Tag: interview

Lyric Essentials: Odessa Charon Reads Brian Doyle

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week writer and teacher Odessa Charon has joined us to discuss the work of Brian Doyle, fateful encounters, and the divinity that surrounds us in our everyday lives. Thank you for reading and, as always, we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: What was your first experience with Doyle’s work?

Image of Doyle was taken by Odessa when they met.

Odessa Charon: There was a Literature professor I had, when I went to college in the eerie lowland expanse of Ohio. This professor was a mentor and confidant. At the time, I was struggling with my mental health, oscillating between severe depressive and manic episodes. I had begun processing a CPTSD diagnosis, while still living in a dorm room where I experienced a deep trauma. I felt Godly entities had deserted me. My brain was a consistent threat to my existence. Art and spirituality no longer fed me. Life did not inspire.

One afternoon, forbidden spliff already between my lips as we wrapped up a class session, this professor-guide called me into her office before I could rush out the door to get stoned. Without words, this professor pushed a photocopy of Brian Doyle’s prose poem, “A Sin” across her cherrywood desk. Intuitively, she knew it was exactly what I needed, in the midst of tumult. 

Never before had I read a piece which so defiantly shirked conventions of formatting. “A Sin” echoed my own writing style and mental health at the time; swirling, hypomanic thought processes, free of punctuation unless absolutely necessary. Yet Doyle grounded his works in what is true and unchanging. While brain chemistries and emotions are fleeting, Brian Doyle wrote words rooted in the grace(ful/less-ness) experience of humanness. In both his writing style and the Divine love, hope, anger, and confusion he spoke to, I felt held and inspired.

Odessa Charon reads “A Song of Believing” by Brian Doyle

Read the poem here.

AH: In our correspondence, you mentioned a life changing experience with Doyle. How has he inspired your work?

OC: Around the time of being gifted “A Sin,” I was introduced to Martin Heidegger’s theory of thrownness; the feeling of having-been-thrown into the world. After a particularly transformative psychedelic experience, I became acutely aware of my own place on this Earth. Shattering like tectonic plates, a stagnant piece of me shifted. Meditations within this dark night of the soul forced the realization that I was living in a pattern of dissociation. While my internal world was going through a death-life cycle, I understood I would never reach the “life” stage, unless I left Ohio. Portland, Oregon intuitively called to me. I knew no one there, and had never visited. 

If you have ever spent an extended period of time in Portland, you may have noticed the extreme “portal” that that place is. Living in that part of the Pacific Northwest grants access to elements of spiritual awakening which are incredibly specific to the land there. Everyone, and I do mean that, I came across while living there was on some kind of pilgrimage towards something larger. Portland breathes in those who are ready for that journey. For me, it was exactly where I needed to be. Coincidentally, Brian Doyle also lived and taught there.

Before I decided to leave my college in Ohio, I decided to tour Portland, just to be sure I wanted to move there. Spiritual knowingness is one thing, but logistics are a whole other. On a whim, sitting in my campus dining hall, I emailed Doyle at his University of Portland address. I asked if we could meet, just to chat about his work. I explained that I was not a reporter, or any kind of professional in the literary word—just a nineteen year old fan, processing a phenomenological awakening. We could get lunch, or coffee. He responded, “I don’t have meetings over food, but you’re welcome to come to my office.” 

We sat in his university office for an hour. We reflected together on how a Midwest landscape of seeming nothingness can inform an ecstatic experience (he related it to Jesus in the desert). I processed moving away from my Jewish religious background (“when you’re nineteen, it’s important to discover what you actually believe in”). Between students dropping off essays, Brian Doyle and I processed religion vs. spirituality vs. the mystical (in his words, most organized religions are “smoke and mirrors and performance”). We spoke of how to write, and why (“because you need to”). We laughed, too. Brian Doyle was an insightful, perceptive man, profoundly connected to the Great Unknown, as much as he was a humorist. If it doesn’t bring you joy, he said in some other words, don’t do it.

That meeting inspired me to embrace mystery. My creative work is a chimera and oftentimes, a shapeshifter. If I were to force it into one genre, or one format, I would lose my magic and passion. In a way, he gave me a sort of permission, for sacred embodiment. Before I left Brian Doyle’s office, he gave me one of his own copies of Grace Notes. On the title page, he inscribed in his winding handwriting, 

“To my friend Odessa—

With laughter and prayers and my regards on your work—

best wishes for light and for fun in it—

Brian Doyle.”

Something to note is that Brian Doyle passed away from a brain tumor, about seven months after we met. I am forever in gratitude for his lessons, his impact, and his presence.

Odessa Charon reads “if we got to be what we so want to be” by Brian Doyle  

Read the poem here.

AH: Why did you choose these poems specifically?

OC: I chose the poems/proem, “The best poem ever” (available on the Sundress Patreon); “A song of believing”; and “If we ever got to be what we so want to be” because they represent the mission of Brian Doyle’s work, as well as my own philosophy of living. All three speak to noticing the Divine in everything, everywhere. Life, as crushing as it can be, is also devastatingly beautiful if you open your eyes to it. In “a song of believing”, Doyle writes, 

Look, I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedies, we slide away into the dark oceans behind the stars.

But I also know that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the brooding wall.

Brian Doyle did not pretend that the inherent transcendency of life was all rainbows and ascension. He did not invalidate that this world is rife with heartbreak, and valid terror. The point is, you feel the fear, and do it anyway. Both hope and loss can be held at the same time. One may be more prevalent than the other at times, but it does not mean the light goes away. Personally, mindful awareness of duality is a lifeboat; it saved me, and continues to do so.

Both “The best poem ever” and “If we ever got to be what we so want to be” are also testaments to that idea. I have spent the last five years as an early childhood educator. This was not a line of work which I ever saw myself entering, but it has been a healing balm for my inner child. Working with children has further enlightened me to the idea that there is magic and mystery all around us, at all times. In “the best poem over,” Doyle and his child consider, 

Maybe there are a lot of poems that you can’t write

Down. Couldn’t that be? But they’re still there even

If no one can write them down, right? Poems in

Books are only a little bit of all the poems there are.

Those are only the poems someone found words for.

Poetry, like Divine inspiration, like grace, are always accessible to those who can bring themselves to notice it. A core part of childhood, ideally, is the ability to play. Playing, to me, is a form of connecting with something much more intuitive and special, than the adult world gives credit to. As adults, play is a form of inner child healing. Play can also include writing. If we as grown-ups can embrace a childlike sense of wonder—if we could grasp the fluidity of art, emotion, and Godliness (whatever that means to you)—I believe we would all be much better off.

