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.
Features & Reviews
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What to Read When Celebrating Black History
The Rumpus editors share a list of books to celebrate Black History Month
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.
The page is the stage: An interview with Junious Ward
“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
Yearning and Wandering: Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral
The earth is fertile ground for seeking one’s roots and connection to others.
What might my gaze reveal? An Interview with Erica Berry
I suppose I’m obsessed with how we buffer uncertainty.
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.