Category: Interviews & Excerpts

Short Story Excerpted from Alex Behr’s New Collection Animal Kingdom: “A Nation of Bombs”

They have vestiges of sex, like when a phantom limb feels pain. He is her man, and she pledged him her devotion, but she mispronounced troth at the altar, so does her pledge of fidelity count? Like, forever? How dead does she have to be? If they wished, they could unpaper the mirror with the…
Marcus Pactor Talks to Lance Olsen about His Most Recent Novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies

Lance Olsen is one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists. Few writers have been as consistently excellent over the past thirty-plus years. In that time, he has evolved from a cutting-edge sci-fi writer into a wizard of form and narrative, infusing his singular works with poetically imaginative language as well as a rare range and depth…
Vi Khi Nao in Conversation with Poet & Scientist Kim Barke about Her Collections State to State & Months at a Time

Kim Barke is a queer poet, playwright, composer, publisher, and creative director whose work defies conventional categorization. She holds a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology and an MFA in creative writing, and has worked in advertising for over 25 years, earning nine Cannes Lions among numerous other accolades. She is the author of three poetry…
Ryan Bollenbach: A Memorial Excerpt from His Chapbook Letters from a Strange Land

I first got acquainted with Ryan through his submission to our print issue, Vol. 6, where he sent two poems called “sometimes the word for tender isn’t tender.” Fortunately I’ll always have these poems to connect me back to that person and, now, his chapbook, Letters from a Strange Land, which he recently published with Carrion…
“Carved with Longing”: A Conversation with Lauren C. Johnson, Author of The West Facade, by Kathleen J. Woods

Lauren C. Johnson’s rescue dove Schooner is perched on her knuckles, eyeing me through the Zoom interview screen. “He’s bonded into a really hands-on bird. See? I can just scratch his little neck now, and I never used to be able to do that.” Johnson continues, “I think he sees us as part of his…
“A Brief but at Times Illuminating Encounter”: Matthew Kinlin Interviews Literary Translator Frank Garrett

Frank Garrett is an independent scholar, writer, and literary translator based in Dallas, Texas. We spoke over Zoom about his projects in translation, philosophy, and specifically his ongoing work around queer Polish poet Józef Czechowicz (1903 – 1939), whose novel The Story of the Paper Crown he translated for Sublunary Editions in 2023. He is…
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 (DrunkSkull Books), 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,…
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…