Interviews 2019 (1-8):
Dingman, Glasgow, Kanta, Bedell, Barber, Grey, Bradfield, Rojas

The Shore Interview #1: Chelsea Dingman

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB "For a Thousand and One Nights" and "The Columbia River Taught Me How to Run," your two poems in this issue of The Shore, both skillfully address not only the hardships and complexity of womanhood but also contemporary concerns such as war and crime. How do you handle addressing topics that may be seen as controversial, and what advice do you have for poets trying to do the same?

CD Awhile ago, I read this wonderful essay by Solmaz Sharif in The Volta, which begins:

            “Every poem is an action
Every action is political.
Every poem is political.

                        **

A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning.
What is political about this moment?

I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.”

By quoting this, I mean to say that I write like everything we do is political (though I might not realize it when I’m in that moment) and the contemporary concerns of women or war or crime are an extension of this. When I write about controversial topics for women, I want to let myself go wherever I need to go, though I might be uncomfortable. I want to hold nothing about those experiences back. How else achieve honesty in a poem? I think I have also felt an inability to say what I mean at various times in my life, depending on my circumstances: whether a man or social expectation controlled my job or my future hopes or my home life or my fertility. Whether other people have declared war on each other when I wished only for peace. Whether mass crimes are swept under the rug so that we will focus on celebrity or vanity or a false dream of country and home. Whether I am confronting social issues or diseases that affect us all. I am often too polite. I am often sorry. In my poems, I have a space where I can spit and scream and wonder and laugh without shame.

My advice is: take risks. If it scares you, it’s probably worth writing down.

Also: be honest. Whether you are writing persona poems or complete fiction, the experience of the poem must be honest, and truth and honesty are two totally different things.

EB Let’s talk craft for a second: what strategies do you use when determining your line breaks and stanzas?

CD Line breaks are my favourite way to exert control over the poem. They control pacing and surprise. I want each line to have weight. To be its own entity, containing its own information. The images are then separated and different layers are created. Surprise comes when the line turns after each break to change the experience entirely. I just love the complexity that can create.

As for stanzas, I regularly write by hand in a notebook and many poems start as one stanza. When I revise into a word doc., I make more formal decisions about what the content of the poem dictates as to its form. I believe in the relationship between form and content. The stanzas give me the opportunity to reflect how the speaker feels and use the page to demonstrate that. I find the line useful for this also—disruption, chaos, contentment, stability. Stanzas and line breaks are tools that help create tone throughout the poem, along with diction and sound.

EB In your book, Thaw, and your chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved, you frequently handle complex historical subjects. What advice do you have for poets trying to effectively integrate research into their writing process?

CD Research is such a great tool, but difficult to use well. I found when writing my chapbook, which is a historical journey of a man from eastern Europe in 1924, that I had trouble divorcing myself from the research when inside the poems. The literal truth was killing my poems. I could not get at the speaker’s experience when feeling so tied to history books and the “truth” that was not necessarily my speaker’s truth. My speaker was based on my grandfather, who is not alive to dispute history. Though I’ve been told what he disagreed with, I couldn’t give myself permission to write his political experience in the same way that I could sit inside his personal experiences. With both of my full-lengths, I was much more able to sit inside an experience and let the research guide me without taking over.

I’d say that there has to be a balance. The research is so interesting that it can take over my senses, but they need to be present also. I loved Lynda Barry in grad school and often used her prompts with my students: look up, to each side, below: what do you see, smell, hear, feel? This helps me stay present and in my body when my head wants to lead.

EB Are there any magazines or journals you're currently enjoying?

CD There are so many. An all-inclusive list would be near-impossible, but I’ll try. In no particular order, these journals are supportive and/or regularly publish gorgeous work:

For print:

Pleiades, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, POETRY, The Southeast Review, Colorado Review, Raleigh Review, NECK, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, Cherry Tree, Copper Nickel, Gigantic Sequins, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Ecotone, The Sycamore Review, Ninth Letter, Bennington Review, FIELD, Third Coast, Sugar House Review, Southern Humanities Review, jubilat, Tin House, A Public Space.

For online journals:

TriQuarterly, The Shallow Ends, Foundry Journal, Glass Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Waxwing, Baltimore Review, Redivider, The Journal, Frontier Poetry, Diode Poetry Review, EcoTheo Review, Bear Review, Guernica, Four Way Review, Diagram, Wildness, Radar Poetry, Phoebe, Puerto Del Sol, Superstition Review, American Literary Review, American Poetry Journal, The Adroit Journal, Story South, The Collapsar, LA Review, Nashville Review, AGNI, Thrush Poetry Journal.

EB Thank you! That is an exciting list. Let’s turn back to our issue for the last question. Could you please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

CD In Ella Flores’ “Subject, Impermanence,” the fluid states of being are explored in terms of how constant change manifests itself as impermanence. Similarly, Daniel Lassell’s poem, “Attic,” describes change as it affects the things one gathers in an attic. These things, though static, cannot remain the same over time. In this constant evolution, through seasons and human contact, the states of these belongings are changed and thus rendered impermanent. That sense of impermanency also applies to their disuse: “the putaways, / the eternal offseasons.” Flores also suggests that memory, or the inability to participate in the change of another entity, leads to this sense of impermanence.

Whereas Lassell’s poem is one stanza, constant in its delivery and image-laden, full of short lines to separate images, and difficult questions (“who among the beams / wills light away from light”), Flores draws the reader into the tide. Each line ebbs at the margins. The stanzas are an unsettling, uneven number of longer and shorter lines. The constant is the sea’s inconstancy.  Despite those differences, both poems speak to what lasts only a moment when given our full attention. Both poems ask us to look and not look away.

EB Thank you, Chelsea, for being and inspiration and such an amazing literary citizen. It is our honor to highlight your stunning work.

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Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (February, 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Her work is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and Triquarterly, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

The Shore Interview #2: Matty Layne Glasgow

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB In both “Lady Caribou Is a Badass” and “Fairy Drag Mother Reads Cinderella for Filth,” you utilize a strong conversational voice that speaks directly to the reader. What strategies do you use to determine the voice to convey in a poem, and what effect does those choices have on your work?

