Interviews

TERSE AND BOTH RHETORICAL AND LYRICAL, Jericho Brown’s poems explore race and sexuality with an unflinching gaze. Sometimes formal and always smart, the poems are infused with a sense of grace. Subjects that feel at first deeply personal become part of the experiences of a greater we. At the core of Brown’s poems is a call … Read more

THE POETRY OF D. NURKSE is hauntingly honest. It’s resonant with generosity, vulnerability, and love for the world while being rooted in unflinching observations of reality and justice. He makes magic of myths, nature, family, and the gritty stoops of Brooklyn. In a review of A Night in Brooklyn, Philip Levine writes, “He should be the laureate … Read more

TO READ REBECCA BROWN’S WORK is to be led by a minimalistic and incantatory voice into a world simultaneously familiar and peculiar. Brown’s stories—true and fictional—are imaginative, obsessive, witty, often dark, and always brilliant. Through her exploration of themes such as violence, youth and aging, loss, and human connection, Brown is a master of blurring the … Read more

THROUGHOUT HER WORK, Maggie Smith presents vulnerability and softness that comes from someone writing a love letter to the very thing that is trying to destroy her—and everyone else. Smith pulls from fairytales, imagined natural disasters, and biblical stories, but reminds us that the dangers we face are often human. Without an edge of anger or … Read more

COMING SOON to Willow Springs

Spokane-based artist and graphic designer Chris Bovey is the mastermind behind the cover art for Willow Springs issues 81 through 86. Each of these covers is iconic Spokane, and his work has forever shaped the look and feel of Willow Springs magazine for the better. Bovey’s goal is to cherish and capture the heart of Spokane. To glorify the … Read more

“I CAME TO UNDERSTAND that my father was my antagonist,” Kim Barnes declared in a 2009 essay for the New York Times, “the one against whom I tested myself every day, the one who had both scarred and shaped me.” Barnes’s female characters—in her fiction and nonfiction—face two primary obstacles: overbearing men and religious fundamentalism. In … Read more

THROUGH HIS CONTROL of persona and voice, Gary Copeland Lilley examines the experiences of people often relegated to the margins—sex workers, prisoners, drifters. The undercurrent unifying these characters and voices is Lilley’s innately felt musicality, drawn from the litanies of the King James Bible, the looseness of the blues, and the recitation of hoodoo ritual. A … Read more

THE  SPEAKERS  IN  PAISLEY  REKDAL’S  POEMS are often observers—drawing connections between the private and the personal, the historical, mythological, and scientific. Her lyricism and her combination of loose, free verse and structured, traditional forms come together to emphasize the slippage between fact and fantasy, old myths and new. In a review of Imaginary Vessels for the Los Angeles Times, … Read more

IN A REVIEW OF SPACE, IN CHAINS for the Kenyon Review, Jeremy Bass writes that Laura Kasischke “[posits] her readers in the space of active consideration, a space in which the reader might feel, as her poems do, actively alive in a world that is both fanuliar and strange, at once common and surreal.” Although Kasischke’s writing comes … Read more