Blog / Interviews

10 Questions with Owen McLeod

May 16, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

“Barren field, tin sky, couds
the color of clouds. Why describe things
when things describe themselves?

Besides, there’s nowhere to turn
when your shield against despair
becomes its source,”

--from “Igloo” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1)

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

I don’t remember the first poems well enough, since I wrote them in my last year or two of college (the late 1980s). Then I went to graduate school in philosophy and abandoned poetry. Twenty-five years later, in the fall of 2014, I started...

10 Questions with Jodie Noel Vinson

May 9, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

“On a Chilly January morning in 1893, Louise Imogen Guieny took the train from Auburndale to Boston and made her way with the brisk, long-legged steps of a practiced walker to 246 Boylston Street. When the poet entered the warmth of Perkins Hall, her gold-rimmed spectacles must have immediately fogged over. Yet even through the clouded lenses Louise might have seen the room was close to full—could word of the Women’s Rest Tour Association have spread so quickly? ”
--from “The Unprotected Females of the Women's Rest Tour Association” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1)

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10 Questions for Mhani Alaoui

May 4, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

”BEITHE WAS A LOUD CITY. It had the loudness of a city not yet used to itself. Steel clicked against steel and stone echoed stone. There was no respite from its noise.
    On a bend in the road in the center of Beithe, there stood a house. It was known to all the town-dwellers as Anna’s House. Though no one knew why. For in fact, the house belonged to a young woman called Sarah and no Anna was ever seen or remembered to have lived in that house on a bend in the road in the center of town.
    And in Sarah’s house, there was silence. The loudness and noise never entered Sarah’s huse. Every...

10 Questions for Vincent Granata

April 24, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

“When I was eight years old, my mom invented a game called “getting lost.” She was worried, she later told me, that I was starting to feel less loved. At four and a half I’d drawn a chalk mural to welcome my new triplet siblings, but Mom feared that I’d grown to feel lost in their shuffle.
      We sat together in her minivan the first time we played the game. “Okay, Vince,” she said. “Tell me where to turn.”
      I pointed left and she swung out of the driveway. At the end of our street...

10 Questions for Cynthia Dewi Oka

April 18, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

"My love,

The tide is poised. Between you and I the end of the world

where an abandoned crane will either spit blue
blazing desert from its graffiti lips or smash
the crow-bedecked tenements in search of a trumpet..."
--from "The American Dream Writes to Orpheus" which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1)

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

My first published poem was called The Catheter Speaks...