MLG I write towards a voice that strives for authenticity—of the speaker, of the myriad characters or entities manifest in the poem, of myself as the poet and space where these ideas and motivations all converge. In a poem like “Fairy Drag Mother Reads Cinderella for Filth,” I knew I wanted to embrace persona and write from the perspective of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother—but a drag queen—so voice and speaker arose as the most important elements of the poem from the first draft. A persona poem necessitates the poet hold a deep understanding of the speaker which can be challenging, but I also feel that understanding makes those poems more feasible in terms of developing a strong singular voice because I know where I’m writing from.

Regardless of the type of poem I’m working on, I always read aloud as I draft. I generally want my poems to have some sort of sonic appeal and performative quality, but beyond that I find reading the poem aloud as I write helps locate and hone the voice in each poem. I constantly write through struggles with voice and focus in my work, but even more so in the first couple of years of my MFA. I wanted every poem to do so much then, juxtaposing every humorous image or pun that came to mind with the darker themes of the poems explored. Many of the poems began to sound the same in their inconsistencies, so I really slowed down my drafting process to allow for time to perform the poem aloud and focus on a coherent perspective and voice in each poem.

These struggles often leave me pondering what I want my voice as a poet to be, but I think the poets I admire most show dexterity and range in the scope of their work, so I don’t think I really long to have a singular voice, but rather one that evolves in its quest for authenticity.

EB How does today's political climate have an impact on your poetry?

MLG It certainly provides ample material and research on the depravity of the human condition everyday. For a few years, I wrote pretty regularly in response to news stories, ranging from the Pulse Night Club shooting, to the pogrom in Chechnya, to the self-immolation of David Buckel last year. Online publications like Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, and Rattle’s Poets Respond (amongst many others) provide a platform for poetry that directly engages with the political crises we face, and that platform remains quite important when we think about poetry as an artform with the potential to transform society.

More recently, our political climate has ingrained a sense of resistance in my work. I suppose my resistance manifests in both content, like themes of queer ecology and toxic masculinity, and form, such as bastardizing the sonnet or the villanelle. More broadly though, I think just as we resist exploitative systems in our society, we must resist problems that arise or have long been present in our own literary communities—whether that be access to community and academic programs, who occupies positions of power in those institutions, and how they yield that power. When I hear “identity poetics” or “political poetry” thrown around in a condescending or pejorative manner by those who reign over these institutions with fairly stale and antiquated perceptions of what art or poetry should be, my rainbow blood boils.

EB In your forthcoming book, deciduous qween, you frequently speak about your own experiences with masculinity and sexuality. Was it difficult to address these topics, and what do you hope your readers gain from your exploration of these subjects?

MLG This is the first manuscript I’ve written, so I would say everything about writing deciduous qween was difficult—from finally addressing my mother’s death in a meaningful and healthy way, to journeying back through some very traumatic experiences in my life growing up closeted in Texas. In terms of masculinity and sexuality, several of the poems continue to operate under a veil of shame that I and a great many queer souls continue to carry with us and navigate as best we can. That personal shame certainly arises from our culture of toxic masculinity, and poems like “Lady Caribou Is a Badass” and another more empathetic poem titled “Straight Boy” are attempts to deconstruct that toxicity.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to breathe without that poison, and so much of the collection attempts to liberate itself from that shame through queer worldmaking: love affairs with Captain Planet and Superman, imagining trees as drag queens, revealing the queerness of male seahorses and vultures. I hope readers, regardless of their sexual identity, gender identity, race, or age, can find solidarity and refuge in these poems. I didn’t get the chance to read Carl Phillips and Richard Siken until I was in my late twenties, and those books would have given me so much more purpose and hope in getting through high school and college. If someone reads deciduous qween and thinks “I feel that, too, and it’s okay to feel that,” it would be a refreshing breath in the depths of a queer forest for me.

EB Are there any magazines and journals you’re currently enjoying?

MLG The new issue of Gulf Coast is fabulous. I’m also a big fan of Pleiades, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, Bat City Review, and Denver Quarterly.

There are so many amazing online journals that I simply adore, but I’d like to give a more personal shout-out to Cotton Xenomorph, Underblong, Thrush, BOAAT, The Shallow Ends, Muzzle, and The Offing—all of which do such an impressive job of curating incredibly talented, emerging voices.

I also serve as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and I love the work we are able to bring into the world, so I must give Adroit a ’lil plug, too.

EB Could you please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

MLG Jill Mceldowney’s “The Believing Brain” considers what we are entitled to from this Earth, from time, and from love. The speaker describes meteors as “somebody else’s light,” as “the kiss that opens / everything,” creating a delicate juxtaposition between possession, intimacy, and destruction. Whose life or love does the meteor touch before touching Earth’s surface? Most intriguing to me is the acknowledgment of time, not only in the history of rock but in the reverberations of the poet’s curiosity with the question “How could I / continue / to write to the living / when what echoes the rock is deep time—.”

Lisa Compo’s “Monsoon Sun” also explores expectations of Earth and time through intriguing language of “the here-now” and “the here-sun.” Compo’s expectations center on the yearning for a cactus to grow with “The old / backyard saguaro has always been 10 feet tall, I am / waiting for it’s first arm to grow—it may be another 50 years.” Much like in Mceldowney’s poem, the speaker awaits a sign or growth from our world that may never come. Here though, Compo plays with time with the apparition of a ghost, “a scorpion left behind” who also waits. Each of these gorgeous poems ponders what we are entitled to see and to know, and how we grapple with the absence of that sight.

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Matty Layne Glasgow's debut collection, deciduous qween, was selected by Richard Blanco for the 2017 Benjamin Saltman Award and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in June 2019. His recent work appears in or is forthcoming from the Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Grist, Houston Public Media and elsewhere. Matty lives in Houston where he teaches with Writers in the Schools.

