Interviews 2023 (33-40):
Silano, Gardner, Kooi-Talen, Colenbaugh, Bowen

The Shore Interview #41: Martha Silano

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: In your poem, “Possible Diagnosis,” the speaker poses several questions ranging from, “What’s that stone, that one stone edging / toward the edge?,” to the one word, “God?” But the poem rejects resolving these questions outright, its unresolved nature even hinted at in its tercet form. Can you speak to how the act of questioning informs your work and why it seemed essential to this piece in particular?

MS: I guess I was asking questions—some that cannot be answered—because the speaker is grappling with finding out she very likely has a terminal illness. It sure seemed to me like the right time to ask unresolvable questions! I do write a lot of poems in tercets. I hadn’t really thought about why that is, but perhaps it’s to up the unresolvable. I do have a soft spot for poems made up entirely of questions—what a feat to pull that off. In this poem, maybe I ask questions because I’d been asked so many by doctors, including MRI technicians, laryngologists and finally neurologists, on the way toward a diagnosis. Maybe I was tired of being asked so many questions about my symptoms. I do often ask questions in my poems—I mostly rely on intuition and the cadence of the line when it comes to whether to phrase something as question versus a statement. In this poem I was very much focused on, instead of providing the reader with what actually happened, trying to say things with bizarre and arresting images. I hope I was able to pull that off.

EF: The speaker describes people in interesting ways: a friend as a “dictator of snow,” the mother as a “cheerer-upper,” even the speaker as a “witch.” When writing, do you think there is particular potential in explicitly assigning or naming roles for people to play in poems?

MS: I do not usually give people roles in poems. I am not sure exactly why I decided to do that in this particular poem. In all honesty, I don’t recall a lot about the making of this poem, except that I recall it came to me rather quickly, and it required minimal editing. It was more like a taking dictation situation.

EF: I was fascinated by the image of the “spotted towhee” in the final stanza. It functions as a hinge between the speaker carrying “cloth napkins” “down to their home / in a living room drawer” and the spider epiphany at the end. In such a personal and interpersonal poem, what drew you to nature, or the exterior world, in bringing equilibrium to destabilizing possibilities?

MS: I brought in the spotted towhee because I’d seen one earlier that week, “making a ruckus in dead leaves.” I guess the word dead was no accident, but at the time it felt like I was simply sharing a recently witnessed image. I almost always put at least one bird in my poems—I love birds and derive so much pleasure from them. The leaves are dead, though, and a spider is being crushed…or maybe it will be spared.

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

MS: I love 32 Poems, DIAGRAM, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, Sixth Finch, ONE ART, Image, The Shore and so many more.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

MS: I feel like Kelli Russell Agodon’s “Devotion for a Cosmo That Can’t Contain Us” and Ronda
Piszk Broatch’s “Writing a Poem with a Glass of Wine or Two, and Three Pieces of Chocolate” are in conversation with one another. I love how both of these poems run on playfulness, inventiveness and originality on the subject of love. In Agodon’s poem, gorgeous and apt images, such as “radiant as the nebula / starlings we fell in love with” pair well with Broach’s attention to the cosmic in “Time doesn’t mean anything to you, but you’re all about / gravity, and space is your natural environment.” It’s not easy to write about romantic love, but Agodon and Broach make it look easy…and do it spectacularly well.

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Martha Silano is a poet living with a diagnosis of ALS. Her most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review and The Best American Poetry series, among others. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.

The Shore Interview #42: Caylee Gardner

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: When reading your poem, “The Moon on the Lake Makes Two,” I was struck by the play with personification up until the third-four stanzas and the subsequent turning away from strict personification toward an explicit human speaker. Can you explain a bit of your writing and editing process when it came to this moment?

CG: My writing process usually begins with a line or image that I’ve recently written down in my Notes app. For “The Moon on the Lake Makes Two,” the title came first. I’m always out in nature and I love the moon (as most poets do!), so I was thinking about an image of the moon reflected across a body of water and the duplicity created there, as well as the phrase we use when we agree with or share the same feelings as someone else: “that makes two of us.”

There’s a perceived inevitability in the title/image and a lack of permission from the lake as the moon is reflected on the water. I also thought about how one person or being can perceive a relationship they’re implicit in differently than the other. In both relationships, I felt that there were interesting tensions to explore between choice, control, creation, (un)certainty, what’s real and what’s not, and so on. Because of this, I wanted the title/image to inform the rest of the poem and how the reader perceives the human speaker, so the personification of the moon came first.

EF: The epigraph to your poem is “after Richard Siken.” How do you see your poem responding to Siken’s work?