AH: What have you been up to lately (life, writing, anything)? 

OC: Currently, I feel myself arising from a contractive state. I view life as a series of “contractions” and “expansions.” Contraction, like the physical pains of labor; expansion, as in the literal life that comes as a result. I moved to Portland, Maine (I must love port cities) in the autumn, and am still finding my footing here. I have a couple of friends, but no writing community thus far. It is cold as hell and being a teacher in a pandemic is… Yeah.

I love Maine and am grateful to be here. Physically and psycho-spiritually, I am exactly where I need to be. Is it comfortable? God, no. Is it aligned and worth it? Unequivocally, yes.

Soon, I am navigating a total career switch to the publishing industry. It is scary, to do a thing for the very first time. But that fear is so juicy, in a way. It is such a potent time for growth. Creatively, I am in a fallow period of working on my book, Nostos. I write trauma narratives, which tend to spill onto the page when they are good and ready. I trust myself and the process. Fallow periods are preparation. Divine timing never fails.

Brian Doyle was an American writer and educator. Doyle was the editor of Portland Magazine, taught at the University of Oregon, and was the author of several novels, poetry collections, and essays collections. He was the recipient of multiple Pushcart Prizes and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Read some of his work at Orion.

Read about him at LitHub.

Learn more about his books here.

Odessa Charon (they/them) is a writer, teacher, and spiritual intuitive. Primarily through symbology related to Greek myth, they write from their own experiences of recovery from childhood abuse and sexual trauma. In support of them writing their first creative nonfiction book, Nostos, Odessa is a grateful recipient of a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant. Through writing and intuitive work, Odessa is a healing guide for brave souls, journeying to their own underworlds. Odessa Charon resides in Portland, Maine. They live with two witchy cats and the friendly spirits in their apartment. You can follow them on Instagram for thoughts on mental health and spirituality, at @odessaiswriting.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist, writer, and journalist. Her writing has appeared in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Lyric Essentials: Sumita Chakraborty Reads Alice Oswald

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week we’ve chatted with poet and educator Sumita Chakraborty about ecology, Alice Oswald’s work, and poetic inspirations. We hope you enjoy it, and, as always, thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: Why did you choose Oswald? What was your first experience reading their work? 

Sumita Chakraborty: I chose Oswald because I’ve been learning from her work for a long time, and the way she thinks about language and poetics (among other thematic obsessions like death and ecology) really resonates with me. Technically, the first time I encountered her work was when I still worked for AGNI, where I was on the editorial staff for 13 years—at the beginning of that stretch of time I was an intern, and her poem “Dunt” (which is now in her fairly recent collection Falling Awake) was initially published in the very first issue of AGNI on which I worked, back in 2006. My real sustained engagement with her work came with her excavation of the Iliad, Memorial, which I read when it first came out and then became even more significant to me after my sister died in 2014. I read it multiple times a day for a few months and then started digging through all of her work.

Sumita Chakraborty Reads “Memorial” by Alice Oswald

AH: How has Oswald’s work inspired your writing? 

SC: Countless ways, to be honest! One thing that’s lately been on my mind, especially post-Arrow, is that I think Oswald has a remarkable way of dissolving the imagined boundary between the “experimental” and the “lyric.” I think that boundary is one that we often internalize or are taught to internalize, whereas Oswald reminds me that they are both very much two sides of the same coin—or, probably, basically the same side of something much more complex than a coin. I also love the way she honors and follows language, as well as the way she fluidly balances and re-balances each poem’s investment in ambiguity and concreteness alike. To be honest, I could go on for ages about her work and its importance to me; I wrote about some other things I’m drawn to some years back for LARB, and I do go on for ages there! I completely trampled the initial word limit I was given and I am very appreciative that the editors there let me run with it. 

Sumita Chakraborty Reads “Must Never Sleep” by Alice Oswald

AH: There seems to be an intersection between Oswald and you: you both have a tendency to dabble in the discussion of the environment. Where did your interest in this begin? 

SC: That’s kind of you to say and to notice! Ecology studies is a huge part of my scholarly life, so I’ve been thinking about it fairly actively at least since I began my PhD in 2012. I think where I especially resonate with Oswald’s approach to it is best captured in a remark she made in, I believe, an interview with Granta. She says that the nature poets that she likes the most are Homer, Ovid, and Shakespeare, specifically “because they include the human and the non-human in the same picture”; of ecosystems, she says, “How can you categorize that?” A similar approach guides my interest in the environment. 

AH: What have you been up to lately? Got any news to share (life, writing, small achievements—anything!)? 

SC: I’ve got something environment-related, actually! My academic book—which is one of my main preoccupations at the moment, and is called Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene—is newly under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. On the poetry side, I’m playing with some new forms of visual and multimedia poetry that I’m really enjoying, and my second collection is shaping up to be rather obsessed with questions of interiority. 

Alice Oswald is a British poet; although she is not as well-known outside of her native country, her work is widely circulated. She is the author of The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile and six other poetry collections. Her poems delve into the topic of nature, history, and environment. She was the first woman to serve as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Read her poem “Flies” at Poetry.

Read a profile about Oswald in The New Yorker.

Find her award-winning collection Falling Awake here.

Sumita Chakraborty is the author of the poetry collection Arrow, which was published by Alice James Books in the U.S. and Carcanet Press in the U.K. in 2020 and has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her work in progress includes a scholarly monograph, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing at the University of Michigan.

Find her on Twitter @notsumatra. 

Learn more about Sumita on her website.

Read her poem “Dear, Beloved” at Poetry.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Interview with Inès Pujos, Author of Something Dark to Shine In

In anticipation of the release of her collection Something Dark to Shine In, Inès Pujos spoke with Sundress Publications’ editorial intern Ryleigh Wann about the use of the speculative and macabre in writing, animals, and survival.

Ryleigh Wann: The manuscript for Something Dark to Shine In was, at some points, also known as Against Porcelain and Lilly of The Valley. Could you speak more about the title of the book and how it encompasses the collection?

Inès Pujos: When I originally finished writing the manuscript post-MFA, I named it Against Porcelain after the title poem, which captured this urgent and macabre perspective that seemed to thread the collection as a whole. There was something eerie about porcelain, in the color and the fragility nature of it all. After submitting to several contests, a few editors pointed out that they thought a different title would be better suited. So I began submitting it as Lilly of the Valley, a nod to another title poem that was added after the first draft of the manuscript. But as time went on, I felt that title felt a little too mundane. My manuscript was previously picked up by another press and the editor suggested that I just lift my opening quote from Frank Standford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You: “I’ll just bleed so the stars have something Dark to Shine In.” This quote has always resonated with me and really encompasses this idea of making something special out of one’s own martyrdom and trauma…which is what my whole collection discusses, and so the manuscript officially became Something Dark to Shine In.”