The Shore Interview #3: Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB In this issue of The Shore, your poems “Syntaxes of Conversion” and “Displaced” use stunning diction and imagery, both of which are rooted heavily in location. How do you use place and historical elements in pieces such as these, and what advice do you have to other writers aspiring to use their poetry to tell similar stories?

SSK Thank you for your generosity. It is a gift to witness one’s work being read closely, and so well.

I have been gravitating towards ideas that extend scope to embody a multiplicity of factors, as they grow in their infinities. My latest manuscript concentrates around the epistemology of “ghosts,” and the plurality of meanings in which the word can be put into context when used. This bears a correlation to what we internalize about place: violence, agency, ecosystems, and so forth. The way I view “place” is as several doors opening into each other, into more doors, into more topography. Cognitive biology taught in school often disregards the fact that “human beings” belong to the Kingdom of Animalia. Place transcends to incorporate larger ecosystems that strive to be all encompassing, a conjoined miracle. I adore John O’Donohue, and I carry these words from his podcast interview: “the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach.” I often seek to re-examine mortality and our bodies in this regard.

I perceive landscapes and bodies as having the same subatomic particles within their diverse atoms. We carry these elements within ourselves. To writers interested to utilize place and historical elements in their writings, I’d say: Allow yourself to feel/see/hear/witness without synthetic insulations— this allows for a certain tenderness and surrender. Look at place as a gift: a rapture of wilderness growing through each patch, and what that may tell you, or what you may take of it in inference. Place is not reaching from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B,’ finish tasks on hand, and move on, but, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, “The soul should always stand ajar.” The questions I often process in the interiority of my spirit are: What does a changing landscape mean? What does it mean when a tree is cut down, or the mouth of a river closed with concrete and construction projects? What may that embody for a place? How does my body react, as being a part of this landscape? How do the bodies in the village/town/city react with these changes? What may I subconsciously internalize? Am I aware of any privilege(s) that these responses elicit? Ask yourselves questions, and be prepared to be amazed at the answers, even your own silences.

I have grown in stronger multitudes in engaging with place being resident in The University of Stirling, Scotland, as the current Charles Wallace Fellow. I have the rhythms of birdsong, snow, and rain in memory as I wake from slumber. I recently trekked the Ochil Hills, and returned with a sense of bewilderment, and two Scottish pine cones as gifts from the earth.

EB How has working as the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and as a reader for both Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal influenced your own personal writing and submission process?

SSK The work for Parentheses Journal began in December 2016, alongside discussions with Harshal, the wonderfully talented force behind our fantastic issue covers, fiction, art and photography selections, and website layout designs. I admire his work, and refer to his offerings as a transcendental, multi-genre artist interested in design and sci-fi. We are a PoC led journal and welcome a range of works from across the globe. I work closely with the process of publication for each issue, and regard each submission to our small press a gift.

I’m the poetry reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the process is intriguingly diverse with each publication. These experiences have definitely contributed to engaging with close-readings of works. I’m especially thankful to two most wonderful editors, Joshua Roark of Palette Poetry, and Levi Todd of Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and admire the work put out in the world by all these publications. There is a lovely sense of community, and solidarity in working together with a magnificent team. I’m thankful to be among such gifted and generous editors.

EB How do you believe poets can use their writing and platform to help with pressing sociopolitical matters, such as the conflict you discuss in your poem “Displaced”?

SSK “Displaced” is dedicated to my nani, my maternal grandmother. She once told me that the galaa, from Hindi, meaning the throat is a powerful place to form understandings. I’m going to translate the sentence from Hindi as “Exile begins in the throat.” I reckon a powerful paradigm shift takes place when our families share the stories of their histories, even ones they infer as most mundane. It is often within the folds, silences, absences, and gaps that remnants of a lot of matter remain. Nani was an incredible woman, quite unconventional. I must trace to this particular part of an interview of Ocean Vuong— “I think of Yoko Ono, a straight woman in sexuality, but to me, she is one of the queerest embodiments of art-making because she was always rejecting (and therefore always a threat to) the patriarchal standard placed upon her. Here is an Asian woman who was “supposed” to be obedient and subservient to her rock-star husband, John Lennon, and when that image was shattered, the white establishment portrayed her as the malignant Eastern succubus or witch that destroyed a global treasure called The Beatles.” My question is, how many times has a woman been the counterpoint of surveyance and censure because people interpret that she defies their ideas? I know I have been, several times in the past, and will continue to be, until someone realizes why this must not be the case, probably one person at a time. Prejudices from entitled people have caused me severe strain, but I disallow these experiences to be sole governing factors of how the world is, or must be. I seek, in widening scopes, silences and the aspects of holy, within, and in landscapes around me.

My grandmother was a refugee during the Partition, and traveled from Karachi, Pakistan, to erstwhile Bombay, India, in a huge ship. The ocean here is not a mere symbol of momentum, but shifts to being a route of passage. The natural world around us is an inextricable part of ourselves, and I sometimes read parts of texts at random, and those that resonate with my spirit, I write down in various places: mobile phone, diary, notebook, laptop, sticky notes, and so forth. The Upanishads disseminate a similar outlook: “He who sees all beings in his Self and his Self in all beings, he never suffers; because when he sees all creatures within his true Self, then jealousy, grief and hatred vanish.” This reminds me of “Gnothi Seauton” from the Greek, meaning “Know Thyself.” These intersections lead toward work in one’s inner-landscape, a sense of self-awareness, which, is the culmination point of a lot of ideas. These contribute to my evolving paradigm of looking at the world, as a part of it, as perhaps being different, but not disconnectedly disparate.

I reckon what I’m trying to say here is, everything leads to an understanding of oneself and our surroundings. The sociopolitical aspect is inextricably linked to our everyday. The personal is political. Recently, while kneading dough, I was simultaneously speaking to someone about a political theory, which I realize, now, in hindsight, may be perceived as a political act. As poets, we have the idea that our present will be a future, and it is important to be intensely aware. I’ll say that it would be imperative to listen, process, and allow yourself the silence. Your poems are, and will be forces of wakefulness, when you choose to share them with the world.

