Interviews

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

“IT’S DIFFICULT IN TIMES LIKE THESE,” Anne Frank wrote. “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Frank’s words, delivered in the face of what she called “grim reality,” … Read more

“I WISH I COULD GO through the poem image by image, line by line, and tell you where it is me, and where it is somebody else,” D.A. Powell says in an interview with Nashville Review. “But to tell the god’s honest truth, I don’t know if l know all of that one hundred percent, nor should … Read more

…I’m sayingin the beginning was the wordand it was good, it meant one human entering another and it’s stillwhat I love,  the word madeflesh. Fuck me, I say to the onewhose lovely body I want close, and as we fuck I know it’s holy,a psalm, a hymn, a hammerringing down on an anvil,forging a whole new world. … Read more

“How I would love to be the speaker of my poems!” declares Cate Marvin in an article published in the Los Angeles Times. “For then I should know such liberation.” This liberation is exactly what draws us into Marvin’s poems. Her speakers are free to love, to seek vengeance, to exert authority. Marvin grew up in Washington, … Read more

“How I would love to be the speaker of my poems!” declares Cate Marvin in an article published in the Los Angeles Times. “For then I should know such liberation.” This liberation is exactly what draws us into Marvin’s poems. Her speakers are free to love, to seek vengeance, to exert authority. Marvin grew up in Washington, … Read more

Major Jackson’s poetry is clear, fluent, and musical, sometimes relying on formal structure, sometimes referencing pop culture, and often investigating how seemingly disparate subjects can interact and inform each other. He asserts that a poem “becomes a kind of time capsule,” and as such, can contain references to both Kanye West and ancient Greek mythology, … Read more

“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit,” Joyce Carol Oates declares in The Faith of a Writer, “I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called ‘culture.’” Oates has dedicated herself to life as an artist. She’s produced over … Read more

Andre Dubus’s fiction dives into the underbelly and wrestles with copies we often turn away from: crime, poverty, infidelity, violence, merciless bullying, and pathetic sex. His lush layers sensory detail ground the reader in the smallest moments of his characters’ lives and their often unresolved conflicts. We tumble along with them, with rarely a redemptive branch … Read more