Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for George Kalamaras

July 25, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“The poems of my friends will never be lost in layers of white death.
I read them aloud and hear them breathe.
Gene’s Dostoevsky & Other Nature Poems. Alvaro’s little broth
of a train in the distance boiling down to nothing.
This is not an elegy but a love poem.
This is not a love poem but a praising of hounds.
The day of no fire waits, here, inside wood smoke and snow.”
—from “The Day of No Fire” which appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.
One of the first...

10 Questions for Francesca Bell

July 18, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“In the Maltese Church the American kisses
her dark groom and the priest watches
before he grants the blessing
why did the choice land on Prague why on this rainy day
white veils belie nothing
but the girl in the wheelchair wants to make it
over the bridge before the lightning gets going”
—from “Rainy Sun” by Ilma Rakusa, translated by Francesca Bell for the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
One of the first pieces I translated is a poem, originally in Arabic, by Bissan Abu Khaled, called “The Orbit of a Possibility....

10 Questions for Stacie Leatherman

July 17, 2017 - By Beth Derr

". . . as the sea commits to its mutability, and when rain
strikes the earth, commitment,
as one commits to breathe."
-From "The Commitment of Rain" which appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Although I have been writing and publishing in earnest since undergrad, I remember that my writing started to truly take shape after the death of my mother, when I was 22. I cannot remember those poems’ exact titles, but I remember trying very hard to articulate what that loss meant, and really, I haven’t stopped writing about death, in some way, since that...

10 Questions for Jared Harél

July 13, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to,

says my son at his bris, though it’s my party

and I carry the weight of a hundred generations

on the tip of my penis might be more apt.

Or: It’s my party. Let us pray.”

--from “Meditation in the Key of an Exhale” which  appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.

Writing poems lends itself to many “firsts”. “Meditation in the Key of an Exhale” is actually a first poem in that it was the first one I wrote about my...

10 Questions for Nancy Naomi Carlson

July 11, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“In the enormous, moldy bathroom with damp, flaking walls leprous with saltpeter and black-speckled marble tiles that make each step and splash resonate, as in ancient Roman thermal baths, Rehvana climbed into the tall, dark green serpentine bathtub; she sank into the colossal lion’s claw-footed tub. Suppressing her shivering which could barely be helped, face to face with huge mares frozen in a furious gallop, nostrils flared, forelegs raised, urged on by a bronze-covered Neptune turning green, pock-marked by marine salts, brandishing a truncated trident, Re­hvana luxuriated in a long bath, thoroughly enjoying the pleasantly tepid water that flows from...