EB Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying?

SSK Several— and I know I’m not going to be able to enlist them all here, but a few names that come to mind, in no particular order, are: Quiddity, The Normal School, Waxwing Magazine, Foundry Journal, Puerto Del Sol, Flypaper Magazine, DIAGRAM, About Place Journal, The Puritan Magazine, Stonecoast Review, The Stillwater Review, Hypertrophic Literary, Up The Staircase Quarterly, BARNHOUSE Journal, Indianapolis Review, Jaggery, Lucent Dreaming, Quarterly West, Arkana, OCCULUM, The Rising Phoenix Review, Dying Dahlia Review, DATABLEED, and prior archives of FLAPPERHOUSE Journal, & & &—

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

SSK I thoroughly enjoyed perusing the archive and Issue One, as well as some fascinating work featured in Issue Two.

I’m particularly drawn towards how “An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward” by JK Anowe, and “Granddaughter Left” by Melinda Ruth navigate paths in which the narratives of these poems intersect and form discourse.

I am struck by the first line of the poem “An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward” by JK Anowe: “First, a man burns faster than his country…” Both the poems incorporate a sublimity with juxtapositions of the body and the rising action. The idea of death transcends the conventional portrayals of dying, and force us to look at life against the grain, without pre-embedded notions. I have engaged with both these poems at multiple times in the day, and they read as responses to one another about what the body, loss, and death may conjure as synchronicity. Consider the lines: “Body, you’re so thin I think you’re fleeing / yourself” in “An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward”, and “Silence / falls before dying. We are told / silence is pale blue…” in “Granddaughter Left.” There is a lingering sense of in-betweenness within the encompasses of these lines, as last lines before a gloom of taciturn. The lineation in both these poems also portray the diverse responses to melancholy and mourning. The poet JK Anowe incorporates a tightly structured stanza with shorter and longer lines akin to the lines in an electrocardiogram monitor. The poet Melinda Ruth, on the other hand, incorporates the use of a two-line stanza of short and lengthy lines that are similar of an intensifying crescendo.

Also, consider the titles: “An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward,” and the usage of the word “Outpatient,” a person who is perhaps unfamiliar with the space they are in, while they probably need a more holistic space. It may be synonymous in the wrenching line “I’m here because I want to die & have no better way / to mean it.” The title “Granddaughter Left” may have several underpinnings, and the first thought that inscribes my mind is a mourning ritual for the one left behind, and the one that “left.” These lines: “…forgive me, / I lied. Silence spills / from summit down. The space left unoccupied / by what once was.” There are ideas of the body being a finite thing, an entity that occupies space. These two wonderful poems are elegiac in their glowing silences, like the first ray of sunbeams on a pile of snow shards.

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Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a recipient of The Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling (2019). A GREAT scholarship awardee, she has earned her second postgraduate degree in literature from England. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is the author of Land: Body / Ocean: Muscle (forthcoming with dancing girl press).

The Shore Interview #4: Jack B. Bedell

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB Your poem in this issue of The Shore, “Serpents and Insects, 1647,” is an ekphrasis written about an Otto Marseus van Schrieck oil painting that is currently located in the New Orleans Museum of Art. In a museum full of breathtaking art, what about this painting specifically inspired you to write about it? What strategies did you use to interact with the artwork in your poem?

JBB Walking through the 17th and 18th century exhibits at NOMA, I was drawn to the Schrieck painting because of the artist’s use of light and compression. “Serpents and Insects, 1647” is a really dark composition featuring one beam of light shooting through the center of the scene. That beam of light is filled with all kinds of struggle. There are snakes fighting over frogs, frogs fighting over insects, and all sorts of plant life fighting for space and light. There’s even the tiny blue spot of a fly circling through the beam’s expanse. All of this occurs in a few square feet of real estate, a real microcosm of life.

As soon as I stepped a little closer to the painting to begin the process of making notes toward a draft, though, I noticed the incredible detail Schrieck included in the darkness of the piece. Even in the deepest hues of the painting, there are brush strokes defining leaves, vines, branches, and bark. The whole canvas is filled with a density of shapes and a kind of negative depth that fascinated me. Right away, I knew it would be an incredible, rewarding challenge to write a poem engaging and employing Schrieck’s sense of light and dark, struggle and life.

Ekphrastic writing is always intriguing to me because the art can function as window and mirror simultaneously. The first thing I did diving into Schrieck’s painting was to create an inventory of what fascinated me most: obvious features of the painting like the moths, snakes, and frogs; but also the negative aspects of the piece like the black vines and leaves receding into the dark. I wanted these components of the painting to dominate my poem as well, trusting that somewhere behind my fascination with these details was meaning and significance. I really hoped the details could communicate my impression/interpretation of the painting without any editorial, narrative commentary.

EB Being in the position of Poet Laureate of Louisiana puts you into the position as the head of your state’s writing community. What are the best ways writers in your state can get involved with the writing community? Do you have any advice for writers looking for community regardless of location?

JBB Louisiana is blessed to have pilot organizations like the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and regional arts agencies like the Shreveport Regional Arts Center or the Acadiana Center for the Arts which support and feature writing and writers. These statewide and local agencies lead the way in terms of creating and offering programming for writers. There are workshops, readings, and spoken word performances happening all over our state. There are also festivals and events like the Tennessee Williams Festival, the Festival of Words and Music, and the Louisiana Festival for the Book that provide incredible opportunities for writers to connect and to grow as artists. There are also immersive writing experiences like the New Orleans Writing Marathon happening annually that give writers the chance to get out there and write with others. As Louisiana Poet Laureate, I’ve been really privileged to lead many of these initiatives over the past two years, and I’m excited to keep it all going after my term has ended.

