Category: Lyric Essentials

Lyric Essentials: Jillian Fantin Reads Shelley Feller

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Jillian Fantin joins us to discuss the work of Shelley Feller, world building, queer poetics, hybrid poetry, and how it’s all a labor of love. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Shelley Feller’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Jillian Fantin: So I first encountered Feller’s work when my MFA thesis advisor Joyelle McSweeney (amazing poet and human person, make sure to check out Death Styles when it comes out) recommended Dream Boat. At the time, I was just beginning to experiment with queer world building, as well as popular culture(s) and what is “valuable” to be written about. Additionally, a lot of my poetry at the time began to hybridize into visuals, like emojis and doodles of noses and seahorses, and into playscript, with named characters performing and dialoguing amongst themselves. I didn’t know why, and I’m guessing that’s why Joyelle recommended this collection.

Shelley Feller’s general work—but especially Dream Boat—is now a major foundational inspiration of my poetics. In the simplest terms, my current overarching poetry project is to celebrate the queer transmasculine body, as well as what I find to be its threefold artistic potentiality: to serve as a physical site upon which to survey the degradation of the Anthropocene; to help explore the intimacy that occurs when visual art, specifically fashion and textiles, effectively “transitions” into poems (i.e., the visual subject’s new “queer [written] body”); and to reveal how the intentional writing of gibberish and sound mirrors the making of one’s own body. Without Dream Boat, I truly believe that I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Ultimately, Dream Boat totally rocked all of my worlds. It didn’t feel like I was “reading” poetry. No, Shelley Feller built this ooey gooey world full of sonic experimentation and really made me completely submerge myself into something new. I’ve read collections that excite, entice, and enamour from its page-bound position, but Dream Boat’s poetry resists these traditional boundaries while still eliciting these same emotions. Honestly, I cannot even describe this collection using written language besides encouraging you wholeheartedly to approach it with the knowledge that it will swallow you whole and ride you all the way down. I don’t know where “down” is, but “down” feels right and left an impression on me.

Jillian Fantin reads “after the fall” by Shelley Feller

RW: How has their writing inspired your own? 

JF: I think I’m a poet because I’m not funny enough to be a comedian and not silent enough to be a mime. Because of that, I gravitate towards writing like Feller’s because their unfettered sound and vision refuses to be boxed in with a qualified “enough.” Reading their poetry is the opposite of sensory deprivation. Sensory decadence, maybe? Whatever it should be called, Dream Boat really inspires me to experiment with sound and vision and to not water my work down in an effort to be palatable to an audience that wouldn’t read my work in the first place. Further, Shelley Feller expresses the tenderness found in queer decadence, and that care for every line’s position and every shadow or echo of text is something I try to imbibe within all of my writing.

The most impactful element of Feller’s writing upon my own, though, is the refusal to accept. Refusal to accept the traditional confines of the page, the line, the word, the image, everything. Now I don’t mean to say that Feller believes that there are no boundaries in the world, or that humans should be and/or are capable of anything. What I mean is that Feller’s writing seems to actively reject the humanmade values that restrict “poetry” to mean “what is saleable.” Their poetry’s disruptions of the traditional line, use of multiple font shades, and inclusion of emojis not only creates a new language, but Feller’s Dream Boat looks forward, explicating what possibilities language holds when we reject the notion of poetry as commodity (and therefore as fetish) and challenging readers to consider the inherent value of poetry in its simple identity as poetry.

All of this to say: much of my work (including my first full-length being published by y’all!) functions as an experimentation in sound and image to excavate what poetry is and what my poetry is. I used to corral poetry. Now, I let poetry take me where it wants to go.

Jillian Fantin reads “on our first date he says he’s poz & asks if i’m scared, if I still wanna” by Shelley Feller

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically? 

JF: Admittedly, I just wanted an excuse to jump back into the collection. No big rhyme or reason in the decision-making process: I really just wanted to share some of my absolute favourite poems from one of the poets most impactful to my life. I apologise that this isn’t exactly a verbose answer, but honestly? Feller’s brilliant poetry makes up for all that I lack.

RW: Your debut chapbook, A Playdough Symposium, is published with Ghost City Press. What was the process of creating this collection like? Any specific writing rituals or things you were surprised by as this book was coming to life?

JF: I’m very much a proponent of CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry rituals, so even when I’m not explicitly creating and performing a bodily-involved ritual, that sort of corporeal embodiment of poetry never fails to come out. The concept literally came about while reading Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and I just sort of rolled that name around in my mouth until it birthed sissyfist. After sissyfist came two-piece suitor, and they sort of just fell into their roles from there. After that, A Playdough Symposium came about within my chapbook manuscript young velvet porcelain boy. Eventually, it slowly but surely funked its way right off those pages and demanded the attention of a Platonic dialogue. Much of my current writing process involves recording myself or literally speech-to-texting my thoughts, and most of sissyfist and two-piece suitor’s conversations came from conversations I had with myself.

