Patrick Hueller lives, writes, and teaches in Minnesota. He is the author of several books, many of them aimed at getting kids pumped about reading. These books have been selected for the American Library Association Rainbow Award and School Library Journal’s “Accessible Reads for Struggling and Reluctant Readers.” He has a forthcoming collection of short stories, Fake Tattoos (Cornerstone Press).

Poetose is thrilled to publish Falling, in Love with Teaching! How did this book of narrative poems come to be?

The collection began with a single poem. A fight between two girls broke out in the middle of my 9th grade English class while we were reading Romeo & Juliet. I ended up stepping in the middle of the two girls. Afterward, everyone who cared about me kept asking if I was okay or if I needed anything. The only thing I needed was for these teenage girls to give this play about emotionally-charged teens another look. When I sat down to write about the incident, I was shocked to discover it came out as a poem. For the next year and a half, classroom experiences kept coming out the same way.

Your poems are packed full of humor, and I imagine you bring that same energy to the classroom. Do you feel that your teacher self is very different from your writing self?

I feel a little weird talking about being funny. Have you ever read a novel where the characters are described as laughing at another’s character’s joke? More often than not, I didn’t find what the character said funny, so the laughter feels forced. It’s like the novel’s version of a laugh track. Don’t get me wrong: I hope the poems ARE funny; thank you for the compliment! The things my students do and say often crack me up and I hope they do the same for the reader. At my best — which I’m definitely not always at — I want my writing voice to feel similar to my “real” voice, in the classroom and anywhere else.

We rarely hear the innermost thoughts of our educators. To many of us, encountering a teacher outside the classroom is rather a shock when it dawns on us they are real human beings with ongoing lives, too. In writing, were you ever self-conscious about letting readers, which includes students and other teachers, into the world of Mr. Hueller?

I think the only self-consciousness I felt was on behalf of my students. I never want to be the cause of their embarrassment. It’s kind of like years ago, when I did open mic standup comedy: I don’t mind talking with total honesty and self-deprecation about my own life, but my family wasn’t always so sure they wanted to be the punchline. I’m never trying to put anyone on blast. For that reason, I’ve obviously changed names and slightly altered situations whenever I think I should.

One of your poems, “Here’s Your Prompt,” brings up a perennial question in literature: “In order to endure, must human beings sacrifice a portion of their humanity? You conclude that absolutely not: “We must restore it.” Did you feel like in writing you were seeking to impart some lessons? Speak directly to educators? Do you have any advice for young educators who perhaps find the classroom more challenging than they expected?

Young educators, if they’re anything like me, will find the classroom more challenging than they expected. I’ve been at this a while now, and I still frequently find it more challenging than expected. I think the goal is to figure out which challenges are the ones worth embracing. I try not to get wrapped up in the bureaucratic challenges (which is obviously easier said than done). Some teachers are whizzes at deliberating over every syllable of this or that standard, or at filling out all the required paperwork. And honestly, God bless them for it. I’m just not wired that way, and I guess I want to tell people that, if you’re not either, you can still make a career out of this crazy profession. You and I can spend our time going back to the fundamental questions: Why teach? Why read? Why write? What does the subject matter have to offer us and the other human beings packed in our classrooms? For me, those questions remain both endlessly unanswerable and endlessly worth asking.

How does being a father and husband impact your writing life?

Writing time gets... interrupted more than it used to. As it should.

You address some challenging issues in the classroom these days, such as AI and phone usage. How do you decide how to approach these kinds of topics in your poems?

I’m definitely guilty in other outlets of my life of getting preachy. My soap box is well-worn. But the truth is, I’ve never really trusted lectures about how the world should or shouldn’t work. Not from others, and not even from myself. I trust stories. I trust art. These things, when done well, allow for complexity and contradiction and nuance. For years, I’d been brainstorming something of a teaching manifesto. Instead, I wrote these poems. I hope they feel as real and honest to other teachers about the issues we face in our society and schools as they did to me when I wrote them.

Do you keep a journal of what’s happening in the classroom? In life?

This is gonna sound pat, but it’s true: for over a year, the first drafts of these poems were my journal.

How do you decide whether something will take the form of fiction or poetry?

It’s hard to answer this one without sounding gaggingly pretentious, but... I don’t really decide. I’m just trying to let the words out in whatever way they want to come out. If I’d read my last statement when I was a high schooler, I would have rolled my eyes SO HARD. But it’s true!

Who are some of the writers and books you hold most dear?

Like just about everyone reading this, I’m sure, my list of favorite authors and books is too long to list to post here. In general, I suppose the ones I hold most dear are the ones who, for whatever reason, get me back to my own work. I go back most often to study and learn from short story writers. Antonya Nelson’s short fiction is amazing, as is Tobias Wolff’s. And Charles Baxter’s. ZZ Packer’s collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is always close at hand. My favorite poet is and will likely always be Louis Jenkins. He wrote prose poems, a genre which can come off as pretentious but with him was the opposite. Just a guy telling you plainly and perfectly how weird and messed up and hilarious life can be. In my twenties I basically stalked him once. I was visiting my sister in Duluth and remembered he lived there, so I looked him up in the phonebook. I couldn’t believe it: his name was right there. I drove to his house and saw what I took to be his shadow in the lit window; then I raced away, heart thumping. A couple years later he visited my grad program, and I fessed up. He was amused, even sent me a free copy of his latest collection. One thing I’ve always loved about the writing community is its generosity. The other is how — at a time when our culture is less interested in literature — a reader can think of an author as their own personal celebrity.

Praise for Falling, in Love with Teaching

“You, perhaps, didn’t know you needed this collection of poems about teaching. But you will fall in and wish to stay here. Patrick Hueller delights in words. His playfulness invites you to linger, to lean in and listen. His economy of language moves at the speed of the school day; and yet, his wisdom keeps you turning over images long after you’ve closed the book. Buy this for colleagues; hand it to your principal. Share these poems as gifts. Then write your own.” -Penny Kittle, author of Book Love and 180 Days

"In Falling, in Love with Teaching, Patrick Hueller demonstrates his remarkable ability to help teachers see ourselves and our students. This collection allowed me to eavesdrop on his classroom for a school year. I laughed, cried, doubted my abilities, wondered what to do when a difficult student was acting up, and ultimately, felt pride. Reading these poems, I remembered why I love teaching." -Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your Names & I Will Testify

"As a teacher (as one of Patrick Hueller’s teachers two decades ago) and sometimes poet, these poems take my breath away. They are, in turns, entertaining, whimsical, edgy, insightful, heartbreaking, and revelatory—occasionally in the same poem. His passions for teaching, for his students, and for humanity itself shine through. But beware: alongside the frequent joys, the metaphors often carried me places I did not anticipate. Grateful for this poetry that is soul-searing (and soul-seering) at its best." - David Weiss, author of To the Tune of a Welcoming God and When God was a Little Girl.

“I am obsessed with this book. Hueller makes light work of explaining the unexplainable: this beautiful, mundane, heartbreaking, and soul-healing job we teachers have happened upon. I’m ordering it for my classroom, the school staff room, and every person I’ve ever tried to describe my work to.” -Hannah Kaplan-Hartlaub, High School English Teacher

“I have never read anything like it. I swear I was laughing and audibly gasping every other poem.” -Kelsey Clodfelter, High School English teacher
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"Falling, in Love with Teaching serves as a powerful reminder that real wisdom isn’t expressed through rote recitation of dates and facts. It’s expressed through the heart, from person to person, and from poet to reader, in lessons that will last a lifetime.” -Jenn Hollmeyer, author of Orders of Protection, "Life Lessons" review in MicroLit

"Much of this collection simply and eloquently captures why we as English teachers continue to teach as well as why we read literature with teenagers." -Megan Bassing, High School English Language Arts Teacher

“Patrick Hueller's Falling, in Love with Teaching isn’t a collection that denies exhaustion or pretends teaching is all inspirational bulletin boards and coffee mugs. It knows the hard parts. But it refuses to let difficulty become the only story. This is a book about the incredible lightness and power of this most important career. It's a reminder of the joy and heartbreak while leaning in to the value. Readers will remember their favorite teacher, the one who made it all worthwhile. It keeps returning to wonder, connection, surprise, grief, and the strange privilege of getting to help build a person’s inner life.” -Māra Corey, High School English teacher

"I'm not a poetry fan (in English for the short stories and novels, not the poetry), but I love these poems!" -​Mark Alford, High School English Teacher

Buy Falling, in Love with Teaching

Read "Warm Demand," a poem in the book

Read a Review in MicroLit

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Barricade, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Fire on the Tongue (Arrowsmith Press, May 2026), Habits of Light (Finishing Line Press, August 2026), A Critique of Haiti's Political Leadership: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan, August 2026), Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026, and 2027 include: a poetry collection from Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout), and an academic book from Bloomsbury Academic (Five Drum Majors of Haitian Poetry: Literary and Historical Consciousness).

Congratulations on your recent book, Fire on the Tongue, out from Arrowsmith Press! How did this book come to be? Could you share a bit about the title?
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The idea of a title is deeply personal. A title resonates when it captures both the tone and the emotional landscape of a book. In the case of Fire on the Tongue, the title was selected by Arrowsmith Press editor Askold Melnyczuk after several rounds of discussion and consideration. It comes from a line in one of my poems. When I saw it alongside three other possibilities, I was immediately drawn to it. It seemed to embody the spirit of the collection—its urgency, its lyricism, and its emotional temperature. A good title becomes the reader’s first point of entry into the work, a kind of signpost that hints at the journey ahead. In the end, I believe a good editor does not impose a vision but reveals one. They help the writer see the work more fully.

Did you write the poems in this collection in English? You also write and translate in Haitian Creole. How do you decide what language to write in? Are some things better expressed in one language than the other?

Writing, for me, is an act of consciousness. It is a way of recognizing the power of words while confronting the histories and structures that shape human life. Some questions I explore can be expressed equally well in Haitian Creole or English. Over time, however, I have come to accept that I write mostly in English because of the literary communities I inhabit, the audiences I engage, and my academic responsibilities. Having lived for many years within North American culture, its linguistic rhythms have become central to my creative impulses.

At the same time, I continue to write in Haitian Creole because it keeps me psychologically and linguistically connected to my origins. It reminds me who I am beyond geography and profession. Writing in English also carries an ethical responsibility because of the economic and cultural power associated with the language. That awareness compels me to witness, to testify, and to seek release from the weight of history. Regardless of language, writing is ultimately the pursuit of truth and an act of freedom.

In “Pyramid of Words,” you write: “I seek words to speak for scorched tongues…words to cleanse the infection of the conquerors’ languages.” Could you share how Haiti’s history of colonial oppression emerges in your writing?

Haiti’s history is never merely historical for me—it is lived memory. Colonialism, revolution, occupation, dictatorship, migration, and resistance continue to shape the emotional and political landscape of Haitian life. My poems often explore how these histories remain inscribed upon bodies, languages, and landscapes.

When I write about “the conquerors’ languages,” I am not rejecting language itself; I am interrogating the histories embedded within it. Language carries memory, but it also carries violence. Poetry allows me to examine those tensions while imagining possibilities for healing, dignity, and liberation. Rather than offering historical commentary, I try to reveal how history continues to live within ordinary human experience.

There seems a constant duality that runs through your poems. You explore the beauty of the sea, the magic of the circus, what your grandfather taught you—yet also of the sinister undercurrent of danger, the violence of whipped animals, and being whipped yourself. Is this duality simply what living is? Maybe you could speak to this power of yours to not shy away from what is hard and complex.

I believe life is inherently paradoxical. Beauty and violence often exist side by side. The sea can be both nurturing and destructive. Childhood can contain wonder alongside fear. Love and suffering frequently inhabit the same memory.

I’m not interested in simplifying those contradictions. Poetry, for me, is a space where complexity can exist without demanding immediate resolution. If the poems possess any power, I hope it comes from their willingness to remain with difficult truths rather than turning away from them. Human experience is rarely singular, and poetry should honor that multiplicity.

Some of your poems reference being whipped as a boy by your grandfather. “You wanted a man erected from a boy, / my legs sculpted by staccatoed lashes.” You write of the violence with moving lyricism, it seems like an act of transformation of something incredibly painful into your breathtaking poems. Could you speak to the process of diving into your past? And what it brought up for you?

Memory is not an archive of fixed facts but a living process of interpretation. Returning to childhood, including painful experiences, requires both honesty and compassion. Poetry does not erase suffering, nor does it justify it. Instead, it allows me to transform experience into language that may create understanding rather than silence.

Writing about those experiences also reminds me that personal history is never purely individual. Family histories, cultural expectations, migration, and historical forces all shape who we become. Revisiting the past is therefore not simply an act of remembrance but also an attempt to understand how identity is continually being formed.

You’re “an Atlantic diasporic molded & shaped / By circumstances, constantly shift-shifting / To survive parasitic waves.” Where is home for you now? Do you feel at home in Boston?

Home has become less a fixed geography than an evolving relationship between memory, language, and community. Haiti remains my emotional and cultural foundation, but migration has taught me that one can belong to more than one place while never belonging completely to any.

Boston has become an important home for me. It is where I have developed lasting friendships, have a family, built an academic life, and grown as both a writer and a teacher. At the same time, my relationship to Boston remains informed by my diasporic experience. Home, for me, is not simply where I live but where I can think, write, teach, dream, and contribute meaningfully to the lives of others.

How has living in Boston influenced you and your writing?

Yes, absolutely. Boston is a wonderfully complex, intellectually vibrant city. Here I have encountered people from many different backgrounds and perspectives, experiences that continually challenge and expand my thinking. The city encourages me to imagine new possibilities while also deepening my appreciation for Haiti’s revolutionary history, especially the historical connections between Boston and Haitian leaders during the Age of Revolution.

How have you found community as a poet and writer?

I have been fortunate to belong to communities of writers who challenged, encouraged, and nurtured my development. Those relationships have shaped not only my writing but also my understanding of what it means to live a literary life.

The first community that proved essential to my growth was the Dark Room Writers Collective. Through that collective I had the privilege of meeting writers such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, Ntozake Shange, Derek Walcott, and many others whose generosity and example opened entirely new literary paths for me. Writing may appear solitary, but literature itself is profoundly communal.

Your poems seem to recognize and fully explore the potentiality and limits of language. Could you speak to your relationship with language over time? What can language do and not do?

Language has become increasingly mysterious to me. The more I write, the more I recognize both its extraordinary power and its limitations. Language can preserve memory, resist oppression, inspire compassion, and imagine new worlds. Yet it can also conceal truth, justify violence, and reinforce systems of domination.

My relationship with language has therefore become one of humility. I no longer believe language can fully capture reality. Rather, I think poetry approaches truth asymptotically—it moves toward it without ever completely possessing it. That uncertainty is precisely what keeps me writing.

What does your writing process look like?

I write almost every day. As I’ve grown older, I demand greater rigor from my language. I’m deeply interested in how words act upon the psyche and how they shape—and are shaped by—our collective human experience.

I don’t follow a strict routine. When I write successfully, it is usually late at night or very early in the morning. Those quiet hours create a space where language can emerge with fewer distractions.

Do you have any favorite writing habits or rituals?

My process is highly iterative. I move through many drafts, often beginning with fragments—an image, a phrase, a rhythm, or a particular tonal gesture. Those fragments gradually suggest an internal architecture that the poem is attempting to build.

Revision is where the real writing occurs. I frequently dismantle poems before rebuilding them. I also read aloud constantly. Poetry must satisfy not only the eye but also the ear. Sound often reveals weaknesses that silent reading cannot.

How have your many book projects come to be?

Each book has emerged from a different set of questions rather than from a predetermined plan. My work consistently returns to language, history, consciousness, migration, and power. I’m interested in how language reveals and obscures truth, how memory survives displacement, and how systems of power shape individual lives.

Increasingly, my questions revolve around belonging, migration, and the ethics of representation in a fractured—and often morally compromised—world. I’m fascinated by the extraordinary creativity of human beings alongside our equally remarkable capacity for destruction through structural violence, racism, greed, sexism, and other forms of domination. Each project grows from sustained engagement with these questions rather than from a desire simply to produce another book.

You’ve worked with an impressive number of presses: Beacon Press, Central Square Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Finishing Line Press, now Arrowsmith Press. Could you share a bit with our readers your various experiences in publishing? Did any surprises arise? Do you have any advice for writers seeking publication?

I’ve been very fortunate to have grown up in an environment where writers were respected, and where books were regarded as sacred objects. The life of the mind was highly valued in my family and in my neighborhood. It was true when I was growing, and it is still true now that the writer still has a role, though it is neither singular nor fixed. At its most vital, writing bears witness. It interrogates dominant narratives, preserves memory, and creates space for alternative ways of seeing.

Moving between poetry and academic prose is both challenging and generative. Each genre demands a different relationship to language—poetry privileges compression and resonance, while academic prose requires clarity, argument, and exposition. The appeal lies in the tension. Each form sharpens the other. Poetry deepens my sensitivity to language; scholarship disciplines my thinking.

Having my point of view, my reading of the world shared through publications, has been satisfying, surprising at first, and now, I have an obligation to contribute my voice to the public square in a way that is lucid, truthful, respectful, and aesthetically meaningful. Writing is not just the production of words, it is a concert of thoughts—one’s own with others. It is a fine tuning of expressive culture. It is leaving a legacy of and about humans’ creativity and our place in the world. Before you enter that concert stage, you must read carefully. You must listen attentively to what other composers have created. You must understand scale, tone, voice, and the weight of composition. Being a writer is not about appearing fashionable; it is, to some extent, about becoming another Atlas—willing to carry the weight of language, history, and responsibility.

You previously taught as an Assistant Professor in Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University. It’s also exciting to hear that you’ll be starting in Fall 2026 as an incoming Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at University of Massachusetts – Boston. What are some of your favorite texts and writers to teach?

I enjoy teaching writers whose works ask difficult ethical and historical questions while remaining formally inventive. Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Mohsin Hamid, Amitav Ghosh, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, and Nawal El Saadawi consistently generate thoughtful conversations because they encourage students to think critically about identity, history, migration, gender, power, and memory. I hope students leave my classroom not simply with more information but with a deeper capacity for empathy and critical inquiry.

Who are some of the writers or books you hold most dear?

Writers who engage both the lyrical and the political have been central to my development—those who refuse to separate aesthetics from history. I’m drawn to voices that challenge language while remaining accountable to lived experience. I admire writers who refuse to separate aesthetics from ethics, beauty from history, or imagination from responsibility. The writers who remain with me are those who deepen my understanding of both language and humanity.

I’m currently reading Fearless by Tracy K. Smith; Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, and Vision and Difference by Griselda Pollock. I move between these and poetry collections. Poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Bei Dao are very dear to me. Of course, there are several fiction writers (Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, Amitav Ghosh…) and theorists (Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Sylvia Wynter, Ann Laura Stoler, Jürgen Habermas,…).

Do you have any advice for young writers?

In a culture saturated with information, the writer’s task may be less about producing more content and more about deepening attention. Slow down. Observe carefully. Read widely and generously. Resist easy conclusions. Remain accountable both to language and to the communities whose stories you tell. Above all, be honest—with your subject, with your readers, and with yourself.

Do you have any life advice in general?
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Try to be a decent human being. Remember that you are a transitional being—a provisional presence among countless other provisional beings. There is nothing inherently superior about any of us. Make your time in this world meaningful by contributing kindness, curiosity, and integrity. Kindness is not weakness; it is one of the highest forms of strength. Live with humility, remain open to learning, and leave the world, however modestly, better than you found it.

Fire on the Tongue by Patrick Sylvain

Habits of Light by Patrick Sylvain

Read more Poetose Interviews

Sarah Schwartz’s poetry has been published in various nationally recognized journals. She earned her BA in English at Pomona College, MFA in Poetry at Brown, and MA in English at University of California, Irvine. She teaches English at The Park School of Baltimore.

Poetose is delighted to publish your debut collection of poems, The Calling. Could you share a bit about how these poems came to be? What are your hopes for the book and its readers?

