From the Blog

10 Questions for Joshua Garcia

July 28, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

My therapist asks me why I think I always return to lack,
and it may or may not be related, but it's been on my mind,
so I finally tell him I might have been assaulted by my doctor.
—from "Poem with Starbucks and Kissing and Trees", Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I received a very generous rejection at age 12 from an unnecessarily kind editor at The New Yorker who must have understood that he was responding to a child. I only remember that the story had something to do with my dad, a school bus, and a sunset. One of the first poems I wrote that I took seriously as an adult, however, was “Wet Dream,” which is about memory and beginning to...

10 Questions for Amanda Hawkins

July 26, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

At first the men thought it was a store of foggy white cum.
I can forgive this mistake-desire can interrupt logic.
—from "Spermaceti", Vol. 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In fifth grade I wrote what I now call a feminist version of Pete’s Dragon in verse: A character called Rose befriends a little girl who is going through challenging times and needs a friend. The girl is the narrator and tells of how Rose had to leave to help someone else. I still have the paper.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I believe where we are and how we write—at any point—is a layering effect of the past, but recently? I...

Moving Water

July 24, 2021 - By Doug Anderson

For the last two years I’ve had the privilege of watching Serious Play Theater Ensemble develop its new production, Moving Water. As one of the photographers helping with this project, I have been enchanted by its action and imagery. The subject, however, is far from enchanting: it’s chilling. Fresh water is disappearing from the earth while, paradoxically, global warming is melting icecaps and threatening low-lying coastal areas with submersion.

In Florida, a high rise condo has collapsed killing over a hundred people, and others are in danger. Everything in our daily lives is affected: seventy percent of our produce comes from California and its aquifers are being rapidly depleted during a long and severe drought, in which a spark from a...

Literature Doesn’t Stop at the Unspeakable

July 22, 2021 - By Michael Rothberg

(Cover design by Deste Roosa; cover art by Judith Wolfe, detail from Dans la Lumière de Glace 1, from the series Hommage à Charlotte Delbo, 2013.)

A Review of Ghislaine Dunant, Charlotte Delbo: A Life Reclaimed, translation and introduction by Kathryn Lachman (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).

The work of Charlotte Delbo has accompanied my thinking and teaching about the Holocaust for the last twenty-five years. Her trilogy Auschwitz and After counts among the most searing responses to the Nazi camps that have appeared in any language, and her late work Days and Memory contains some of...

10 Questions for Adrian Matejka

July 21, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Slowest-footed day of the week,
wrong noted & creaking on
the credenza while the other

influencers gossip in the kitchen's
linoleum.
—from "Tuesday Feeling", Vol. 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first time I wrote a poem was in March 1994. I remember it so vividly because I was in Bloomington, Indiana walking across a field near campus. I was listening to Miles Davis’s version of “Footprints” and for just a moment, I thought I understood his language of trumpets. I got my notebook out and wrote a draft of a poem called “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” that ended up in my first book 9 years later. That’s one of the...