Tag: William Lessard

Nonfiction Review: William Lessard Reads Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Critical Writings A Tradition of Rupture

A Tradition of Rupture collects the critical writings of an Argentine poet (1936-1972) whose life and work have come to the attention of English-speaking readers in the past decade. Not unlike the Roberto Bolaño craze of the aughts, new translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry have appeared almost every year, selling well among anglophones eager for…
“But the Nightingale”: William Lessard Interviews Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry. frank: sonnets won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN/Voelcker Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times…
“Ashenfolk”: William Lessard Interviews Joseph Mosconi + 6 Exclusive Poems

Joseph Mosconi is a writer, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. A former Google computational linguist, he is the executive director of the Poetic Research Bureau (PRB), a hybrid arts space that hosts weekly readings, performances, and films by today’s most progressive poets and artists. Mosconi is also a co-founder and programmer at 2220…
Caw Caw Phony, 21st-century nature poems by Michael Sikkema, reviewed by William Lessard

Saxophonist and composer Marion Brown mapped the pastoral for avant-garde jazz. “Afternoon of a Georgia Faun,” the title piece of his 1971 album, explores deciduous sonics beyond the jagged urbanism of Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and his own late 60s work. In an interview for 1973’s “Notesto Afternoon of a Georgia Faun: Views and…
“Cheers to the Weirdos!”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2022

I’m a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer from a very particular, what-some-have-deemed-“weird” taste. Given this affliction, I wanted to create a list of suggestions from authors who share my penchant for more experimental or innovative…
“The Land of All Time”: William Lessard Interviews Clark Coolidge + Six Exclusive Poems

For six decades, Clark Coolidge has been presenting language awash in information, with jarring and frequently hilarious syntax. Although frequently associated the Language School and the New York School, his work reflects his life-long dedication to jazz drumming and an improvisational poetics that takes in the entire world. In the following interview, Coolidge talks about…
“Outside the door there is an animal writing my name in the blood of other animals”: William Lessard Interviews Adam Tedesco, Author of Mary Oliver

With the publication of Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019), Adam Tedesco gives us a cycle of poems that places topics like addiction and recovery outside the expected psychological frame. A video artist as well as a poet, Tedesco brings a fluid sense of medium as well as outlook. The result is not Robert Lowell-style confessionalism…
Artist Spotlight: Four Visual Poems by Sarah J. Sloat

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Sarah J. Sloat reminds us that even in our digital culture writing is about texture. Combining words, images, and erasure, her work exposures the landscape residing within every page. Sloat is a poetic detective that looks behind the whiteness. At her hand, the line of text moving…
“A Catalogue of Things That Follows from Looking”: William Lessard Interviews Julia Madsen

Julia Madsen is a writer who thinks like a filmmaker, a filmmaker who thinks like a writer, and an artist who thrives on intertextual uncertainty. With the publication of The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland (Trembling Pillow Press, 2018), the first-time author joins Anne Boyer, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, and…