And I’m honored to have them published! I wrote these poems over the course of many years. The oldest was written when I was in college, almost twenty years ago! I wrote the most recent about a year ago. I have hundreds of poems sitting in folders—both physical and digital—and when I decided to put together a chapbook, I noticed that a number of poems focused on a particular occupation. I went back through some of my favorite poems with that lens, asking myself, “Is this a poem about an occupation? Is it about a calling? Is it about a way of working in and seeing the world?” I was surprised to see how many poems fit, and how many poems were enlivened by a new title that pointed to a calling.

I hope that readers encounter ways of experiencing and understanding the world that feel both familiar and strange. I hope the poems make a reader think, for example, “Wow, I know what it is to be an exhibitionist, though I’ve never called myself one.” My guess is that readers will see aspects of themselves in most of the poems. We are so various.

Are there some callings that particularly speak to you? Apart from “The Poet” of course. And why?

I suppose my previous answer revealed more than I intended. A poet is, I think, an exhibitionist.

As I think more about your question, I have the sense that it is the resistance to each calling that speaks to me. What each calling can’t account for. I suppose that makes my true calling the skeptic.

You ask many intriguing questions in your catalog of callings. Could you talk a little bit about how you use questions in your poems (in this book and/or beyond)?

I’ve always been drawn to questions. They are often more interesting to me than answers. And they are almost always the starting point of a poem. I heard once (who knows where, I’ve never been good at citing my sources) that if you know where a poem is going, you should abandon it and start a new poem. I like to start a poem a bit off-balance and once I’ve righted myself, the poem has ended.

Sometimes in my editing process, the questions disappear or transform into statements. Perhaps that’s a way to build trust with my reader, to give the reader a sense that I am a trustworthy guide.

How did you first start writing poetry?

I wrote my first poem in fourth grade. I was lying in bed and a poem came into my head. I got up, turned on the light, and wrote it down. I was so excited about the feeling of translating a hard-to-pin-down feeling into words that I was almost manic with it. I couldn’t sleep. I think I went to my mom’s room to show her the poem, as if she could confirm that I had experienced something magical. I don’t remember her reaction; maybe she confirmed it, maybe she didn’t. Either way, I knew it was magic.

In “The Accountant,” you write: “Look at your good fortune. Account / for it. Days sliced through with sunshine, night blessed / with an easy heat.” There’s a confidence and beauty to your voice and diction that feels so distinct. Could you talk a little bit about the process of finding your voice as a poet?

I had a writing teacher once tell me that I could “get away” with commands in my poems, and that has always stuck with me. I think she was picking up on the fact that I take on a compassionate authority when I’m writing, strength that makes room. I sometimes call this “the goddess voice.” This voice is often nearly automatic. You know Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought”? That’s how it is with that voice. It comes into my head and it delivers words quickly, sometimes before I’ve even comprehended them. Maybe it’s the voice of my body, of my hands. It’s the voice of self-trust, and I think self-trust is always the route to finding one’s own voice.

Why do you write?

In some ways, it’s like how people describe an addict constantly chasing that first high. I am constantly hungry for that feeling my fourth grade self had—alive with my own mind and the magic of language. There’s no feeling I desire more. That’s enough to keep me returning to the page.

Who are some of your literary influences?

So many! Emily Dickinson was the first poet I loved. I’ve also been really influenced by my college mentor, Claudia Rankine, and all the poets she introduced me to: D.A. Powell, Brenda Hillman, Lyn Hejinian, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Cesar Vallejo, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And at Brown University, too, I was introduced to avant-garde and experimental poets that opened up my conception of poetry. I’ve always felt that I was a little less experimental than my literary influences, but I try, as they do, to let language lead, to let the music of it sing through me without trying to control its meaning.

Who were some of the experimental poets you were most drawn to at Brown? And how was your experience in that MFA program? You wrote a poem a week, right?

At Brown, I was reading a lot of Ben Lerner, Anne Carson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Pam Rehm, Heather Christle. I was especially interested in people playing with and exploding the lyric poem. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr’s anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language was hugely influential for me.

I think I was too young (fresh out of college) to really appreciate what my time at Brown afforded me, which was, above all, time. A fully funded MFA is one of the only ways to get paid to write poetry, and I had no idea what a privilege that was. I was deeply challenged by my classmates and I wrote more than I ever had before. In a sense, I learned how to be a writer. I learned that I work best in the mornings, and that I must be reading poetry every day in order to write it. And yes, the expectation for our workshops was to submit a poem a week. Sometimes I had many poems I wanted to share, and sometimes submitting even one poem felt vulnerable. Sharing regularly was good practice for me. It made me less precious about my poems.

Are there certain classes you particularly enjoy teaching?

Two of my favorite classes to teach are Poetry Writing and Etymology and Semantics. Poetry Writing has pushed me to try to communicate my attitude to writing, which is very process-oriented and open, to my students. I want them to lose control, to experiment, to collage. And it’s always deeply exciting to see where that takes them. I’ve seen some incredible poems come out of that class. “Etymology and Semantics” is a study of theories of language, the history of English, and sociolinguistics. It’s another way to destabilize students’ relationship to language as fixed, given. And it’s always fun to learn the new slang when we talk about how the internet has affected our language.

Could you share a few examples of your letting-go-of-control experiments with our readers in case they would like to try?

The poet CAConrad has wonderful ideas about this kind of experiment. Ecodeviance: (soma)tics for the Future Wilderness is a great place to start.

Here’s one I do with my students, based on what I learned from doing a workshop with CAConrad: Go outside and find a tree. Put your hand on it and listen to what it has to say. Write down everything that comes to mind. A few days or weeks later, return to the writing. Alternate between typing up what you wrote and doing a blind free write (this requires that you turn the light on your laptop down so the screen is black). Print out the document. Have someone else read what you typed up and highlight phrases they like. Using their highlights as guidance, cut out chunks of text you want to use in a poem. Have someone else rearrange the pieces for you. See if you like it. Rearrange it as you see fit. Edit it until you love it.

This is a poem I wrote using that process called “Disciple of Trees”:

It hurts to bind the truth
my body knows, to claim outrages
as my own. I’m worthless
and precious as earth.
I like when it rains, soaks me
good, changes my color, fills
the stream so it rushes
symphony. Stab of
sunlight. My eyes
full of it, my mouth full
of my voice. I don’t worry
how I break off
as long as I’m rooted
in the good dirt. Drop down,
find out who sings there.

What is your writing process? Do you have any favorite rituals, if you believe in them?

My workshop with CAConrad solidified the importance of ritual to my writing process, though I think I’ve always been drawn to ritual.

My rituals are always changing to suit whatever emotional landscape I’m traversing. This summer, for instance, I’ve been staring into my own eyes in a mirror for five minutes before I start writing. It’s been an extremely powerful practice that is helping me come into contact with myself as a subject, and not as an object. Martin Buber has this idea of I-Thou versus I-It relationships. And I realized recently that I often have an I-It relationship with myself. Looking into my own eyes forces me to see myself as whole.

Claudia Rankine taught me that writing happens in two stages, with two very different energies. The first stage is impulsive and energetic; it requires that you put away self-censorship or any form of evaluation. You just get it all down. The second stage is when you bring in the editor. It’s more careful, more deliberate. I think of these two stages as being totally distinct, and I try to keep them separated. I edit weeks or months or years after that first rush of language. When I am in the second stage, acting as my own editor, I do a lot of collaging—taking bits and pieces from here and there to form a whole. Once I have what seems to be a whole, I delete and condense. Sharper, tighter. And, of course, everything must be read aloud in the editing process. You can't know what a poem is or how it’s working until you read it out loud.

In this sense, it seems there is a kind of cyclical aspect to the writing process, of letting go and asserting great editorial control. Do you find one stage more challenging than the other? Spend more time in one stage than the other?

Yes, it’s absolutely cyclical. Asserting control is much more challenging because it invites in the internal critic, and the critic is loud and harsh. As I work to condense a poem, I have to be careful not to condense it out of existence. It requires returning and returning and trying to see clearly. And yet, it’s something I can just sit down and do. I can be in just about any state to do it. Whereas the letting go requires some nurturing, some mental and emotional space, and a ton of time. I definitely spend more time in the letting go process—but that process includes, for instance, taking a walk, reading poetry, journaling, staring into space.

How do you know when a poem is done or at least ready to be sent out into the world?

I don’t send my poems out into the world all that often, maybe because I try to cultivate a feeling that writing is not a performance for others. Once I feel like I’m performing for others, I get stuck in self-doubt and social niceties. But I think a poem is done when I’ve read it at least three times out loud and nothing snags on my ear. There’s this nagging feeling I get when I read a poem I’ve written and I know it’s not done or something is wrong with it. I don’t always know what it is, but I can always tell.

What are you currently working on?

For the past few years I’ve mostly been focused on writing fiction. I just finished a manuscript for a novel about a polyamorous woman whose unexpected pregnancy puts her into contact with a demanding ancestral spirit. And now I’m working on a novel about three strangers who find out they have the same anonymous sperm donor and where their shared desire to know this sperm donor leads them.

Do you have any advice for aspiring young writers?

Nothing that hasn’t been said a million times before. Keep doing it, forever and ever amen. Forget about publication or validation or confirmation that you’re good enough. You’re good enough. Everyone is good enough to write.

An exquisite and often humorous catalogue of poems that offer an array of ways we might see the world and by extension, our place in it.

Sarah Schwartz’s beautiful debut collection of poems, The Calling, contends that we are each called to a way of seeing the world. Moving from the microscopic view of a chemist to the macroscopic view of a geologist, the mathematical view of an architect to the exuberant view of a painter, these poems both delight in and resist the notion of an “occupation.” Schwartz writes: “We are made of many strange shapes, and we don’t even think about it.” These poems ponder our abundant strangeness and don’t shy away from “what is most radical about human existence.”

“With The Calling, Sarah Schwartz takes on the guises of various professions, ranging from ‘The Astronaut’ to ‘The Matriarch’ to ‘The Poet,’ to ask meditative questions about what it means to be human and the lines between ‘biological essentialism versus cultural socialization.’ The speakers in these poems are seeking answers about life’s abounding mysteries: the nature of desire, how to form meaningful connections, among others. Schwartz’s poems are like little jewels, finely shaped and expertly polished.” -Stevie Edwards, author of The Weather Inside and Quiet Armor

“These poems are dedicated to different professions, their jargon, their trade secrets. In a community of highly specialized workers, Schwartz’s speaker is unique, since the vocation of The Poet is both a job among other jobs and the special title of the one who turns the others into life narratives: ‘not just these fifteen / fish, I am the whole / aquarium.’ As Ion put it in Plato’s dialogue, the greatest poet may turn out to be the greatest general.” -Aaron Kunin, author of Love Three

THE CALLING by Sarah Schwartz

Poetose is now listed with Poets & Writers thanks to Paul Flagg’s efforts! We also have a trademark application pending thanks to Meia’s (my) enthusiasm for IP and the USPTO!

And a new initiative has launched thanks to Brett Van Emst of Midnight Mind: Mark your calendar for #LitMagWeek from September 28 to October 2, 2026. Poetose will be joining over 100 literary journals, magazines, and presses from around the world to offer discounts, share insider stories, and more. Learn more and see the many participating folks at LitMagWeek.com.

Also coming up this fall, I plan to represent Poetose at the delicious Boston Veg Food Fest. As my friends and family know, I’ve been a devout vegetarian since the age of eight when I looked down at my plate and connected the tasty morsel with the delightful chickens I liked to raise. I’ve also applied to represent the press at JP Open Studios and the Boston Arts Book Fair, though the latter is not at all guaranteed.

Keeping this short and sweet! And now to sharing all the exciting poemy things of late…

Sincerely,

Meia

Poetose Journal

• “My sponsor says: get a plant / your first year sober; / no relationships.” ~“Gardening at Night” by Alex Stolis

• “​Jo can fly. But don’t look up, she won’t be in the sky overhead, the one we can see, the sky that hosts all things that fly...” ~“The Sky Below” by Philip Matcovsky

• “...I don’t / know who I will be today— / the bird on the wire or the bird / in flight...” ~“Sighting” by Meghan Sterlin

  

• “Long winter. How my life unfolds...” ~“Don’t Waste Sorrow” by Lana Hechtman Ayer

  

• “Characters: A short poem in English, French, and Japanese” by Andrew Milne:

• “They are everywhere, eggs imperceivable, / clinging to the bottom of cans, their webs / the same drab color as the cabinets...” ~“Grain Moths” by Anne Moore Odell

• “Sometimes I pick at myself, and pull at snagged threads / of my life, words, deeds, thoughts, woven in weft and warp, / pulled against my bias, well-worn, yet form-fitting…” ~ “Threadbare” by Richard Stimac

Thank you so much to writer-bookseller Margaux Williamson for this lovely blurb on These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones:

“I am so glad to have read Soon Jones’ work. I appreciated how this collection spoke so unflinchingly about identity and the grieving that can come with shedding our internal and external pasts. All of it was just so beautifully haunting.”

Thanks also to Sundress Publications and Guest Editor Merrick Sloane for featuring poems from Soon Jones’ These Aren’t My Woods Anymore!

Read Soon’s poems, “Half/Slice” and “You Cannot Serve God and Mammon.”

Poetose author Miguel Eichelberger, author of Everything Is, talked about “translating the untranslatable,” adding human detail, why writers should write everything, the Stargate universe, and “don’t show, let them see” in a terrific interview with Paul Zeidman. Watch the video interview on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify.

Don’t miss this brilliant interview with Poetose author Sherre Vernon, also with podcast host Paul Zeidman, about Sherre’s book Translating Blue, loving the sound of words, striking a balance when writing, the importance of complexity, and the value of finding the right word. You can listen to it on YouTube or Spotify.

Thank you for reading! Here’s a photo of some new washi paper and book earrings to tide you over until next time:

I hope you’re staying cool in this extreme heat if you’re local, enjoying the World Cup, and getting some summer rest in.

These days Poetose has been publishing many works somehow rooted in love, and not limited to romantic love. There’s familial love, love for one’s students, for one’s dog and the great blue heron, for the little self one used to be…

As bell hooks said, “I’m talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives…we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in.”

This newsletter is a round-up of what’s been going on recently if you don’t follow Poetose on social media. This month there was a 5x increase in submissions, so lots of new and beautiful work to share from the journal, and we’re still catching up.

I hope you enjoy, and have a safe and happy 4th!

Sincerely,

Meia

“Love is one of the essential experiences of being alive. Through love we mature, we grow, and we gradually become whole. Love enables us to see ourselves more clearly, to hear our own inner voice, and to understand who we truly are. Through the person we love, we come to understand ourselves more deeply and discover the meaning of our lives.”

Don’t miss this beautiful interview with Poetose author, Xue Di, in Ocean State Stories ❤️

Poetose Journal

• "The first thing Lana learned about love, she learned from the gannets. They mated for life, she noted in her waterproofed notebook, perched on the wind-scoured granite of Gwennap Head. But their loyalty was a brutal, practical thing. It was not about affection, but about the efficient rearing of chicks on this precarious, guano-strewn cliff edge. If one partner failed to return from the sea, the other, after a period of circling and crying, would find a new mate by next season. Love, here at the western extremity of Cornwall, was a contract written in salt and survival." ~“The Language of the Gulls” by David I. Hughes
  
  David writes of his story: “The Language of the Gulls” follows Lana Trevelyan, a bird observatory warden on the Cornish coast, whose disciplined, scientific understanding of the seabird colonies around Gwennap Head is unsettled by the arrival of Finn, a poet seeking refuge from personal grief. As their relationship deepens through a shared attention to the landscape, they become divided by a fundamental question: whether human beings should intervene in the natural world’s brutal indifference. When Lana attempts to rescue a stranded guillemot chick during the aftermath of a violent storm, the decision leads to a devastating tragedy that permanently alters her understanding of love, loss, and the coast itself.

• “The day is grey. Rain spits, changes itself into snow, / rain again as it seeps through late-winter mats / in the graveyard—” ~ “Faith in Spring” by Carol Shillibeer

• “Julia” by Kim Suttell

• “Thanks for reading your poems to us. Do you ever get nervous? My speech teacher says to pick a spot in the back of the room and talk to that. It’s hard to get much across with an empty chair. I keep trying to imagine a chair with eyes. Blue eyes, like this guy I had a crush on in fifth grade. He moved away.” ~“A Bit of Torque: High School Students Email Me about My Latest Book of Poems*” by Carol Barrett, inspired by a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
  

• “Gray-faced and -laced, slightly bow-legged, / she still sprints down the drive…” ~“Early Morning Walkies with Daisy” by Catherine Arra
  

• “I do my rounds, eating the tiny / Santa Rosa plums that grow / by the Caltrain tracks.” ~“Pluming” by Dolo Diaz

  

• “While you were dying, I tested felt-tip markers on paper until they bled in faded streaks, as if I could practice emptying desk drawers of all they carried, the old love notes, to-do lists, phone numbers without names, passwords to expired accounts, forgotten memberships to forgotten places…” ~“Felt-Tip Markers” by Deanna Lernihan

• “I had just passed three-foot high cattails in full, ribald bloom, overtaken by bulrush—grasses as tall as human beings—arched like grand bridges over the water, their tips swaying in small eddies at the pond’s edge, when I came to an abrupt halt. Only a few feet away, a great blue heron stood before me, looking out across the water…” ~“Soar” by Heather Holliger

• “…We were as brief as the punts / in this place.” ~“By the Cam,” by Sandy Solomon

• " I looked around / the room and realized I’d become / something of a veteran." ~"Warm Demand" by Poetose author Patrick Hueller appeared in Minnesota English Journal recently. It’s an excerpted poem from Falling, in Love with Teaching, out from Poetose this September 1.

  

“It’s like I’m driving and a red car rolls by, and I think, ‘Look, there’s a red car.’ For me, something strikes me and I can say, ‘Look, there’s a poem, or a flash, or a novel.’ I don’t go looking for it, but it will always find me.”

Read our interview with prolific and beloved local writer Timothy Gager. Timothy has published 20 books of fiction and poetry. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over 1000 works of fiction and poetry published, 19 nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and has been read on National Public Radio.

Fun Meia tidbit: I first learned of Timothy’s existence about ten years ago thanks to Tom Tipton, who has sadly since passed away (read a heartwarming article in Cambridge Day on him here). Tom founded Out of the Blue Too Gallery in Central Square, now based at the beautiful Somerville Armory on Highland Ave and kept alive through multiple iterations by Parama Chattopadhyay. Back in the day I was walking along Mass Ave, as one does, and as I did in those days so many times... If memory serves me right, who should I encounter but Tom, smoking a doobie, who promptly gave me a tour of the gallery, learned of my artistic inclinations and need of a writer to blurb my book, and introduced me to Timothy online—who promptly and kindly responded. It was one of my first forays into interacting with kind strangers in this city. And I can confirm they may be found anywhere!

“Like most important desires in life, finding a place for myself will never feel 100% finished, but I think that’s a good thing—to keep seeking and expanding.” Read a beautiful interview with San Francisco Bay Area-based award-winning poet Veronica Kornberg.

A San Francisco Bay Area poet, Veronica Kornberg is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Catamaran, Indiana Review, Plume, Calyx, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Veronica co-founded a long-running poetry reading club on the Peninsula, and is a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review. At her home in Pescadero, you can find her exploring the tidepools or on her knees in the dirt, tending her habitat garden of coastal scrub. Her full-length poetry collection, Strange Gift, was published in April 2026.

A San Francisco Bay Area poet, Veronica Kornberg is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Catamaran, Indiana Review, Plume, Calyx, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Veronica co-founded a long-running poetry reading club on the Peninsula, and is a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review. At her home in Pescadero, you can find her exploring the tidepools or on her knees in the dirt, tending her habitat garden of coastal scrub. Her full-length poetry collection, Strange Gift, was published in April 2026. ​

Congratulations on the publication of your book, Strange Gift (Winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award in Poetry 2025)! Could you tell us a little about how this book came to be and what you hope readers will take away from the book?