CG: There are so many incredible devices and techniques Richard Siken uses in his poetry, particularly in his collection Crush, that make it frantic and obsessive yet controlled. When I wrote “The Moon on the Lake Makes Two,” I was interested in the way many of Siken’s poems are self-conscious and the speaker is, or intends to be, in control of the narrative in some way. In his poems “Dirty Valentine” and “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” the speaker is a writer and inventor of sorts. They imagine alternate versions of a story, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. But both poems close with an apology and the fantasies are lifted and we’re left with the reality about the world and relationship depicted in these poems. When we omit or change parts of a narrative, does it still contain a kind of truth? What does a storyteller’s denial of reality reveal? “The Moon on the Lake Makes Two” is in conversation with these questions.

EF: Your poem predominantly uses line enjambments to add subtleties and double meanings. Conversely, it also causes the few endstopped lines to stand out and how they appear more often as the poem progresses. Could you talk about the significance you see this craft choice having for the stakes of your poem?

CG: That is such a great question! I’m a sucker for wordplay and double meanings, so I am often thinking about lines as their own unit or how I can use enjambment to add extra meaning in a poem. I think a good enjambed line suspends our expectations or asks a question that is then answered in the next line. For this poem, I used enjambment to create tension and uncertainty as the poem progresses through moments—surreal and dreamed—between the speaker and the “you” of the poem. But by the end of the poem, the speaker is more resigned to the nature of the relationship and their role in it. The endstopped lines reflect that shift.

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

CG: I’m so glad you asked! I feel like I happen upon new and wonderful lit mags every other day. It’s fun to fall down a rabbit hole and read back issues of a magazine if they exist online. Lately, I’ve been in the mood for poetry that might be considered unconventional or is otherwise whimsical, humorous, or a little bit (or a lot) weird. Some favorites I’ve found recently are MudRoom, Beaver Magazine and Underblog, which I stumbled upon shortly after re-reading some of the poet Chen Chen’s work online. I’ve also been reading issues from Stone of Madness Press and ALOCASIA, which are both wonderful spaces for queer writers.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

CG: I wish I could talk about the brilliance in every single poem in this issue! So many of them are permeated with grief, memory and hunger. I was particularly moved by “Click Bug” by Madeline Allen and “June” by Katherine Smith. Both poems stunningly and devastatingly explore loss and revisit a past moment from a matured perspective. 

“June” remembers a simpler time in the past that has yet to be marked by loss or pain, evoking a sense of timelessness. I love the use of enjambment in this poem, which hints at the maturation and losses to come and juxtaposes the girls’ innocence at the time. The glass bottles held by the girls contain soda and the barbed wire keeps the young girls out of only a resting pasture. The narrator’s age and knowledge can’t help but peek through this memory.

“Click Bug” is similarly retrospective. I adore the opening image of this piece and the small intimacy depicted here: “The first night I touched Sarah she flung her arms wide / and I fell into them like relief before she pulled / the frantic spasming thing from my hair.” Loss also haunts this poem and what Allen captures so well is the loss of closeness and the possibilities for more.

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Caylee Gardner (she/they) is a queer writer in Salt Lake City, Utah. She received her BA in English and gender studies from the University of Utah. When she’s not writing about nature, queerness and (sometimes) resilience, she enjoys exploring mountainous terrains and spending time with friends. Find them on Twitter/X at @gardner_caylee

The Shore Interview #43: Julia Kooi-Talen

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: As a poet and essayist, were either of your two poems in Issue 22 ever considered as possibly being part of essays during the drafting process? Or did any particular aspects about either poem feel like they could only function in poems?

JKT: I never considered either of these poems to potentially be essays, but I think there are threads in these poems that I find creeping into my essay writing. Threads about lineage, longing, relationships, loneliness. "Bugs" to me is so sound and rhythm driven, a feature I love to play with in poetry. I'm tuned into sound in my essays too, but in a different way, because I'm not as concerned with the line break. A line break can so deeply impact the rhythm and sound of a line. "Given Up Hearts" was written after Paige Lewis, and because I admire their poetry so deeply, I didn't want to stray from the genre of poetry. When I read Lewis's poems, I feel like they take me through these brilliant facts and scene snippets that only a poem can bring together and see something anew through. I suppose I was playing with that associativity in "Given Up Hearts." I love a little bit of randomness in a poem. Poetry feels like the closest writing to thinking and I really wanted to play with that here.

EF: In "Bugs," there is a fly that whispers to the speaker and later the speaker confides in the fly. I found this exchange surprisingly haunting and reverent. Why do you think this exchange felt vital for the overall stakes of the poem?

JKT: In this poem, I really wanted to even the animate playing field between human and non-human beings. At the time of writing this I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mel Y Chen and Karen Barad, and thinking about what the Eurocentric western world considers and doesn't consider to be alive. It was important that the fly spoke first, to push back against human beings having the first say. I also wanted the reader to consider what the non-human beings in their homes are witnessing. The speaker then intones a prayer to the fly, before the fly's death. I think ensuring that the speaker speaks back to the fly, allows for the death of the fly to feel more mutual. A part of the speaker is also gone with the fly. This felt vital to again help even the scale of animacy between humans and non-humans in this poem.