My advice to other writers is always really simple: BE a writer, identify yourself as a writer, write in public, connect with other writers if you feel it will help you, find ways to share your words either through traditional publication, sharing with writers’ circles, or taking part in open mic opportunities. More than anything, I would encourage writers to accept themselves as writers, to give themselves permission to write without judgment (or at least be impervious to it!), and to truly value what they create. Extend that acceptance to others, and you have the makings of a beautiful community.

EB Correcting the public’s outdated misconceptions about poetry is something you’re tasked with frequently. What are some strategies you use to get non-poetry readers to interact with and understand contemporary poetry?

JBB I just had the incredible chance to work with a huge group of high school students in the Gear Up! Program who were studying character (in film, in literature, and in the ethics of everyday life) in hope that it might lead to more confidence in themselves as they prepare to write their college admission materials. The whole point of my presentation was to show the value of each individual’s voice. I stressed how much the world absolutely needs their individual voices right now, more so now than any period in history I can think of.

It’s wonderfully rewarding for me to take a group of students like that through a series of first-person narrative exercises and third-person descriptive prompts toward the drafting of poems, to hear their stories, and to see them discover pride in the words they string together. It is truly heartwarming for me to be present when a person realizes there’s nothing more poetic than their own voice, that poetry does not have to be some kind of mysterious Rubik’s cube of symbols, and that their words, and their choices of how to put those words onto a page or into the air, IS poetry.

Once you get someone to realize the value of their own voice and their own words, it’s a quick leap to the realization of the value of ALL voices. And once you can break down all the stigmas and biases in how we engage poetry as a set of arcane forms and rules, as a puzzle or mystery, you make contemporary poetry accessible and welcoming. We are blessed to live in a time of incredible invention and diversity, both in terms of voice and in terms of forms of expression. The more we can celebrate that diversity in the poetry we read, the more we’re able to do so in life.

EB Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying?

JBB I fall in love with new journals every day! My list just keeps growing, and I really love how easy it is to find great journals online and through social media.

I have tremendous respect for the editors at print magazines like Speak, Orion, Ecotone, The Common, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Image, Ruminate, Sugar House, and many, many others who are able to produce gorgeous issues full of amazing writing issue after issue. As the editor of a print publication myself, I truly understand the pressures of managing printing and postage costs, and I’m in awe of the consistence excellence of the print journals I read.

I’m equally knocked out by the excellence of the online journals I read daily: Pidgeonholes, Okay Donkey, Whale Road Review, The Shore, Waxwing, Cotton Xenomorph, Barren, UCity, Moonchild, Juke Joint, Oxidant|Engine, Rhythm & Bones, Yes Poetry, L’Ephemere Review, EcoTheo Review, Kissing Dynamite, saltfront, Terrain, Burning House, One. I honestly think I could keep typing this list until I passed out from exhaustion! The vision, taste, and dedication to quality and inclusion the editors of these journals display is amazing, humbling really. It’s a joy to have access to the phenomenal poetry they publish, much less to have work featured there!

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

JBB Two poems from Issue 2 I’ve revisited several times are JK Anowe’s “An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward” and Chloe N. Clark’s “The Time I Saw the Earth from NASA’s Mission Control.” Both poets employ techniques of perspective, voice, and dislocation masterfully, delivering breathtaking epiphanies so organically I lose my breath reading the lines.

Through setting and the division of body and soul, Anowe’s poem absolutely dislocates reality toward the revelation that “I’m here to die & have no better way / to mean it.” When the poem turns finally to the narrative soul standing over a body in pain and the realization that the external world looms around them waiting like “a fist / around you,” it’s like a GPS pin has been planted right into the spirit of the poem.

Clark’s narrative inhabits an equally dislocated setting, space. Line by line, we journey through the space of memory, the space between what we mean to do and what we actually do, and the spaces we visit to find something. The poem is so effortless in its assertion that staring isn’t always enough; sometimes we have to have patience, to “wait” until it’s time to see. And in seeing that one thing we’ve been looking for, we are often blessed with more, the opportunity to “see / everyone from here.”

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Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, fall 2018). Currently, he has been appointed by Governor John Bel Edwards to serve as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

The Shore Interview #5: Sarah Barber

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB When engaging multiple modes in a poem (elegy, ars poetica, pastoral, aubade, etc.) how do you manage to make the poem do the work of each without losing any poignancy? 

SB What an interesting question!—one that I haven’t actually given much thought to before now. I find traditional modes like elegy, aubade, pastoral, etc. blur very easily; for example, if I’m deep in a pastoral depiction of nature, it’s hard not to see myself as also working prematurely in an elegiac tone, if only because it’s impossible to forget that so much of the natural world I’m trying to describe is changing. It’s hard not to wonder, when you write about a green field or a river, what a future reader will make of either, whether they will have even known either intimately. I’ve always been fascinated with the pastoral mode so I think it comes very naturally into my work even when I’m not intentionally engaging it, which is how I suspect most poets work: there’s a mode or maybe two modes that we become obsessed with early in our careers so that, later, elements of that mode never really leave what we’re writing unless we deliberately wrench ourselves away. Perhaps it’s that early obsession that helps the mode retain its energy and power.

EB You mentioned that your three poems in this issue of The Shore are from a project you’re working on focused around domestic objects. What led to your interest in this subject matter? How are the poems in this series interacting with one another?

SB Yes, I’m really enjoying this project. Though it’s maybe a bit embarrassing to admit, I’ve always been into things, a super-materialist; I really was obsessed with the furniture and knick knacks in my parents’ house and used to move them around and organize and arrange them. I love objects and would probably find myself in real danger of becoming a hoarder if I didn’t live in such a small house. So it comes quite easily to me to fall deeply in love with an object like a paperweight or coffee cup or painting in the first place. I come by my acquisitive nature genetically, I think, and in the last decade or so have inherited many objects that belonged to my grandparents or that my parents have discarded. What to do with these things has been a puzzle in my actual life, as I feel the burden of them very heavily: how, for example, do I throw out my great-grandmother’s watercolors or my grandmother’s needlepoint pillows, though the former are not very good and the latter are ripping at the seams?; I can’t. I think I began by trying to address that difficulty and this has led me to some poems that talk to one another about inheritance and family history and how we keep memories of our loved ones alive through things. In this way each poem in the series is fundamentally my way of wrestling with death. The other big issue that led me to these poems is that I’m nearing 40 and starting to think finally, after many years of rejecting the possibility, of whether to have a child. Sometimes I think if I hadn’t inherited all these family heirlooms, none of them worth much in the eyes of the world or particularly special, I wouldn’t be worrying over whether to have a child to inherit them in their turn!

