Deep Empathy and Dreamlike Transformation: On Gabriella R. Tallmadgeâs Sweet Beast
“. . . the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”
All posts filed under: Recent
A selection of recent special features, essays, interviews and reviews
Re/Mark-Able: Black Women Poetsâ Punctuation(!
“When a black woman poet refuses punctuation, she is refusing more than standard English. She is also refusing to allow the marks of history to (over)determine her writing.”
Interview // âThe Poet as Urban Plannerâ: 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.” âJosh Feit
Interview // âShapeshifting, Flawed Mediums, and Wolvesâ: A Conversation with Jessica Q. StarkÂ
“Iâm 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. Iâm just trying not to feel hungry anymore for this kind of haunting, which begins to feel like a part of oneâs skin.” âJessica Q. Stark
The Palinodeâs Ethics of Questioning
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressedâto expose the story of your old poem as a preconceived myth.”
Flight by Flame: On Chris Abani’s Smoking the Bible
“By stitching the mundane to the profound, Abani renders a reclamation of a tender masculinity, an understanding of the relationship between joy and trauma, and a pursuit of the sacred.” âIndira Dahlstrom
A Guide to Disorientation: Dana Levinâs Now Do You Know Where You Are
. . . the collection is concerned with all kinds of disorientationâliteral, figurative, physical, and spiritualâand the despair that comes with navigating unknown terrains.
A Poet of the American Storm: On Landscape with Bloodfeud by Wendy Barnes
“To be vulnerable means also to know oneâs own capacity for harm . . .”âAmy Klein
Interview // âLabeling, Covering, Converging, Confessingâ: 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.” âEugenia Leigh
Interview // âMoments without Anchors & Intimacies without Controlâ: A Conversation with Taneum Bambrick Â
“In both of my collections, Iâve 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.” âTaneum Bambrick