EF: There is this beautiful moment in your poem, "Given Up Hearts," where the speaker describes giving stories to the stones they skip at a place called Echo Lake and how the speaker thinks to "stretch the glittered skin of the fish...to gather the entire lake into its anatomy" and thus the speaker would find that stone, and its story, again. I particularly enjoyed the play between the lake's name and the speaker's desire to find what they'd let go of and how the moment augments the separate images introduced in the poem up to that point. But my question is this: how do you see the Echo Lake moment as it pertains to the poem's finale between the speaker and the "you?"

JKT: Wow, thank you so much for this generous and insightful reading!  When writing this poem, I spent time at a tiny lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan called Echo Lake. There, you can hike into this peninsula in the middle of the lake and when you shout across the lake, your shout comes back to you. That movement, that reverberation, back to the self, moves parts of this poem forward. I think that this poem is trying to construct a relationship between Echo Lake and the speaker's heart--the expansiveness of both, the stories in each, the wishes in each. The speaker is casting a wish for the "you" in their heart and I think the imagery and sounds of Echo Lake are imbued in that wish.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you are currently enjoying?

JKT: Oh my goodness, so many! I've been really into past-ten, a journal that publishes flash essays about where the writers were ten years prior to the date the essay is published. I'm also a fan of the beautiful anthologies fifth wheel press has been putting out. Some other incredible journals I often go to for inspiration include DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Longleaf Review and Passages North.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

JKT: I found "Sonder" by Brett Griffiths and "Diagnosis as Fishing Net" by Sarah Fawn Montgomery to speak to one another in strange, beautiful ways. There is the overlapping imagery of the spider and its myriad of webs as well as the fishing net. Both images call back to one another. Additionally, I found both poems to be pondering time, grief, longing, in different ways and different contexts, through these intricately woven lines and images. It's really cool to find these echos in a literary journal.

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Julia Kooi Talen is an essayist and poet based in the Midwest where she teaches creative writing and composition. Currently a PhD Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Talen lives with their cat, Otis, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Northern Michigan University as well as an MSW from the University of Denver.

The Shore Interview #44: Carson Colenbaugh

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: “Love Song Scrawled at Shaking Rock” offers several potent comparisons, like having “a little love,” to a massive, once-balancing, once-moveable, boulder. Indeed, the fact that the titular Shaking Rock fell “ill to gravity’s dull / ubiquitous tug” seems to be pivotal to the speaker’s final clarity. Are there any details, subtle connections, or other aspects about the poem that surprise or seem more important to you now than when you first finished it?

CC: Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity and for this great first question. When I was living the experience that prompted this poem and when I drafted the poem, I was focused on the immediate scenario: I saw something immense that ended, saw something special surviving and found myself and the ‘we’ caught between the two. Only after thinking about this question do I realize that most rock-centric works I’ve read don’t cast the rock as a figure or character with an ending. Last March, I had the pleasure to work at Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House and was reminded of Jeffers’ poem, “Oh, Lovely Rock,” by the foundation’s president, Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts. In that poem and most of Jeffers’ other works, all influenced by his more-or-less pantheistic views, rocks are nearly deities and eternal, outlasting his own fragile humanity. Yet in front of me, in those woods, was a rock that in someone’s lifetime ceased doing what folks thought it would always do. Jeffers was a huge influence on me at the time and it’s interesting to have written something unlike what I’ve read and to have worked against the influence of an influence without realizing it. This poem was born before I ever read James Still’s River of Earth and fell in love with the preacher’s sermon about mountains rising and falling like tides, one of my favorite passages in American literature. And now I will be on the lookout for more dying rock poems in my daily reading.

EF: Could you explain the process of arriving at the poem’s current form, including line or stanza length and shape, or, conversely, could you speak to how you see the form functioning now in hindsight?

CC: I find free-verse almost impossible. The weight of choosing line-breaks outside of some quantitative parameter is debilitating. This poem was originally drafted with others that I wrote when I first decided to seriously pursue poetry, and since I knew that contemporary poetry is almost entirely free-verse, I needed to come up with some way to fake it. All of the lines in this poem are 11–13 syllables according to my pronunciation, as I didn’t want to accidentally write a 10-syllable pentameter line and felt that a 3-syllable range would be enough variation to seem ‘free.’ Writing this now, I realize the absurdity of this method, but at the time it taught me almost everything I’d need to know about concision and tension. As for the stanzas, I write best when viewing lines as single units of information, with like information grouped together in little rooms. I originally wrote this poem in a single body, and I’m pretty sure the cinquain was the only stanza type that didn’t break-up the list of plants in the middle of the poem. In hindsight, the form functions as the poem’s only possible vessel, but my algorithm had to fail at every other possible combination of line and stanza before landing here.