Thank you, Meia! I feel very honored to have been awarded the prize and I enjoy working with Jill McCabe, the Publisher at Wandering Aengus, and with my Editor there, Tina Schumann. The book has a braided structure overall, rather than being a “project” book with a single theme or form. It is a mix of narrative poems and more lyric, image-based poems. Broadly speaking, for me at least, the book is about what it means to create a home for oneself in the world, and within one’s own soul. I am at home in my family and friends, in nature, and in language. My wish would be that every person understand that they have a voice and a story that only they can tell, and that it deserves to be heard and held.
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You write, “I thought maybe there was a place for me in this world, a little side street off the parade route.” Have you found that side street? How can we all find it, do you think?

Like most important desires in life, finding a place for myself will never feel 100% finished, but I think that's a good thing—to keep seeking and expanding. That said, yes—I do feel like I have found my little side street, through art and reading and writing. And through my poetry community—let's say it's a little side street filled with comfy couches and café tables, conversation and caring. How can we all find that? I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that big question, and it may be different for different people. But I think that the surest way, is to connect with people engaged with and stimulated by the same creative endeavors that one has. None of us has to be alone.

Strange Gift is a beautiful debut. Each poem feels like a gift born of lived experience, crafted with great attention to the sound and musicality of language. Could you talk a bit about publishing your first book of poems later in life? How do you balance lyricism, narrative, and the spaces in between?

Thank you for saying that. Publishing a first book later in life made me somewhat self-conscious about whether I'd be accepted, but in my experience, poets have been incredibly open and inclusive, at least the poets that I've been drawn to. So, it's been unexpectedly affirming to publish a first book later in life. Lyricism versus narrative is a topic I'm particularly interested in at the moment. I am struggling a bit to complete a chapbook on a topic that seems to require a lot of expository writing. Because of that, I am being led into hybrid organization and hybrid forms, such as haibun. It's always the poem itself that demands the form that satisfies, so I try to stay attuned and open to what a poem is telling me it wants to be.

In the poem, “Sunday,” you write: “it’s embarrassing, / the degree of pleasure taken / in the easing of an intact root / from the loam. That slight give / of the fleshy taper / glowing faintly / like an upside-down altar candle / pulled from the dark.” You share the pleasures of weeding, elevate what might seem ordinary, and write wonderfully of your relationship with the earth time and again. Could you share a bit more about your evolving relationship with the earth?

I have always found great solace and awe in the natural world. As a small child, it was the main place of creative play and story-making for me. As an adult, I feel poems begin to form while trail-running through woods. On the coast, I am converting an acre of ice plant into a California native plant habitat garden. It's restorative work, life-affirming, and a humble act in support of something larger than myself. I'm thrilled that you see something in my work that elevates what might seem ordinary. For me, one of the dearest things that poetry can do is to show how extraordinary the ordinary truly is.

Your poems acknowledge “the slippery / undulating truth,” that “There is the order of the world that we understand, and the order of the world we do not understand.” Like slippery, ever-changing sea or sky, they’re comfortable with mystery, ambiguity. They’re meditative, never didactic. Could you speak to this at all craft-wise or otherwise?

My poetic impulse is away from tidy narrative. I am not trying to explain the world (and I couldn't if I tried). One way to think about a poem is as a construct that re-enacts some aspect of reality in such a way that a reader can step into it, wander around inside, and come away with their own experience of that reality. There is so much joy and surprise when we can enter the illogical, the paradoxical nature of life, even if the subject is a hard one. For me, poetry (and metaphor) is a vehicle for both meaning and freedom. Craft-wise, there are so many techniques to break open the door to mystery—the surprisingly-placed line break, the open fields of blank space for breathing, repetition and chant, the compression and expansion of time within a short space—to name just a few.

In “Soft Ground,” you write that you “can hardly bear to leave the garden” even for a week. And you go on to write about how it has changed you. How has gardening changed you and your life?

For one thing, it has attached me to a specific place, which I'd never truly felt before. It's given me a sense of belonging, and a feeling of home. It's a place and activity that is always asking something of me, defying me, or unexpectedly gifting me with pleasure. Kind of like a home or a family or a lover. There is also a sense of intimacy with the garden, and solitude. A sense of the quiet mind that comes with an active body.

Could you share with our readers a little bit about your “lifelong quest for the ecstatic”?

I love this question. My first memory is as a two-year old put outside to nap in a perambulator beneath a giant maple tree. The weather grew very gusty and woke me up. I was watching the limbs writhe above me without really understanding what I was seeing, and the autumn leaves came swirling down into my stroller or spinning away against the blue sky. I can still feel my utter delight and belly laughter, coupled with a sense that I WAS those leaves and limbs and sky. That is what metaphor does—it shows the otherwise hidden connections of two completely unlike things, and by being porous to that, we can enter a state of transcendent exultation, akin to love. But it is always transient. We fall back into our ordinary selves, and seek again. For me, this feels like the ultimate freedom. At the end of his gorgeous poem, “Postscript,” Seamus Heaney shows how the beautiful or painful world comes at you “sideways / and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

Author Tina Schumann writes that your poems “remind us that if we pay close attention we too can stand ‘listening with our bodies’ to ‘the rivers braiding inside us.’” In a world where it can be increasingly difficult to pay attention, to listen with and to our bodies, do you have any thoughts or advice on the art of paying close attention and practicing presence?

This question makes me think of the words of artist Robert Irwin, who said “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you are looking at.” Paying attention in a truly free and open way enables the poet to discover realities that exist beneath the surfaces of things, particularly emotional realities. It takes a certain amount of turning off of the logical, explanatory parts of the mind, so that the process of discovery can occur. One “easy” way to start is to write down everything you can observe about an object, every little detail. Then write questions about it: Who has touched this object? Where has this object traveled? If it could speak, what would it want to tell me? And so on. Very rich material will unfold from your imagination and feeling. This is only one of many ways to “trick” your logical brain to quiet down.

Did you always know you wanted to write?

When I was very young, I wanted to be a person who could levitate (I actually practiced it for a long time, but alas, only levitated in my dreams). I did write poems as a child, but then became interested in the visual arts. What I would say is that I always knew I was meant to be a creative person. I think other people recognized that in me, as well.

Who are some of the writers or books you hold most dear?

There are so many! I would say Heaney is the largest influence on my work, for his engagement with the emotional resonance of objects in the contexts of their stories and in the fineness of his imagery. Ellen Bass has been very important to me, especially in the handling of narrative. And I'm always striving to find language as vivid and surprising as Patricia Smith's. She is masterful.

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

To be honest, I don’t always. But I won’t send it out without feeling like the poem knows what it wants to say, and does so. Sometimes, I’ll change a poem after it’s already been submitted to places, but the changes are usually minor. In general, I do a lot of polishing before sending a poem out.

How has living in the San Francisco Bay area influenced you and your writing?

I am a transplant to the SF Bay Area, and I can’t imagine living elsewhere. I love this place—the natural beauty, its sense of reinvention and freedom, and the tolerance for the strange that exists here. I really value that. The Central Coast of California, where I tend a habitat garden of what’s called coastal scrub, is often important to the imagery in my poetry.

Do you have any favorite writing habits or rituals?

I love to write at night, on a deadline. I have arranged my writing life so that my first readers are always waiting for a draft from me. It’s stressful, but works for me. I like to tell people that I don’t have a writing habit, I have panic room. That said, all day long, I jot down things I notice or stray thoughts on my iPhone “Notes.” So it’s easy to go to that to jumpstart a poem, once I sit down.

Having readers always waiting for a draft from you sounds like a wonderful way to maintain accountability. How have you arranged this? In other words, do you have a regular schedule (e.g., weekly or monthly)? Are these for individual poems or longer works, etc.? How many first readers are there?

I think it is very important for writers to have trusted and smart first readers. It’s important that you are eager to read and discuss the other person's work, and that you find their critiques helpful to your own work. Often, you can connect with someone in a workshop—people always seem to be looking for trusted readers. I love a group that meets in person, but Zoom does make it easier to connect with writers who don’t live nearby. It is heartening to have people engaged in the same artistic endeavor—community makes everything easier.

I belong to several groups or individual writers with whom I exchange work. Mostly, we meet once or twice a month on a set day, for example, first Tuesday or third Monday. We send individual poems, sometimes two poems. For nearly a decade, the poet/micro-fiction writer, Sarah Freligh, and I sent each other a poem every week. That was wonderful. Four or five people is the max for me, so that there’s enough time for a thorough discussion of each poem.

What do you hope readers will take away from your writing? Do you have an overarching aesthetic, artist statement, or ethos?

I want to leave them with a sense of connection. Also, to offer compassion and an honest voice. I like the sense of communicating directly with a reader. I believe a poem is created anew each time someone reads it; it’s not the same poem that it was for me, because the reader brings their whole self to the poem, their stories and their own the emotional responses. When I write a poem, yes, it is written by me, but it also takes up residence in the reader. They can claim it, too.

What are you currently working on?

Currently I am working on a chapbook about healing from a major ocean accident I was in, so that is more of a ‘project’ approach to a book. I do have another full-length collection in the works, but it is too soon to really talk about it.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

The young can be so vulnerable. I would tell them to remember that they have a story only they can offer. And I would wish for them to hold on to their unique story, and not worry too much about people not valuing their stories and language. If it’s of them, it is of great value.

Do you have any life advice in general?
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This question makes me feel pretty modest, but here goes: Be kind. Stay strong. Pay attention. And, oh yeah, have fun!

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Timothy Gager has published 20 books of fiction and poetry. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over 1000 works of fiction and poetry published, 19 nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and has been read on National Public Radio.

In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with over 150 pages of new material, The Best of Timothy Gager. ​

In 2025, Timothy started the podcast, with his co-host, "Dean," The 2 Deans: Dating, Dread, and Disasters.

Timothy is the former Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts, and is employed as a social worker.

Poetry feels like one of the few places where people are authentic these days. Do you feel that way?

I do. Besides, words, meaning, craft is important and authentic as well. Sometimes it can be faux-authentic depending on how it plays on the page. As poets we are good actors, the challenge is the projection of the work representing thoughts and feelings. I try not to dwell on the mundane, unless I’m being playful with the day-to-day.
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You write: “Can you hear me at this distance / saying, I don’t need people / I can stay in my room. / But I don’t have to be that person anymore.” So much of writing is solitary and language can keep oneself company so well. How has the process of letting the world in more unfolded for you?

I think that it is more of a metaphor for isolation, and the wondering if you are important or just a tree in the forest, so to speak. My isolation now is more to re-energize than anything else, not because I’m depressed. I appreciate my alone time, certainly stay busy, but this alone time is also for my spirituality and to stay “in tune.”

I so appreciate the vulnerability in your poems. How do you decide how vulnerable to be? Or is anything a go?

No decision to go or not go into vulnerability, but emotional vulnerable is one thing for my writing that is an open book. I may not wish to share innermost secrets but rather innermost thoughts. We are all vulnerable, whether we like it or not, but how that plays out, and how much you want to show is the key. As they say, “you MUST go there.” I think I must be vulnerable to be honest and take that leap because otherwise the extreme opposite can just be objects sitting on a shelf, which of course there is an art in that too.

How do you decide whether something belongs in a prose piece or poem?

Most likely, I decide before I even start what genre I’d like to produce, but maybe after the first two lines or sentences I can go the other way immediately if I see something in there. If it’s not that immediate then it’s going to be where it is at that moment, poetry or fiction, or recycle bin.

You write in the Introduction to Best of Timothy Gager about having an ego for many years and then learning some humility. Could you talk a bit about this phenomenon of writers and ego?

Well, we are all pretty much self-centered sons of bitches, aren’t we? It’s just a matter of reeling it in. Self-centeredness, mind you, is just thinking about yourself, which our mind tends to do whether we like it to or not. I learned humility in my recovery, and I feel the best when after fifteen years, when someone else in the rooms tells me, “I didn’t know you wrote.” There is a time and place for everything to be done or said.

Relatedly, and conversely, do you think art reduces ego? That is one of the reasons I think that art is of tangible value to the world, because the act of creating seems to reduce individual ego.

Today less so than ever. Social media is just ego, and one must promote, to some extent there. Who is the person always having a good time or succeeding is all you see there. We, as humans, seek and yearn for endorphins much more than acts of philanthropy.

You’ve been sober for 15 years. How have your writing and life changed in this time?

I mean I hope I would have naturally gotten better in fifteen years organically, I know my focus is better, and how I move through narratives or how themes change and stay aligned.

How has having children changed you and your writing?

Other than having time to write when they were younger? It gives me more to write about, but also, they are now grown adults, so I feel that it is their story to write.

Are you always looking at the world through a poet’s lens? Or do you have multiple brain states? I know you work full time as a social worker which requires a different set of skills.

I have lenses to look through that’s for sure, and also wear many hats. Social work, podcasting, host of a literary series, performing solo as singer-songwriting artist, full-time meetings of recovery . . . so for writing. It’s like I’m driving and a red car rolls by, and I think, “Look, there’s a red car.” For me, something strikes me and I can say, “Look, there’s a poem, or a flash, or a novel.” I don’t go looking for it, but it will always find me.

Could you talk about the Dire Literary Series and your more recent adventure into podcasting?

Eighteen years live, and now six as a virtual series, which someone got me to start up again in 2020. I try to be of service to other writers, but I get so much out of it. It’s amazing talking to writers, sort of geek-tacular in many ways. Now the podcast I started with a college friend because we were talking about dating and disasters which happen, so I do that too, every week. Disasters in dating are hilarious, and as my therapist says, “now you have an outlet for your type of sense of humor.” Writer Jackie Dawes is now my co-host and the podcast is called Dean and Dawes: Dating, Dread and Disasters.

It might be self-explanatory, but could you elaborate on what you mean by “live 24/7,” which you write in your book’s Introduction and when signing books?
​
One Day At a Time. 24 hours a day for 7 days a week, then, for me life is better. I try to do that. Live for life to be better. It already is about a million times over.

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Lo Riddell is a lesbian writer from southern Ohio, currently based in New England. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in 2022, and now spends her free time writing poetry, prose, zines, and essays on pop culture. You can find her, along with her collection of vintage clothing, on Instagram at @vintagelouisa, or at her writing website, loriddell.com.

Soon Jones is a Pushcart Prize-nominated Korean lesbian poet and author originating from the rural countryside of the American South. Their work explores the unending cycles of grief, trauma, and finding inner strength in your darkest moments. Soon is a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow and holds an MFA in Poetry at Oklahoma State University.

Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the award-winning author of Green Ink Wings, The Name is Perilous, and Flame Nebula, Bright Nova. Sherre has been published in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review and The Chestnut Review, nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and anthologized in several collections including Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions.

Explore the full booklist on CLMP’s website!

“I think place informs a piece, even indirectly, and I believe that feeling of disconnect between where you’re raised and where the motherland is is something many of the diaspora struggle with. I’m out of place where I was born, and I’m out of place in the motherland – there’s a liminal quality to it, always being stuck between worlds and never able to fully fit into one or the other.” ~Soon Jones in a wonderful interview with writer E Ce Miller in Four Way Review <3

E Ce Miller writes: “If I had only one word to describe These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, the debut collection of poems by Soon Jones, it might be lush. This collection is lush in its immersion in the natural landscape of the rural American South. It is lush in the language of emerging sexuality, in what it means to come-of-age ravenous for something too dangerous to name. It is also a collection that interrupts so much of that lushness with the violence of homophobia, of racism, of being a person for whom ‘home’ is complex and ever-elusive—poems that examine, as Jones describes to me in our interview, feelings with no name, poetic truths that hard facts can’t capture.”

Read the Interview

Read a Poem by Soon

Happy AAPI Heritage Month! It’s not to late to celebrate (throughout the year!) with this list of literature, including These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, from the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP)!

Poetose Journal

• “I heard a kid say, ‘My mind is like a coloring book, but my thoughts only have one color.’” ~“​Across This Planet of Crossings” by Andreas Fleps

• “I learned to love books bodily...” ~“Bookish” by Lynn D. Gilbert

• “Alteration” by Gail Schulte:

• “It’s not like our younger / selves, to be sure…” ~“Making Love as an Old Man” by David Radavich:

This CLMP booklist of titles launching in May 2026 includes Poetose author Xue Di’s Blue White Water! It’s a beautiful bilingual sequence of lyrical prose poems addressed to a distant love, translated by Alison M. Friedman, and two illuminating interviews with the renown Chinese poet.

Xue Di was born in Beijing. He is the author of four volumes of collected works and one book of criticism on contemporary Chinese poetry in Chinese. In English translation, he has published five full length books and four chapbooks. His work has appeared in numerous American journals and anthologies and has been translated into several languages. Xue Di is a two-time recipient of the Hellman/Hammett Award, a recipient of the Artemis A. Joukowsky fellowship through Brown University, and a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship.

If you’d like a review copy, digital or physical, please email paul@poetose.com.

Order Blue White Water

We’re so excited to publish The Calling by Sarah Schwartz, now available for pre-order! The pub date is August 1. If you’d like an advance review copy, digital or physical, please email paul@poetose.com.

The Calling is an exquisite and often humorous catalogue of poems that offer an array of ways we might see the world and by extension, our place in it.

Schwartz’s beautiful debut collection of poems contends that we are each called to a way of seeing the world. Moving from the microscopic view of a chemist to the macroscopic view of a geologist, the mathematical view of an architect to the exuberant view of a painter, these poems both delight in and resist the notion of an “occupation.” Schwartz writes: “We are made of many strange shapes, and we don’t even think about it.” These poems ponder our abundant strangeness and don’t shy away from “what is most radical about human existence.”

Sarah Schwartz’s poetry has been published in various nationally recognized journals. She earned her BA in English at Pomona College, MFA in Poetry at Brown, and MA in English at University of California, Irvine. She teaches English at The Park School of Baltimore.

Pre-order The Calling

We’re thrilled to publish Falling, in Love with Teaching by Patrick Hueller this Fall 2026, on September 1. If you’d like an advance review copy, digital or physical, please email paul@poetose.com.

Falling, in Love with Teaching, by veteran high school English teacher Patrick Hueller, is necessary reading for all those who care about the state of education. At a time when the profession is undergoing an existential crisis, this singular book of narrative poems reminds us of what makes teaching so vital. It’s an honest and heartfelt love letter to the calling, a book that belongs in every classroom and on every teacher’s reading list.

Patrick Hueller lives, writes, and teaches in Minnesota. He is the author of several books, many of them aimed at getting kids pumped about reading. These books have been selected for the American Library Association Rainbow Award and School Library Journal’s “Accessible Reads for Struggling and Reluctant Readers.” He has a forthcoming collection of short stories, Fake Tattoos (Cornerstone Press).

Order Falling, in Love with Teaching

Other Poetose News

• Happy one-year anniversary to Miguel Eichelberger and his chapbook, Everything Is! Watch a reel he made on IG here; the book has found itself in homes across the world and touched many hearts.

• Don’t miss all of Poetose author Sherre Vernon’s wonderful updates in her latest newsletter!

• Substack sent an alert saying Poetose is #93 in the Literature category, which means the Top 100! Whatever that means exactly, how exciting! Thank you very much for reading and being a subscriber :)

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Visit Poetose

Below are some photos from yesterday’s Indie Lit Fair co-presented by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) & the PEN World Voices Festival 🥰😍🤩. It was great to meet some of you!

We met so many folks doing incredible work including The Feminist Press (whom we had the honor of sharing a table with!), Radix Printing & Publishing Cooperative, CavanKerry Press, The Bilingual Press, Tough Poets Press, McPherson and Company, Black Lawrence Press, and Archipelago Books.

The cloudy day took a turn toward some sunshine. Several blocks beside Washington Square Park were closed off so attendees could meander through without worrying about traffic. Children and adults enjoyed munching on guava candy and lollipops and partook in the giveaway of lots of free zines and origami paper cranes. Sara Zieve Miller’s adorable frog stickers and Meia Geddes’ book earrings drew lots of oo’s and ah’s. People chatted without too much prompting and we appreciated how endearing and supportive folks were. We had our beautiful new book releases by Soon Jones, Canadian writer Miguel Eichelberger, and Sherre Vernon.

We are grateful to PEN America & CLMP for having us! This was our first time representing Poetose publicly, and it was such an exciting opportunity we couldn’t pass up. The joy of meeting people in person cannot be overstated and we’re inspired to attend more events in the future when possible. 🌞💜

Sincerely,

Meia

There is much to share since last writing! I appreciate everyone’s patience as I balance librarianship, teaching at UMass Boston, taking courses as an MFA candidate, managing Poetose, and maintaining my sanity.