EB Aside from your poetry on domestic objects, are there any other projects or opportunities that you’re excited about?

SB I feel very much in between in projects right now, which just means I have too many different ideas for what might make a series. It’s an exciting moment but one that also brings me a lot of anxiety, as I’ve never been someone who writes very regularly, like all those folks who sit down every day for an hour; I’ve never been that disciplined, nor tolerant enough of the amount of bad writing you have to generate that way, and I’ve always preferred to binge-write, in long stretches on days utterly empty of obligation. Those are tough to get, so I’m trying to train myself to a different method, and it’s tough. I am most interested, right now, in a series of poems in what I think of as the collective voice of the worst corners of the internet, conspiracy theories and trolls and all—though I’m a little troubled by how easily that voice comes and wonder whether I’m ironizing it enough when I write a dramatic monologue, for example, in the voice of a flat-earther. So those are fun but unsettling, and yet I think not to be unsettled and surprised by what you write means you are risking boring your reader, not just yourself. 

EB Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying? 

SB Yes, I’m always reading something. Right now it’s the Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, and American Poetry Review on my desk. I’m fairly traditional, maybe, but I try to keep up with the “big” magazines, though I’m sometimes more delighted with the little ones, to be honest. Because I’m a teacher and trying to connect with the work my students are reading so I know what they are bringing to the table, I’ve become very interested in Instagram poetry—no particular writers, just the way I can literally flood my feed with it. I like the interesting interplay between text and image and little aesthetic choices like fonts.

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

SB I enjoy the way Kelli Russell Agodon’s “When You Are a Ghost, I’ll Also Love Your Shadow” and Jeffrey Bean’s “You Are Going to Die” each address the way we suppress our awareness that we and all those we love will one day die—one day way off, we hope, when we think of it all—while engaging deeply in the mundane. I just love the way Agodon turns a pet peeve like “kitchens…filled / with lovers who don’t put their cups / in the sink” into the starting point for a meditation on “all the years we wasted being young,” which I take to mean all the time we spend frustrated or longing for something else when of course our daily experiences are themselves a joy and a wonder; in her poem I feel strongly the pressure of all the time we could have spent “reaching down into pleasure” that we instead spend on frustrations. Bean tells us “we think there is nothing amazing,” then proceeds to show us the amazement of “trees / the size of dinosaurs and gobs // of fire above them in space;” those stars are of course amazing and as much an object of wonder as our bodies, always already failing “whether [we] remember // to think of water and pebbles / or hum songs while [we] walk.” Each poem seems to me to call us to deep attention of our daily existence in ways that recall the praise poem and its deep affirmation and celebration of all that is good, especially our daily breathing.

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Originally from St. Louis, MO, Sarah Barber now lives in rural upstate New York. Barber holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 2010, she has taught at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY where she is Associate Professor of English. Her poems have appeared in journals such as New Ohio Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and Poetry. She is author of two collections: Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry; and The Kissing Party, published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press.

The Shore Interview #6: Kimberly Grey

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB Your piece in this issue of The Shore, “Intellectualization,” is an excerpt from your third book, A Mother is an Intellectual Thing. Unlike your forthcoming collection, Systems for the Future of Feeling, this third book will consist of hybrid essays rather than poetry. Could you tell me a little about these two collections, as well as what you’re able to accomplish through blurring genre lines?

KG Systems for the Future of Feeling explores the inadequacy of language, the effort of language, the disintegration of love both personally and publicly, terror in modern society, empathy and consolation and our desire (and responsibility) as beings in the world to express the inexpressible, comprehend the incomprehensible, bear the unbearable. It’s interested in the functions of repetition and patterning, creating “language systems” that circulate within their own energy, demonstrating the ways we repeat in order to understand, to remember, to question, and to emphasize our own expressions of awe, confusion, bewilderment, nostalgia, horror, and joy.

I see now, in hindsight, that Systems was pointing me towards the hybrid nature of my third book. A Mother is an Intellectual Thing is an examination of family scapegoating and dysfunction and it quarrels with my estrangement from my family of origin. For that reason, form and genre aren’t decisions, but mechanisms against indeterminacy and instability. The shifting and blurring of genre show the attempts one makes at using all of their intellectual and creative resources to create coherence for a traumatized self.

They are both such different books. Systems for the Future of Feeling is still rooted in poetry, though the poems do take on many different forms and innovations, even crossing over into the territory of imagined interviews. A Mother is an Intellectual Thing is constantly shifting formally, though for the most part, the book consists of short lyric essays that grapple with Anna Freud’s notion that intellectualization is a self-defense mechanism used to avoid feeling. It allows one to think the pain, rather than feel it and has been described as a form of “mothering the mind.” If anyone had told me one day that I’d be erased from my family, completely disposable to my mother, I would never have believed them. But that became my reality in early adulthood and writing this book has been my attempt to both understand and bear the trauma that comes with such a dislocating loss.

EB “Intellectualization” is just another example of your mastery of the innovated form—how do you decide what shape the poem needs to take and how to make the form accomplish what the words are unable to?

KG I really do think the poem decides its form and you just have to follow it. But I am interested in pushing the boundaries of genre and form. To me, everything is worth innovating. In the case of “Intellectualization,” I was interested in how the fragment functions in a constantly shifting system of language, time, and image.

EB You often interrupt personal narrative with fragmented images, surrealism, and gnomic gestures. How do you unify these elements so that they synthesize with each other in a way that layers the poems’ meaning?