At the same time these characters emerged, I’d been diving into different forms of masculinity in performative spaces and the intersection of production and laziness—which is sort of a fancy way to say that I was watching a lot of Jackass reruns. I’m really fascinated by Jackass, the way that these men did so much to themselves, their bodies, their total psyches, and in doing so kind of managed to game capitalism and own their own means of production within their labour—i.e., their bodies. I dare anyone to say that they’d be in a state of immediate awe upon seeing Plato and Phaedrus talking beneath a tree. Instead, I think most people would assume that sitting under a tree and talking isn’t anything but nonproductive. I argue that it’s antiproductive and, thus, pretty radical in practice. And what makes it more radical to me is the simplicity of the “because,” i.e., the reason for talking under a tree. Which is, they wanted to talk under a tree. Though of course this is a relatively simplistic take on both Platonic dialogues and Jackass, but I wanted it to be simple. I like simple.

TL;DR: A Playdough Symposium is mushy, formless dialogue of lazy erotics between a pair of beings oscillating between Socrates/Phaedrus and Johnny Knoxville/Steve-O. Nothing happens, but so much happens, too. Without knowing, they explicate the different classical ideas carried in the titles. It’s a love story about a love I’m new to knowing.

One last note because I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it to anyone before: I still don’t know Holographic Will and the Cemetery Flamingo that well. I feel like their appearance as a sort of Sunday Funnies, Calvin and Hobbes-esque dynamic pairing serves more as a conversation starter/extracurricular excursion for sissyfist rather than a totally-autonomous pair of beings. Perhaps a sequel? Or a prequel? Who knows, honestly. They do, but certainly not me!

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Shelley Feller holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their work can be found in Interim, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

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Jillian A. Fantin is a contemporary court jester with roots in the American South and north central England. They are the author of the prose poetry micro-chapbook A Playdough Symposium (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the vessel for transmission of the forthcoming full-length, hybrid poetry-play THE DOUGHNUT WORLD (fifth wheel press, 2024). With writer Joy Wilkoff, Jillian co-founded and edits RENESME LITERARY, a shortform Twilight-inspired online arts journal. They also serve as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications’ Best of The Net Anthology and a blog curator for Querencia Press. Connect with Jillian on Twitter (@jilly_stardust) or Instagram (@jillystardust). If you enjoy their work, they encourage you to either make a donation to the Indigenous nation upon whose land you work, send virtual SIM cards to Gaza via esimsforgaza.com, or contribute to their personal creative and educational work via Venmo @Jillian-Fantin.

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Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Erika Walsh Reads Chelsey Minnis

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Erika Walsh joins us to discuss the work of Chelsey Minnis, and the importance of taking risks in poetry, whether it be through form or humor, and how bending expectations in writing can be freeing. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Chelsey Minnis? Why did her work stand out to you then?

Erika Walsh: It was initially a bit disturbing to me that I couldn’t remember the exact moment I encountered Chelsey Minnis for the first time, but then it felt kind of fun and cool, as though she were part of my life all along; like there was never a time before her. I know for sure that the first book I read by her was Bad Bad, and that the first singular poem I read online by her was “Clown,” but I can’t recall how I came to find her, or which came first. 

I remember being tickled by the wild aesthetics of Bad Bad, with its pink and white striped cover, a seemingly random drawing of a two-headed fawn at the center of the book, and “bad” reviews highlighted on its back cover, such as “Her poems take some getting used to” and “Many won’t find her…acceptable at all…” These poems took real risks, such as covering multiple pages nearly entirely with ellipses. I was especially struck by Chelsey’s “Anti Vitae” which made me laugh out loud, as it listed her “failures” as a poet, such as “Mispronounce ‘Kant’,” “Told poems ‘lack agency.’ Have to ask what ‘agency’ means,” and “Told that poetry is ‘loose’ by future poet laureate.” It was so refreshing to read poems by someone who is clearly an artist and a poet, but not in a way that adheres to any arbitrary expectations of the literary world as an institution.

RW: How has her writing inspired your own?

EW: I love how genuinely funny Chelsey’s poems are. I began writing poetry thinking there was a “right” way to write a poem, and my poems came out feeling stifled and forced as I tried to bend them into shapes I thought may result in others taking me more “seriously” as a poet. Now that I’m in my MFA, I think I maybe for the first time feel like I truly have the space and support to write poems that are less “safe.” I feel more free to not only write poems that are “weird” or “experimental” (but still aesthetically pleasing), but also to write poems that are absurd and maybe even a little bit crude, maybe a little bit ugly. Chelsey’s writing also shows me that there are not only many ways to write a poem, but also many ways to be a poet, and that validation from other poets or from literary institutions can only take you so far. Writing the poems you want to write solely because you want to write them is the real pleasure.

