Here are our twelve most-read interviews of 2018:
“When I’m in [revision], it can feel like play—trying out pieces to see if they fit, and seeing the charge that certain words take on when located into a different context.”
Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017)
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“In the core of my chapbook are poems that speak about the history of the Korean ‘comfort women’ (a euphemistic term for sex slaves of the Japanese Imperial army), although not all the poems are about that history.”
Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017)
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“I think I need more answers. The book itself is so full of questions, most are unanswerable in some way.”
like a solid to a shadow (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017)
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“My main advice for aspiring writers is to turn off your phone, put it in another room, and just get down to it.”
Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss (Stillhouse Press, 2018)
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“Languages of politics and intimacy are in constant tension so that the violence of an occupied Afghanistan cannot, for example, be separated from the violence of the father’s cancer treatment.”
[ G A T E S ] (Black Lawrence Press, 2017)
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“I like to read women and… my work tends to respond to women’s issues, such as personal exile, whether in this century or the last.”
What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018)
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“I wanted these essays to be acts of attention. Contempt rules our world and tyrannizes the way we act with one another, whether it manifests as self-aggrandizement or ridicule or pity. That’s an Annie Dillard verb too, the imperative: attend. It’s perhaps one of the essay form’s highest functions.”
The Long Weeping: Portrait Essays (Orison Books, 2017)
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“I know this is where I’m from, but it’s more than that. West Virginia is such a rich landscape, because it’s a place that often exists outside of the realities of most Americans. It exists as stereotype for many, but underneath that stereotype, the lives of the people who live there are so rich.”
Jaws of Life (West Virginia University Press, 2018)
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“I’m obsessed with movement of peoples, borders, temporality, ideas. Movement and the possibility or impossibility of return.”
Sugah Lump Prayer (Akashic Books, 2017)
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“Like most books, Orient’s about a lot of things: deserts, refugees, religion, conflict, culture, orientalism, violence, pornography, art, music, binary thinking, noise, politics, identity, empire and the way we speak of it, language and the way we speak of it. The list goes on. It’s a real cacophony….”
Orient (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018)
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“I’m properly represented in [my chapbook], my heartbreak, my longing, my sadness. My weird 17-year-old-ness. Coming to terms with my queerness, my complicated relationship with my family, love & loss.”
How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press, 2017)
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“I chose the form of the sonnet to inform this long series of poems, for the emotional ballast the form provides in its rigor, but also because the sonnet lends itself to argument and countering established notions (sometimes established by the poet herself) and because my writing in this form in a self-consciously feminist voice shifts the long (mostly male and white) tradition of this ur-form in English.”
Age of Glass (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018)
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