In Conversation // Something to Sing, But Nothing to Say—Jesse Nathan and H. L. Hix
“Poetry can be a means of facilitating one’s experience of the continuity that is ‘underneath’ the artificially-imposed partitionings.”
All posts filed under: Recent
A selection of recent special features, essays, interviews and reviews
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
Field Note: Birds of Prey on the Highway
“What I have discovered in my adult life, in my driving and commuting life, is that I love birds of prey.” —M. Soledad Caballero
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
I Am Finished With History
“The hallowed argument goes: The artist has vanished but the art lives. Franklin adds: Art lives and so does the materials that made the art. They mark us as much as we’ve manipulated them.” -Esther Lin
So You Are Here, and There Still
“Throughout Metzger’s poems, we experience an artist patching together experiences– present and past–, sometimes creating tectonic friction between them, in order to dwell on the meaning of life.” -David Roderick
2023 James Welch Prize
View our 2023 James Welch Prize winners and finalists in this online folio, featuring the full poems of m.s. RedCherries and Nicole Wallace.
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