Erika Walsh reads “Clown” by Chelsey Minnis

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

EW: “A Speech About the Moon” (from Zirconia) puts me into a trance state every time I read it. It initially feels almost like a punch line, to have the poem start with one line about the moon before moving on to the birds and the fish and the sea, which quickly become the real adhering images of the poem. Then you begin to realize this poem is haunted. Whatever is haunting you rises to the surface as you read it, but in a surprisingly gentle way; gentler than you could have imagined. This poem gives you the space and permission to settle into the feeling; to not flinch away from your fear. I consider “Clown” (from Bad Bad) to be a classic. As I mentioned before, I believe it’s the first poem I ever read online by Minnis. This poem makes me laugh out loud, especially the last few lines: “You can’t imagine how jolly/ everything is. And the fright wigs… I don’t want to be a clown but I’m/ sure to be one. My mother was a clown.” Every time I read these lines, I know with absolute certainty that they must be true; that there is something clown-like in me, and in my ancestral lineage, and perhaps in every person who comes across this poem. Somehow, we’re all connected by both the fact that we are clowns, and the fact that we don’t want to be them. “Men Cry Because of the Heat” is another poem from Bad Bad that just makes me laugh. It really embodies the feeling of absurdity in Chelsey’s poems. The droll delivery of the speaker adds to this feeling. This poem also is in ways a parallel to “A Speech About the Moon,” with its attention to similar images, such as crying, ice, and birds. But unlike the speaker in “A Speech About the Moon,” the men in this poem aren’t paying attention; “If a bird lands on their shoulder….they don’t even think about it…they can’t realize anything…about birds.” The speaker in “A Speech About the Moon,” is alone with her thoughts, whereas the men in this poem have help (“You have to cut their shirts into half shirts….”). The sadness in this poem does not, after all, arise from the same place, or from an “enchanted misery.” It is only the heat.

Erika Walsh reads “Men Cry Because of the Heat” by Chelsey Minnis

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

EW: I was recently named Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review, the literary journal affiliated with my MFA at the University of Alabama, and will begin this position in January 2024. I’m very excited about this, especially since this is a journal I’ve been reading and following for many years! The 9th issue of A Velvet Giant, an online literary journal which I also edit and co-founded, also just came out last month. In terms of my own writing, my poem “My Baby” was recently published in Pigeon Pages. I have two poems coming out in VIBE in early 2024 (and the folio is available for preorder right now!) I’ve been writing lots of fairytale inspired poems lately, and have been writing ecopoetry as well and thinking about the connection between the violences humans commit against our planet and against each other. In terms of more life-related news, I recently moved into a new apartment with my partner. I’m planning a puppet show with one of my best friends, and starting to get back into studying tarot. I’m thinking about the future in a way that feels mostly exciting.

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Chelsey Minnis studied creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of several collections of poetry including Zirconia (2001), which won the Alberta Prize; Bad Bad (2007); and Poemland (2009). She lives in Boulder.

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Erika Walsh is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Alabama, poetry editor of Black Warrior Review, and co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant. Erika’s creative writing has been featured in Hotel Amerika, Booth, Pigeon Pages, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy of the Arts and Art Farm Nebraska, as well as a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets.

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Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Ashley Hajimirsadeghi Reads Kim Hyesoon

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Ashley Hajimirsadeghi (former Lyric Essentials editor and an all-around Sundress staff contributor!) joins us to discuss the work of Kim Hyesoon and the importance of female poetry, translation, and how everyone needs a break at submitting to marinate in ideas. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Kim Hyesoon’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: The first time I read Kim Hyesoon I was a freshman in college. I’d just moved back from South Korea after studying Korean at Ewha Womans University, and to curb the sadness of leaving behind a country I really loved, I was finding all of these ways to stay connected to the culture. I purchased a copy of Kim’s Autobiography of Death on a whim after reading about how she was one of the leading female poets in Korea–and one of the few who gets translated and brought into broader international discussions of literature made by Korean women.

What struck me then–and still strikes me–is how experimental Kim is with her work, and how unapologetically female it is. Autobiography of Death is specifically a reaction to the Sewol tragedy in 2014, but Kim generally uses the grotesque in a way that reminds me of abject theory, of artists like Meret Oppenheim and Cindy Sherman. It’s something I began to realize as an eighteen-year-old and now study today.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi reads “H is for Hideous” by Kim Hyesoon

RW: How has her writing inspired your own?

AH: I really do believe reading the work of women writers like Kim Hyesoon really helped hone in this instinct to focus on women’s stories. It was by consuming stories like these that I realized as a writer I was more comfortable anchoring pieces in narratives versus abstract concepts–and because of that, I began to lean more into documentary and ethnographic poetics. Reading Kim’s work also reminded me of translation and the power behind who and what gets translated–I wanted more from Korean women writers, and while we’re going through quite a bit of a Korean culture renaissance recently, it made me realize I wanted to read more broadly and translate myself. So I do Bengali poetry translations in my free time with books I sourced from a Bangladeshi bookstore owner in Jackson Heights, Queens. You learn a lot about language, power, and intentionality when you do this kind of work.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi reads “Mailbox” by Kim Hyesoon

RW: Your chapbook, Cartography of Trauma, has a beautiful cover and title. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?

AH: Ironically, a lot of these poems are from high school and beginning of college. When it comes to exploration, I was in the beginning stages of thinking about how trauma is a ripple effect across periods, and I wanted to really hone in on women’s experiences. I have a tendency to blur fiction with reality, while delving into history, but I want to be really intentional and careful with the work I’m doing. Some of it is personal, some of it is research, but with fictional bends. I say I’m an accidental poet; I was a devoted fiction writer who kind of fell into this.

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

AH: Right now I’m in my third semester of graduate school and preparing for my thesis. It’s going to be on colonial Korean women’s literature, so writers like Kim Myeong-sun, and this concept of hybridity as a form of self-expression for those suffering from the double colonization involved with the patriarchy. I’m trying to turn this into a digital humanities project, so maybe I’ll open it up to broader Asian feminist writers like Qiu Jin (if I have the energy). 

