interviews

Pale Fire in particular I find genuinely hilarious, and thinking about “Note” now, it reads like a minor variation on that novel’s schema, with the original creator getting in the last word

The story also engages with the emotional tensions arising from the anticipated return of ’Wayne’s long-absent mother, as well as the intricacies of the relationship between ’Wayne and his sometimes overly present father.  Both relationships are portrayed with nuance and…

Something changed substantially during COVID. Housing skyrocketed. Our unhoused population skyrocketed. The opiate crisis was in full display. My wife and our son and I were living in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Cap Hill and marching in the George Floyd…

Gregor Samsa went to bed a tired, overworked salesman and woke up as a giant cockroach. Anelise Chen’s own metamorphosis was nowhere near as drastic. Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025) is Chen’s exploration of what it would mean…

Mystic-heretic-philosopher-poet Alina Ștefănescu’s newest collection of poetry, My Heresies (Sarabande 2025) is a radiant skirmish of families and selfhood, countries and allegiances, rules and refusals, and the force with which fraught love (is there any other kind?) bends us to…

In her newest novel, All This Can Be True (Keylight Books, 2025), Michalski makes readers want to break out the black eyeliner and catch a show headlining (the excellently named) Clit Girls.

If you can laugh about a difficult situation, laugh in your aggressor’s face, it gives you a sense of power.

Despair is a luxury, but hope is a discipline.

I’m curious about a world in which people are less bothered by the physical confrontation of mental disability, and that felt important when I was writing this book to have mental disability take up physical space in the poems and…