Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Amy Johnquest

May 14, 2018 - By Edward Clifford

Artist Amy Johnquest contributed the cover art and portfolio from her collection Adopted Ancestors, A Family Album (Volume 59, Issue 1, Spring 2018).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you created.
I’m almost sixty years old so by “first pieces” I’m figuring you’re talking about the hand painted Victorian cabinet cards like the ones in MR. About four years ago I got the bug during a ladies collage party, hosted by a vintage photo collector and dealer Stacy Waldman. She provided us with scads of photos and ephemera that weren’t suitable for resale. In other words destined for the trash bin. Like a modern day...

10 Questions for Jona Colson

May 8, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

Outside I saw the flagstones movi ng like heads in a Picasso
    painting—black beetles for eyes.The space unpeop

led yet so alive.The sky torn off but still du

sted with clouds.

My father die d in his bed—silent and cooling like the steel
     kettle my mother used for tea.

—from “At the Open House,” Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I return to Anne Sexton. Her truth is a courageous.  I also read Anne Carson—her experimental forms and metaphors are gods. 

What did you want to be...

10 Questions for Ilze Duarte

April 30, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

“She stole almost everything from me. First, Mom’s joy. Then, Grandma Bela’s tender attention. And, still, Julinho. She took away the best that I had, the adults’ trust and my innocence. She tore me from my nest. And this, one couldn’t forgive in a person, even if she is kind, generous, and pretty.”
—from “Miss Bruna,” by Marília Arnaud, translated by Ilze Duarte, Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I was a student in the Certificate in Translation Program at the University of São Paulo many years ago. I had completed my bachelor’s degree in English and thought that taking the translation program would help me improve my English. (I didn...

10 Questions for Gregory Fraser

April 24, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

My son brings home a drawing from school my wife thinks looks
like four erect penises. I say they’re just very tall mushrooms.
Daddy dick, mommy dick, son dick, daughter dick, insists my wife.
She believes all boys see the world in terms of dicks. Half of me
agrees. The bottom half. The top consents to nothing.
—from “Very Tall Mushrooms,” Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As an undergraduate, I wrote a poem about Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and it appeared in the campus literary magazine. I was reading a lot of Wallace Stevens back then, and, naturally, his “The Man with the Blue Guitar” powerfully shaped my vision. The poem...

“A devastating downshift”: Paula Bohince on translating Corrado Govoni

April 23, 2018 - By Krzysztof Rowiński

An Interview with Paula Bohince, winner of the 7th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation

Krzysztof Rowiński: First of all, congratulations on winning the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize! Thank you for taking the time to talk about your work. Could you start by telling me about how you came to translation? Was it something that was a result of your own writing, or was it more about the love for Italian language or literature?

PB: I began in 2015, after my third book of poems was finished but before it was published—in that kind of blank space. That collection, Swallows and Waves, was based on Japanese Edo-period artworks, and I approached those poems as a kind of erasure of self—there is no...