Besides that, I’ve been taking a cute little break from submitting to marinate in my ideas and writing. I find it so liberating to step away from the submitting grind and just write. I’ve been doing this a lot more lately, and I think it’s helped my practice as a writer.

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Kim Hyesoon is one of the most influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She is the first female poet to receive the prestigious Midang and Kim Su-yong awards, and her collections include I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016), and Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018). Kim lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist currently pursuing an M.A. in Global Humanities at Towson University. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review, a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and a contributing writer and film critic at MovieWeb. She can be found at www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com // Instagram: @nassarine

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Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Kara Dorris Reads Molly McCully Brown

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Kara Dorris joins us to discuss the work of Molly McCully Brown, video games as a source of inspiration for titles, metaphor, and disability poetics. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

Kara Dorris: When choosing which poems to read from Brown’s The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, I decided to pick the first poem, a proem, titled “Central Virginia Training Center.” This poem does the work of a great first poem by setting up a personal connection and reaching towards the broader, universal truth of disability as a social construction. “New Knowledge for the Dark” takes on the persona of an inmate and explores the abuse, the dehumanizing that has occurred in many psychiatric institutions around the country. In contrast, “Without a Mind” takes on the persona of a worker making their rounds, showing an ingrained ableism, a seemingly integrated presumption that disability is punishment for sin and a waste of a life. Each poem is compelling, revealing yet another injustice, and I can’t recommend this collection enough.

RW: Your collection, HitBox, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2024. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?

KD: HitBox feels very different from my previous two collections—it feels angrier, less ready to accept what we are told by so-called authority figures yet hopeful that empathy, inclusiveness, and equality will triumph. As I wrote these poems over the past few years, I didn’t really consider it as a “book” or think to connect the poems consciously. But when it came time to arrange a manuscript, I noticed the violence, I noticed the questioning and the hitting occurring within the poems. I struggled with a unifying theme—beyond punches and feminist anger. Then I came across the term “hit box” used in video games and lightning struck. A hit box is the space around an avatar that registers when a punch lands, or when your avatar scores a hit and the connecting points. This hit box seemed the perfect metaphor for the “hits” the world throws our way, that knock us off our axis. Plus, I am constantly annoyed at the skimpy, over-sexualization of female video game characters, so a cohesive, angry, and hopeful book was born.

Kara Dorris reads “New Knowledge for the Dark” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: When was the first time you read Brown’s work? Why did it stand out to you? How has their writing inspired your own?

KD: This is Brown’s first poetry collection, and I think the title is what really drew me in at first: The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Since then, I have also read her essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body. Writing the disabled experience is challenging; oftentimes, disabled writers are considered too narrow or too personal or as trying to elicit pity. Oftentimes when disability is portrayed it focuses on the individual disability or impairment, not the social construction of disability that makes it hard to navigate through this world. Wonderfully, Brown’s collection shows disability as personal, but does not neglect the social stereotypes that create the larger experience of disability. Partly personal/speculative/what if—Brown wonders if she had been born just a few decades earlier, would she have ended up in this place? In this place where women were institutionalized forcibly sterilized, where patients were really inmates without rights or dignity. The poems are also part historical research—Brown embodies the voices that had no voice. Through persona poems—from wards and warders—we understand the helplessness of the inmates and ableist mindsets of those who assumed they knew what is best for the disabled population. I find this poetry collection fits into ideas of crip aesthetics, which shows that disability is socially constructed and celebrates differences; it shows the long history of forced institutionalization, even positioning us into locations such as the Blind Room and the Infirmary, inviting readers to walk through these doorways with the speakers, to never forget our harmful, ableist past. 

Kara Dorris reads “Without a Mind” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: Who else have you been reading lately, and who else has been inspiring you in your own craft?

KD: I think we should all read more disabled poets: Sheila Black, Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Rusty Morrison, Jillian Wiese, and torrin a. greathouse. All these poets have inspired my writing and the way I write about disability. Growing up no one mentioned disability, even though I was born with a genetic bone disorder. In graduate school, I was never offered a disability studies class or a literature class that interrogated disability representation. For a long time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my experiences, to put words to the socially constructed ideas of shame revolving around disability. These poets helped me find these words, and I will always be grateful. 

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Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body— which was published in the United States in June 2020 by Persea Books, and released in the United Kingdom in March of 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020).

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Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press, as well as HitBox forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2024). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, and Crazyhorse, among others as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Waxwing, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com

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Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in HAD, The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Subhaga Crystal Bacon Reads Ely Shipley

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Subhaga Crystal Bacon joins us to discuss the work of Ely Shipley, blending lyric with narrative, and the political power of poetry. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

Subhaga Crystal Bacon: “Boy with Flowers” is such a poignant story of early recognition of one’s gendered self apart or aside from one’s birth sex and family expectations around that. It felt very—literally—familiar to me. The same is true of his poem “Six, which illustrates the way external forces—teachers, “the recess lady,” suppress what in us must find release. “Night around Me” leaps forward into young adulthood, navigating the secret pleasures of the queer night. It’s about queer desire, and it’s so deeply felt. 

RW: How has Ely Shipley’s writing inspired your own?

