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"All reading is performance, all performance is reading."

October 3, 2022 - By Alison C. Rollins

I've always admired the way Alison C. Rollins's poetry bridges urgency and experimentation. In her hands, objects from the archive are transformed into poetic vectors to imagine other worlds, other possibilities. I've also been following and admiring her recent experiments with creating physical objects from this poetic process. When we received her exquisite poem, "A Bell Is a Messenger of Time" for the Fall 2022 issue of...

10 Questions for Mee Ok Icaro

September 30, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

When I was small like
a selfish idea
I would pick pieces of his hair
off my smooth girl-body
swollen
in the dark places
where he had become light
—from "Triptych," Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
After a long hiatus from writing after high school, I took it up again when I was 33. The first piece I wrote was an excerpt in what will soon be my memoir, although I didn’t know it at the time because I was about to die. My illness got me into writing again though, and writing in part saved my life.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I have been a longtime admirer of Donna Tartt’s The...

10 Questions for Carol Moldaw

September 29, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

For years, Sue and I would collapse into hysterics
if one of us said "Stuttgart." We didn't have to say
"Mercedes factory" or "bedroom" or "Mom."
Just "Stuttgart" was enough to set us off,
—from "Stuttgart Revisited," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
If I skip over earnest grammar school doggerel, high school self-conscious (and earnest) attempts, college (still earnest, still (more)-self-conscious) glimmerings, then the poem I mark as my first is “64 Panoramic Way,” the first poem (but not the oldest) in my first book, Taken from the River.  I wrote it in graduate school and the title...

10 Questions for Megan Pinto

September 20, 2022 - By Helen McColpin

I try and go back to the bottom
of the placid blue lake, or maybe
the storm’s calm eye. This is how I bargain
for your love in my mind, like a child.
—from "Chiaroscuro after Caravaggio’s Paul," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In 5^th grade my local newspaper had a poetry contest. I remember sitting in my backyard and writing a poem about the beach. I still remember the opening lines: “The foamy waves lap the shore/ the salty breeze in my face/ seagulls fly toward their home/ and me, just standing there.” I don’t remember the rest of the poem, but knowing my 5^th grade self, I’m sure it was existential....

10 Questions for Ryan Habermeyer

September 15, 2022 - By Helen McColpin

Fifty-nine hours before dying, Hermann Ploucquet greets the postman in the doorway. There is a letter from his mother and another from his friend, the physicist Hippolyte Fizeau, but none from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. No doubt he pretended not to be disappointed, and I can imagine him chatting with the postman about his gardens.
—from "Skin Walking," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In elementary school I remember writing and illustrating a story about a boy who discovers a broken thread of sunlight on the playground and takes it home. He feeds it, bathes it, plays with it, tries to use it to climb to heaven. My parents saved all kinds of junk from my school days, but sadly...