KG I think much of this has to do with the work of the unconscious and my inability to construct traditional narrative. Thinking is not linear. Remembering is not linear. The mind is a spatial and constellated thing and it involves interruption, rupture, weaving, and layering. I let my thinking dictate the form. I try to show my mind on the page, almost like a map or blueprint. In the case of my third book, I’ve discovered the thinking mind and feeling mind are quite different and they manifest in different ways in language. Fragmentation occurs merely through this splitting and the nature of form, itself, allows the fragments to co-exist and inform each other.

EB Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying?

KG I’m amazed, every week, by the content of Ron Slate’s On the Seawall. Ron is such an amazing literary citizen and features all genres, interviews, and translations by new and established writers. It’s an amazing feat and I’m so happy it exists. Please check it out: https://www.ronslate.com.

I also think A Public Space publishes some of the most dynamic and interesting work out here. I always looking forward to each new issue they publish: https://apublicspace.org.

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

KG I really love “Aubade for the Robin Dive-Bombing as I Leave for Work” by Jordan Durham and “For a Thousand and One Nights” by Chelsea Dingman, two poets I admire greatly. Both of these poems hold the tension of what it means to be a woman in the world, the necessity of narrating our stories, our histories, our daily lives. In both poems, the physical world is almost a mirror to the woman, this defiant thing that is constantly erased but defiant in its desire to stay. Dingman writes, “The field gives. The river gives before it ends/ in the mouth of the sea. A woman/ ends, collateral we scatter in the field/ to bless what we’ve been given.” The poem evokes Scheherazade and her attempt to postpone her own execution by the king through telling him stories. Durham writes: “I can’t hear the pitch of my voice/ anymore, which is to say I burnt the coffee and cried on the linoleum/ moments before knowing love could be a swift and angry decline.” In both pieces, there is tension involving survival in a world that is not always kind to woman, a world that doesn’t always listen to them, but (the poems implicitly caution) must. But both poems evoke a defiance—as Durham says, “Even the earthworms will surface to move and evade their predators of land and sky.” I’m so grateful for this work, and the work by so many women which gives me permission to be just as defiant, just as strong in the telling of my own necessary stories.

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Kimberly Grey is the author of Systems for the Future of Feeling (forthcoming from Persea Books in 2020), and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and teaching lectureship from Stanford University and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship to Umbria, Italy. She is currently completing a PhD in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and teaches for The Stanford Online High School and Summer Institutes Program.

The Shore Interview #7: Elizabeth Bradfield

Questions by Ella Flores, Blog Editor

EF Your pieces in this issue of The Shore are from forthcoming projects. Your fourth book, Toward Antarctica, is quickly being followed by Theorem, your collaborative effort with visual artist Antonia Contro. Could you tell me a little about these collections, as well as how crossing media boundaries creatively pushed your work?

EB Toward Antarctica uses photographs and haibun (a traditional Japanese form that blends prose and haiku) to investigate my experiences working as an ecotour guide in Antarctica, the history and "myth" of Antarctica itself in culture, and the very real lives of animals in the southern polar regions. In Toward Antarctica I wanted to ground-truth my experience of a place I'd long dreamed of and to investigate the idea of labor/service economy in "nature writing." In Theorem, my book-length lyric narrative rests alongside spare, distilled artwork by Antonia Contro. Together, they explore the legacy and shape of secrets acquired in childhood and held through a life.  

One thing I've found in working with visual art, particularly when image and text are both present for the reader/viewer, is that it makes me very interested in the gaps between image and text -- I like to think about how those spaces can be fruitful and evocative, how far the leap between them can be before it loses meaning.  I never want image and text to illustrate one another. My preference is to have each do their own work, but in a way that is still in engaged conversation. In Theorem, in particular, because the images were Antonia's and I wanted to respect their integrity as objects, this required a text that holds space for the images themselves to speak. It resulted, for me, in writing that is much more spare and allusive than I would ordinarily write. When I respond to a visual artist's images, which I've done before in poems published in the middle section of Once Removed, I fall into a dream-like and incantatory state that is rarely accessible to me otherwise. I treasure it.

EF You often include markers of time in your poems. "Encountering the Oomingmak, a Conversation across Distance and Silence" and "Of Flight" for example, mention specific years, while "Fourth Occupation, Baffin Island" relies on the speaker's personal history. How do you balance different measures of time (be it personal, anthropological, geological) in a way that elevates each layer without minimizing any?

EB We can't separate ourselves from our time. Even the "timeless and universal" moments of loss and love are experienced within an historic moment, and this thrills me. I have always loved that Adrienne Rich puts a year-stamp at the bottom of her poems. Even if the poems are not engaging with a particularly "timely" question, it's interesting to consider the time from which they arose. I think of this similarly to the way in which I feel that our social selves--race, gender, sexuality, geographical origins, personal obsessions--are formative to any poetic engagement we have. Different aspects of that self/time can be raised up, as a conductor raises up one part of a symphony to let its sound shine, in a poem to explore a particular moment.

EF With all the experience you've accrued at sea and at high latitudes, how have the way familiar places and stories inspired you, changed over time?

EB When I first started working on boats, it was an exciting, connective, curious time and held a lot of innocence. I'm sure that innocence and wonder was naive. Yet I'm still grateful for it. Now, what I see is layered by knowledge of increasing temperatures, noise pollution, fisheries pressure, and more. I continue to be increasingly humbled by all I do not know. But this is not just true of the high latitudes, it's true of everywhere. I suppose that one thing that has shifted since my first experiences working alongside glaciers in the 1990s is the urgency and awareness of climate crisis. That means both the huge human shifts now mandated for people living in the north--village relocations, hunting/gathering changes of time and technique, and more--but also the eyes of "the outside world" on a place that when I first encountered it felt as if it existed more independent of that outside gaze. There are both benefits and drawbacks to the increased attention to and curiosity about northern climates, peoples, stories, and beings.

EF Are there any magazines or journals you're currently enjoying?