SCB: Writing my new collection, Transitory, I was delving into the life stories of trans people murdered in 2020, and it touched on my own experiences with homophobia, threats of violence, and the ways our families and society shape how we experience ourselves. Eli’s work spoke to the wounded parts of me that are finding voice and healing through writing from my own gender queerness.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon reads “Boy with Flowers” by Ely Shipley

RW: When was the first time you read Shipley’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

SCB: I first read Shipley’s work in the wonderful and essential anthology, Troubling the Line. There are so many beautiful and important voices in that collection, torrin a. greathouse, Eileen Myles, CA Conrad. Eli’s work stood out to me because of its lyricism, his way of telling a story through image and metaphor. It’s to me a perfect blending of lyric and narrative.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon reads “Night Around Me” by Ely Shipley

RW: Who else have you been reading lately and who has been inspiring you in your craft? 

SCB: I read a LOT. Diane Seuss, Maggie Smith, Paisley Rekdal, Jennifer Martelli, Eduardo C. Corral, K Iver, Paul Tran, Eugenia Leigh. I return again and again to Plath, Hopkins, Stafford. I find reading to be very generative. I think most poets would say the same thing. If you’re having a block, just read. Seuss’s frank: sonnets has really shaped me. When I draft a poem, it’s often a ramble to try to get down the sound and the feeling. I often try to shape it into the American Sonnett—seventeen syllables per line. Seuss says in frank “the sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do/without.” Hitting those syllabics requires rethinking wording and phrasing, and then sometimes after I get it into the form, I undo it and see if a different form will suit. It’s a process of shaping, though I do recently have a lot of new sonnets! Doing the Sealey Challenge every August is a great way for me to expose myself to poets whose work is new to me, and I often find myself turning back to the blank page to digest what I’ve read and see what it resonates with inside me that wants to come out. Poetry inspires poetry.

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Ely Shipley is the author of Some Animal (Nightboat Books), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Trans and Gender Variant Literature Award and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; and On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, a letterpress chapbook from speCt! Books. His poems and cross-genre work also appear in the Western Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Interim, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Fugue, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

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Subhaga Crystal Bacon (she/they) is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, from BOA Editions, and was listed in the Library Journal’s list of Books to Read in 2023. She’s the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004.  A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she’s a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Her work appears in a variety of print and online journals including the Bellevue Literary Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Indianapolis Review, Rise Up Review, Ghost City Review, and others. 

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Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Matthew Johnson Reads E. Ethelbert Miller

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Matthew Johnson joins us to discuss the work of E Ethelbert Miller, place-based writing, and baseball in poetry and how surprising topics and discuss much broader themes. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read E. Ethelbert Miller’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

 Matthew Johnson: I first came across E. Ethelbert Miller’s work while I was a graduate student at UNC-Greensboro, so around 2018-2019. I don’t remember how exactly I first saw his name, but I was immediately drawn to his poetry collection by the title itself, If God Invented Baseball; I found it to be creative, as well as his choice for a cover photo, which featured a picture of the legendary Negro League pitcher, Satchel Paige, who is one of my favorite all-time athletes and individuals to have studied and read about. Years later I bought the book, but I initially read it through an inter-library loan; I remember the librarian kinda having this puzzled look when I told them the title of the book, as well as the title of the movie I was checking out at the same time, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I was really struck by the fact that here was a poet using the sport of baseball to talk about childhood, home, race, politics, and place. Since the ancient Olympics, sports have not just been purely about sports, and at the time, I had seen and read countless articles, documentaries, and non-fiction books about sports mixing with other topics, but not in a poetry book, so to go this collection for the first time was a vastly different experience from the literature I was reading and studying at the time.

Matthew Johnson reads “Fly Balls and Other Beautiful Things” by E. Ethelbert Miller

RW: How has his writing inspired your own? 

MJ: I was fairly new to the publishing world when I came across Miller’s work. Prior to reading If God Invented Baseball, while I had written poems with a focus on different topics around sports, I had yet to come across an author who dedicated a whole collection of poems based on these similar topics. After reading Miller’s work, it instilled in me a spirit that, ‘yeah, people would be interested in reading about these types of topics if you write about it.’ But, while he talks about these athletes who a lot of people know about, Miller personalizes it to his upbringing and background, which I think is important and allows a writer’s voice to come out. I don’t think it can just be about the athlete or sport; the writer needs to be in there somehow, and Miller does a great job at that. It also stirred in me to go out and research and find like-minded readers and writers. There are a bunch of great magazines out there where athletics and literature blend together (e.g, The Sport Literate, The Under Review, Clinch, The Twin Bill, Words & Sports Quarterly, Aethlon).

RW: Where would you recommend new readers of E. Ethelbert Miller’s work start out? What other similar poets do you recommend? 

MJ: Several poems by E. Ethelbert Miller can be found on Poetry Foundation and Poets.org, so I think that would be a good place for readers to get started with his work and style. I greatly enjoyed, If God Invented Baseball, and even if you’re not a baseball fan, readers could still take pleasure within it. Two poetry collections I read within the past several years that are a little similar would be, Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Lightning by Loren Broaddus and Aisle 228 by Sandra Marchetti. These poetry collections, like the work of Miller, use baseball to discuss broader themes that don’t just pertain to sports. I especially enjoyed the aspect of place in their works as they are both writers from the Midwest. I thought each presents that part of the country in an intriguing light to someone who is very unfamiliar with it, as I have only lived on the East Coast.