RW: Can you speak about the use of the speculative in this collection, found in the wolf
character in “Breaking Winter” or the meandering nature of “Patron Saint of All Lost Things”?

IP: I first began writing because I was not able to draw…or at least draw well. I always loved the surrealist painters and gravitated towards the surreal in my writing. It was in those early writing days that I created whole alternative worlds with these more fantastical characters all living in a village by the sea. As the years went on, more of these surreal characters began to emerge and I’ve carried them with me in various poems. Interestingly ,the wolf character appeared in my writing as a predator, in relation to the narrator. But over time, the wolf also became a feral protector. A few years out of writing “Breaking Winter,” I was working on my trauma with my therapist through EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and the wolf character came to my protection…in all of his feralness he was able to be protective and at times nurturing so my relationship with this character changed.

As for “Patron Saint of All Lost Thing,” that poem was written in one sitting. I was on the train from NYC to New Haven and “Says I Love You”… I just remember having written one line and then it all flowed out of me, very much stream of consciences…which also could have been facilitated by the movement of the train. It was here that I explored a bit more of my personal family folklore and the long form allowed for a more whimsical approach. By the time I reach New Haven, I had the first draft done…my friend and I spent the afternoon walking through a graveyard …which was peak gothic and writerly and was able to make its way into sections of “Patron Saint of All Lost Things” after that.

RW: Can you tell me about the use of form throughout the collection, specifically in “Breaking Winter” or “More Blood in the East Village” and your use of space on the page?

IP: I find writing in certain forms to be very motivating when I experience writers block and although I am comfortable with more traditional form, I do like creating a hybrid out of it… taking something traditional and adding a twist to it. Yes…I love using white space…whether it is through erasure poems or using the space to create an erasure type esthetic. I use spaces as a way to add a bit more breath in my poems…often I find that my work has some manic energy to it and I rush to get everything on the page. The use of white space in “Breaking Winter” or “More Blood in the East Village” acts almost like the beat cue in screenplays. I want to add more tension between the manic/more urgent pacing with the use of white space.

RW: This haunting and haunted collection employs morbid language and imagery to discuss the impacts trauma has on the body. Can you discuss the influence of the macabre in your writing of such visceral language, themes, and imagery?

IP: My use of the macabre in my writing is a direct influence from my thought process and I’ve turned to writing to explore and destigmatize my own intrusive thoughts from previous traumas. But I also think that I’ve always been a bit morbid. As a child, I was fascinated by animals and wanted to be a surgeon. Growing up, my cats would often leave their prey lying around our yard and I would take their bodies back inside and try to examine their bodies and blood under a microscope. When I saw a dead bird on the road, I would put it in my bag and examine its wings, tried to sew it back. My desire to be a surgeon stopped the moment I experienced some medical trauma when I was thirteen. Though I still poured over my own surgery notes and pictures…I just didn’t feel comfortable inflecting harm on someone even if they medically need it. I find the body fascinating, whether human or animal and am curious to witness its inner workings. Post numerous surgeries and medical treatments, I took a lot of those experiences and put them into writing. That lived experience combined with intrusive thoughts only further fueled my more visceral images in themes. I think there’s a link between the macabre and trauma, In Esme Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme teases out this connection beautifully…of consuming more macabre media and even true crime following a trauma. I think it’s my brain’s way of finding attunement, so I’m naturally drawn to morbidity.

RW: Tell me about the particular syntax of these poems, particularly the use of enjambment and blank spaces between phrases in individual lines like in “Good Faith.”

IP: I approached “Good Faith” in a similar manner to “Breaking Winter” and More Blood in the East Village”…in terms of the form and use of white space. Though, in this later poem, many of the spaces are not so much about creating tension and rather using the space to emphasize the intimacy between my partner and I…kind of like when we look at each other and I know what she’s thinking and vice versa.

RW: Something Dark to Shine In almost reads like a grimoire. Can you discuss the balance of the personal and cosmic mythologies (or magic) occurring within these poems?

IP: I grew up in the United States with just my immediate family…all my extended family was in France and so the only constant connection to my larger family was through old photographs. I used to take them out and look at my relatives, create narratives as a way to feel closer to my relatives. At an early age I found out about my grandmother’s suicide, which occurred when my mother was fourteen. My grandmother was so tragically beautiful and the stories surrounding her depression, her mental illness, and her family dynamics captivated me. So those stories always appeared to have some scene of mysticism/ family folklore. I would say that this folklore is very present in “Patron Saint of All Lost Things”, where I explore family grief and trauma and making something bright out of something so terribly tragic. It all ties back to the need to make something special, it’s very human.

RW: What truths do you think the book is searching for?

IP: I think a lot of personal truths were written within this manuscript by my own unconscious. When I first wrote the poems within my second and third semester of my MFA, I had not come to terms that during my first semester, I was raped. And yet, looking back at the poems now, almost ten years later, it was so clear that my body processed the rape earlier than my own mind…so there are so many personal truths hidden throughout the poems. Same goes for my own gender identity…I look at the lines that are in this book and I am stunned at how clearly I knew myself within that realm of the poem, but that it took me a little longer to come to terms with these truths.

RW: Many of the truths in these poems include a consideration of place, such as the East Village, Tompkins Square. I found it interesting how this ecotone is written about; the speaker or language of these poems interacting with a location. What does it mean to you to write about a place?

IP: I find location to be a very important part of my writing process. Perhaps it’s the influence of screenwriting, but I almost always need to ground myself in a physical space…whether imagined or real…I need the reader to be able to see where I am. And a great deal of these poems from the manuscript were written at coffee shops in the East Village, on my walks through Tompkins Park, and throughout the Lower East Side. I think there’s something inherently special about the East Village…so many great art movements were born there, and it was the first time that I saw a
large city function as literally a small village. I talk about my friend’s mother, Leslie, who I never met while she was alive…but having heard so many stories about her while in High school,  always imagined the neighborhood as Avant Garde and feral. When I first spent more time in the East Village, I felt instantly connected to it, and to Leslie, and I began writing my own folklore narrative between us.

RW: Which poems compel you the most?