It’s all very fulfilling in many ways. Although I’m hopeful that next year will be a tad less hectic and have intentionally tried to arrange it so.

Upcoming, Poetose will offer the opportunity to send over audio versions of poems on the website for any Journal contributors who wish to share those. A call will be forthcoming in the slower months!

All the best,

Meia Geddes

Forthcoming Books: Pre-order

Three of our four forthcoming books are now available for pre-order! If you’re interested in receiving any of these books as advance review copies (for review or interview purposes), please email hello@poetose.com.

Falling, In Love With Teaching, by a veteran high school English teacher, is necessary reading for all those who care about the state of education. At a time when the profession is undergoing an existential crisis, this singular book of narrative poems reminds us of what makes teaching so vital. It’s an honest and heartfelt love letter to the calling, a book that belongs in every classroom and on every teacher’s reading list.

Patrick Hueller lives, writes, and teaches in Minnesota. He is the author of several books, many of them aimed at getting kids pumped about reading. These books have been selected for the ALA Rainbow Award and SLJ’s “Accessible Reads for Struggling and Reluctant Readers.” He has a forthcoming collection of short stories, Fake Tattoos (Cornerstone Press).

The Calling is an exquisite and often humorous catalogue of poems that offer an array of ways we might see the world and by extension, our place in it.

Sarah Schwartz’s poetry has been published in various nationally recognized journals. She earned her BA in English at Pomona College, MFA in Poetry at Brown, and MA in English at University of California, Irvine. She teaches English at The Park School of Baltimore.

Blue White Water is a beautiful bilingual sequence of lyrical prose poems addressed to a distant love, as well as two illuminating interviews with renown Chinese poet, Xue Di.

Xue Di was born in Beijing and is the author of four volumes of collected works and one book of criticism on contemporary Chinese poetry in Chinese. In English translation, he has published five full length books and four chapbooks. His work has appeared in numerous American journals and anthologies and has been translated into several languages. Xue Di is a two-time recipient of the Hellman/Hammett Award, a recipient of the Artemis A. Joukowsky fellowship through Brown University, and a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship.

Pre-Order a Book or Books

Indie Lit Fair on Saturday, May 2 in NYC

Poetose will be at the 10th annual Indie Lit Fair in New York City THIS SATURDAY, May 2, in Washington Square! The fair is co-presented by PEN World Voices Festival & the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP).

Poetose founding editor Meia Geddes and long-time Poetose artist contributor Sara Zieve Miller will be tabling. Come say hello! We will have books by Poetose authors Soon Jones, Sherre Vernon, Miguel Eichelberger, and George Genovese, literary animal notebooks (dogs, cats, bunnies, and chickens engaged in literary endeavors), handmade book earrings, zines, handmade booklets, and more.

This has involved many hours of preparation, so wish us luck! And check out the many other cool happenings that are part of the PEN Word Voices Festival.

Poetose Journal

Don’t miss these recent beautiful pieces, odes to spring and more, galore. Thank you to all of Poetose’s incredible writers for finding and submitting to Poetose over the months.

• “…I tramp through blades of wet sweet grass, listening to Korean songs about spring, cherry blossoms, and what love meant to me in the language back home...” ~Esther Ra, “Valentine V”

• “…I won’t chase a snatched waist with surgery / or inflate my features with botox balloons…” ~“Daring to Age” by ​Abigail Michelini (WATCH THE INCREDIBLE VIDEO!)

• “And it was then that, there, in the cherry orchard, / by the gooseberry patch, the honeybee bumbled / through pied wildflowers…” ~“At the Country Estate” by Keith O’Shaughnessy

• “...The river always remembers a name born in the rain; the way the water striders keep spelling it out....” ~“Seamus” by N.W. Hicks

• “...Learn to love autumnal darkness like you love night’s receding in March, like king tides giving way to the distant moon.” ~“King Tides” by Taunja Thomson

• “...and what makes us unstuck / to the objects of our clinging?” ~“Inspiration of Insignificant Things” by Ariel Tovlev

• “Everything in the ocean: / baby dolphins with their awkward / learning-to-leaps, whales, microorganisms…” ~“Hope” by Lisa López Smith

• “...I miss my mother, a kind of strange fury like a small tornado in my chest...” ~“Today I want to be like Gerald Stern,” by Ellen G. Stone

  

Read More of Poetose Journal

New Notebook: Dogs on the Green Line!

This adorable literary dogs notebook featuring art by Sara Zieve Miller finally arrived! The supplier generously re-printed the order after FedEx lost the shipment for months. The dogs are reading Bark Bark, Woof, Even More Smells, and Arf, brilliantly imagined and illustrated by Sara. Please note that we can only ship within the United States, as unfortunately the shipping cost to other countries is prohibitive.

Dogs on the Green Line Notebook

Poetose Creators on Creators Interviews

Don’t miss these inspiring interviews! Below are just some of the more recent…

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Welcome, Paul!

We’re excited to welcome Paul Flagg as our Editorial & Publishing Intern! Paul has already helped enormously with cover design input and reviewing submissions. He will also be assisting with publicity.

Learn More About Paul

More News

Don’t miss this incredible interview with Poetose author Soon Jones and Paul Zeidman of the Creative Writing Life Podcast “about writing to deal with personal demons, searching for the perfect word, and the value of studying hip hop and slant rhymes,” among many other things. Order Soon’s book, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore.

Poetose author Miguel Eichelberger speaks eloquently about grief, realizing what is truly of value, writing, and how he hopes his book will help readers find grief easier to hold and carry in this moving podcast. Order Miguel’s book, Everything Is.

“What translation boils down to for me is that, as humans, we have our own experience, and every act of communication is an act of translation. It is an attempt to give me to you, or to receive you into me. And somewhere along the way, there’s disconnect. We have to find the most adjacent, the most appropriate, the most resonant sort of words to offer, because sometimes, what we need to translate is too much. It’s the emotion and the physicality. So how we slant our translation depends on questions like: Who’s the you and who’s the I and who’s the we—and why are we communicating?” Read this wonderful interview with Poetose author Sherre Vernon, “Sherre Vernon in Conversation with Katie Kemple and Shana Ross: On Translating Blue,” in The Ilanot Review. Order Translating Blue.

On May 15, join Taylor & Co. Books, The Poetry Society of New York, and Poets House for a fundraiser sit-in in protest of genocidal regimes, marking the launch of the anthology, I Feel Nothing Like Good. Please share this with the New Yorkers you know! Proceeds from both the anthology and the event will be donated to The Sameer Project, a mutual aid organization providing direct humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and the Sudanese American Physicians Association, a network of medical professionals working to support and strengthen the Sudanese healthcare community in the U.S. and beyond. Poetose’s Meia Geddes will be reading. You can sign up for the event via the Eventbrite listing.

Happy belated Women’s History Month! CLMP published their annual Reading List for Women’s History Month 2026, including our very own Translating Blue by Sherre Vernon & These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones!

Well friends, that’s it! Thank you for reading this far.

Substack notes that this post is too long for email, so hopefully some of you got to this point!

All the best to you, stay safe and sound.

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs, cats, and mice.

Your writing has such wide range, moving between moments of tenderness and intimacy to those of violence and pain. Could you speak to this a bit and to simply surviving as a human in the world?

my poetry comes from my life, my mind: my mental health, my body: my physical health, the way my eyes see things, the way my consciousness elaborates things. i love to play with words and images. i love to create new things. it is hard to survive in this world. capitalism is our ultimate demise and it is killing us. so i write my poetry in which i see the world and i see myself in a mirror. i write my poetry so i can live understanding things in my own way.

my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (FlowerSong Press, 2024) is such an awesome book title. How did this book come to be?

the book originally had a different title, which i did not like too much and intended on changing. edward, publisher of FlowerSong Press, had posted some random question on social media and the comment i made to his post, randomly to be funny, became the title right before i submitted the manuscript to him.

the book came to be the same way all my books come to me, by writing poems. i see a poem as its own individual being. i do not write poems to rearrange them in some organized novel. i do not write novels. i do not write poems to instruct them to make a book, instead i write poems inside a manuscript and am done when it is deemed necessary. so the first poem is the first poem i wrote and the last poem is the last, with bad poems removed. each poem is its own entity and lives as its own self. my poems do not interact with each other.

You write in one poem in the book called "i pretended that he liked me," that: "i contemplated being alive; / the fulfillment i caused in another" and "i’m trying to learn love, but no one will teach me." Could you talk a little bit about love with our Poetose readers? How can we create more of it in the world?

love is tricky, hard, and complicated because we are human and different. no one person is alike. we have to compromise and learn from each other to make things sustainable. we can create more love in the world by not being so superficial. we can teach more love in the world by raising boys correctly, as humans, and not as robots. we can teach them that emotions are natural and one should not hold them inside until they explode. we can teach love more by letting girls defend themselves against people instead of brushing it off as “that's what boys do.” we can create love in the world by teaching that everyone is the same no matter what sexuality, race, sex, or gender they are, or where they live. we can create more love by loving people as who they are instead of how they look. to teach that ugly people can be beautiful and beautiful people can be ugly. we live on one earth and we are all human.

Did you always know you wanted to write?

since i began writing in 2001. i was around 14 and since then i have never wanted to do anything else. i have dedicated my life to poetry.

Who are some of the writers or books you hold most dear?

some of the poets i hold dear to me are: fanny howe, william corbett, christopher bursk, jim dunn, caconrad, tommy sheffield [who is also my editor], micki topham [one of the greatest slam poets in the d.c. area], sandra feen [my ride or die], chad horn, aldo amparán, chris butler… but there are thousands of poets that i love, cherish, and am grateful for for helping me along the way and giving me the opportunities that have guided me to where i am now. i cherish every poet who has ever given my books a blurb, every person who has written a review. another person i find very important in my life is tavo arrieta, who is a brilliant artist and has let me use multiple paintings they've created as book covers.

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

the poem tells me when it is ready and i listen to the poem because otherwise i could accidentally destroy it.

Do you have any tips for writers when it comes to contributing to the greater literary community and being literary citizens?

firstly, you will get a million rejections because that is the way of the poet's life. you'll also get jealous, you'll get mad, you'll get tired, you'll get stressed, you'll want to quit a thousand times because we are human and have emotions. you have ten-thousand poets in the same room with you trying to get the same thing as you want. if you really want to be a poet, you'll not give up. secondly, celebrate your fellow indie poets. if one of us wins, we all win.

How have your many book projects come to be?

i befriend publishers, get to know them and let them know me, then cordially ask them if they'd like to read my manuscript.

You've published many books and chapbooks. How do you decide whether a body of work will take the form of one or the other?

i never decide what a group of poems will do, they let me know when they are ready to build a home in the world and to explore it.

Do you have tips on how to be so prolific as a writer?

don't do anything else but write, read, edit, and network. let poetry take over your whole body, life, and soul. i do nothing else besides poetry. love what you do and cherish your poetry. poetry is not a hobby or a side quest.

How has living in Kentucky influenced you and your writing?

i have no clue because i've never lived anywhere else!

Do you have any favorite writing habits or rituals?

i enjoy listening to music when i write. i have found i write better in chaos because it causes me to focus more. i only write when i want to write, i never sit down at a blank screen and force myself to write. a ritual, i guess could be, i edit my poems as i write them, line by line, stanza by stanza, and the whole of the poem once completed. i edit the poem later, and i edit again before i send the manuscript off.

You seem to be very active as a writer on social media. What are some of your thoughts and feelings about being on social media as a writer?

for me social media is a job. i do it to be visible, to network, and to promote. i use social media to be present and to expand my reach. i spend over 40 hours a week on social media. i use social media because i am unable to go out and go to festivals, book fairs, or in person readings. social media is my platform, and it is where all my friends are.

What do you hope readers will take away from your writing? Do you have an overarching aesthetic, artist statement, or ethos?

i always say i write the dark onto the page because the page can handle it, and i keep the good in. so i hope that readers see that living is very important and being yourself is the best way to survive.

What are you currently working on?

my new book house as a cemetery came out from Rebel Satori Press on march 10th, and has been nominated for the national book award; i finished my next full length collection milk scissors and it is currently at a publisher waiting for a response; i have a secret project at a publisher which i cannot speak about; and i’m currently working on a chapbook titled: this is what silence taught me.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

have fun, practice and practice more, always want to learn, and read as much as you possibly can. read everything, not just the poetry books thrown in your face. there are more poets that exist in this world besides the 1% of academia poets that you are constantly bombarded with. read living poets because living poets exist and you can speak to living poets. you can love dead poets, but people forget to read the poets who are alive. celebrate all poets equally. and, very important, you can be a successful poet without an mfa.

Learn More About John & His Books

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George Genovese has published five volumes of poetry, Time Steals Softer (2007), The Essential Space of Play (2012), Love Letters to the World (2016), A Gloomorous Book In Verse (2019), Mind Drift (2022), and a collection of short stories, The Bookworm and Other Stories (2022) with Ginninderra Press. He collaborated extensively with Australian Composer, Lawrence Whiffin on projects setting his poetry to Whiffin’s inventive and colorful music. In 2010, Whiffin composed a song cycle based on Genovese’s Time Steals Softer for accomplished bass singer, Jerzy Kozlowski, and virtuoso pianist, Michael Kieran Harvey, which was performed by the Astra Chamber Musical Ensemble under the direction of John McCaughey. He has contributed lyrics to three CD releases by Mario C. Genovese: Crossover (2006), In the Flow (2019), and Out of Reach (2025), and collaborated with him on a CD collection of his poetry set to music, A Community of Tree (2023). In 2024 he published a chapbook of fiction, Sky, with Poetose Press and “Cages” with Poetose Journal. Most recently he published a review of Glyn Maxwell’s New and Collected Poems in World Literature Today and “The World Went Clanking“ in Microlit: a Tiny Journal of Prose & Poetry. He has written for The Age and Independent Australia.

You also wrote a book titled Love Letters to the World, and that is how we know of each other’s existence! How did this lovely book of “textual comradeship” come about? How do you think we can all contribute more love to the world?

Like most of my work, it began as a collection of poems accrued over time. At some point, however, I started thinking thematically about desire, which presented itself as a node whereby the world we make and inhabit, and just about anything else one can imagine, could be explored. Thinking this way, I focused on desire not only as an affective phenomenon, which it undoubtedly is, but also something that might be broadly characterized in terms of the artifacts and tools we fashion to satisfy our needs, wants, wishes and intents. So, a hammer, for instance, is desire objectified for its open-ended satisfaction in various projected transmogrifications, such as, the creation of shelter, furniture, other tools for other satisfactions and projects etc. And this brings us to the expression of desire through its principal tool, which is inextricably bound up with it and underpins all others – language.

​Language is constituted by the need to be understood in one’s extension of self-to-other. It similarly demands the necessary reception of that other as a custodian of meaning and is in that sense a condition for reciprocal satisfaction. It is the primary means of inter-subjectively achieving our multifarious ends, which is to say, it, and the meaning it makes possible, is the expression of desire not as solipsistic affectivity or irrational instinct, but something inescapably purposive that concretely, and communally, shapes our world.

This interplay between desire as impetus and language as primordial tool is clearly visible in the relationship of an infant to its mother. The first uttered manifestation of language is a call for nourishment that only another can provide. That is nothing less than an expression of desire as bodily lack. The call takes many forms and may intend a desire for security, the need to be released from the painful irritation of soiled nappies – urine burns – or the sheer, pleasurable, comforting proximity of another’s presence. As language develops, this fundamental substructure doesn’t ever disappear, it merely takes new forms whose complexity overlay and obscure it.

As to how we might contribute more love to the world, I think being at peace with oneself, and one’s limitations, is a good place to start. When one discovers something beautiful that one feels to be meaningful or uplifting, or when one has done something personally fulfilling – it could be a poem one has written and is pleased with – one feels full, complete. What happens then is that one becomes generous because when one is satisfied with oneself there is an excess positivity that cannot be contained and must flow out to others. So, the short answer is, I suppose, be creative, do that thing that gives you joy and includes others.

Reading your writing, one gets the sense that you have a lot of fun with language – the sounds of it, in narrative poems and stories, through repetition... How would you describe your relationship with language? Do you ever experience difficulty writing?

Like other writers, my relationship with language is deeply personal. It’s a matter of little to no compromise. So, like life, it’s a serious business but that doesn’t preclude the equally serious business of having fun with it like one should with life. I am dissatisfied with work I feel is missing the mark and, often, I don’t necessarily know what that is until I’m well into it. The phrase or idea that kicked it off might very well be discarded in the writing process, and frequently is, but then something magical happens. A vista opens and the poem takes me somewhere it wants to go. I don’t like obscurity for its own sake and try to be as clear as possible, despite the strategic use of ambiguity, punning, etc. Obscurity is only valid if the subject concerned demands it – there are ineffable things in life language can only approximate – but I do not like it if it becomes recourse to laziness or wallpapering a shallow idea.

So, there must be a serious attempt at sincerity to the vision one is asking a reader to consider. Having said that, I must admit I do fall short of this ideal at times. In a work with which I'm generally satisfied, there might be something I know is problematic or inadequate and requires amendment, but for which I currently lack the exact formulation needed. I could, for the sake of unconditional integrity, hold off publishing till I achieve what is lacking, or do what I've often done, tell myself it's a provisional rendering that can be replaced in the future, knowing full well I probably won't get the chance, while hoping readers will not notice this inadequacy, blemish or downright mistake I've tried my best to mitigate or disguise. I inevitably lie to myself and others, but that is not so unforgivable so long as one does so artfully.

Yes, writing is difficult at times. In any case, there seems to be definite periods where I can do nothing but wait. I think of it metaphorically as a seasonal thing. Just like the earth on its yearly cycle, there are times of necessary dormancy and there’s little gain trying to grow something out of season. In those times, I read other writers I admire and whose greatness so frightens me to death that the desire to write something worthwhile remains with me, quietly incubating.

Did you always know you wanted to write?

Yes, but not in any defined, creative sense. I remember in early childhood I was fascinated by this magical art by which someone produced signs that others could understand and which I could make no sense of. It really bothered me that I was somehow excluded from this game. I did the things kids usually do and made scribbles on a page and presented it to my mother for her inspection. I asked her if she could read what I wrote and she said she could and it was very good. That was comforting but I knew there was something wrong because I could make no sense of my scribbles. I suspect I did have some intention of what I was hoping to say when I made my random squiggles but which I could no way recount looking at the page after the fact. Later, at about age eleven, we were asked to write a poem about war. For one of the rare instances in my school days, I was inspired by the given task. It seemed I had very definite ideas about what a poem is. It consisted of short, pithy lines that had to be rhythmic and with rhyme. As an act of rebellion and freedom – for poetry allows you that, doesn’t it – I even incorporated a pun on the word “bloody,” which was considered a punishable swear word in our Catholic school. But that was also motivated by the need to reflect that the subject we were tasked to write about struck me then, as now, as obscene. I remember looking up and seeing many of my peers apparently struggling and I was puzzled. For the first time I could remember, we were asked to express what we thought about something, so what was so hard about that? The teacher liked my poem, read it out and asked if she could keep it. What satisfaction I got hearing our model of correctness saying the obscenely intended “bloody” and getting away with it! Well, maybe I wasn’t the total loss as a student my school days had hitherto conditioned me to believe. After that I started writing poetry.

Who are some of the writers or books you hold most dear?

Where does one begin? There are so many. Okay, I hate to start with what has become a banality because anyone who pretends to know anything about literature feels expected to mention him, but here we go again – Shakespeare. As a young boy, I watched teleplays of his work and though I couldn’t understand a word of them, I was arrested by their sound. The sheer sonic quality of the language, its rhythm, intonation and hypnotic power, had a weight and authority that seduced me into the unfolding drama long before I could comprehend what the narrative, themes, characters etc. were about. The words floated like palpable puffs of air, aural baubles or brilliant twirling ribbons. Looking back, the more I understand these things now, the less I can feel the raw revelation of that music bedimmed by semantics or, perhaps, my jaded senses.

