Here are our sixteen most-read interviews of 2016.
“it was a strange, unsettling time where all of the usual contradictions of being a person in the world felt more palpable & the chapbook is about that feeling.”
Transit (Button Poetry, 2015)
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“I wanted the pieces to ebb and flow, to crash against each other, to speak to Phillis and for those whose names we do not know.”
dear girl: a reckoning (Gold Line Press, 2015)
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“I love having a ten-minute time limit to begin creating something; I think my brain works best when it’s fighting against a restriction.”
Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014)
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“This question, ‘What is left whispering in us once we have stopped trying to become the other,’ is at the seam of every poem.”
Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016)
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“I was having a recurring dream featuring the musician Prince and he and I talked about the chapbook a lot in the dreams.”
Asmarani (Akashic Books/ African Poetry Book Fund, 2016)
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“The otherworldly light and low-slung sky gets my creative fire burning like no other place. There’s a dreaminess to New Mexico.”
Moods of the Dream Fog (Finishing Line Press, 2016)
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“Sometimes there’s just a word or an impression that I collect, hoping to use it at a later time.”
This Diet of Flesh (Finishing Line Press, 2016)
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“I feel that I know of the parts, wholes, and holes of a collection as I write, and I write to figure out how the poems belong.”
toxic city (Tinder Tender Press, 2015)
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“The chapbook lets me be emotional & rude while still being a beautiful product.”
rude girl is lonely girl! (Pizza Pi Press, 2016)
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“My work reverses the lens —it watches the witnesses, the YouTube viewers, and God while critiquing the practice of trialing civilians by gunfire.”
Surveillance (Writ Large Press, 2016)
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“Like children’s stories the world over, the ones I grew up hearing also often had lessons to teach about how good girls should behave–that they should be self-sacrificing, clean, subservient.”
The White Swallow (Gold Line Press, 2015)
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“My notebooks look like pure madness.”
Silver Bullet (Mindmade Books, 2015)
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“Grist deals a lot with how to make sense of the body in disruption.”
Grist (Floating Bridge Press, 2016)
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“Everything that you do is connected at the soul level.”
Their Sobering Suicides (Finishing Line Press, 2016)
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“Giving myself time to write is almost as much of a discipline as the writing itself.”
Figuring (Bull City Press, 2016)
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“Poems usually have to push through the busyness, but I’ve learned to stop what I’m doing and write them down when they arrive.”
Blue Tarp (Finishing Line Press, 2016)