IP: This answer has changed so many times of the years. Looking back, I notice the difference in my work the most with the poem entitled, “The New Frontier.” While the subject matter is about grooming and sexual assault, a subject that I cover in other poems, It’s the first poem that I am more direct about the subject itself. It was written after I had realized and began to process that I was a rape survivor, and I was more comfortable with claiming that trauma and had the words to articulate what I had survived. Previously, my unconscious didn’t’ have that clear cut language and I tended to rely on metaphors and more surreal settings. While there are some
surreal aspects to this poem, it felt like a turning point in my own trauma processing and writing.

Order your copy of Something Dark to Shine In today

Inès Pujos holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Their poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, among others. Their manuscript was a finalist for multiple prizes, including Alice James’ 2017 open reading period and Semi-finalist for The 2017 Berkshire Prize by Tupelo Press. For more information visit inespujoscreative.com.

Ryleigh Wann is an MFA poetry candidate at UNC Wilmington where she teaches creative writing and is the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in Rejection Letters, Flypaper Lit, and Kissing Dynamite Poetry, among others.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson Reads Lisel Mueller

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! Today we’ve chatted with educator and poet Sunni Brown Wilkinson about Lisel Mueller’s work, revealing what you’ve been reading in your work, and connecting writing to occupied spaces and histories. As always, thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: How and when did you first discover Mueller’s work?

Sunni Brown Wilkinson: I’d seen Mueller’s name around on the internet for a while on poems I really liked, and then about a year ago a poet friend posted ‘Alive Together’ on her Facebook page one day and wrote about how much honor she gave that single poem, how profound it is. I went to the library a week or so later and checked out the book Alive Together, Mueller’s newer and selected poems, and fell in love with her work. I’ve been exploring her poetry ever since.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson Reads “Alive Together” by Lisel Mueller

AH: Mueller’s work is often said to engage with history and folklore, with both personal and private lives. As a writer, do you relate to this inspiration, and if so, how? 


SBW: I very much relate. One of the things I love most about Mueller is the way she celebrates the domestic life as a vibrant, necessary space, but also connects that space with history and specific historical or artistic figures. It’s as if she’s constantly braiding together moments in her day, things she touches and people she loves, with something she read about a composer or a study on bees or a meditation on Monet. She sees how things intersect.

And her own family history of fleeing Germany at the onset of WW II at age 15 with her parents and, from the safe harbor of America, watching her native country implode, informs nearly every poem, if not contextually than in spirit. Where we come from and the road of our past, the marvel of being able to live the life we do, are themes that seem to hold onto the hands of nearly all of her poems.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson Reads “Things” by Lisel Mueller

AH: How has Mueller’s work inspired you? 
SBW: My mentor in grad school, Christopher Howell, once said, “Your work should reveal what you’ve been reading.” I love how Mueller does this so openly in her writing. She writes directly about Mary Shelley, Patricia Hearst, science magazines, composers, fairy tales. Each poem is a portal into this living space where other great minds work and mourn and live. She keeps a humility about her own genius by admiring the genius and discoveries of others.

Her poem “Reading The Brothers Grimm to Jenny” is just heartbreakingly lovely. The line “Jenny, we make just dreams/ out of our unjust lives,” and the image at the end of herself holding “the golden key” for her daughter, whose understanding of the world is rooted in her mother’s words, reveal this person who knows the worst of the world and still believes in the magic. And who reverences the childlike belief that good will conquer all. She both questions and celebrates that.

There’s a warmth, a curiosity, and an admirable dexterity of the mind that comes through in every Mueller poem. She’s equally comfortable writing about her grandmother’s gold pin, bees, roadtripping down the highway, and picking raspberries as she is writing about classical music and composers, Monet, the Queen of Sheba. Why wouldn’t you want to hang out with someone like that? She’s interested in everything! She’s down to earth and deeply perceptive. Her language is electric and accessible. If we could choose a BFF dead poet, mine would be Lisel Mueller. She reminds me to stay curious, read gobs, and live purposefully in my own quiet
spaces.

AH: What have you been up to lately? Got any exciting news to share (about life, writing, anything!)? 
SBW: I recently started writing essays. I’m taking a very slow route to putting together a
collection, but I’ll get there. I’ve already got the central ideas in place and am tinkering
with the parts. It’s also coming up on Halloween, so that means we’re reading scary stories at our house and going for hikes in the foothills and having fires in the fire pit and making lots of soup, so life is good!

Lisel Muller was an American poetry born in Germany. After fleeing Nazi Germany at age fifteen with her family, Mueller became interested in memory and history within poetry, which led her to produce prolific work. She is the author of the Second Language (1986) and The Need to Hold Still, among many other books.

Read more about her at Poetry Foundation.

Read her poem “Afterthoughts by the Lovers.”

Find her in-depth obituary in The New York Times.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s most recent work can be found in Western Humanities Review, Coal Hill Review, New Ohio Review, Ruminate, and South Dakota Review. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of Sundress Publications’ 2020 Chapbook Prize).  Her work has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and the Sherwin W. Howard Award and was runner-up for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.

Find Sunni’s collection The Marriage of the Moon and the Field here.

Read two of her poems here.

Find an interview with Sunni here.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Kimberly Ann Priest Reads Rebecca Lindenberg

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week poet and educator Kimberly Ann Priest joined us to discuss the work of Rebecca Lindenberg, becoming a poet, poetry as a form of excavating memories. Thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: During our email correspondence, you mentioned that Lindenberg’s Love, an Index was one of the first poetry collections you read when you decided to write poetry. How did this experience shape how you’ve approached your own writing?

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Kimberly Ann Priest: Excellent question. I’m going to give you some background on my entrance into the poetry scene….


It was 2013. I was almost 36 and making a brave move to divorce a violent spouse while also pursuing my MA. I made $11,000 a year as a grad assistant instructor, plus child support, and found myself in the throes of exhaustion and grief and a new style of harassment from my soon to be ex. We had been married for 15 years and I had become accustomed to a semblance of romance, but mostly a list of reasons why I wasn’t a suitable romantic partner. About a year after divorce, my ex would come out as gay and continues, to this day, to assert that the violence of ‘the past’ was not his fault nor the complications it has caused me his responsibility. Getting out of this relationship, with two children in tow, was daunting and complicated as he and his family maintained control over all of my material possessions and the community around me, and continued to try to hold sway over my children’s perspective of the marriage. (Thankfully, on the latter, they were not successful).