Edgar Allan Poe has been a big influence. Again, he is very much a sound-based poet. Some of the effects of his poetry are gorgeous and hyper-articulated syllabically, reinforced with insistent, even monotonous, repetition till the meter pounds like a beating heart in the throes of an existential crisis, or the throbbing temple of someone about to be driven mad. His poetic subjects are narrow, emotionally as much as thematically, and not for everyone. His great short stories open other poetic vistas. As much as being a pioneer of science fiction (Jules Verne admired his work) and the father of the detective story (Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by him) and something akin to poetic non-fiction (his final story, "Eureka: A Prose Poem"), he was, I believe, a significant influence on the development of the symbolist prose poem. Read in a particular way, something like "The Pit and the Pendulum" is substantially a prose poem about human existence. The central metaphor of finding oneself inexplicably entrapped in a dungeon with the ever-present threat of death in one’s midst is an extended metaphor for our worldly embodiment. Add to that the rhythmic quality of the sentences, use of repetition and extensive symbolism and one sees the combination of these elements act to heighten the poetic tenor of the prose. I have little doubt that Baudelaire, who translated Poe into French, homed in on these qualities and went on to become recognized as the first major exponent of this symbolist form. Which brings me to this great poet I admire and can only read in English. He’s one reason why it would be worth learning French.

Dylan Thomas is another favorite. He is extraordinarily colorful in his refraction of syntax and is a master of drawing what seems a beautiful blend of bardic and modernist musicality in his use of slant rhyme, assonance and inventive alliteration, often cast in original forms, such as in the sublime, "Poem in October."

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and his works leading up to it, had a big effect on me, probably not surprising considering I was a relatively sensitive adolescent overwhelmed by life at the time. (These days I’m only shocked by it.) That work made me want to become a novelist and I thought of poetry as a kind of apprenticeship leading up to that. Then I could do some real writing! Boy, how wrong you can be! Give me poetry any day.

Here’s a quick list of some others that come to mind. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was sitting on some steps at school before class. From behind me I heard the voice of my English teacher, who said, “Here’s something I’ve been reading I think you’ll like, you can keep it.” Before I knew it, I had a Penguin Classic in my hand, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories by Anton Chekov. She was dead right – I loved it and still have it on my bookshelf. A discovery I made for myself is Guy De Maupausson, whom I love as much as Chekov as a short story writer, if not more. Nietzsche, whose Thus Spoke Zarathustra is as much a work of poetry as groundbreaking philosophy. I set aside his sexism which is problematic and goes to show how much an intellectual giant can so little understand women; D.H Lawrence, a versatile creator and thinker of enormous depth, and one must mention T.S. Eliot who, at his best, is an enigmatic balance between discreet conservatism and revolutionary brilliance. For me, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is, among other things, a potent poem of spiritual yearning that evokes a sense of transcendent absence haunting each utterance, never explicitly stated, while, at the same time, being a bold declaration of modernist aesthetics through precisely what it does state and the way it states it. As to the relevance of this poet today, who can doubt we live in a time when the world is run by hollow men? I would also add, funny as it may seem, The Beatles. My fascination with their lyrics and the need to understand them certainly didn’t hurt my nascent analytical skills. Songs like "Nowhere Man" and "Yesterday" are inherently poetic and provoke serious reflection. As for "Strawberry Fields Forever" – what more need one say? I could go on forever...

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

There is a point when you just have to let go and move on to something else, but I don’t think a poem is ever finished or ready anyway. I don’t mean that in Auden’s sense of “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” There may be a truth to that but, for me, a poem is a sonic thing, so, firstly, it can never be ready for the world unless and until it is vocally performed in some way – recited – alone or before others, ideally the latter. In tandem with this, I’d add that a poem is a spatiotemporal phenomenon; it necessarily unfolds in time and when it is recited, it also shapes the space around it. Then its space becomes resonant to greater or lesser degrees, and that inscription of the moment is the closest thing to its readiness. So, inasmuch as each moment in time is new and unrepeatable, a poem will only be provisionally complete for the duration of its perusal or vocalization, but it can never be finished, which is a good thing because that safeguards it as a portal to infinite variation and insight as long as people care enough for poetry.

How have your many book projects come to be?

Well, my first one with Ginninderra Press, Time Steals Softer, was a kind of happy accident. An acquaintance of mine mentioned they were then taking submissions. I had decided not long before it was about time I started submitting to journals. Being the naïve sort of person I am I didn’t distinguish between a press and journal, nor did I think to research what I was submitting to. So, I sent away five poems. When the publisher came back and said he’d like to publish me, asking if I could supply, maybe, another 75 poems, my jaw dropped. “Oh,” I thought, “so that’s the difference between a press and a journal...” I didn’t even know if I could scrape up that many, despite my years of writing. After that manuscript, I submitted another five works to that press, one of which is a collection of short stories. With each publication, I felt myself easing more completely into my voice and I’m grateful to the publisher, Stephen Matthews, for allowing me the scope to do that.

Last year Poetose released a chapbook, Sky, which I’m particularly fond of because it showcases a poetic prose side to my writing unlike anything I have had published anywhere else. That project came about because of a coincidence, or synchronicity, if you like. You published a book with the exact title I used, Love Letters to the World, within a month of my publication in 2016 – you got in first! When my wife looked online to see if there were any comments about the launch I had done one weekend, she came across this other book with the same title. That blew me away. After contacting you, I told you of this amusing coincidence, and we struck up some correspondence. We exchanged our books via snail mail and enjoyed each other’s work. Given the title of our books, we were also amused that, in a metaphorical way, our books had really acted like a love letter to the world, because a literarily affectionate and warm exchange with another living person had ensued, a “textual comradeship” that eventually led to Sky.

I have also worked with musicians as a lyricist. A song cycle based on my Time Steals Softer was written in collaboration with Australian composer, Laurence Whiffin, along with "Wild-flower Love" and "The Inadmissible Visions and Revelations of Captain Null," all of which were performed in disparate settings. Interestingly, this collaboration happened through serendipity. I met him doing German classes. He enquired about what I liked doing and when I responded he was immediately interested in seeing my poetry. He liked it and we went to work. I have also been involved in 3 CD’s of musically based works and one of original poetry with Mario Genovese, a wonderful composer and musician.

How has living in Melbourne, Australia influenced you and your writing?

This is a question whose answer must in many ways remain hypothetical because I cannot compare it with an alternative life or setting. But I can say Melbourne has a vibrant literary community, with lots of venues where one can see good poets and take part in open readings and has been so for decades. It also had some very fine bookshops which, unfortunately, have depleted with online shopping. For instance, we had till a few years ago Collected Works Bookshop, a specialist bookshop run by veteran poet Kris Hemensley and his partner Retta Hemensley. It was a Mecca for Australian and international poets who made a point of visiting there, or doing readings, when in town, and where even the likes of Seamus Heaney opined he had not seen anything comparable in the Southern Hemisphere. So, I was lucky and one only realizes this when beautiful things vanish or one looks in the mirror to notice how old one is suddenly looking.

Do you have favorite writing habits or rituals?

First and foremost, procrastination! Once I get over that – it may take weeks or more – I sit down and before I know it, I’m off. In fact, I never cease being surprised why I worry something may not happen. Something almost always does, even if I don’t like or use it. Unconsciously, I’m still working it out. I just have to allow it to happen by sitting down and working. Years ago, I used to try to write every day, no matter what. I’d brainstorm and see what would happen. Sometimes things did, other times half-baked ideas had me paint myself in a corner. I prefer the procrastination-method these days. If there is an idea I like, I often let it sit and prefer to spend time thinking about it before putting pen to paper. I might make notes of stray associations for mnemonic purposes. I go over it as I drift off to sleep at night and let the unconscious do its work. If the raw idea sticks with me, I know there’s something there loitering to be taken up. When I do finally get going, I have been known to tickle my muse with a beer or several, some wine or whisky, but that behavior seems to be taking an inexplicably respectable abeyance lately.

During the process of writing procrastination might set in again, especially if I seriously like what I’ve done because I start to fear I might spoil it. That is unsustainable because unfinished work is more dissatisfying than an imperfect one and so, eventually, I continue until I come to an impasse that literally feels like a knot in my brain, and which leaves me staring at the page wondering what to do next. The instinct is to stay doggedly set, fighting with myself and the page, to force my way through to the next stage, but I’ve learnt there is a better way, and this is certainly part of a ritual I use as required. When I get into that state, I get up and walk away, setting my mind to another task unrelated to writing, usually something domestic like washing dishes or sweeping the floor. It’s amazing how often the idea I’m after, or a useful one, soon crops up when I do that. That knot in the brain is a valuable clue. It feels like all my directed energy is blocked at that moment and needs to be loosened, so when I let go and walk away, the shift in focus frees that energy to redistribute itself. The mind is still trying to solve the problem one set oneself, in the same way that an afterimage lingers when one has stared at an object for some time, but then, suddenly, it has this released energy to redirect into new channels and meaningful connections that other layers of the mind had been deprived of. Another benefit of this ritual is that I also manage to get a lot of housework done along with my literary endeavors!

What do you hope readers will take away from your writing? Do you have an overarching aesthetic, artist statement, or ethos?

I find it difficult talking about my writing in any depth. I mean a poem takes the form it does because there’s no better way to put it, right? So much is going on when I’m writing, which I later forget, that I’m wary of saying too much because an interlocutor might latch onto a conditional description unrepresentative of the total work as if that pinned it down like a dead butterfly in their insect storage box. I much prefer to let readers come to their own conclusions rather than determine their responses. I’m more interested in what they have to teach me about my writing. However, I hope people will have fun or gain pleasure and insight, intellectual, emotional or otherwise from things I write. I don’t approach writing with anything aesthetically or philosophically formalized as such, just an attitude that strives for quality with as broad a spectrum of forms and emotional tonality, from serious to humorous or even preposterous, as I can muster.

What are you currently working on?

I have at least one book of poetry done and a book of short stories nearly ready. Normally, I would touch base with Ginninderra Press to run them by the publisher but since he recently passed, I’ve let that slide. I do have a long and intricate work titled Notes on Desire. It is an odd work in the form of an essay by a writer who is attempting to make his ideas on desire demonstrable to himself via pitching them to an imaginary audience. In it, our writer tries to examine how desire shapes our world and, to do that, he must look at its relation to time and space as the garments in which it is attired and manifested. It is a blend of fact inasmuch it takes actual dreams from various sources and interprets them in the light of Freudian and Jungian theory; and fiction, in that it is not really an essay in any formal sense but uses that pretense as a vehicle for personal exploration. It does significantly supplement the notion of desire touched on in Love Letters to the World that the poetic, episodic manner of that work took and attempts to render it in a way only prose can do in discursive detail, while blending the mock essay format that Sky utilizes. It is still a sprawling unresolved labyrinth with one or two dead-ends, and not poetic in the usual sense, if at all, but there’s something that compels me to remain engaged with this lumbering hobby horse. If it ever gets finished, the epigraph that will head the first page will be a sentence from Edgar Allan Poe’s, "William Wilson," “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

Do you have any advice for young writers?

If you’re meant to be a writer, you’ll stick with it because you really have no choice. Once you realize that, realize too you are unique – there is no perspective equivalent to yours, so, essentially, there is no one else who can see what you see, say what you have to say or write like you. As much as you may admire other writers and learn from them, well and good, we all need teachers, but remember, one Shakespeare, Dickens, or Dickinson is sufficient, another would be superfluous. You, on the other hand, are equally unrepeatable, so get on with it!

Do you have any life advice in general?

As an attitude that can be extended to whatever you do in life, I can think of nothing pithier than the advice Dylan Thomas gave the cast rehearsing for the premier of Under Milkwood in New York, 1953, which is a play for voices that is fabulously unconventional and rich in eccentric syntax designed to heighten poetic cadence. To aid them as they struggled in rendering the rhythmic and emotional complexity demanded after one of them admitted, with some desperation, she had no idea how to recite it, he simply said, “Love the words, love the words.” That’s it, have the courage to love!

What jobs have you taken to support your creative endeavors? Have they been in alignment with a life of writing?

I have done jobs that paid the bills but left me free to go home without weighing me down with responsibilities extraneous to my main goal, which is to daydream and create. I have never thought of any of my jobs as a career. I have done cleaning, been a civilian store-person on an army base, a clerk for Social Security, a gardener and landscaper in Germany while I lived with my prospective wife in an anthroposophical community, a mail clerk with a private company and now a mailroom manager in the public service. I was even a deli worker for a day – a ham-handed one at that! When I met my German wife-to-be, I was a part-time cleaner. As I intended to sponsor her on a prospective marriage visa, I had a sudden attack of conscientiousness when I realized I needed a full-time job to support us. That’s when I became a mail clerk. The upshot of that was interesting because I felt so much of my writing time had suddenly evaporated that it forced me to ensure I utilized the little gaps between workdays effectively, and I wrote most nights and weekends. It was during that period I did the brainstorming I mentioned earlier just to feel like I was writing something, anything, and not wasting all my time on things I had little enthusiasm for. In a way, working against that sort of restriction probably helped increase my output. I should add that even though my jobs have not been aligned with my writing, they have nonetheless been helpful because I’ve been forced to engage with all kinds of people. One inevitably observes people in a particular setting and picks up things that become useful for one’s craft, which is ultimately a good thing. No experience in life is ever wasted. Art is everywhere.

Poetose has published your chapbook, Sky, and prose poem, "Cages." What led you to feel Poetose would be a good home for these works? What do you hope readers will take from them?

Well, the name of the imprint made me curious. After a little reflection, I got the sense it was a portmanteau word combining poetry and prose. So, I thought of the press as something that dealt with poetic prose. That was why I submitted "Cages" to the Journal. At that stage I didn't realize that many of the other submissions to the Journal would be in verse. It took me a while longer to connect the logo with a toe, and thus that the name was also a pun on toes. It took me even more time and reflection to realize that toes are connected to feet and that feet can refer to metrical measures, which again brings us back to poetry! Ah, there was the connection to verse proper I had overlooked when submitting "Cages" and Sky! With that realization, I came to appreciate the further connotations of setting forth, directed movement and progress in this richly compacted name. To me, walking and poetry go well together and I guess poetic feet are probably named after the rhythmic quality essential to walking, which is analogous to iambs or trochees, or perhaps spondees, depending on how one’s gait might fall, and which is an activity many poets, famous and unknown, have gleefully practiced. (Now that I think about it, I could have said above that walking is one of those rituals I employ when writing!)

Also, I enjoyed the two books I had read by the publisher, their originality, emotional range and warmth. I could see the books published by Poetose were lovingly produced, with attention to font and layout, fine quality paper and wonderful illustrations by Sara Zieve Miller. The manner of craft brought to bear on its productions very much signaled that for this publisher the material body of a book is in no sense indifferent to its content, but is itself intended to be a beautiful object, which I found to be the case in the attention afforded Sky. Considering the publisher’s artistic care and commitment to excellence and birthing beauty into the world, I was well pleased to entrust my work to Poetose. As for what readers may take from my two works with Poetose, I should say an openness that questions our propensity to bind ourselves and others with ideologically- and emotionally-based barbed wire. When we do this, we limit ourselves and others to our mutual detriment. Put as simply as I can, I wish readers will take away a sense of reverential wonder for existence and the freedom of a child at play.

Read George's Prose Poem "Cages"

Sky: A Chapbook by George Genovese

Read More Interviews

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is the executive editor for the nonprofit press Black Ocean and the promotions and marketing communications director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks “Proficiency Badges,” “Grapple,” “Overture in the Key of F,” and “A Useless Window.” She writes the “Poetry & Biscuits” newsletter on Substack and curates a house reading series by the same name. When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.

Did you always know you wanted to write?

I’ve been writing poems as long as I can remember. I loved notebooks as a child, and I loved the sound of words. My first pet was a black and white bunny that I received around the time I was 5. I named her Chutzpah. I am not Jewish and was not raised in a family that spoke Yiddish. But I was living in New York City, and I picked up the word from a sauce commercial that was on tv. Even then, I was always storing away little pieces of found language that felt mysterious in meaning and fun to say. So, some part of me clearly always wanted to be a poet.

Who are some of the writers you hold most dear?

T. S. Eliot. Emily Dickinson. Anne Carson. Susan Howe. William Faulkner. Marcel Proust. And Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse was the novel that convinced me as a freshman in college to devote my life to literature and become a poet, no matter what. It was the most poetic writing I had ever read – despite being a novel – and I recently re-read it earlier this year and had that feeling confirmed. I could live in the “Time passes” section forever.

How has working in marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press and as Poetry Editor at Black Ocean influenced you as a writer?

Being surrounded by books and authors every day is incredibly humbling. I have no ego about what I do – nearly everyone in my world has written a book, and I see 600 new ones every six months. I know how incredibly competitive the literary and publishing world is, and I know how many books that are smart, powerful, and creative never receive the attention they should. My career has made me a very grateful writer.

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

It’s entirely instinct. And sometimes I’m wrong.

How has living in Chicago influenced you and your writing?

I think there is no better city in America to be a writer. I am blessed to be a part of a big community of poets and writers here, and it’s truly a community. It’s not competitive. It’s supportive; it’s another way in which Chicago earns its “city of big shoulders” nickname. Everyone is out to help one another, to make connections and introduce you to new writers and friends. There are many wonderful reading series, each with its own personality and all with engaged and consistent audiences. I don’t get to anywhere near as many readings as I’d like, but I love knowing they are happening.

You host the reading series, Poetry & Biscuits, and it seems you excel at building community. Do you have thoughts or advice on nurturing a sense of community, as writing can so often be a solitary endeavor?

Don’t wait. Don’t think you have to be a Martha Stewart-level hostess. Don’t think you have to have a big space or any space at all. It can be an online community of a few friends who share work and keep each other accountable. It can be an informal book club. And, of course, it can be a regularly scheduled meet-up at a coffee shop or bar. The most important part is building this network, reminding each other that, especially in these dark times, there are other people who believe in literature, language, creativity, art, and the human. We all need that.

Your Poetry & Biscuits newsletters are deeply poetic and it seems that you approach life – whether it's a piece or writing or a recipe – as a kind of poem or work of art, what would you say to this? Do you have a general set of guiding principles?

I’m truly honored that you think so, because if I have achieved this, then I achieved exactly what I have wanted for my life, which is for there to be no separation between life and art. It means living so that every act is one of observation, critical thinking, and/or creative making. Day jobs and their rote communications and bureaucracy certainly get in the way of this. But, in every moment that’s truly mine, I try to choose the side of art.

Congratulations on your forthcoming book, The Book of Marys and Glaciers, coming out from Tupelo Press! How did this book come to be?

Thank you – I am still surprised the book will exist, as I am every time I publish a book. The book is composed of three long sequences of poems, and the longest sequence, “Dust Cover” was written first. I had never really been to the desert until about five years ago, and I immediately fell in love. Yes, it was the loneliest, emptiest place I could think of. The vastness, the overwhelm, the uncanny of is this really Earth? But, I began to realize that deserts, despite their definitions, are not empty at all, but full of many things, if even also full of emptiness. And, there are also many kinds of deserts, not just the sandy hot kind, but the cold, glacial kind, the echoing of space kind, and the urban and domestic kind. Deserts, it turned out, were everywhere I looked. And, so the poem began.

Could you share how the book explores space, emptiness, and quietude (as mentioned in the description)?

I am a poet who is very grounded in place as much as the process. In the case of the title poem, Italy and Alaska. It was in Italy where I found myself confronted with the first Marys. But it was never just Mary. It was Mary with the angels; Mary with a baby; Mary with the wisemen. She was never just Mary, but always defined in relationship to someone else. I kept thinking that all Mary wants is to be alone. Less than a year after starting the notes on these poems, I was in Alaska in the Prince William Sound listening to the calving of glaciers. And, I kept thinking about Mary again. The solitude and magnificence of a glacier that calls out as it metaphorically gives birth or calves as it slowly sheds itself into shards. One day, the last of its language. They all had something in common to me, and that’s a place these poems keep trying to interrogate, to press a finger deep into.

