Category: Interviews & Excerpts

Peter J. Kahn Talks to Poet & Artist Hosho McCreesh about His New Collection Psalms from the Badlands

The Hebrew Psalms were songs of lament, a crying out for help, or hymns praising God. Hosho McCreesh, in his new book Psalms from the Badlands, loosely follows the tradition of the latter and fills his pages with hymns that praise not necessarily God but life and the land on which life flourishes, specifically “the…
Novel Excerpt: “Struck” from Afterlife by Angela Woodward

In this luminous novel, Angela Woodward chronicles the meaning of death, the illusions of truth, and the strange, shimmering persistence of the self beyond the ordinary boundaries of life. Through fictional encyclopedia entries, surreal vignettes, and personal narratives, Afterlife blurs fact and imagination, the material and the ghostly, with poetic precision and biting wit. Woodward’s speaker journeys…
“Evil Was Real”: Matthew Kinlin & Nicholas Rombes Discuss His Novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Released just over a decade ago, the mystery of The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing from Nicholas Rombes only deepens. In the mid 90s, a journalist tracks down and interviews a rare film librarian who once burned a stockpile of film cannisters and disappeared for many years. The head-twisting neo-noir follows Laing’s descriptions of these…
Three Original Poems from If Only in Combat I Find Love by Jack Nancy

So the Carnival Does Not Crash Bikini Jesus of the red hangercome down, you mangeryou’re not meant to be up thereyou poet, come down, you are a boxfor living things, cows, farm animals Picking up lines from the half head goneripping off sweaters from the should be deadnot knowing how to clean themwatering the plastic…
“Visiting the Dilapidated with Hope in Your Heart”: Abbie Kiefer Interviews Poet Kelly Gray

Kelly Gray’s Dilapitatia is, in many ways, a book about haunting—how lineage keeps shaping the present, how the dead remain with us, how our minds and bodies keep returning to the mysteries that possess us. I recently talked with Gray about her collection. Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide…
“The Dilettante Magpie’s Guide to Research”: Natalie Louise Tombasco in Conversation with Poet Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press), and the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared…
“Quotation Marks Are for Amateurs”: Matthew Kinlin in Conversation with James Nulick

From the venom-tongued Valencia to the hallucinatory The Moon Down to Earth, James Nulick writes novels about outsiders with the precision of a plastic surgeon and the phantasmagorial style of Marcel Proust reanimated in battery acid. His hypnotic and serpentine prose cumulates and reaches new heights in his latest novel Plastic Soul, a work of…
Adam Camiolo Talks to Celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan Author Pip Adam

Pip Adam is the celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan author of four novels, including New Animals (2018), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and her latest, Audition, which was published in the U.S. by Coffee House Press in June. The novel is a profoundly strange but deeply moving exploration of life in the margins of society, the…
“There Is So Much to Unlearn”: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz by Jax Connelly

When I was sixteen, I had a fat crush on my boss at the grocery store where I scanned boxes of cereal and punched in produce codes for five dollars an hour. He was twenty-four, a community college dropout with dyed-black hair and a tattoo of a guitar stretching out over the back of his…