I Never Thought I’d Write a Book Like This: An Interview with Nicole Chung
It's my year of Banana.
Features & Reviews
9282 posts
The Poem is Second, Living is First: An Interview with Tim Z. Hernandez
Above everything else, people come first.
The Sound of Home: Sonorous Desert by Kim Haines-Eitzen
. . . if we open our ears . . . we might even find ourselves feeling truly home
I Freed Myself from Needing to Make Sense: A Conversation with Leila Chatti
I’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I’m in control.
Waking Up at the Wake: Desire, Death, and Disruption in A Shiver in the Leaves
When I consider a shiver in the leaves, my mind fares in two directions: One is back to my first-time experience with psilocybin, shocked at how the fig leaves hung as if shivering . . . and the other is back through American history . . .
Critical Attachment to Geniuses: Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet
. . . how to simultaneously develop a deep curiosity about cultural icons and maintain a critical distance from them . . .
Hope and Rapture in the Anthropocene: A conversation with Julie Carrick Dalton
. . . fall in love with honey bees, or fall in love with the forest . . .
Loving the questions: Religion and poetry with Jennifer Michael Hecht
Thinking in terms of the poetry of your life is about noticing that you are one of the sentient beings in a universe with billions of galaxies, and your experience is the universe knowing itself and it is weird and messy and painful but it matters.
The Myriad Conflagrations of our Times: Chloe N. Clark’s Patterns of Orbit
In this collection, the reader can slipstream from space shuttle to submarine, from Grimm to Goldilocks to Charybdis, because a cautionary tale that’s never heeded is never out of date . . .
The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan
“The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?”
Strength and Feeling in Motion: A conversation with Henri Cole about Gravity and Center
Horses are a nice metaphor for the sonnet’s strength and feeling in motion. Beauty and violent power come together in an animal form. When I write, I have the feeling of being a rider. As the poem gallops forward, I am knocked about.
Travels in Paradise: Pico Iyer’s The Half Known Life
To try and gain a level of peace amidst the disappointment and chaos of the world is perhaps the only real paradise.