Interview

Róbert Gál

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A good joke should be understood straight off, just like a good aphorism.

Amy Berkowitz

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The book is true: I had a terrible experience in grad school, it made me feel like I had nothing to say, that poetry wasn’t a place where I could say anything.

Toby Altman

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What does it mean to translate architectural or structural principles into poetic form? And how might asking these two art forms to engage with each other transform them?

Steve Amick

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A candlelit tub is like a time machine—darkness can be a form of time travel, I find. All those modern trappings get shed away.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

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When we widen language, we widen understanding and we widen questions. We allow for questions that we might not necessarily allow for if things are too boxed off. I feel like it’s questions that are going to get us through.

Tom Snarsky

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When you’re on the flat part of [a] phase transition . . . you can’t just go blitz through it. . . . You need to give that change its proper attention, like letting the water still in a pond so you can see the leaves from underneath, their reflection.

Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

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It’s easier to stay in a place that’s known to you even if it’s hurting you. So there’s a question of loyalty, whether to your country or your family, that is complicated by being a colony.

On the Poetics of Congregation amid Dispossession: A Conversation

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The ghazal is a cumulative form that builds on established metaphors in a non-linear fashion. . . . I see tremendous liberatory potential in its cumulativeness. . . . When writing a ghazal, my poetic voice is not just my own, just like my pain is not just my own.

Joseph Grantham

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I try my best not to think too hard about categorizing what is part of my work as an “artist” or “writer” and what’s a diversion.

Jessica Johnson

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That sense of the un-holdable world-horrors and calls to action alongside pictures of scarves that my friends knitted and soup that they made and thirst traps and flowers and trees and cats, the sort of simultaneity and unprocessability . . . vibrating in your pocket, definitely fed METABOLICS.