You write of solitude and silence beautifully: “A woman alone is entirely herself. A woman alone leaves excess in her wake, every portion too big. In the company of others, she takes up no space, but alone, she is the space.” Could you speak to how solitude plays a role in your writing practice and life? Do you intentionally carve out time for solitude? And last but not least – how can we all, especially women, practice taking up more space?

I grew up as an only child, and so being alone comes rather naturally to me. I barely survived my freshman year in college dorms and moved into a studio apartment on my own as soon as I could. My husband and I have been married for nearly 25 years, but for much of that time, he has had jobs that have required him to travel frequently (sometimes every week). Those evenings alone are definitely key to my writing process. I talk out loud to myself constantly, and I usually compose poems aloud as well—I’m always working through a thought and its sounds; and I can only do that alone (or with my cat). I am one of those weirdos who truly enjoys dining alone at a restaurant (as long as it’s not too frequent an occurrence), and I also love being on my own in a foreign country. And I wrote those lines doing just that—having lunch on my own in Italy, independent and joyful. As a woman, independence has always been something I’ve prized. I love being married to my husband, but I need to know that at any moment, I can take care of myself completely. I think cultivating a strong sense of independence is the first step toward learning how to take our place in society and not apologize for it.

You write: “Our days are squares of everyone’s posturing. Twice filtered and retouched...I look at all of us and see our need.” This encapsulates the attention economy so well. How would you describe your relationship to social media? What would you say to writers who feel pressure to be on social media but prefer not to be?

My Gen X self hates social media and longs for the 90s (in oh so many ways). Don’t let anyone pressure you into it. As I tell all my authors at Chicago who ask, if you’re not already doing it, don’t start. You need to be comfortable with it; it needs to feel authentic, and it needs to be consistently maintained. If it’s not natural to you, it’s not worth it. It’s not natural to me, but somehow I find myself a middle-aged woman in charge of a publishing company’s social media strategy. So, I can’t escape it and need to know how it works, but I actively pine for it all to implode. It is one of many failed utopian promises of the internet age; it didn’t make us better informed or bring us closer together as a society. Instead, it just taught many of us the power of good lighting for selfies.

You write: “Ask me in any language / I stumble just the same / All communication is through fragmentary / expression, questioning and guessing / The listener carries the burden of communication” and “We are writing our own dictionaries with each attempt to explain to each other.” How do you think we can all be better listeners and speak to one another’s worlds?

That is a really big question, and I wish I had the answers. I think part of the problem is that we’re not really listening at all these days. We’re talking over each other. We’re scrolling and scrolling, even while we’re streaming something on TV. We’re being pinged by email and Teams messages and texts and calendar reminders. We’re always doing at least two, if not four or more things, at once. I love my cat Maya because several times a day, she gets demanding. She climbs over my laptop and onto my lap or my chest, and insists that I put my computer or phone down and take a break. And just sit still. I listen to our breathing. I listen to the birds in the big tree out front. I listen to the squirrels on a chase, the delivery drivers with their music turned up, the passing threads of conversation from neighbors out walking their dogs and babies. I think it all starts there. Putting down all our distractions and sitting still. You start to feel human again, not just someone plugged into a machine. And regaining our own humanity will lead us to acknowledge it again in others.

What are you currently working on?

I am a project poet, and my next, in an ode to my NYC upbringing, has the working title of “Bridges and Tunnels.” I recently finished the “Bridges” sequence, and you can see a selection from it at Periodicities. The sequence is a reckoning with family history that also engages in dialogue with Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots by John Swanson Jacobs (brother of Harriet Jacobs).

Do you have any advice for young writers?

Read. And then read some more. Read widely – anything that sparks your curiosity. And then, listen. Poems are happening all the time. Take notes.

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Congratulations on Microcosm’s 30th anniversary! Could you share the story of how Microcosm Publishing & Distribution began, and how it has evolved over the years?

JB: Microcosm started as a reason for me to get out of bed every day in the 90s. I had been publishing stuff by my more creative friends for a few years. I knew someone who worked at a Kinko’s and someone who could ship things for me for free through their work. So I would set up behind the bar at local punk shows at the Euclid Tavern and Speak in Tongues as I was growing up in Cleveland. Around 1996, I had been doing this for a few years and so I guess I decided to give it a name, to be more official. Or maybe it was the general confusion that people would write for a catalog but always ask for it under a different name, so a single name to tie it all together made sense. Anyway, the idea was to make resources like the ones that were lacking in my own life.

By the time that Elly and I met, a little over ten years later, Microcosm had grown in a really awkward way. It was never meant to be a “job,” but it could consume hundreds of hours per week just from keeping up with the letters and the orders and keeping things in print. I think the intentionality of it is why it resonated with people. It was meant to be a reason to stay alive, never a business. And I think that echoes with people much more than I ever realized.

EB: When we got together in 2009, Microcosm was a scrappy, troubled operation that couldn’t afford to buy envelopes. By the time I officially joined up in 2015, we were growing every year but still had that scarcity mentality, with every day spent putting out fires. We called our workplace culture “fixing the Millenium Falcon in the middle of battle.” We made a huge effort over years—necessitated even more by our massive growth after we took back our distribution in 2019 and then during the pandemic—and stabilized both the company and our own mentalities. Our readership changed along with us, as longtime readers grew up into middle age with us and new people with new ideas and perspectives joined the team and found our books. We’ve entered a new cultural moment of heart-on-sleeve earnestness that reflects that of Microcosm’s first heyday in the early 2000s, and we’re thriving in it.

How is it that you are so consistently innovative in your publishing offerings, and, well, in everything that you do?

JB: Wow! Thank you! We want everything that we do to empower someone to change their life and the world around them. That takes many forms but mostly it’s in projects and ideas that we could never conceive of on our own. We need our hive mind to bring the best concepts. We think the best projects are topics that most people think they already understand or consider boring but can be brought out to shine in new ways. That could be anything from the history of Hawaii to coping skills for freaking out to how to bookbind to feeling less alone. Perhaps it’s coming from a world of performative* concepts, but all of that makes sense under the same tent to me. When we’re tightening the screws on a project, we ask “Is this an audience that we can reach? Will this help people?” and that’s when we green light it.

*Everything in punk rock is putting on a character to make a point

EB: A lot of the best ideas come from within our team—idle asides on Slack or jokes that escalate quickly in the warehouse. We have a relatively flat hierarchy, and a lot of communication channels that are shared by people who might be relegated to their own silos at a larger company. A lot of our best ideas, for content and also for how we manage ourselves, come from our shipping and receiving departments.

How do you hope that Microcosm will change the world, and readers, for the better?

JB: One of the earliest surprises about focusing on resources for at-risk weirdos like myself was that it appealed to lots of people who were treated as unimportant by society. So they came out of the woodwork in force to support us from the beginning. From our earliest tours, the audiences were always comprised of young trans women of color. That made things meaningful in a new way that I hadn’t considered. They were just responding to the subject matter and approach. And that’s pretty much the same today. Some of them grew up and landed adult jobs, which is really inspiring but mostly there’s a new crop of people that relate with what we’re doing every year. They send us really amazing mail every day. There’s a kid who recently had us ship a t-shirt so that it’s there when they’re out of prison. That’s something that could have happened 30 years ago too. Everyone has to have hope.

In the past 30 years, the world has acclimated to our behavior. Maybe someone could argue that we met it in the middle. That’s a huge relief as I was hanging on by a thread for a while there. Politics are popular in a way that they weren’t in our infancy. Those titles went from marginal to mainstream.

In Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman’s take is basically that capitalism devalues and economically traumatizes anyone that doesn’t fall into an increasingly narrower definition of “normal.” “Normal” really means completely interchangeable workers with consistent rates of productivity. The whole point of the Microcosm project is for people to feel less alone. So, in that sense, Microcosm is the Empire of Abnormality. And we’re here for it.

Do you have any advice for publishers? In addition to reading A People’s Guide to Publishing, of course, and listening to your podcast!

JB: Several publishers per week tell me that they just want to “make great, beautiful books” and not worry about the other stuff. Well, the other stuff is actually The Stuff. While many publishers have sought out the “kindler, gentler corporation” to save them, it’s mythological. You have to build and create your own infrastructure if you are going to succeed. Similarly, publishers often believe that they can achieve success by chaining themselves to our success, but the truth is that they need to find their own best practices.

EB: Books can be a tough industry, money-wise. There’s been a lot of economic interference, leaving a widespread sense of scarcity and overwhelm, and it can be easy for different parts of the industry to fall into resentment and fighting each other over scraps, rather than uniting to solve our common problems. It’s never too late to pull yourself out of this mindset! Find out the things that are a success for everyone they touch and go in that direction. Create a workplace culture and set of business practices that reflects the values of your publishing program. Even if you’re a one-person operation, treat yourself fairly! Support other independents and they’ll support you back.

Do you have any regrets over choices you made in Microcosm’s development?

JB: I wish I had taken it seriously earlier. You see, since Microcosm was always a reason for me to get out of bed every day, its success was also something of a joke in my mind. I’m staunchly Generation X. And part of that upbringing is being a success apologist or downplaying your success. I think that was a major advantage through most of my career.

Toiling in obscurity is really healthy for workshopping things: twenty years where nobody cared what I was doing was really freeing to make sure that it was working. I still run into booksellers who ask, “Why had I never heard of you before?” but the people who approach me to tell me that they love what I do are the most important people in the world to me because they actually notice and listen. So we make sure that we have books that speak to those people and keep them safe.

That said, it wasn’t really until 2011 when we signed with Independent Publishers Group (IPG) that I had to answer for our choices. And they really pushed me to take those choices more seriously. Amazing guidance created turning points for us to be recognized and probably are the reason that you are reading this now.

How has being based in Portland, OR, influenced the business and your lives?

JB: Prior to 2014, Portland didn’t have the local money to be supportive of institutions so we were almost entirely reliant on being a “national press” from our inception. This pushed us to go out on tour every year from 1997 to 2017, when we felt a little too busy and worn out.
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Portland has always been supportive in other ways, of course, as our cheerleaders. For many, because we started as the local publisher that had no resources but maybe could, lots of people felt invested in our story. And I think that story intertwines into how Portland saw itself, especially in the 90s—that you could found a press and have it resonate and go places.

EB: It’s easier to function the way we do in Portland than it would be in many other places. A big part of that is the built environment: the city has an urban growth boundary, making it geographically small, and activists in the 1970s blocked construction on most inner-city freeways, and we have great bicycle and transit networks. As a result, it’s possible to do most things without a car or truck—we don’t own one ourselves, which means we didn’t have as much earning pressure on the business when we were smaller. We use bike trailers to haul books to events, and the community’s turned out for a huge bike move when we’ve changed warehouse locations.

Another aspect of Portland’s culture is that free boxes on the curb, little free libraries, and people just generally wanting to share what they have is baked in. Nowadays we’d call that mutual aid, but there’s really no need to buy most things new here. We used to get all our mailing supplies from SCRAP, our local creative reuse project. Most of our office shelves here are built from scrap wood found on the curb.

This stuff is pretty normal here, so we’re not constantly having to explain ourselves or buck against expectations of more formality or “professionalism.” Our unofficial motto is “have the most fun.” Biking across town with an unwieldy tower of boxes or the latest homemade bookshelf is definitely conducive to that!

How often do you solicit manuscripts and how often do they come in unsolicited?

JB: Just about everything that we publish comes in through the submission form on our website—probably about 90%. The rest of the things that actually come to light are sometimes us suggesting to an author that we have a relationship with that they might work on a specific project. The trouble with this approach is that writing a book is a ton of work so for most authors us suggesting it to them causes us to be in a position of “selling it” to them and the vast majority of those projects never come to light. So we focus mostly on what comes to us, operating more as a filter.

EB: We put a lot of thought into where our authors come from. A lot of them ordered a book from us years or decades ago—or found it at the library or bought it at an event or received it as a gift—and liked it so much that when they eventually write a book they’ll pitch it to us first. We focus a bit more on brand recognition than many publishers do, and this is part of the reason why.

What are you looking for in the zines and books that you decide to publish?

JB: We were both teenage runaways, which I think is central to the story. We want to create the resources that were lacking for us as teens, presented in a way that would be attractive to someone like us. This had the additional benefit of being very attractive to many wide subsets of the population that hadn’t felt acknowledged previously by publishing. I wanted to create the tools for people to change their lives and the world around them, and that hasn’t changed at all in 30 years—we are just getting 5% better at it every year.

EB: We’re also looking for authors who are excited to collaborate. Our ideal author is keenly focused on the reader’s experience, eager to work with an editor, and can set both their ego and insecurities aside enough to not get hung up on the wrong things. There has to be a lot of trust in the relationship—the author is uniquely qualified to write their book, and we’re uniquely qualified to get it into readers’ hands. Things go sideways when we start stepping on each others’ toes, but if we can work together well we can do things we could never achieve separately.

Could you speak a bit about how neurodiversity and publishing intersect for you? Joe has spoken about identifying as autistic which is really empowering.

JB: I was diagnosed as autistic in my thirties, which had already made life difficult and failure rampant. But what autism also did for me was give me a lifetime of experience to see that adults don’t know what they are talking about. This is particularly useful in publishing, where adults really don’t know what they are talking about. As such, I threw out the rules that don’t make any sense or serve the stated goals. I rebuilt mechanisms for what was best for what I wanted to achieve. Again, something that I hadn’t considered is that this resonated with lots of people who have the same experiences.

In middle age, I was also diagnosed with ADHD and OCD. And I think these are equally relevant. I can obsessively perform a repetitive task with attention to detail and pattern recognition long after most publishers would have given up. We are told that these are “disabilities” but that’s only half the story and most of that is in how we are treated. I work harder because I know the stakes of how I am viewed in most workplaces, and this unfortunately extends to publishing. It really took proving my concepts as bulletproof hundreds or thousands of times over before almost anyone took me seriously. But toiling in obscurity is really healthy for workshopping things too: twenty years where nobody cared what I was doing was really freeing to make sure that it was working. I still run into booksellers who ask, “Why had I never heard of you before?” but the people who approach me to tell me that they love what I do are the most important people in the world to me because they actually notice and listen. So we make sure that we have books that speak to those people and keep them safe.

EB: I recently found out I’m neurodiverse too—an auditory processing thing that I’m still learning about. My own experiences over the last few years have helped me be a better manager and work better with our authors. I’m able to listen to people and really hear what they’re telling me for the first time in my life, which has been extremely cool. I set up a lot of Microcosm’s HR and management systems and they’re very much informed by my growing recognition that different people need (sometimes vastly) different things at different times. Joe and I co-wrote the zine Managing a Neurodiverse Workplace during our big zine-writing frenzy last year that shares everything we’ve learned so far. I hope it inspires people who know even more than we do to write their own books about it, to normalize this sort of thinking.

How do you find time to rest and have fun? Or are you always working 24/7 and having fun because work is fun..?

JB: I think we both really enjoy what we do. We rest more now than we did years ago, believe it or not. We both walk and Elly lifts weights. It’s the quiet observation of the world that is fun but more than that, there was a point where I asked Elly at what point she wouldn’t want to do this anymore and she just looked at me like the question was absurd or I was trying to tell her something.

EB: Adopting a puppy in 2021 has kept work-life balance real for me. I have the capacity to keep my head down and work 12-16 hour days, but the dog will not tolerate that. He requires exercise, adventure, going into local businesses to see if they have treats, and stopping to greet every single person we encounter. It’s hard to argue with those priorities.

How do you find time to balance your own writing with publishing? You both seem so prolific!

JB: The “Year of Zines” was something that Microcosm announced casually without thinking about it too much. But most of our best ideas are like that. And it turned out to be truer than we thought possible. Zines were massive in 2025. I think they help to make people feel like reading is something other than homework or an obligation. It shows you how cool the world is and you don’t have to look at a brick of a book on your nightstand and feel guilty every night. So we’re doing more of that in 2026.

Somewhere around 2022, we increased our scale considerably, tripling our staff. Elly and my jobs turned into taking care of everybody more than doing our own work. And quickly we found that we weren’t doing much in the way of creative work. So I started spending my weekends going to the tea shop and researching and writing new work. It was something that I did for me. And then by 2025, I convinced Elly to do that with me every weekend. And perhaps that worked too well because to hear her recall it, she convinced me to do it with her. Which is 100% the culture of Microcosm. Someone has a brilliant idea and credits it to someone else.
So anyway, we started writing and publishing a new zine every other weekend. The first one was a gift for our friend who was in the hospital with sepsis to make her feel better about having to slow down. But we kept it up most of the year. And we want to expand that into making 2026 more about our own creative work so that we aren’t just on the bureaucratic side of things. Elly is a fantastic writer and reporter and has done a ton with that, so I don’t want her languishing by just submitting paperwork to the IRS and making sure that our staff have what they need. Our idea is that writing is a hobby and publishing is work, so there is a separation there. I think a certain amount of public expression really helps someone to feel less alone in the world.

EB: When I wrote a weekly column fifteen years ago, I quickly realized that I got paid the same flat rate whether I spent 10 minutes or 10 hours on each installment, and that my editors were happy when I wrote things that brought in a lot of clicks and comments. To make it fun for myself, I would think of the most hackneyed, commercial ideas possible and then quickly write the most unhinged treatment of each one that I could come up with. It was a winning formula, and that’s the spirit behind our most successful zines. For instance, it makes zero sense for Microcosm to publish a Christmas title, so we came up with a zine about the sordid history of Santa Claus and had the best time researching and writing A People’s Guide to Santa Claus. We still have spirited arguments about some of the ideas that came up in it. It’s doing well enough that we’ll turn it into a book.

What are your thoughts on growth and scaling for Microcosm? Are you always actively trying to grow, do you have more of a slow growth, going with the flow mindset, or does this ebb and flow?

JB: At one time, growth felt simply impossible. Then we were doubling each year and it felt like we couldn’t stop growing. We tried to actively slow down. We’ve found a healthy medium this year where we are seeing growth but it’s not exponential. Part of the reason for this is that you break things when you grow. You are rebuilding the wheel instead of making books at a certain point and that’s not fun.

EB: When our growth slowed dramatically after 2022, we hypothesized that publishing more books every year would increase our growth again. It just increased our overwhelm, and it turns out that we have historically done the best financially publishing about 35 titles a year. We can focus more on each book at every stage, and everyone is happier, from our own workers to the equally overwhelmed bookstore buyers who have to wade through an increasing onslaught of new books each season. When we decided to make this change, it was like a burden lifted—birds sang, people laughed giddily, the air felt cleaner. The numbers got us there, but even without them it was clear that it was the right decision.

What are some of your future hopes for Microcosm and just in general in life?

JB: We want to remember what is fun about this every day while we take care of our people. We want to see the Microcosm project outlive us so that other people feel less alone in the world.

EB: I’d like Microcosm to keep growing, but at a more reasonable pace. My biggest dream is that Joe and I can become nonessential, and that the business would still stay strong and flourishing and true to the shared core values that brought our team together and keeps us all willing to work hard and challenge ourselves. Part of that is the constant battle to keep wages and benefits in pace with the cost and complexity of living. Another part is our ESOP—employee stock ownership program—that enables people who work here long term to become co-owners of the company, and is the seed of our succession plan. Another part is continuing to improve our leadership practices so that everyone feels empowered to understand what needs to be done and step up and do it. It’s all enough to keep us occupied for the foreseeable future!

Do you have any advice for young writers? For publishers?

JB: There is no “kinder, gentler corporate savior.” You are responsible for building the infrastructure, systems, and identity that breeds your own success. It’s not going to be a single agreement or relationship that delivers you. You’re on your own in the best way possible.

EB: We’re living through a polycrisis and it’s raised the bar on what we need in order to function as people in a community. Go to therapy, go to meetings, have honest conversations, read, figure out whatever your stuff is and address it head-on as soon as you can. It might feel like your insecurities, suffering, or addiction are what’s fueling your art or making sense of your identity, the plot twist of recovery will put everything that seems impossible directly within your reach. This isn’t just true for the struggling writers among us—publishing is all about relationships, and the better you can do relationships the better you’ll be able to do the work that matters to you.