All of that said to provide context to my state of being when I entered my grad program at Central Michigan University. I was worn to a thread and working diligently to rebuild myself and a career after having not been allowed to do so for those 15 years. I started my MA with a focus on Brit Lit, but after one semester realized that what I needed to do was write, not analyze others’ writing so much. I think it was October when I sat down with Robert Fanning, one of the poetry professors in the English Department, to inquire about the Creative Writing track in poetry. I remember how “chill” he was during our meeting and thinking that this is what I needed: chill. I needed something in my life to be less demanding and more therapeutic. Thus, I began my journey as a poet.

I don’t recall if we read Lindenberg in class, or if her work was recommended to me elsewhere. I took a lot of courses on craft and female poets so she may have been one of them. All I remember is getting her book and reveling in its steady beats and weaving of grief and romance. It felt like love. It felt like rain. In fact, Megan Devine says “Grief is love in its wildest forms.” It felt like that.

I was writing a lot of love poems then—an irony given my circumstances. But I think the earliest stages of my grief were marked by the loss of romance in my 20s and 30s. I was grieving the love I had felt for someone who didn’t love me back. I was grieving the death of the person I thought he was. The backstory of Lindenberg’s Love an Index is heartbreaking. The man she writes about and grieves in this book was her partner of several years who went permanently missing on an expedition to explore a volcano, something he loved to do. When I married, my partner was my best friend. Somewhere along the way, within only a year or so, I lost him. He went missing. No romance ensued and I found myself mostly alone in my homes with children, emotionally and economically striped to the bone. Somehow, Lindenberg’s work spoke to this early grief—the loss of romance I felt—because her connection to her partner was so raw and real and desirous. She does not hold back her feeling—even writing poems that reveal anger
and argument, regret and desperation.

And this is how her work shaped my early writing, and still shapes it today. My work is deeply relational and, I think, multi-dimensional. No relationship is all joy or all hate, all pain or all roses. Even my relationship with my ex cannot be flattened this way. In “The Language of Flowers,” Lindenberg turns love round and round and shows us both the beauty and pain of it, the sentimental and practical. I appreciate this about her writing. The emotional life is grounded in the reality that there’s a little hate in love, a bit of anger in desire, a lot of bravery in lament, and tensile quality strength in the tenderness and weakness born of agony. Lindenberg has helped me embrace grief in my work as an expression of everything I once loved and hope to love again.

Kimberly Ann Priest Reads “The Language of Flowers” & “The Language of Flowers Revised” by Rebecca Lindenberg

AH:Why did you choose these poems specifically?

KAP: Both “The Language of Flowers” and it’s opposite “The Language of Flowers Revised,” as well as “Carnival,” take objects—flowers and carnival masks—and reveal their duplicity. Again, as I mentioned in the first question, love fueling both celebration and grief. [It might even be said that grief is another form of celebration.] In these poems, flowers are constructed of various materials, even glass and paper, to translate different facets of desire, wanting, care, heartbreak. All of it is love. And all of it is potentially deceitful. In “Carnival” the mask (not to be confused with pandemic masks) is understood as a facial covering both concealing and revealing beauty and pain [as if these are mutually exclusive] and it’s hard to know which it is covering and what it is doing just as it is hard to know our own hearts.

These poems suggest that no emotion is exclusive—or even assured. “[A] moon face” reads “Carnival,” “with a healed gash that means harvest.” What a line. The wound, the gash, is signaling a season of harvest, of plenty. Or how about in “The Language of Flowers where “Plum” means “lost in beauty” and comes right before “Poppy Red” which means “threatening pleasure.” Such a juxtaposition of getting lost in something desirable to the senses as a possible threat of pure bliss. Something is always at stake in Lindenberg’s expressions of romance.


Maybe the most difficult thing about loving someone who does you almost nothing but harm, is that you are unsure of your own love. The emotional self is constantly confused. How do you love someone that screams at you and pins you to walls or shatters glass at your feet only to watch you pick it up slowly so your children won’t walk on it? I only know I tried. Flowers never meant what they were supposed to. And unmasking my abuser was always turned on me in a vicious game. I listen to these poems and wonder what it’s like to write and read them as someone deeply in love with someone who also loved them back. I am so interested in the way they are familiar to me in their metaphors, yet different in their expressions. Or are they? I don’t know. I hope to find out someday.

Kimberly Ann Priest Reads “Carnival” by Rebecca Lindenberg

AH: When asked why she writes poetry in an interview on McSweeneys, Lindenberg said the following: “I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say.” Now I am asking you: why write poetry?

KAP: I appreciate Lindenberg’s answer. I’m not convinced poetry is about language at all. I think it is most certainly about what cannot be said, the silences. It is certainly that for me. I can’t tell you what it’s like to love someone who harms you, or long for romance for 15 years while caring for children, or grieve an abuser, or hate everything the abuser does, or want flowers to mean something wholly different from what they’ve always meant—but I can show you. I can write the wordless pain and desire. For me, poems are most certainly about what I cannot explain.

When I started writing during my grad program, I had no words for what had or was happening to me. In fact, I was in such a dissociated state that I barely even remember what happened those 15 years; I only knew it was bad. Writing, after my grad program, became about excavating those memories. All I could do was portray snapshots of moments and feeling. Many things were “echoing around in my bone-dome” that I could only access through the poem. So, yes, to Lindenberg’s answer.

These days, I don’t have memories to excavate. I have found all that I need. But the echo-ings will come again with new experiences. I feel this deeply. There will always be echoes that have no language; and for those, I will need the poem.

AH:Have any updates (about life, writing, anything!) that’d you like to share?

KAP: Sure!
I just moved to Pittsburgh for a year as the James Tolen Writer in Residence at Writer’s House. Thus far, I am inspired by the squirrels all around. There are so many squirrels. I haven’t begun writing yet, but there may be some squirrel poems soon.


My next chapbook comes out with Harbor Review Press in March. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Allison Blevins, the press editor (who happens to have a new book out—Slowly, Suddenly). My book is called The Optimist Shelters in Place and was written at the onset of the pandemic. It’s my first non-trauma book so I’m excited for something emotionally different on the horizon. It tackles loneliness in America, among other things.


Other than this, I’m just calibrating to a new environment. I finished three full-length books of poetry this year and they are all going out into the world seeking homes. I moved through a lot of past territory in those poems and now I’m exploring the present moment, which is a strange, nice shift. While at Writer’s House, I’ll be doing some memoir pieces and other prose. And maybe just relaxing a bit… watching squirrels.

