In Conversation // “The Canyon and the Island”—John C. Morrison & Daniela Naomi Molnar
“The poem is an experience largely because of how its sounds turn its reader’s body into an instrument.”—Daniela Molnar
Author: Alexa Luborsky
Interview // “Language as a Map to a Future Destination”: A Conversation with Ina Cariño
by Aditi Bhattacharjee | Contributing Writer Ina Cariño’s Feast (Alice James books, 2023) is a fearless debut that combines their personal story with the political history of the Philippines to express the aftereffects of colonization and migration. The collection explores a hunger for identity, ancestry, geography at the intersection of liminality, among other things. The poems in the book are replete with beautiful food images that help in creating the worlds that the narrator enlivens for the audience. The raw authenticity of the narrator’s voice brings us closer to navigating questions of otherness at different levels that people of color feel on a daily basis. I was very grateful to be able to have a conversation about their process in writing this collection via a Google Doc. Aditi Bhattacharjee (AB): I am fascinated with the universe you have created in “Feast,” which is rich with mountains, loam, archipelago, tropical fruits, milk, vines, butterfly, beetle, finches, sari-sari stores, haranas, dandelion-clocks, dreamsongs and, underneath all of that, one also finds the images of nicked thumbs, swollen bottom …
Interview // “The Voices We Carry”: A Conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye
“Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things…”
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Interview // “Speech Crush”: A Conversation with Sandra McPherson
by Nan Cohen | Contributing Writer Sandra McPherson’s first published poems appeared in Poetry Northwest in the Autumn, 1965, issue, edited by Carolyn Kizer. Since then, she has moved from Seattle, where she studied with Elizabeth Bishop and David Wagoner, to Portland, Oregon, and then to northern California, where she taught creative writing and literature at the University of California, Davis, from 1985 until her retirement. Her books include The Year of Our Birth, The Spaces Between Birds: Mother-Daughter Poems, and The 5150 Poems. Her honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work was also featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series The Language of Life. In 1999, she founded Swan Scythe Press, which still publishes poetry chapbooks. Her twenty-second full-length collection of poems, Speech Crush, was published in late 2022 in the California Poets Series of Gunpowder Press in Santa Barbara. She lives in Davis, California. This interview was conducted over e-mail in January and February 2023. * Nan Cohen (NC): I’d love …
Review & Interview // “Scent as Summons”: A Conversation with Elizabeth A. I. Powell and Review of Atomizer
“Having a strong sense of smell allows one to decipher certain truths about a thing, unless one has detached from oneself.” —Elizabeth A.I. Powell
Interview // “Color is a Way of Entry”: A Conversation with Christine Herzer
“I work with language (in its many shapes/contexts, e.g., words, the news; visible/invisible; etc.) and towards finding language capable of holding paradox, of holding everything (like a painting, like a house).” —Christine Herzer
Interview // “The Poet as Urban Planner”: A Conversation with Josh FeitÂ
“Poetry gives you the room to explore these weird juxtapositions where you’re talking about a transit-oriented development, and you’re simultaneously talking about Athena. She rides a chariot, and we’re riding a bullet train.” —Josh Feit
Interview // “Shapeshifting, Flawed Mediums, and Wolves”: A Conversation with Jessica Q. StarkÂ
“I’m fascinated in thinking about money as an apparition whose haunting drives earthly creatures to do the silliest of actions, to become the strangest renditions of oneself. Every single person I know, including myself, is haunted by this not-love, this not-woods. I’m just trying not to feel hungry anymore for this kind of haunting, which begins to feel like a part of one’s skin.” —Jessica Q. Stark
Interview // “Labeling, Covering, Converging, Confessing”: A Conversation with Eugenia LeighÂ
“Bianca is less about ‘the speaker getting back to herself’ and more an account of the speaker getting a chance to create the self on her own terms. To control her narrative. And, also, to grieve the younger self she never really got to be.” —Eugenia Leigh
Interview // “Moments without Anchors & Intimacies without Control”: A Conversation with Taneum Bambrick Â
“In both of my collections, I’ve tried to write a scene as closely as I can without looking away or dragging something else in to contextualize it. I am interested in how a poem can point itself at a moment without giving that moment background to anchor it.” —Taneum Bambrick