Matthew Johnson reads “Before Ball Four” by E. Ethelbert Miller

RW: You’re the author of the recent publication, Far From New York State (New York Quarterly Press, 2023). What was the process of creating this collection like? How did you reflect on place, history, and your own experience while writing these poems?

MJ: Having moved around a bit, I have always been fascinated by the idea of regionalism. In the final semester of my graduate career, I was in an early American Literature class and for the final presentation, my topic focused on the works of Washington Irving. I had heard of his famed characters, Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman, but I never really read his work until then, and I greatly enjoyed reading his Sketch Book. And it was through research, I kinda went down a wormhole and was inspired by artists and writers of New York, and not from the city, but from the rest of the state. Even though New York City is wonderful, there’s a whole bunch of state and experience and beauty north of it, including the parts where I am originally from (New Rochelle in Westchester County). I wanted to write about these experiences, and I looked inward as well as outward, specifically to my parents, who spent the majority of their lives in Westchester County (New Rochelle and Mount Vernon) and have told me countless stories of their childhood and early adulthood. And though my experience wasn’t as vast as theirs, I did have some, including when I returned to New York in adulthood to work in journalism in Oneonta (between Albany and Binghamton). So I wanted to talk about these histories, as well as the histories of the people who inspired me, including in the form of literature, music, and sports.

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E. Ethelbert Miller was born in the Bronx, New York. A self-described “literary activist,” Miller is on the board of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, and has served as director of the African American Studies Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. His collections of poetry include Andromeda (1974) and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (2004), among others. The mayor of Baltimore made Miller an honorary citizen of the city in 1994. He received a Columbia Merit Award in 1993 and was honored by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House in 2003. Miller has held positions as scholar-in-residence at George Mason University and as the Jessie Ball DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. He has conducted writing workshops for soldiers and the families of soldiers through Operation Homecoming and is the founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area.

Purchase If God Invented Baseball here.

Matthew Johnson is the author of Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books) and Far from New York State (New York Quarterly Press). His forthcoming chapbook, Too Short to Box with God, is scheduled for a November 2024 release through Finishing Line Press. His work has appeared in Front Porch Review, Roanoke Review, Northern New England Review, South Florida Poetry Journal Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. A former sports journalist and editor (The USA Today College, The Daily Star in Oneonta, NY), he has also been a Sundress Publications Residency recipient and a multi-time Best of the Net nominee. An M.A. graduate of UNC-Greensboro, Matthew is currently the managing editor of The Portrait of New England and the poetry editor of The Twin Bill. You can view more of his work and his social media platforms at his website: www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com

Purchase Far from New York State here.

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Maya Williams Reads Raych Jackson

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Maya Williams joins us to discuss the work of Raych Jackson and how poetry can intersect with the complexities of the Black community and Christianity. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Raych Jackson’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Maya Williams: I first watched Raych Jackson on Button Poetry, and then read their book Even the Saints Audition, and have been in love with her work ever since. It stood out to me then because it was so refreshing to hear someone talk about the complexities of Black community and Christianity.

Maya Williams reads “On Job” by Raych Jackson

RW: How has Jackson’s writing inspired your own? 

MW: Jackson’s writing has inspired my own by inspiring me to go directly back to Biblical text of where suicidality takes place and write in response to it. In my book Judas & Suicide , there includes a poem about Jonah that is inspired by Jackson’s poem about Jonah.

RW: You’re the author of the forthcoming Judas & Suicide. What was the process of creating this collection? 

MW: The process of creating this collection first involved writing a poem that’s the same name as the title of the book. It took three years to write, and then got accepted by Game Over Books in late 2021.

Maya Williams reads “Jonah Was Trapped Before He Met the Fish” by Raych Jackson

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

MW: My book Judas & Suicide  is out this month! I’m going on a book tour for it that has in person and online events that can be seen here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CsJOc2QromU/

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Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and performer. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube. She is the 2017 NUPIC Champion and a 2017 Pink Door fellow. Her recent collection Even the Saints Audition won Best New Poetry Collection by a Chicagoan in the Chicago Reader fall of 2019. Jackson currently lives in Chicago.

Visit her website here.

Purchase her collection here.

Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently the seventh poet laureate of Portland, Maine. May 2023 marks the release of eir debut collection Judas & Suicide. October 2023 marks the release of their second collection Refused a Second Date. They were one of three artists of color selected to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America series in 2020 and were listed as one of The Advocate’s Champions of Pride in 2022. You can follow more of eir work at mayawilliamspoet.com

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Elizabeth Upshur Reads Anuradha Bhowmik

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Elizabeth Upshur joins us to discuss the work of Anuradha Bhowmik and how poetry can infiltrate girlhood, nostalgia, and reclaim it all. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Anuradha Bhowmik’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Elizabeth Upshur: 2016? Feels so long ago! I remember connecting with Bhowmik’s work because they are these incredibly poignant time capsules, little snapshots in black and white that you want to devour every little detail of, to see all the similarities and differences pointed out in the American experience. I remember writing my first syllabus in Kentucky for my kids in English 1010 and I knew that I could reach them through Elegy, 1998 to not only craft their own personal narrative but to gain a deeper understanding of an immigrant experience that wasn’t colored by Fox or the pulpit or what have you; it was the opportunity to see a person, a young person, like them.