Rebecca Lindenberg is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2012) and The Logan Notebooks. Her poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry 2019, Tulepo Quarterly, and Diagram, among others. She currently is teaching at the University of Cincinnati, where she also edits the Cincinnati Review.

Find her website here.

Read an interview about Love, an Index here.

Read “He Asks Me to Send Him Some Words (Home)”in Tulepo Quarterly.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021) and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions 2022), Still Life (PANK, 2020), Parrot Flower (Glass, 2020) and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP, 2018). Winner of the2019 Heartland Poetry Prize from New American Press, her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Lunch Ticket, Borderland, etc. She is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and serves as an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry.

Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.

Find her new collection Slaughter the One Bird here.

Read Kimberly’s poems “This Much” and “About Blue.”

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Interview with Akua Lezli Hope, editor of NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets

Cover Image for NOMBONO

Ahead of the release of the speculative poetry collection NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets, Akua Lezli Hope spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Stephi Cham about how the meaning of “nombono,” the number 10, and the roots of speculative poetry influenced her editorial approach to the collection.

Stephi Cham: What was your primary thought process as you put this collection together? Is there a larger narrative you hoped to achieve?

Akua Lezli Hope: I envisioned a collection of BIPOC speculative poetry last fall, when I entered the competition to create an anthology. I was privileged to be included in a number of speculative poetry readings and panels at SF/F conventions last year. I was inspired by both the presence and absence of BIPOC creators. I committed myself to remedy the twin absences of speculative poetry and of BIPOC creators of speculative poetry. I created Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series and conceived my idea for this anthology.

SC: How did you choose the title? How did the word “nombono” speak to you?

ALH: I went in search of a title. One of my favorites was already taken, so then I went in search of non-English words. “Nombono” means vision. It is lovely in the mouth and it’s a “false friend” as it resembles “name good” (“bono” is used in English pro bono—for the public good and “nom” means name in French). So the Zulu has all these western evocations as well as the wonderful meaning. Vision speaks to the ability to invent, imagine, intuit. NOMBONO.

SC: You write that speculative poetry started as “humanity’s first literature.” How do its roots influence the writings in NOMBONO?

ALH: I can’t speak for or to each writer’s influences, having only read a few poems by each. That would be most presumptuous of me. There is myth making and myth telling and retellings among the poems in the collection. Encoding myth/beliefs and folkways was the role of humanity’s first literature—which was in verse. These poets are performing the role of humanity’s first poets, creating art that encodes and reports their experiences, ideas and vision.

SC: Can you talk about your process in dividing this collection into 10 sections? What is its significance?

ALH: There were more sections. I sought to have poems be in conversation with each other, to create a flow, to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. 10 means a return to unity, the fusion of being and non-being, it is a divine number.

SC: What role does the recurring theme of societal denial play in these works?

ALH: There are many roles that societal denial plays — it is propulsive, introspective, motivating, meditative, informing, deconstructive, instructive, inspiring, underpinning, undergirding, catalytic. It spawns the affirmation, avowal,  achievement. It is the sad stage setting that is shred, overturned, overcome, repudiated. It is that which is overcome.

SC: In “Mmádu Si Àlà Putá,” Ogbuji writes, “It’s time to push away the teat and forage / the void, to answer scarcity with courage—” How can we answer scarcity with courage in our lives?

ALH: We answer scarcity with courage by being undaunted and undeterred in our creating, by making good and peace manifest, by loving fully both ourselves and the world we inhabit. There is no scarcity, there is only the lack of will and imagination.

Download your free e-copy of NOMBONO here or order a print copy from the Sundress store.

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, and peace. Her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, an Elgin and SFPA Award, and Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest Book Award. She is the editor of Eye To The Telescope #42 on The Sea.

Stephi Cham holds a BM in Music Therapy with a Minor in Psychology from Southern Methodist University. She is currently working toward her MA in Publishing at Rosemont College, and she is the Fiction Editor at Rathalla review. She is a freelance editor and the author of the Great Asian-Americans series published by Capstone Press, and her work has appeared in Strange Horizons.

Lyric Essentials: Emily Schulten Reads Theodore Roethke  

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week writer and educator Emily Schulten is joining us to discuss the work of fellow poet Theodore Roethke, writing on grief, and first encounters. As always, thank you for tuning in.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: How and when did you first discover Roethke’s work?

Emily Schulten: I imagine my first encounter with Roethke were in graduate school. At least that’s when his work impacted me such that it has stayed with me. There are some poets who can do this, who have this power to stick with the reader in her daily life, sometimes in the background and sometimes the foreground, but there consistently.

Emily Schulten Reads “The Lost Son” (Part 1, The Flight)”

AH: Roethke was such an inspiration for many, from former students to Sylvia Plath. How has his work inspired you as a writer?

ES: Roethke’s use of rhythm is so musical. The heaviness that he is able to create in tone pairs with these earth images to haunt the reader and even to contribute to his mythmaking. This musicality and myth-making inspire me as a writer, as does the ability to consume the reader with his creation of atmosphere.

AH: Why did you choose these poems? What drew you to them specifically?

Emily Schulten Reads “Root Cellar”

ES: Roethke is a grief poet. More than that, he is able to take grief and use it to transcend himself and to make sense of his grief. These poems are emblematic of the grief that inspired so much of Roethke’s work, the relationship he had with his father in both life and death. (A connection we see that Plath was particularly inspired by.) “Root Cellar” and “The Lost Son (Part 1, The Flight)” approach this grief in strikingly different ways, but with much the same outcome. “Root Cellar” depends so much on the greenhouse imagery to convey the emotion the speaker feels in this place that represents his father, and “The Lost Son” is a more inward journey and interrogation for the speaker. These poems illustrate well Roethke’s breadth as well as his use of sound and image.

AH: Do you have any news to share?

ES: I’m eagerly anticipating November’s release of my second collection of poems, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar, from Kelsay Books.

Theodore Roethke was an American poet from the mid-twentieth century. After his father’s death and uncle’s suicide, he would become an educator who taught many giants in American poetry: Sylvia Plath, Carolyn Kizer, and so many more. During his lifetime he won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award for two different collections.

Read more about him and his work here.

Read his poem “The Storm.”

Find his collected poems at Penguin Random House.

Emily Schulten is the author of two collections of poetry, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar (Kelsay Books, November 2021) and Rest in Black Haw (New Plains P). Her work appears in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, and Tin House, among others. Schulten earned her MA from Western Kentucky University and her PhD from Georgia State University. She is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys.

Find her website here.

Purchase her collection Rest in Black Haw.