Joe Biel is a self-made life-long-learner and autistic publisher who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock to sell millions of books. Biel is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, Publishers Weekly’s #1 fastest-growing publisher of 2022 and #3 in 2023/2024, and WorkingLit, the software responsible for Microcosm’s aforementioned success — now available for other publishers. Biel has been featured in Time, Esquire, Forbes, Bulletproof Radio, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), as well as NPR and PBS. Biel is the author of A People’s Guide to Publishing, Autism Relationships Handbook, Unfuck Your Business, Enduring Legacy of Portland’s Black Panthers, and dozens more. Biel is the director of five feature films, including Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland, $100 & a T-Shirt, and hundreds of short films. Biel lives in Portland, Oregon.

Elly Blue is a co-owner and the vice president of Microcosm Publishing, and the co-host of the People's Guide to Publishing podcast. Her books include Everyday Bicycling and Bikenomics, and she is the editor of the annual Bikes in Space anthology of feminist bicycle science fiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner, their dog, and a small fleet of cargo bicycles.

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Joe & Elly's Publishing Podcast

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Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?

I remember one of my first days at college and walking through the art department as I explored the campus. I immediately knew that I wanted to include art classes in my schedule, which had been pretty academically oriented before that. I did end up majoring in art. My main discipline at the time was ceramics with photography as a minor.
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After graduation I sought out a community with a strong ceramic community and ended up in Boulder, Colorado, where Betty Woodman was a major force. Overtime I set up my own studio and built a kiln. For twenty years this was my pursuit. Eventually, I became dissatisfied with my own self-focus on becoming a “famous artist.” I was on a big ego trip and the art world had ceased to be fun. I stopped doing exhibition type work and developed a line of light fixtures, which was a production line. Eventually, I closed the studio and moved to the Boston area where I had friends, but was not doing any creative work.

How did you get into making artists' books?

Around 2010, I started to see images in the night that I wanted to capture photographically. I signed up for a class at the New England School of Photography (NESOP) in night photography. At the time I was working at MIT and one of the labs that I worked for had a digital camera that wasn’t being used. I had permission to use the camera and that set me off on my photographic journey. In that endeavor I continued to take classes at NESOP for technical expertise, and for more expressive guidance, I enrolled in the Atelier program at the Griffin Museum.

Eventually, I discovered the cyanotype process and I’ve been working with that for a number of years. I have a series called Mythic Nature which has been widely exhibited including a solo show in NYC. There’s about 25 pieces in the series. I knew that was coming to an end because I kept having the impulse to return to three-dimensional work. I didn’t know what that would look like but I started to fold my out-takes. I was inspired by Diana Bloomfield’s cyanotype books and went about finding my own way through YouTube videos and other websites. Eventually, I took a couple of workshops at Mass Art to learn some real techniques. Both teachers that I worked with are members of New England Book Artists and recommended the organization.

How do project ideas come to you and develop? Does content often shape form?

My bookmaking work evolves out of my photography. I am mainly interested in materiality and I don’t include text in my pieces. I look to see how I can push the materials and do something unexpected. I feel blessed that I have the freedom to continue to experiment and explore different materials and formats.

Congratulations on your many exhibitions! Having attended one recently, I can attest you have impeccable taste when it comes to framing and presentation, not to mention the gorgeous work itself. How do you balance artmaking with the business of being an artist such as managing submissions?

I want my work to be seen so keeping track of upcoming shows and submissions is just part of the process. I also love seeing how other artists are working. We are in a time where there are so many artists working at all different levels in so many different mediums.

Who are some of the artists, book artists or otherwise, you hold most dear?

Currently, I am working with the pop-up book form. I was lucky to have the opportunity to study with Colette Fu at Haystack last summer. Her work is absolutely jaw-dropping and she is also a photographer. Other pop-up artists that I follow are Simon Arizpe, Matthew Reinhart and Peter Dahmen. But I love so many different kinds of art and we are so lucky to have such a great variety of galleries and museums here in New England.

Do you have a favorite medium or materials to work with?

Currently I am working with my cyanotype scraps but a year ago I was working with encaustic medium. I am lucky to have the space to play with different materials as suits my fancy. We’ll see what comes into focus in the time to come.

How has the New England Book Artists (NEBA) helped nurture your practice?

It’s been great to be part of NEBA. I love the visits to the different artist book collections. And there is so much to learn from the other members. There is so much talent in the group.

How has living in Lowell helped support your practice as an artist?

I moved to Lowell in 2019 and I have found that it is a very welcoming community. There is a large community of artists here and it’s very easy to get involved in different projects. Beyond art projects I am also involved with the Bike Connector that collects and refurbishes used bikes and provides them to kids and anyone who wants a bike. Also the Litter Krewe is a wonderful group of folks focusing on beautifying the city and a very civic-minded group of people participating including a state senator and state rep.

What do you hope readers will take away from your artwork? Do you have an overarching aesthetic, artist statement, or ethos?

I hope that my work brings a smile to the face of the onlooker. I am fascinated by what I see around me. One recurrent theme is statuary, from saints and Virgin Marys in the yards of the faithful, to the monuments in the public square. When you focus on something, people realize that they have passed it by without noticing. I often hear personal stories from people as they see my work.

Do you have any advice for aspiring book artists?
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I would just encourage the aspiring artist to throw themselves into whatever they are interested in. Learn everything that you can and when your work doesn't come out as you wanted, see what did work and expand on that.

Sally Chapman is a photographer living in Lowell, MA. After earning a BFA in ceramics and photography from Michigan State University, she worked for over twenty years as a ceramic artist exhibiting widely. When she returned to photography ten years ago, she gravitated towards tactile methods of printing. In her current work, Mythic Nature, she uses the 19th century photographic process, cyanotype.

She has been published in The Hand Magazine and has had solo shows at the MIT Rotch Architectural Library, Cambridge, MA; Gallery 93, Brookline, MA; and The Sanctuary in Medford, MA. She won the Excellence in Photography Award at the Rockport Art Association and Museum National Show. She has been included in many group shows including at the Griffin Museum, Winchester, MA; Image Flow Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; Soho Gallery, New York, NY; Photo Place Gallery, Middlebury, VT; and the Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA.

In addition to her BFA in ceramics and photography from Michigan State University, Chapman has studied photography in workshops offered by the New England School of Photography, Griffin Museum, MIT, and Harvard University.

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In 2011 Keith O’Shaughnessy’s first book of poems, Incommunicado, won the inaugural Grolier Discovery Award, sponsored by the legendary Cambridge bookshop of the same name. His second, Last Call for Ganymede, followed in 2014 from Ilora Press. At long last, his magnum opus, Petrushka, was released by Ragged Sky Press in March of this year. Along the way he has also authored three chapbooks—Carnaval, The Devil’s Party, and Snegurochka—all with Pudding House Publications. A near-lifelong resident of Princeton, he teaches English at Camden County College in southern New Jersey.

Who are some of your literary influences? Do you have any favorite poems, short stories, or books to teach as a professor at Camden County College?

By and large the writers I admire most are not ones whose sensibilities — let alone sentiments — I assent to, but those whose uncompromising extremism appeals to me temperamentally. Among their number I would count, with astonishing originality, Mr. Laureate-of-the-New-World himself, Walt Whitman, whose exuberant affirmations I still find radically invigorating — like ode after ode declaimed whole-heartedly, and full-throatedly, from a mountaintop in praise of all Creation. And a local Camden boy at that! ‘Proud to be an American’ indeed.

At the same time, I will confess to very much digging the slighter lyrics — and a few of the longer numbers — of everyone’s favorite fascist paranoiac Ezra Pound for their austere, perplexing elegance. One of the true freakazoids of the medium, he. As inveterately obstreperous as they come. (But then, from time to time every art form needs a cranky malcontent to whip it back into shape). In the same vein, surely I am the lone weirdo in the Anglophone world who delighted in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno — entire. Really, simply cracking the spine was like getting zapped by a max-voltage jolt of static electricity. Like some kind of versified shock treatment. Truly — the man damn near fried the bejesus clean out of me. More minutely, the same could be said of the octave of Hopkins’ no less exultant “kingfisher sonnet,” wherein the phonemes quiver like charged particles in an atom (if that’s actually what happens in an atom). To further mix (equally ill-informed) science metaphors, an analogous chemical reaction was catalyzed by Beckett’s Molloy — as well as, come to think of it, Paradise Lost — once upon a time.

Suffice to say, I favor the beamed-down-from-outer-space, Hey-Kool-Aid, we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore effect, such as simultaneously takes your breath away and knocks the wind out of you with gob-smacking, flabbergasting force. I also prefer an idiom totally remote from the colloquial, as one might associate with a rune or spell. Not for me the affable gabbing or heartfelt testaments (much less indignant screeds) of so much contemporary verse. To clarify, this is not some theoretical criterion I’ve traced out in the abstract and committed myself to in principle, just an inexplicable predilection of taste. A wise woman once told me all lyric poems should read as though written in italics. Hear, hear!

Last, banal as it may sound (and be), Shakespeare’s boundless vitality still exhilarates me, and I am never not teaching at least one of his works, which always succeed in putting the play back in the drama. In fact, I can assert with near-absolute certitude, as I do with punishing regularity in my survey courses, that if the Bard were alive today, he wouldn’t be wasting a moment of his time penning genteel period pieces for Masterpiece Theater, complete with ruff collars and stuffy accents, if not the odd pair of silk slippers for good measure. No, the consummate entertainer would be out in Hollywood making a mint producing blockbuster after blockbuster, putting on the greatest show not only in town but on earth.

This is your third book, and you've authored three chapbooks. How is it that you are so prolific?

Truth be told, I’m not sure I’m prolific so much as just prolix. Since birth I’ve been afflicted with a wicked case of never-shutting-the-funk-up disease (as my students would be more than happy to attest). So, though I’ve produced only the three volumes, considering the most recent one’s heft, I’d gladly take the word-count challenge with just about anybody this side of Joyce Carol Oates. I am a maniacal reviser, but a compulsive adder-on-to as well (much to the chagrin of all involved). ‘Brevity is the soul of wit,’ far from a nugget of gnomic wisdom coined by the playwright himself, was just a pat maxim dutifully parroted by an obtuse doofus who was not only decidedly longwinded but witless in the extreme. Shakespeare’s own speech spewed forth in bountiful, at times ungovernable, profusion. My tongue is too in love with the sensation of utterance to hold its peace for long.

What is your writing process? Any favorite rituals, if you believe in them?

For me, vast spans of time can elapse during which I inscribe nary a character, but when the Muse moves, I not infrequently find myself seized by a kind of hectic frenzy, as if taking dictation from a reverie, à la that most notorious of opium-imbibers in the throes of ‘Kubla Khan.’ (Hmmm — ‘Weave a circle round me thrice,’ anyone…?) Thence ensues a frantic scramble to get it all down before the fever breaks. Editing, meanwhile, I often reserve for ceremonial performance seaside. No finer way to pass a Sunday afternoon than sitting on the sand with a prodigious pile of print-outs, slashing away ruthlessly with one’s trusty red pen. Plus, the ocean has always felt like my element, as it were. ‘Ah — The mighty Being is awake!’ (Just about the only line of Wordsworth I have any use for, but its place in my greatest-hits package is secure.)

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

Very rarely, in the tumult of the initial inspiration, but more often than not, only after having drawn its author out on the rack for eons on end. Ultimately, either I’m done with it, or it’s done with me. All in service of the same vague, nameless intuition leading me hither and yon like the divining rod in a cartoon desert. Sometimes, at the moment of culmination, I sense an invisible clicking into place — Ah, just right! — more often I simply reach a point of such exasperation that I’ve no alternative left but to cry uncle and reconcile myself to my inadequacy to the task. I’ve been known to put up quite a fight along the way, but even the doughtiest of spirits flags at the last.

Ifeanyi Menkiti, late owner of the historic Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, spoke highly of your "play with language" and said he loved the freshness, boldness, inventiveness, and confidence of your writing. How has your voice evolved over the years to be so singular?

While I do prize a style that is distinct in itself and discrete among others, never would I call any voice my own (including, I dare say, this one). Optimally, one invents a special dialect, with almost its own grammar and vocabulary, to speak the language of each new work in answer to its peculiar atmosphere and mood. More like a medium channeling heavens-sent energies than a human personality telling you its identifying truths. There are, of course, dozens upon dozens of writers who excel at direct self-expression (or at least some passable facsimile thereof). After all, it’s quite alright to be self-centered provided one is in possession of a self around which to be so, meaning I can take a little ‘Egotistical’ as long as there’s some ‘Sublime’ to go with it. But to my taste, in the lyric mode, any reference to private life or the general pedestrian realm is to be eschewed. Few critical descriptors strike me as more odious than ‘relatable.’ Years back, when teaching at a Catholic boys school in pre-gentrification Jersey City (which is to say, getting my clock cleaned in just about every measurable respect five times a day five times a week, excluding cafeteria duty), I mysteriously, if fleetingly, became a daily communicant. I suppose we all need to affect at least the pretense of dignity from time to time. More to the point, I sought out early-morning masses in Italian, Polish, and Spanish since, if I wasn’t going to get the Latin, a living foreign language would be the next thing, because Heaven forfend I might actually understand a word of it.

How has living in Princeton influenced your writing?

Bear in mind that, as a near-lifelong greaser townie, I haven’t spent all that much time hobnobbing with the campus swells, so don’t imagine there’s been any direct literary effect. At the same time, I have to believe that growing up surrounded by people who were not only exceedingly well-educated, but uncommonly vibrant and engaged, made the fruitless pursuit of poesy not seem too outlandishly fanciful an undertaking.

Congratulations on your recent book publication! Could you share a bit about your new book of poems and fables, Petrushka?

Ah, Petrushka — my magnum opus! (Hey, at least SOMEONE’s got to call it that…) Our leading man, if you will, is the gleefully belligerent, aggressively indecorous Russian puppet of the same name, he who, on a platform mounted in the town square, whiles away his time squeaking nonsensically on his signature pennywhistle and thwacking savagely at his nemeses the policeman, physician, priest, and conscriptor with an arsenal of implements — and getting smacked back threefold in return. Interspersed among these interludes can be found a set of symphonically-arranged lyrical fragments from an implied, overarching narrative featuring a chess master, ballerina, opera tenor, and figure skater, as well as, in supporting roles, an urchin, idiot, and organ grinder. Presiding over the proceedings is a trained monkey outside an asylum screeching at his leash in the street. I believe the accompanying press release aptly characterizes the finished product as a cultural curio of sorts — in this case a veritable compendium of the ungainly and unsavory, one everywhere reveling in the perverse and grotesque, albeit with more than a little pep in its step, if not a modicum of dash, flash, and panache to boot.

What are you currently working on?

What I am working on now, with assiduous industry, is anything that doesn’t concern words (the ones set forth before you even now notwithstanding). I’ve long since become obsessed with language. If I’m not careful, I grow positively possessed by it, until such intense pressure is being exerted that my psyche is in danger of undergoing some kind of rupture. Even now I can feel my faculties straining against the gravitation of the discombobulating Petrushka patois — almost as though I’ve written in it so long it’s become my only known form of speech. That’s when I know it’s time to take my business elsewhere — the ocean, the woods, what have you. Just nowheres near print. Happily, I’m also an unregenerate museum junkie, so perambulating the various galleries within striking distance of my native Princeton can be just the thing for un-mediating the brain. To adduce still more proof, when you first proposed this interview, part of me was rooting for the old-school, live-and-in-person, back-and-forth informal chit-chat model so I wouldn’t have to confront the prospect of frenetically rearranging letters on a page.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I feel honor-bound to add that Petrushka has — not exactly back by popular demand — a sequel, entitled Snegurochka, the name of the Snow Maiden of Russian folklore who, according to at least one of the myths involving her, falls in love with a local shepherd boy and appeals to her mother, Spring Beauty, to let her experience mortal love, but at the warmth of his touch, she melts. Pretty bad-ass, no? But have no fear! Either way, it’s decades away from completion. Only fair the world be granted a — very — extended grace period to convalesce from its predecessor.)

Do you have any advice for young writers?

Well, aren’t you in luck, my friends! Why, just follow my proven one-step program and you, too — for five easy payments of wholesale chunks of your soul — could end up toiling away interminably in deserved obscurity. Ha. Lest this devolve into an infomercial testimonial, I’ll limit myself to the following admonition: the cure for writer’s block is, surprise of all surprises, simply not to write. Chances are, there are no hordes of some adoring public ready to storm the Bastille if your flimsy leaflet of pensive reflections isn’t released by the deadline. Wait until you are impelled, as if by biological necessity, to let forth whatever noise issues, per force, from your vocal chords when twanged by one or another of those damnable “thorns of life” a certain husband of Frankenstein once rhapsodized about ever-so-emotively on his proverbial harp aeolian.

What are you reading these days?

Generally I hold off until at least the second date before completely discrediting myself, but oh well, no sense in deferring the inevitable, so here goes: I cannot tell you what I’m reading these days because, well, I’m not reading. Any longer, anyway — that is, beyond casting the odd glance at a periodical. This sorry state of affairs is not the result of some across-the-board policy change. Somewhere along the line I just up and lost the knack of it. The main reason being that — I can only assume due to some sort of deterioration of the brain — my poor eyes can’t manage to break the plane of the page. That is, as suggested above, instead of a mystical portal through which to be spirited off to some fantastical realm, my gaze is met with a flat, impermeable barrier. A vacant plane across which so many otherwise stray marks take variously unintelligible shapes.

The second explanation is that over the years I have grown so accustomed to teaching literature in the classroom that it has come to seem almost a communal activity, akin to theater-going, so retiring to my study with a snifter of cognac for a night of private perusing would be tantamount to poring over pages of sheet music in reverential silence in lieu of hearing it performed orchestrally. I wind up squirming in my chair like a defiant child fidgeting on a piano bench when made to practice his scales. In sum, I give at the office. My off-duty hours I spend otherwise. My page, methinks, is not so unlike the screen insofar there is only so great a percentage of one’s waking day one can dwell there without being deemed downright unviable as an organism. I never stop being appalled at the lengths people will go to not to live their own lives. After all, we only get the one of them, don’t we.

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Lisa Tang Liu is an interdisciplinary visual artist working in photography, collage, and painting. As a naturalized U.S. citizen raised in a working-class immigrant family, she ponders the tension between belonging and alienation, as well as the meaning of being “American.” Her conceptual work examines our interconnectedness with each other and all living things. Lisa is currently exploring the space between the physical and virtual layers of our lives.

​Lisa earned a BA from Wellesley College and studied at the New England School of Photography. She has exhibited in numerous venues in the United States, including The Curated Fridge, The Griffin Museum of Photography, and PhotoPlace Gallery. She lives with her husband Ken and their two daughters in Massachusetts.

Did you always know you wanted to be an artist? When did you first start making art?
​
I loved to draw when I was a kid, starting around age five. I told my mom that I wanted to be an artist then, and she said, “You won’t make any money.” I remember breaking down in tears, but she is definitely not wrong.

As an interdisciplinary artist, you work in many mediums including photography, collage, and painting. How do you decide what to use for any given content?

I was formally trained in photography, and I love the meditative exercise of just photographing whatever is around me for fun. But when I have a concept that I want to express, I think about the medium that would best help me to express a certain idea. For example, in my woven collage piece “Analog Girl in a Digital World,” I wanted to use both analog and digital methods to create that piece, and I ended up using cyanotype (one of the oldest photo printing methods) and juxtaposing it with a digital inkjet print. The square shape of the weave also emulates pixels in my mind. I wanted to express my frustrations at how digitizing everything can make life more complicated.

Could you talk a little bit about how your beautiful projects like “Alchemy of the Unknowns,” “self-reconstructed,” and “red in nature” came to you? How do ideas for projects come to you in general? What are you hoping for viewers to take away?