Elizabeth Upshur reads “Jesse McCartney Live in Atlantic City, 2017” by Anuradha Bhowmik

RW: How has Bhowmik’s writing inspired your own? 

EU: Bhowmik can be so unapologetically femme, glitter, lipgloss, Lisa Frank… I haven’t written like that since I first started writing. Her relationship with her mother… mines nothing like that, and yet I find myself relating hard. Being a teenage girl is fraught enough, adding in technology, being Othered, burgeoning bodies and desire—she’s literally deciphering the code so she can show you how it was, in all its naked pain and glory. And looking back at that foundation propels you to look forward too. What sort of woman are you, holding that smaller self, AND therapy AND a hope for the future? That’s a lot, but for me I keep coming back to the cover of Brown Girl Chromatography, one half of her traditional, one half American(ized). She’s a Janus figure looking us head on— which is fitting because she’s a December Capricorn!—we see who her mother wants to nurture her into versus who Bhowmik is by nature. We’re different browns (she’s Bangladeshi American, I’m African American) but that’s an aspect of culture and of codeswitching that continues to ring true for me, and I hope my writing addresses it as cleverly one day soon. 

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically? 

Elizabeth Upshur reads “Fieldnotes, 1” by Anuradha Bhowmik

EU: Well, I wanted to do a lil sampler, a poetry charcuterie (a poetrcuterie if you will). So I included one each from her series on AOL IM, which I’ve been calling demi-forms since it borrows the structure from that platform, but is also really expansive in the way she utilizes it. “Fieldnotes 1” is my favorite.

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

EU: I’m sharing work with a few friends. Fingers crossed for a residency this year, and I’ve got a project simmering on the backburner. I was awarded a Hudson Valley Writers Center POC Scholarship, so I get to take a revision intensive workshop with January Gill O’Neil. Orchard just finished up their Crash Course on Forms by Black Writers for February and that was so fun. Definitely a highlight of Black History Month for me.

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Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey. She is the 2021 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first collection Brown Girl Chromatography (Pitt Poetry Series, 2022). Bhowmik is a Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry. She earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. Her poetry and prose have appeared in POETRY, The Sun, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.

Find her website here.

Purchase her collection Brown Girl Chromatography here.

Elizabeth Upshur is a Black Southern writer. She is a proud Fulbright alumna, and Poetry Co-Editor at OkayDonkey Mag. She is the 2020 Gigantic Sequins winner for her flash “motherfucker” and has won prizes from Brown Sugar Lit and Colorism Healing for work that deals in race, place, and the speculative. Her writing lives in EcoTheo, Augur Mag, Pretty Owl Poetry, and others. She lives in rural Tennessee with her family and rumors of the occasional black bear. She tweets @lizzy5by5

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Kelly Weber Reads Sara Henning

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Kelly Weber has joined us to discuss the poetry of Sara Henning and world building in poetry, evocative imagery, and memory’s relationship with lyricism. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: How has Sara Henning’s work inspired your own?

Kelly Weber: Henning’s collection was one of many I read as I was thinking about ways to build a sort of complicated family mythology in my first published book, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place. She writes in an unflinching way about trauma and weaves the narrative structure of memory with a lyricism that moves so deftly on the page. There’s such an emotional honesty and directness with luscious sound play and distinctive imagery in her work.

RW: You’re the author of the recent publication, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022). What was the process of creating this collection like? Where did your interest in mythology or formal poetry begin?

KW: This collection really grew out of trying to find a lyric shape and articulation for asexuality and aromanticism, and a lot of the book’s wrestling with the sonnet form and some of its amatonormative traditions are part of the crisis of that book. For a long time I struggled with traditional poetic forms and their restrictions–I still haven’t found a way to write into the sestina that feels genuinely inspiring, for example. But with this book, I realized I loved inventing my own formal changes on the page, like writing a poem with the ampersand as its primary and only piece of punctuation, or really skewing and strangling the traditional sonnet crown into something that was interesting to me. Ultimately the process of creating this collection was about finally finding what was interesting to me about the lyric poem on the page. The thematic concerns followed the formal experiments I was trying, and gradually the themes and shape of the book emerged from there.

Kelly Weber reads “The Truth Only Starlings Will Speak” by Sara Henning

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically? 

KW: “The Truth Only Starlings Will Speak” reminds me of the vivid, evocative description in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”–one of Henning’s many fine skills as a writer is her ability to articulate an image with such lush verbs and word choice. Images in that poem like “lymph nodes feverous / in their recursion. Bending to this rapture” are so perfectly observed in both sound and image. This poem is exemplary of her ability to slow down a narrative moment and find the highest lyric pitch within it. Too, she does this brilliantly in “Terra Inferna,” a poem I also love for the girl and the mare “wild enough / to end everything,” the power and agency within those figures. There’s also so much agency and power in “Once, I Prayed in the Water”–a poem that so beautifully celebrates the speaker’s desire, her autonomy, her sense of eroticism and pleasure and living life to the fullest that leads to that sudden, stunning turn to an elegy for the mother, the burial of the person the speaker once was, and a meditation on how “all things   beautiful & terrible / begin to burn.” I love the tension of the water and the fire in this poem, their yoking together through shine.