Read her poem “Navigating the Afterlife” in Salamander.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Lyric Essentials: Summer J. Hart Reads Louise Erdrich

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! Today artist and writer Summer J. Hart joins us to discuss the Louise Erdrich, being left breathless by writing, and poetic origin stories. As always, thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: What drew you originally into Louise Erdrich’s poetry? Is there an origin story of how you discovered her work?

Summer J. Hart: I encountered the novels of Louise Erdrich long before reading her poems. After graduate school I spent a year or so temping. One of my jobs was as a receptionist for a realty management office. A retired New Yorker cartoonist named Boris Drucker rented the office next door and we became friends. My job was neither challenging nor interesting, so I would often read or draw behind my desk. Boris saw my copy of Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine and the next day brought in his copy of Tracks. For the rest of my time in the office, Boris and I spent our lunch breaks talking about our love of drawing and Louise Erdrich. Erdrich’s writing, whether prose or poetry, never fails to goose-pimple my arms. I’ve spent years researching, collecting family lore, and making art about my own mixed Native and settler heritage. Before reading Love Medicine, I had never heard stories as similar to those my aunts and grandmother shared with me about life on and after leaving the reservation.

Summer J. Hart Reads “Owls” by Louise Erdrich

AH:I was absolutely in love with the details woven into the poems you’ve read! What were your favorite lines and/or images?

SJH: From “Owls”: “Each night the noise wakes me, a death / rattle, everything in sex that wounds.” I love the way Erdrich writes about sex in this poem as “raw need / of one feathered body for another.” The owl is a symbol of death so terrifying that even children don’t enjoy the lilting repetition of its name spoken in Ojibwe. Which was very fun to read! Kokoko. This poem rips bodies open—pulls feathers and bones from flesh. But, it also nourishes.

A barred owl asks again and again, Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?
The couple in the apartment also have an aching, visceral need. “This is how we make love” she writes, “when there are people in the halls around us…” The world inside the apartment is stripped back until there is nothing left but two bodies clinging together. All around them the gears of domesticity churn, relentless. The grinding consumption and expulsion of days whir along. Outside, birds fly from one throat to another. Neighbors scrub plates in the sink. A glass breaks. The pungency of frying onions drifts down the hall.I am drawn to the images (and sounds) of the owls, the humans, and the dead tree. I read this poem as both love letter and Memento mori.

From “That Pull from the Left”:
I love how she begins this poem with a name. Butch. This Butch, even if I read nothing more of him, has somehow been with me my whole life. “But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.” The word delivered. She follows the first iteration of this line with “when a child is born…” A baby is delivered. Cattle are delivered and again to slaughter. Meat is wrapped carefully in brown paper and delivered to the outstretched palm of a customer. The heart, cut from the body is how we begin and end, the start / stop of a muscle. We cling to life in life (our lolling eyes), and our bones fight to keep the flesh and sinew attached even after a final blow delivers death. The poem talks also of the queerness of the woman’s own heart. How she can feel “That pull from the left…” Then, there is the queerness of the sky, or perhaps internal weather, before the dark plunge.

Summer J. Hart Reads “The Pull from the Left” by Louise Erdrich

AH: As a writer and creative human, how have you been inspired by Erdrich’s work?

SJH: Louise Erdrich is my forever-favorite. Her work absolutely inspires me to be a much braver writer—my instinct is to self-censor, skirt around the truth of a thing. But she writes fearlessly about living, loving, dying in the natural world…with a bit of magical reality woven in. Her words leave me breathless, but my senses are sharper having read them.

AH: Got any news to share? It can be life, writing, creative updates–anything!

SJH: I am honored to be the Land Acknowledgment Writer for The 3rd Thing Press’ 2021 cohort (forthcoming November 2021). My poem, “Salt for the Stain” appeared in the Massachusetts Review’s Winter 2021 special issue, A Gathering of Native Voices. The website accompaniment to this issue including video readings and links to Native resources will launch this fall. My first full-length collection of poems, Boomhouse will be published by The 3rd Thing Press in 2023.

Louise Erdrich is an American novelist, poet, and children’s book writer. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, she has devoted her work to exploring the lives of Native Americans and those of mixed heritage. She has published three poetry collections and several novels, many of which have received critical acclaim.

Read her poem “Captivity” at Poetry.

Listen to an interview Erdrich had with NPR here.

Read her poem “Original Fire” at Lit Hub.

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual artworks are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. She is the author Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press) & the microchapbook, Augury of Ash (Post Ghost Press). Her poetry can be found in Waxwing, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in galleries and shows including SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC; Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; and LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA. She is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

Find her website here.

Read her poem “Boy Crazy” at Waxwing.

Find her her forthcoming collection Boomhouse at The 3rd Thing Press.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Lyric Essentials: Jory Mickelson Reads Brian Teare

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week writer and educator Jory Mickelson has joined us to discuss Brian Teare’s poetry, learning from another’s work, and being grounded within a speaker’s body. Thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: Why did you choose these poems and how did you discover Teare’s work? 

Jory Mickelson: Well for one, they are some of his shorter poems. Brian Teare has an incredible ability to write dozen-plus page, dazzling poems. I chose to focus on some smaller bites of his writing rather than read excerpts of longer pieces.

In Teare’s poem “Then I painted the two rectangles,” there is such a sweet resonance between reading the poem and seeing the poem on the page. Additionally, I love how he yokes the two windows above his sickbed in this poem and also the function of imagination in art, all in one go.

The poem “Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding.” seems initially simple. It is made almost entirely of images. But it is also an explanation of the speaker’s mind on the page. I’ve read this one again and again, and it always causes me to pause and reconsider what is happening just below the surface.

Jory Mickelson reads “Then I painted the two rectangles” by Brian Teare

AH: How has Teare’s work inspired you as a writer and creative? 
JM: In a real way, Teare’s work teaches me something new in each of his book. There is a quote by Allen Ginsberg that says, “Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.” Minds don’t come more original than Teare’s. He is fearsome, persistent, and totalizing. What I mean to say is every book is different from his previous one. Some of the concerns repeat, but the language is always pushing itself into new avenues of thought and he is always taking received forms and adapting them. Stretching them. Making them serve new purposes. Who wouldn’t want to learn these lessons?

Jory Mickelson reads “Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding” by Brian Teare

AH: In an interview with The New School, Teare said the following: “Our most vulnerable sites of selfhood are our bodies, our mortal naked selves. They ground us in mammalian experience, a welter of hormones and hungers.” He used this to describe how he wants the language and images of his poems to be for readers. Do you relate to this with your own work (if so, how?), or with what you typically read? 

