Category: Interviews & Excerpts

Poetry: Excerpts from Margo Berdeshevsky’s Before the Drought

Before the Drought is a lyric meditation on corporeal existence, suffused with atavistic spirit and set in historical as well as cosmic time, a work of radical suffering and human indifference but also sensual transport. The tutelary spirits of these poems are the feminine principle, and a flock of messengers that include blue heron, ibis, phoenix,…
Exclusive Interview: Benefit Album for Chelsea Manning Organized Thanks to Trans/Genderqueer Activist Evan Greer

The journalist, singer/songwriter, and activist has called on some of the biggest names in the music industry to support the US Army soldier and whistleblower. By Bernadette Giacomazzo Image: Chelsea Manning Instagram The name “Chelsea Manning” invokes a wide variety of reactions—people think she’s either a patriot or a traitor, a freedom fighter or a terrorist,…
“Your Tongue Will Berate You”: An Interview with Vi Khi Nao by Hillary Leichter

When you open the first pages of Fish in Exile, it is clear: you are conversing with a poet. Language is effortless and strange, glorious in its dexterity and rhythm. Each sentence has the capability to corner you, kiss you, crush you. This is story of Ethos and Catholic, a husband and wife who are…
Excerpt: My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Edited by Jordan A. Rothacker)

Editor’s Preface: In the summer of 2011 I discovered Maawaam’s being in a box. The form his being took in that box was in journals, scraps of paper, scribbled on leaves, photographs, and drawings. The journals were the most significant abundance of being. For the last six years I have studied his being in the…
“The Page 99 Test”: Tony Trigilio & Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford Page ninety-nine opens the final section of my new book, Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2. This page is a key pivot point for…
“The Page 99 Test”: Laurie Stone & My Life as an Animal

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford Damn you, Ford Madox Ford. I wanted to be done with a friend I had turned into a character in My Life as an Animal. Then I read page ninety-nine, and there she was…
“The Page 99 Test”: Joe Milazzo & Crepuscle W/ Nellie

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford We’re standing outside a pawnshop, probably somewhere in Midtown or even Lower Manhattan. The year is 1955, autumn. We’re in the company of John, a “minor character” who may or may not be a…
“Slomo croaking frogs, snow-alone steeples, pits of shoveled salt.”: Contributors’ Corner

Q: Can you share a moment that shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? What prompted your work in HFR? Katie Condon, Poetry Editor, Grist I played basketball in college. My senior year we won our conference and, appropriately, my roommates and I threw a party at our apartment for the team and anyone else…
“To Mark the Infinite Language of the Body”: An Interview with Sara Deniz Akant by Ally Harris

Reading Sara Deniz Akant’s Babette is like stepping into an alien bog, where matter is composed in language that looks vaguely Earthlike, vaguely English, but is actually largely foreign, partially invented, but familiar enough to tether the reader to the world. Babette, frankly, is an amazingly odd book. Reading it feels like decoding a puzzle…