Kelly Weber reads “Once, I Prayed in the Water” by Sara Henning

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

KW: I’m so thrilled that my first book, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place from Tupelo Press, is now out in the world, and I’ve been busy with readings and events and workshops in support of that release. I’m also excited for my second book, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, coming out this fall with Omnidawn Press. It’s a lot happening at once but I’m so grateful for all of it.

Read more from this interview at our Patreon.

Sara Henning is the author of Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, First Prize in the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (Passaic County Community College), and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University.

Find her website here.

Purchase her latest collection Terra Incognita here.

Kelly Weber (she/they) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (forthcoming October 2023). She is the reviews editor for Seneca Review. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a Best American Poetry Author Spotlight, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, Salamander, The Journal, Passages North, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives with two rescue cats. Find them on Instagram and Twitter at @KellyWeberPoet

Visit her website here.

Purchase their debut collection We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place here.

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Lyric Essentials: Juliana Roth Reads Ross Gay

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite writers to read the work of their favorite poets. This month, Juliana Roth joins us to discuss the work of Ross Gay, contemporary poetry, literary citizenship, and how Gay’s poetry feels like a doorway to better understanding the surrounding world and ourselves. As always, we hope you enjoy reading as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Ross Gay’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Juliana Roth: I had a funny way into Ross Gay’s work, which is just to show my ignorance of contemporary poetry. I didn’t know much about living poets until my final year of college. I was working at this small lending library at my school called the Hopwood Room where once a week the MFA students would gather at this big round table across from my desk and a visiting writer would come sit with them and talk for an hour about their process and books. There was a little nook behind my desk where I would work during the sessions and listen in. I was having a really bad day, I forget why, so I was in my nook. Then all of a sudden I started to hear someone reading a poem, and the words really caught my ear, and then the conversation that followed lifted me right out of my mood. I came out from my nook and learned the poet was Ross Gay.

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

JR: In “Becoming the Horse,” I love how I’m taken in to approach “the beast,” whether that is a literal nonhuman animal or any part of us (or our world, which is us) that is difficult to touch, at first tiny as a grass blade, then a fly, then a total transformation occurs. I feel the piece also opens up the possibility that we might change our behavior should we know ourselves or our animals more intimately (nose to nose, heart to heart). It’s a love poem, I think. A gesture towards radical honesty, which the poem seems to suggest might set us free from fear. If we are fully honest and see with true clarity, what is left to fear?

I think this carries into “Ending the Estrangement” where that proximity to what is feared is actually knowing the pain of your mother. The gesture at the end of the poem of singing along with that pain just feels liberating. And like we’re being guided in confronting death. Also a love poem, I think.

And then “Wedding Poem,” definitely a love poem, I think it’s safe to say. For me, the poem captures that sweet embarrassment and shyness that often appears in the face of true love. I imagine that bashfulness happens at any age, and the piece celebrates how simple it is to just let love in—once you do, despite how long it takes to get there.

Juliana Roth reads “Becoming a Horse” by Ross Gay

RW: How has Gay’s writing inspired your own?

JR: The generosity on display in his work is an important model for literary citizenship and maintaining personhood in a public profession. The acknowledgment he makes in Be Holding where he basically says all the poets that came before and all the books he reads, even friends and family, they are his work and in essence the collection belongs to them—that’s pretty significant. I think modeling that resistance to becoming capital and hyper individualism a creative market puts on you is what I hope to do as well. I also think the process he used for The Book of Delights freed me to write my newsletter because I give myself specific constraints not to overedit (there are even typos!), write without knowing in advance what my goal is for the letter, and also as I do the podcast I haven’t spent any money at all on production, so it is very handmade. I don’t think I have a radio voice or personality either—I’m just bringing on people who I admire and who are thinking about the world in interesting ways to chat and we just record our conversation.

Juliana Roth reads “Wedding Poem” by Ross Gay

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

JR: Right now I’m in professor mode just getting us through midterms at the moment, but I did find out a few weeks ago that I was selected as an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, which has been a whirlwind. Last week we got to meet the outgoing fellows and I spent just a few minutes so far with my cohort, but I’m so excited for the community and space to write. I can’t wait to see what work I create while I’m there. I also have a new short film premiering in a festival at Cinema Village on October 26th if there are any local readers who love old movie theaters. As far as life outside of my career goes, I’m just spending as much time as I can with my family right now, including my sweet dog Ziggy. Oh—I started learning to skateboard with a friend this past spring so we practice as much as we can. And I’ve been very into trying different varieties of pesto—hugely exciting, but my favorite so far has been a beetroot cashew. So good!

Read more from this interview at our Patreon.

Juliana Roth is a 2022-23 Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction and was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, The Offing, Irish Pages, and Entropy as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. Currently, she teaches writing at NYU and writes the newsletter Drawing Animals (subscribe here: www.julianaroth.com/drawinganimals) featuring essays, interviews, doodles, and podcast episodes celebrating our interconnection with nonhuman animal life.

Ross Gay is an advocate for joy, love, and the pleasures of life. He is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller.

Inciting Joy is his most recently published collection of essays.

Ryleigh Wann earned her MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. Ryleigh currently lives in Brooklyn. Learn more or read her work at ryleighwann.com