Dreamlike Transformation: On Gabriella R. Tallmadge’s 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
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
Re/Mark-Able: Black Women Poets’ 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 // “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
The Palinode’s Ethics of Questioning
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressed—to 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.” –Indira Dahlstrom
A Guide to Disorientation: Dana Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are
. . . the collection is concerned with all kinds of disorientation–literal, figurative, physical, and spiritual–and 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 one’s own capacity for harm . . .”–Amy Klein
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