JM: I definitely relate to Teare’s work being grounded in the body, in what he calls “mammalian experience.” The poems in my first book Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press, 2019), are grounded in the bodies of the speakers and in the terrain they inhabit or pass through. The embeddedness or embodiment found in Teare’s work is something we share. Though we approach it or think about it on the page in differently.

In my new manuscript, I wrestle with the legacy of Western U.S. history and what it tells us about our contemporary issues of climate crisis, violence, waning empire, etc. These new poems brought me into the bodies, landscapes, and minds of the past in new ways. It was fascinating to see how their “welter of hormones and hungers” aligned or departed from our own today.

AH: What have you been up to lately? Got any exciting news to share (about life, writing, anything!)?
 
JM: Well, while I was at a writing residency in Taos last winter (Thank you Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico!) My book Wilderness//Kingdom won the 2020 High Plains Book Award in poetry and it was fantastic. All of us residents had a tiny outdoor pandemic party to celebrate.

More recently, I taught the Master Class at our local writers’ conference about how poetry, meditation and mindfulness are interrelated. And just this week I was asked by Hugo House in Seattle to teach classes for their winter and spring schedule! I love the energy in the classroom that happens with writers. While I love writing poems, teaching is definitely my second joy.

Brian Teare received his BA from the University of Alabama and MFA from Indiana University. Teare has received fellowships from the the National Endowment of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and was a previous Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of the collections Doomstead Days and Pleasure, among many others.

Find out more about his work at his website.

Read his poem “When we are on the right track we are rewarded with joy” here.

Learn more about his collection Doomstead Days here.

Jory Mickelson’s first book, WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their publications include Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, and The Rumpus.  They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and were awarded fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Winter Tangerine, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. 

You can learn more about them and their writing at www.jorymickelson.com

Find their books here.

Read their poem “Float” at PANK.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear, or forthcoming, in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Lyric Essentials: Shannon Wolf Reads Olivia Gatwood

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week we are joined by poet and editor Shannon Wolf to discuss the work of Olivia Gatwood, the particular power of seeing poetry performed live, and writing as a therapeutic act. As always, thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: We all have an origin story for when we discovered a favorite poet. How did you discover Olivia Gatwood?

Shannon Wolf: Just like many of her fans, I found Gatwood through Youtube performances of her poems. She has a huge following in the slam poetry scene, and I found both her performance style and the actual content of her poems really compelling. She’s best known for earlier poems – like “Alternate Universe in Which I Am Unfazed by the Men Who Do Not Love Me” – and I think it’s because these poems (especially for women) are accessible in their language and ideas, which is not to say they aren’t well written. She has a wonderful eye for making magic from the minutiae. So many of her poems are about the female experience, the female body, and all of its burdens and blessings. Her work is somehow both refreshing and dark, and as a poet myself, that seems like one unattainable feat to accomplish.

Shannon Wolf Reads “If a Girl Screams in the Middle of the Night” by Olivia Gatwood

AH: During our correspondence, you mentioned that you’ve actually seen Gatwood perform her work live. How was the experience? Did the experience of hearing and seeing it performed change anything for you?

SW: It was really fantastic. I think it’s important to note how the venue was packed with so many people identifying as women and it felt like this safe, collaborative, familiar environment – the laughter and the emphatic noises of agreement you often hear at poetry readings seemed three times louder than usual in that room in Portland, Oregon. She performed with a musician, Mexican singer-songwriter Joaquina Mertz, setting her poems to sound, and it was a total sensory experience. Gatwood’s performances (with and without music) definitely add a layer of meaning to the written word. Her style of reading, her tone contextualizes the work – she has this great deadpan delivery that just lights each piece on fire. This particular performance was on the tour for her chapbook New American Best Friend, so I’d love to take in a reading of poems from Life of the Party, which I think drill a lot deeper into the female consciousness (and the dangers that seem to surround it).

Shannon Wolf Reads “My Mother’s Addendum” by Olivia Gatwood

AH: In an interview with The Adroit Journal, Gatwood said the following about Life of the Party: “I was in a constant state of feeling afraid, and instead of running from that feeling or trying to soften it, I held a magnifying glass up to it, tried to figure out where it was born, then write from the beginning.” As a writer, have you felt similar emotions and experiences when trying to write a particular piece?

SW: Absolutely! I would be surprised if there isn’t a writer who doesn’t use their work as some kind of therapy, honestly. I think whether it’s fear, or a specific trauma, or even just making sense of a memory, stepping toward it with your writing can produce something really striking. I often say that Gatwood’s poems are so personal – many in her chapbook refer to specific details from her own reality – but in Life of the Party, Gatwood appears to distance herself much more. Somehow though, this serves to bring the reader in even closer. In “If A Girl Screams In the Middle of the Night”, the singular scream of a girl becomes universal. In inspecting her own fear, she taps into our collective fear. I try to do this in my own work when I inspect generational trauma, and abusive relationships. Perhaps this hard stare into the sun eventually softens the fear anyway.

AH: Have any exciting news you want to share (it can be anything! Life, writing, new revelations)?

SW: I do. I just recently signed a contract for my first full-length poetry collection. Green Card Girl, which will be forthcoming from Fernwood Press in September 2022. It’s about my immigration journey from England to the US, the genesis of my chosen family, and the slow rot of toxic relationships. You can follow me on Twitter @helloshanwolf or check my website helloshanwolf.com for updates on the book! I also have poems coming out with Sledgehammer Lit and HAD, and I’ve just started a new teaching job here in my new hometown, Denver, CO. There’s a lot going on right now!

Olivia Gatwood is a writer and activist. She is the author of the full-length collection Life of the Party and has performed her poetry both in the United States and internationally. Her poetry has appeared in The Winter Tangerine Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Missouri Review, among others.

Find her website here.

Watch her perform her poem “We Find Each Other in the Details” here.

Purchase her collection Life of the Party at Penguin Random House.

Shannon Wolf is a British writer, living in Denver, Colorado. Her debut full-length poetry collection Green Card Girl is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. She received a joint MA-MFA in Poetry at McNeese State University and also has degrees from Lancaster University and the University of Chichester. She is Co-Curator of the “Poets in Pajamas” Reading Series. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Forge, Great Weather for MEDIA, HAD and NoContactMag among others.

You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.

Read her poem “Ode to Tony Soprano” here at No Contact Magazine.

Learn more about Shannon on her website.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear, or forthcoming, in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com