Thank you for the kind words, Meia. “Alchemy of the Unknowns” is very much influenced by Daoism, the Chinese philosophy that emphasizes harmony and balance and allowing the Dao to flow (the Force in Star Wars is inspired by this concept). My project partner, James David Tabor in Arizona, became friends from discussions about Daoism, after having first connected via a network of toy film camera enthusiasts. We started out with America in mind in our concept - that Massachusetts and Arizona are so different in geography, climate, and politics, that it would be interesting to see photos captured from both places collaboratively. In this project, we each photograph an entire roll of film, rewind it, and send it to the other person, without disclosing what we have photographed. The recipient would then photograph the roll of film as if it’s a new roll. So, the images are all accidents. We started the project in 2023, and it’s ongoing and evolving to be more of a project about humanity and an attempt to hold on to trust that is eroding in our society. It is very important that the medium is analog for this to happen – though we are not categorically against AI art at all. Film just happens to be the medium to make this concept work, as there are many unknowns in the process of creating.

"Self-reconstructed" is a collection of work in which I examine my own existence as I enter my fifties – about being American, being ethnically Chinese, being human, being a mother and a daughter, being a woman.

“Red in Nature” was my first time returning to making a new body of photographic work, with intent, since I became a mom. It started in the gloom of the pandemic when I was searching for ways to cheer myself up, and these spots of red grabbed my attention. While being very conscious of being ethnically Chinese and feeling a sense of alienation because of the rhetoric around COVID, I began to pay more attention to plants and animals around me and learned of their origins as native or introduced. For those species that are particularly invasive, the foreign origin is especially tied to them in the language (though even native species can be invasive). Visually, however, these living things are all beautiful, unified by the color red.

How did attending the New England School of Photography influence you as an artist?

Having been trained in photographic techniques has helped me use photography as a go-to tool to express myself. I think much of my work is rooted in photography.

Do you have favorite styles to work in?

I think I prefer processes that are tactile, and so I enjoy weaving and using tactile objects in my art.

Do you have any favorite tools you use in making art?

It’s weird to think of this as a tool, but I’m starting to think that I am embracing chance more and more as a tool, and that seems to be correlated to my belief in Daoist philosophy. That also may be why I love the Holga toy camera - there is so little that you can control.

Do you have any favorite artists? Who are some of your influences, in the art world or beyond?
My favorite visual artists are probably Kara Walker, Yayoi Kusama, Xu Bing, and Tara Donovan off the top of my head. I’m also very much influenced by the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Annie Dillard. And of course, the Daoist text, Dao De Jing (sometimes spelled as the Tao Te Ching).

What have you been working on lately?
I’m concurrently working on a few projects. “Alchemy of the Unknowns” is evolving. I’m going back to scanning a binder of flood-damaged negatives from my travels during a road trip across the U.S. with my husband in 2005, with a few in the same binder from 2008 as well. The United States was a different place back then, and the damaged negatives are adding something to my impressions. I also have a cyanotype project that I’m in the middle of.

What helps nurture your art practice?

Curiosity. This is directly related to my Instagram handle @expert.in.nothing. I would never want to become too complacent in my knowledge in any field.

Do you have any advice for young aspiring artists?

Everyone approaches art in different ways, and art has a different meaning for everyone. So, I can’t say can give any real advice except to find out what art means to you and why you’re making it.

Visit Lisa's Website

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After a brief winter hiatus of rest and catch-up, we are excited to announce our forthcoming books and chapbooks for 2026:

• Blue White Water by Xue Di (chapbook)

• All That Sings by Stacie Eirich (book)

• Falling, In Love With Teaching by Patrick Hueller (book)

• The Calling by Sarah Schwartz (chapbook)

We can’t wait to share more details closer to publication.

This was such a challenging process, as we’ve received an astounding 700+ submissions (including 237 books) since opening to submissions. If you’ve submitted previously, thank you for trusting Poetose with your work. And please keep submitting, the world needs your voice <3 I believe that those of us who are most introverted (and would much prefer to just hide in a corner writing and listening) often have some of the most valuable things to contribute to the discussion.

We continue to have the online journal open for publication of individual pieces and projects of love online — and consideration for forthcoming anthologies on the art of living, the art of loving, and other topics of infinite interest. We also have re-opened book submissions (and they will remain open going forward) for publication in 2027 and beyond.

If you know of anyone who would be interested in submitting to Poetose, please feel free to forward this newsletter on to them!

All my best and sincerely,

Meia Geddes

Poetose Journal

Don’t miss the latest Poetose Journal publications online! We are particularly interested in works that gesture toward love, hope, and utopic visions of the future. And those that center what truly matters — again, love and the intangibles.

“It might begin, the story of how I met my wife, when I was 7 and my father joined the foreign service and we left Vienna, Virginia, population 2,021, to go abroad, but not to the usual places, not to London or Paris or Rome, but to the far side of the world, to war-ravaged Tokyo…” ~from Impromptu Fancies of a Whimsical Life (or How I Met My Wife) by Donald A. Ranard

“…Neither of us is young or new to the institution of marriage, but right now, in this setting, we feel enthusiastic and ageless, part of an ancient river current of lovers. We’ve been sparking in the open, blessed by big skies and birdsong, since we met and fell in love in eastern Washington eight months ago….” ~from Plein Air Erotics by Stephen Lyons

“…Blaring from huge television screens
is a continuous stream of Let’s Make A Deal.
The desire for more, more than what we have
when what we have is plentiful
until the surgeon tells us that he must
cut, snip, scrape, scan, and replace….”

~from In The Surgical Waiting Room While Let’s Make A Deal Streams On TV by Laurie Kuntz

“…Because sometimes the voice
in my head sounds all tinny
and far away like it’s coming
from a transistor radio and sometimes
it’s lush and harmonic like a piano chord
played with all ten fingers…”

~from Winter Crows by Patrick Reeds

3 poems by Veronica Tucker including:

And more!

Pushcart Prize 2025 Nominations

If you missed Poetose’s Pushcart Prize 2025 nominations, don’t miss reading them on this Nominations page!

2025 Books Spotted in the Wild!

Creators on Creating Interviews

Don’t miss this wonderful interview series with authors (not just Poetose authors), artists, and more! You’ll find reading recommendations, advice, and so much wisdom.

Poetose Book Earrings

Poetose book earrings continue to be popular at bookstores and gift shops across the U.S.

That’s it! Thank you for reading this far!

Dear Poetose readers,

Today we have a splendid interview with the prolific & critically acclaimed writer and professor, Anthony Walton.

For those in the area, there will be a book launch event celebrating the publication of Anthony’s chapbook, 1968 (Staircase Books, 2025), on December 15, 2025 at 7 p.m. at the Woodberry Poetry Room.

Please find many reading suggestions enclosed, and enjoy!

Anthony Walton’s poems have appeared widely, in such magazines and journals as The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The Black Scholar, 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Poetry Ireland, Oxford American, Obsidian, Notre Dame Review, The Library of America, and The Academy of American Poets. A celebrated writer of prose, he is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey and The End of Respectability, among other books. With the late Michael S. Harper, he edited two landmark anthologies, Every Shut-eye Ain’t Asleep: African American Poetry Since World War II, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry.

You’ve written award-winning nonfiction and poetry books, not to mention edited two landmark anthologies. How do you choose the particular forms for what you want to say? And how is it that you are so prolific?

It’s funny, I don’t think of myself as that prolific. I always feel like there is a lot more work I could be getting done. But I do work pretty much as hard as I can, most days, and I am very strategic and tactical about what I am doing. I try not to waste a lot of motion. If I’m writing poems I am already thinking about where I might send them, and what manuscript of mine I think they will fit in. And I don’t write prose books unless I have a contract. I am fortunate that people have tended to like my prose books, which means that I then get another chance.

As far as form, maybe I could say my prose work comes from my head and my poetry comes from my heart? That might seem terribly cliché, but—for example—the poems in my prose narrative, Mississippi: An American Journey, are there because they deal with topics—emotions—that I could not figure out how to write in prose. I was talking about this with Michael Harper, and he said, “That’s because they need to be poems.” So I made a list of the topics that I felt were beyond my prose abilities and started writing poems and they came very fast. I think that has pretty much been my model ever since.

Your poetry has such lovely musicality. Could you share with our readers a bit about your relationship with music and the blues specifically, and how it infuses your poetry?

Thank you for that compliment. I am conscious of music in my poetry (and prose), several different ways. First, I am hyperconscious of sound, both overtly, and what I would call covertly. I loved poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Paul Laurence Dunbar growing up, the music that their poems made, and I think that prepared me for the absolute beauty of poets like Seamus Heaney, who pushed that play to a music you can feel on your tongue, in the muscles of your mouth. I am always thinking about “can we get some rhymes in here? Or some recurrences of vowels or consonants?” “Can we make this a bit more verbally playful?” Things like that.

I am also thinking about the music that exists in clarity of thought, which you might see, say, in the poems of Robert Hass or the best poems of Frank O’Hara or Robert Hayden or Frank Bidart. And you might say the work of Elizabeth Bishop combines all of that. I’m thinking about that.

As for music as an art form, I grew up in a home where there was always some kind of music going on, whether it was my mother singing hymns and gospel, or my sister playing the flute, or my brother playing the drums, or he and I listening to records, everything from Beethoven to Steely Dan. Personally, I studied the piano very seriously for a long time. And my father had his own, very idiosyncratic taste in music that I picked up, without even knowing it. He liked Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Cash, B.B. King and a few other blues musicians, and that was about it. And because we were at heart Mississippians, the blues and gospel were going to permeate us in ways that perhaps they don’t affect other people, or mean as much to them. I don’t know. But that’s what I suspect. So, when I started to write, it felt like music and especially jazz and the blues was an obvious place of curiosity and subject matter for me. And I had the example of Michael Harper and Robert Hayden and Sterling Brown to follow. The challenge is to add something to what the musicians and poets have already accomplished. To provide a window, or some kind of praise, or some kind of feeling that gives something more to the person who reads or hears the poems. Maybe I’m able to do that. I hope so.

Who are some of your literary influences?

First of all, I had some wonderful teachers in high school, Sister Emily, Sister Adeline, and Michael Dunn. They pushed and encouraged. I had outstanding professors at Notre Dame, including James Robinson, Milton Wachsberg, Linda Beard, Joseph Duffy, Richard Berengarten, and my dean, Donald Sniegowski. All of them saw me, educated me, and insisted on excellence. I have been deeply influenced in prose by Bruce Chatwin, James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson, Richard Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, the King James and Douay Rheems bibles, and I learned a great deal from Susan Sontag as a graduate student at Brown. I would not be writing prose seriously without her kindness and challenge. I would want to talk about Baldwin, and we would do that, rigorously, and then she would say, “Well, what about this?” and hand me Speak, Memory, and I would go off and read that and we would discuss it.

Poetic influences would include Robert Hayden, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Wright. Most profoundly, I was fortunate to have two very great friends and mentors, Michael S. Harper and Richard Ford, who insisted on taking things seriously and living up to my talent.

Do you have any favorite poems, short stories, or books to teach as a professor at Bowdoin College?

I often teach a class in our Coastal Studies Marine Biology semester that I call “The American Shore Ode,” which is a type of poem, as I learned from Paul Fussell and Harold Bloom, that concerns a poet interacting with the beach or coast and thinking deeply about that as it happens. So, poems like Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” or A.R. Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet,” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” Richard Wilbur’s, “Thyme Flowering Among Rocks.” I really enjoy introducing the young scientists to those poems and modes. And they like it, because it helps them think holistically about the science they are practicing.

I also enjoy teaching annotation in the poetry workshop, as it unlocks the needed ability to read deeply and in an informed fashion with command, and changes how students see literature and what they are capable of, including what they can learn from close reading to apply in their own work. I am a very big believer in close reading and what we might call out of fashion New Critical techniques as ways of instructing young writers. Young poets start the semester looking at North by Seamus Heaney as if it is Cyrillic and end the semester relating poems near the end of the book to poems early on and identifying recurring symbols and concepts and talking knowledgably about the profundity and skill of the weave and build and language.

Are there certain courses you particularly enjoy teaching?

Aside from the previously mentioned, I enjoy teaching the poetry workshops. But on another hand, I’ve been at it thirty years, so I kind of don’t teach anything anymore that I don’t enjoy. I like the students at Bowdoin. They tend to come well-prepared from high school and are eager to learn, and most of them are willing to work very hard. I’m fortunate in that way, and full speed ahead.

What is your writing process? Any favorite rituals, if you believe in them?

My process is to be writing or thinking about writing pretty much all the time. Even if I am watching a basketball game I am probably actually thinking about, mulling, some writing task I need to be dealing with, or some specific writing problem I need to solve. And I trust my unconscious, in that if I am not “thinking” about something, I trust that I am “actually thinking about it.” So even in class, we might be discussing something, a certain poem, say, and I’ll go, to myself, “a-ha, that’s how you need to be thinking about that sentence you’ve been wrestling with,” or something like that.

But no rituals, just up and at ‘em, “what needs to be finished today?” And I do agree with the Roger Ebert admonition, “the muse visits during the work, not before.” So get busy.

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

It’s a feeling. I’ll read through and finally feel like there’s no what I call “bumps.” It’s kind of like striking a tuning fork and feeling the unimpeded frequencies, to slightly modify the metaphor. And there’s no schedule for that. For example, two of the poems I’ve had in The New Yorker had extremely different lengths of gestation: “Gwendolyn Brooks” I wrote and perfected in about 15 minutes, while “Dead Reckoning” took 40 years. I just go over them and go over them until I feel like they are what I think of as “smooth.” And, as I’m a perfectionist with a lot of reading experience, it usually takes a long time. And all along I’m also interrogating them over and over until I think they are finished. Could you do more? Could you do less? Is the vocabulary strong enough, original enough, are there any what I call “soft” words—words that are flat or commonplace? What if you turned this into a pantoum? Are you working the theme hard enough? What would Donald Justice do? What would August Kleinzahler do? Is there something I can do that I haven’t done before?

And so forth and so on. And I’ve learned from my years of publishing poems too quickly—which is very painful—not to do that.

You’ve written many poems honoring others – could you share a bit about what draws you to this kind of elegiac poem?

I don’t really know. Perhaps it is a way of connecting with that person, and in that connection bringing them back, so to speak. As I think about it, there are different reasons. Sometimes, if I knew the person, if I deeply understand how great or special they were in life, like Gwendolyn Brooks, say, or Michael Harper, writing an elegy is a way of conjuring them, of keeping them near. I’ve written a great deal, a couple dozen poems, about the great jazz musician Thelonious Monk. He is someone I admire for his extraordinary—and utterly unique—accomplishment, for his perseverance through injustice and bad luck, and for his kindness and good cheer. I am profoundly moved by his generationally original music. I think I was also interested in him because of my own interest in the piano. And also, I can’t get over how a person who had done so much for the world could not be helped by the medical establishment during his time of need at the end of his life. So that’s a different kind of elegy, a kind of screaming at the world, “you all should honor this person! Take note of his greatness!” And then there are elegies about or for people whose stories just strike me, who I want to note, or bring into my world. That could be anyone, my old friend from Chicago John Knox, or Miles Davis, or Robert McNamara, who I felt great sympathy for because he so blindly led us into national tragedy and dishonor.

What was it like growing up in Illinois and how did it shape you?

I enjoyed growing up in Illinois, and the older I get and the more places I become familiar with, the more I am convinced that I grew up in a unique and special time and place in our national history. I grew up in northern Illinois towns where Black people were not the focus (and locus) of the ire and resentment of white folks, as might have been if, say, I had been growing up in Boston or New York or Hartford or East Texas at that same exact time, and I was encouraged in my interests by my teachers and by, especially, the very rigorous Catholic school systems, including Notre Dame, I was able to be a part of. I had, as Sterling A. Brown would put it, “runnin’ space.” At the same time, I was surrounded by family members, especially my aunts on my mother’s side, who were a source of constant support (and policing). Above all, my parents were able to participate in the sweet spot of the American post-World War II industrial boom, 1955-1980, when average Americans, white and Black, who wanted to work and participate in the system were able to make very good livings and share in the national cornucopia. Then Reagan and Clinton, to name two, took it all back through union busting and downsizing and globalization and created the dog-eat-dog national economy we face today.

How has living in Brunswick, Maine influenced your writing?

Brunswick, on the campus of Bowdoin and off, is very quiet but also friendly and nurturing. That has helped me a great deal. I have been able to focus on getting my work done while also living in a small town full of people I recognize and who recognize me (and who believe in and support my aspirations). It is also a bit of a cultural center, with good libraries, several theaters, a thriving food scene, lots of artists, and an astonishing history going back to the Civil War and before. A wonderful small city, Portland, is just down the road. Finally, it is adjacent to the ocean, and I have been able to spend a lot of time at the shore, which is one of my favorite—essential, even—things to do.

Could you share a bit about your lovely collection of poems, 1968, which you just published with Staircase Books?

James Fraser asked me if I would be open to working with him and Bella on a project, and I said yes, I’d be thrilled. It evolved from there. I had been wanting to do a chapbook, a small collection of poems from over the years. I thought about a theme, and found a group that I think works well together, and which represents a long period of time in my work, several different styles of poems that I write, and many different concerns of mine: love poems, music, history, seriousness, and play—even goofing off. And I actually like it, the chapbook, which for me is saying something. And it’s the first of several volumes of varying length I’m publishing over the next few years. Next, I hope is another chapbook early next summer from Eileen Cleary and Lily Review Press, The Monk Variations, which collects many of my poems about Thelonious Monk, and after that, my first full-length collection, Celestial Mechanics, hopefully next year from Godine. And then more, as I have hundreds of poems. They all, I think, fit together, and it is my plan, or perhaps I should say, again, “my hope,” to years from now eventually fit them all into one long volume, my “planet on the table.”

What are you currently working on?

I am fortunate to have a year-long sabbatical from my duties at Bowdoin, so I am steady at work on a number of things. In prose, I am actively writing a new book of nonfiction that I hope will be out in 2027, and also reading and taking notes toward the nonfiction book after that one, maybe 2029, Lord willing and if the creek don’t rise? In poetry, I am writing poems, revising poems, organizing poems, putting the final touches on that first full-length book of poems while also looking toward the next full-length and the one after that.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

READ—there’s something I tell my students at Bowdoin: “Good writers are made from good readers; great writers are made from great readers.” Reading—regularly, deeply, and with intent, gives us a sense of what is out there, what is possible with language, and what might be missing from our own work. We need to work and acquire a vocabulary of tools that can help us with our interpretations, then apply those tools and interpretations to what we read. Often, we can learn to avoid a lot of the mistakes and errors that “everyone” makes, and that recognition alone can begin to elevate our work. Then, we can study the greats as well as our contemporary favorites and ask questions like “How did she achieve that effect?” and “What is going on here that is not in my work?” For example, I was reading some poems by James Tate the other day and noticing how sly he can be with how he deploys punctuation, how he can devastate you with a colon that any other writer would make a period. Stuff like that. Learning these sorts of things little by little will help our work get better, and before you know it you will have made tremendous leaps in skill and execution. But it all starts with reading.

Are there any poets or books that you would recommend them reading?

I think all young American poets can benefit from reading Robert Hayden. His beyond masterful use of vocabulary (who else would use the word “gracile”?), and his sense of the timeless power of history and what it means to us is something all young American poets should be aware of.

Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice, just to remind oneself of how dazzling a mastery of form and meter can actually be.

August Kleinzahler is a great contemporary master who I think should be even more praised than he is. Every poem of his is an adventure, and they’re all different. He exhibits how poets should, to paraphrase Ammons, “treat every walk as a new walk.”

James Tate’s first book The Lost Pilot, remains after almost sixty years a kind of miracle, and I recommend that anyone working on their poems study it. I also think that the best poems of Campbell McGrath remind us of what is possible, in the best sense of that phrase.

Gwendolyn Brooks teaches us how to see what is immediately around us, specific individuals, and our larger communities. She also teaches us compassion and to not judge.

Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku is a gift to all poets. It is a thorough introduction into the Western practice of that tradition, and the supporting material found in the book is its own little education on poetics. It teaches how much can be done with so little.

Finally, I think young poets should read Polish poets like Milosz, Herbert, Szymborska, and Zagajewski, and Irish poets like Yeats, Heaney, Longley, Ní Dhomhnaill, and Boland. These poets wrote out of their own long traditions with profundity and grace, and they can teach young Americans how to write about both the personal and the political without noise, narcissism, or sentimentality.

I could go on all day, but I think that’s enough?

Order 1968 from Staircase Books

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