From the Blog

10 Questions for Gregory Fraser

April 24, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

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

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

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

April 23, 2018 - By Krzysztof Rowiński

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

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

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

10 Questions for Emily Fragos

April 17, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

 The body she needs me now to cut her food and feed her,
to bring the glass of sweet water, never sweeter, to her mouth,
dry and shuttered. Now it unfurls itself as mouth, fish wet
and bird ascendant to a higher branch, with the taste of peaches
on its tongue, and for a moment she is mine again.
—from “My Body,” Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
“Pompeii 79 A.D.” was one of my first poems. I shared it with others in a poetry workshop and it was admired for its minimalism, its imagery. I distinctly remember writing about a man scooping up his baby in his arms and hopelessly...

10 Questions for Lara Ehrlich

April 9, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

“She empties the car onto the lawn: her gym clothes, an armful of toys, the baby seat her daughter outgrew long ago, and three bags of stuff for Goodwill. She crawls into the back, where she hasn’t been since college when her boyfriend accompanied her home for spring break. They’d snuck out of her parents’ house to the nature reserve parking lot. She’d gone down on him as headlights swept through the woods.” —from “Burn Rubber,” Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In elementary school, I was engrossed in writing a free-form, ongoing saga about Zohara and her wolf companion, Blubluck. Inspired by movies like Willow and books like The Lion,...

10 Questions for Patrick Thomas Henry

April 5, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

“Perhaps, academic criticism attacks the “feedback loop between critical theory and artistic practice” to unconsciously deflect attention from a fear common to literary critics: that the humanities have become a cerebral echo chamber in an institutional environment that privileges STEM fields, the corporate university, and its investment portfolios. This is the fear: we write to each other, read each other, and yet fail to com­municate effectively to the general readership. Outside that circle, our scholarship doesn’t even incite negative reactions.” —from “A Defense of the Artist-Critic, Part One” Winter 2017 (Vol. 58, Issue 4), Part 2 can be found in Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of...