EB Well, at the risk of self-promotion, I will say that we're publishing astounding work at Broadsided Press. Alaska Quarterly Review continues to move excellent work into the world. I was just introduced to The Hopper by a friend, and I'm so glad to know of it. I do love the general interest magazines that continue to hold space for poetry--all of them. Poetry should be part of our general conversations and meaning-makings.

EF Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

EB I think I will engage this question by selecting the two poems that most move me (admittedly, this was a difficult choice among these many, beautiful poems) and finding a way in which they are in conversation -- possibly a mapping of my own interests and obsessions as a reader as much as their own authors' intent. In Mariah Bosch's "Lunarpuntal" and Suzanne Frischkorn's "Victors of Tiny, Silent, Invasive Insect." both poets ask me to reconsider familiar tropes (the moon, the environmental devastation of invasive species) anew. Both poets are engaged in myth-building, re-envisioning the given world so that they can offer/see/hold solace despite a knowledge of devastation. I admire and honor this deliberate push against the apathy of sorrow in their poems. As Frischkorn writes, "Tell me, what did sorrow ever do?" and as Bosch replies, "I move so fully, with or without devotion.”

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Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her awards also include a Stegner Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Scholarship and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor at the Alaska Quarterly Review, she lives on Cape Cod with her partner and is Associate Professor and co-director of creative writing at Brandeis University.

The Shore Interview #8: Andres Rojas

Questions by Ella Flores, Blog Editor

EF Your most recent collection, Looking For What Isn’t There, came out just last year and your first collection, The Season of the Dead, is an audio chapbook released in 2016. Could you tell me a little about these collections, as well as how using an audio format affected the organization of your project?

AR The poems in Season of the Dead had all previously appeared in print, some dating to my M.F.A. days, and some relatively new. When Mark Ari of EAT Poems approached me to discuss an audio chapbook, I had been submitting many of those poems as part of what I hoped would be my first full-length book. Ari (as he prefers to be called) thought of the project as a sound-centered experience, much like a music collection but of course with words only. I sent Ari what I thought was my strongest work, and he selected the poems he thought worked best together. We recorded them in an afternoon at his home, and he then arranged them in an order that made sense to him. In a way, other than writing the poems, the project was out of my hands, which was a welcomed experience: I loved seeing what someone else could fashion from my work.

Looking For What Isn’t There is roughly half of a later manuscript I had been sending out to book contests with only one finalist finish and a handful of semifinalist nods to its credit. I had worked with Sandra Simonds and Maggie Smith to make the full-length book as strong as possible, but even after that I spent over a year sending the full book out with no taker. I got back with Maggie Smith and reached out to Sandra Beasley and the consensus was to cut all but what we decided were the strongest poems and to send those out as a chapbook. I spent most of 2018 sending it to contests and by October it hadn’t found a taker, though it did make the finals twice and was a semifinalist, I think, 3 or 4 times. I had resigned myself to more revision and to starting again in 2019 when I got “the email” from Lisa Mangini at Paper Nautilus Press. By that point I had been writing steadily for almost 8 years to produce enough poems and had been trying to place a manuscript for 4 years. My mantra was “It will not be for lack of trying.”

EF “Soon Before All Light Is Gone” is a masterful example of how you employ blank space. Could you talk about your approach to form and striking a balance between concision/meaning and visual arrangement?

AB Thank you for the kind words! That poem is a rather fragmented one, in time as well as in location, and I wanted the space it occupies to act as a pace-setter for the reader and to suggest a certain order for the narrative flow. Or to put it another way, the line breaks, indentations, and relative line lengths were meant not only to surprise, as I hoped at least a few of them did, but also to act as a sort of conductor bringing together the poem for the reader.

EF “Third Winter in Our Second Country” references Charles Simic and “On a Line by Amiri Baraka” references, well, Amiri Baraka. How do you tackle engaging in conversation with other poets whose work has influenced your own? How do you confront or circumvent such a seemingly daunting task?

AB I am definitely not competing, nor trying to compete, with Simic or Baraka (or, in other poems I’ve written along these lines, with Elizabeth Bishop, Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, and Jenny Xie, among others). Rather I see them as providing giant shoulders on which I can stand and try to do a little bit of my own thing. It’s mostly a gesture of thanks for showing me how to do something I did not know how to do before. In Simic’s case, I misread his phrase “the laughter of stars” as “the slaughter of stars.” After I realized my mistake, I was just struck by its possibilities, and I felt I had to give him credit for such a gift. As to Baraka, I had been stuck with a poem about the violence that seems to be at the center of American life from our treatment of Native Americans and slavery to the mass incarceration of African Americans, police shootings, and mass shootings. His line “things have come to that” embodied the sort of resigned, but not pessimistic, tone I was seeking. Or rather, he had already captured in that one phrase the way I was feeling but didn’t quite know how to express. The poem literally centered around that line, so the title suggested itself quite early on.

EF Are there any magazines or journals you're currently enjoying?

AB I love the work The Shore is bringing into the world from poets such as Chelsea Dingman, Kimberly Grey, Bob Hicok and Martha Silano. Waxwing and Gulf Coast consistently put out extraordinary work, as does Guernica. The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, Thrush, Superstition Review and Copper Nickel remain favorites. There are many great journals out there, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to journals I love that I have been lucky to be a part of such as Psaltery and Lyre, Burning House Press, San Pedro River Review, Scalawag, Madcap Review, and A-Minor.

EF Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

AB I love how Bill Burtis’ “Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image” and Carly Madison Taylor’s “Dream-Plane” seemed to riff off each other, both using the products of modern technology as entry-points into the dangers inherent in any new exploration, physical or emotional. I like how they both acknowledge a price must be paid when we dare go beyond our comfort zone, but that doing just that is the only way to grow. Of course, they provide no easy comfort: there is danger there, and it must be braved, but the results are not guaranteed.

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Andres Rojas is the author of the chapbook Looking For What Isn’t There (Paper Nautilus Debut Series winner, 2019) and of the audio chapbook The Season of the Dead (EAT Poems, 2016). His poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets series and has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review and Poetry Northwest.