The Making of Fossils in the Making

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Thanks to EcoTheo Review for asking me to discuss the process of writing Fossils in the Making as part of their Micro-Essay Series on First Books.

No one’s asked me for advice, including this essay prompt, but if I were to offer any, it would be to pay more attention to these quiet poems. These poems usually don’t get published. They don’t like being alone. Like our own selves, they are formed through their relationship with others, emerging from the ecology of the book rather than being inserted, fully formed, into it. I think this is where the real joy of a collection comes from—the surprising turns and pitches and swerves that propel the reader through it. Journals and magazines tend to favor poems that resemble hit singles, especially in this like-and-share-driven literary market, but you need quiet poems to bring those poems down to earth and draw them into conversation with one another. Nurturing these interstices is, I think, what turns a collection of poems into a poetry collection.

You can read the full essay here.

Interview with Chicago Review of Books

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I talked with Amy Brady at Chicago Review of Books about Fossils in the Making and how it addresses ecological crisis. We discussed the suburbs, the relationship between science and poetry, and what, if anything, poetry can do to contend with climate change and other forms of violence:

I think that, climate-change deniers aside, most people accept the fact that scientific disciplines can tell us something true about the world. There’s an unquestioned belief in scientific objectivity, faith in its ability to impartially apprehend “reality.” I think people are generally more skeptical of the claim that art can tell us something true and necessary about reality as well. However, scientific instruments are still mediating objects constructed by humans, and the knowledge they produce must be supplemented with other ways of knowing, as the sciences do not have privileged access to what is “real.” Throughout the collection, I’m interested in exploring the relationship between scientific “objectivity” and lyric “subjectivity” and the places where these methods of knowing contradict and supplement each other. I’m also interested in what a poem itself proves, if anything. Is a poem a proof of thought? The residue of experience? Can its figures and forms manifest what is intangible, unconscious, ungraspable? Or does it merely prove, again and again, the failure of language to close the gap between the world and our own bodies?

Read the rest here. 

 

DIURNE: Winner of 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award

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Thrilled to announce that my project, DIURNE, which was written over the course of a month while at Vermont Studio Center in 2017, has been selected by Timothy Donnelly as the winner of the 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award!

Kristin George Bagdanov’s Diurne begins with the proclamation:  “a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making.”  In the gorgeously lyrical hybrid text that follows, Bagdanov does the nearly impossible—that is, she merges procedural and confessional modes of writing.  The end result is a text as deeply felt as it is restrained, as grounded as it is philosophical in its implications.

Read more about the prize, finalists & semi-finalists here.

You can read a blogpost that goes into detail about the logic behind this project here. 

Yield Architecture

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I loved reviewing Jake Syersak’s debut poetry collection, Yield Architecture for Colorado Review:

Yield Architecture, the debut full-length collection from Jake Syersak, is an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality. “Yield” here connotes both productivity and acquiescence: the measured output of machine and human as well as the softening of resolve, the point at which one gives in to a structure rather than resisting it. A poem, of course, both yields to and yields its own architecture: revising, incorporating, and resisting forms and ghosts of forms that necessarily populate it. Read the rest.

Order the book.

The Beast That Therefore I Am

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image of beast
The Beast That Therefore I Am by Kristin George Bagdanov

Eight poetry collections published in the past four years turn to the beast as an alternative way of inhabiting the world. This beastly turn has ontological, political, and aesthetic implications for how we theorize the relationship between poetry and personhood (and all of its Enlightenment-era baggage). This review explores both the impetuses and outcomes of these beast-filled encounters but stops short of offering a grand theory of “the beast,” as such a move would undermine the motivating reasons for embodying and embracing beasts as kin.

READ THE REST AT JACKET2

Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Exposure

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Cover Image for Ruminate Magazine: Exposure
” Exposure

“A vulnerability index measures exposure. In climate science, it estimates the resiliency of communities that will bear the brunt of rising temperatures and seas. In social work, it identifies who should be prioritized for services according to their health and fragility. In the financial sector, it gauges a consumer’s level of economic insecurity and stress. In all cases, to be exposed is to be subject to harm.”

Read more about the poetry of Exposure & order your copy today. (25% of all proceeds will go to a local sexual assault victims advocacy center (SAVA).

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