Features & Reviews
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Walking as a Pastime: Jason Allen-Paisant’s “Thinking with Trees”
Despite his struggle to assert himself, to feel belongingness in his adopted home, the poet concludes the collection with defiance and hope. In “Fear of Men,” he questions whether he must imagine “the trees dark at night” or “silhouettes rising,…
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The First Book: Eliana Ramage
‘You will write other novels…’ I find it affirming because (1) it quiets the worry that the first book has to say or hold everything, which no book can or should, (2) the word write.”
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Autobiomythography or Attending to What Memoir Excises: A Conversation with Lana Lin
My artistic practice includes making films, writing, and visual art. It’s driven by the same kinds of concerns around race, identity, and self-expression—and what it means to speak or to say something. In an interview [about] Dorothy, a publishing project,…
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In Praise of Difficulty & Reading Toni Morrison: A Conversation with Namwali Serpell
“She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shouting, clapping, and stomping…
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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…