Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
Features & Reviews
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“If You Give a Story Something, It Gives It Back:” A Conversation with Morgan Talty
A writer isn’t in control of what’s on the page, the story is. But if you give a story something, it gives it back.
Ephemera and Artifacts: A Conversation with Sejal Shah
So many stories are written for/about male heroes with a traditional, predictable plot. That’s not to say that I didn’t and don’t hope other people would read and be interested in these stories, but I wrote them first for myself.
The Slow Melting of Faces: A Conversation with Maria Bamford
You could write about this weird thing, and people who like to read will be down to find out about this different world. It’s a very different situation in a nightclub or a theater.
Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
“It All Came Back to My Illness”: A Conversation with April Gibson
Writing about illness is a way to push back against all the pathologizing and dismissiveness. It allowed me to be in charge of my own narrative.
The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
Intergenerational Epiphany: A Conversation with Margaret Juhae Lee
It’s now my favorite way to write—in community. There’s something safe about it, you feel held.
It is Once Again Hanif Abdurraqib’s Year
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
I Had to Find a New Language: A Conversation with Anna Gazmarian
I wanted to write about faith in a way that people who are not Christian, or do not understand that worldview, could read and have a more nuanced approach to faith.
Sketch Book Reviews: The Book of (More) Delights
Today's delight: a flush of blooming forget-me-nots creating a blue blanket on the edge of my garden.
Vanishing as a Way of Resistance: A Conversation with Saúl Hernández
My job as a write is to first witness, and then record. It would be an injustice to these poems if they were not written from a place of vulnerability and truth.