Interviews

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

“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

“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