EF: Whether it’s Shaking Rock or other attractions, what about physically visiting a place do you think has struck you differently, poetically speaking, than only reading about or seeing a video of a particular location?

CC: As someone educated as a forest ecologist before studying as a poet, the plant species I get to include in my poems are one of my top concerns; they’re like my poetic plus-ones. I know my way around plant communities and the environmental conditions of certain site types in the southeastern US, but I’ve been to enough spots to know there’s always something growing there that the textbooks don’t prepare you for. Besides being a neat nonfictional inclusion, those species usually prompt the poems themselves. How did it get there? Where am I really? When I visited Shaking Rock with my partner, I had no clue we’d slip down into an alluvial floodplain. Silky dogwood and rusty blackhaw are always delightful to see and I’d been taught in college that it’s rather hard to run into a river birch not growing in someone’s lawn. I’ve visited a lot of cool rocks in my life, but finding those plants forced me to think about all the reasons why that particular moment was notable. If I had only read about Shaking Rock, or seen it in photos, my plant palette would’ve been like every backyard in Georgia. White oak and poison-ivy and a pignut hickory, if I was feeling particularly imaginative.

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

CC: I follow Orion, The Bitter Southerner and The Oxford American closely. The folks at Cutleaf, South Carolina Review and Salvation South are doing really lovely work. And the plant-scientist in me adores Arnoldia.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

CC: Two poems from this issue that I found intertwined were Kate Welsh’s “In June, Pigeons” and Ana Prundaru’s “Old Haunt.” Welsh’s poem speaks from an outsider’s view about an unfamiliar habitation; pigeons typically craft “pitiful nests: / a few sticks thrown together…” and although the speaker finds a particular nest worthy of admiration, in the end, the pigeons are left unsheltered. In Prundaru’s “Old Haunt,” we get thrust into the perspective of a human being contemplating a loss of home and the sensations that follow attempts at finding a new one. It was not difficult for me to imagine the pigeons from Welsh’s poem within the speaker of Prundaru’s, which perhaps speaks to a sense of universal domesticity—everything living exactly as they can—that I think about more and more frequently these days.

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Carson Colenbaugh (he/him) is a poet and forest ecologist from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Terrain.org, Birmingham Poetry Review and elsewhere. Ecological work of his has been featured in Human Ecology. He is a 2024 Tor House Foundation Fellow and can be found on Instagram @carsoncolenbaugh

The Shore Interview #45: Ash Bowen

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Your poem, “The Last Love Letter of Marie Curie,” calls upon several poetic modes, from epistle to persona. Can you explain the decision-making process in employing these modes and, perhaps in hindsight, the unexpected ways you feel those decisions changed the work that the poem ended up doing?

AB: When I think back on this poem, what’s interesting to me is that, once again, I found myself writing about a science-related topic. All of my degrees are in English and creative writing, and I was never a particularly good student in the hard sciences, but I’ve found myself often drawn to that field as fodder for poems.

As for decision-making in this poem, I’m not sure that I made a lot of the decisions. I mean that. I didn’t intend to write a sonnet (none of my poems are ever pre-determined). What happens in the poem just happens. This poem came together very quickly, almost a case of automatic writing, and I felt the poem dragging me along as a witness to its creation. Obviously, I made decisions from a technical point-of-view, especially in getting the closing couplet, but overall, this poem feels like an inspired, fortunate gift from the poetry gods.

EF: How did you conceive of this poem’s specific sonnet form, where certain rhymes are substituted with repetition and how did you see it in conversation with the poem’s subject-matter?

AB: The first four lines came out in a burst of inspiration, and once that first inspired moment ended, I read back over those first four lines and noticed that the form has established itself quite naturally, with the envelope/repetition in the first and fourth lines and the internal rhymes at the ends of lines two and three. This was quite a lucky accident, as the form came to me and not I to the form, which has always been the case of my most successful poems.

Sonnets are often (historically, anyway) about an unavailable love interest, and here I thought the tension created by what is unavailable in this poem (i.e., the expectation for a long life) juxtaposed against an already established love union was truly heartbreaking. The form, to me, is kind of like a meditation on the fear of dying in the way that all of the end words connote a kind of anxiety (“empty,” “scared,” “grieve,” “leave,” “white,” “light”) that begins with a plea to be held in the poem’s first line.

EF: Upon first reading your poem, I remember being left with a bittersweet feeling that I couldn’t quite place. The poem is both a love letter, but also a last one. It avoids despair despite the poem’s elegiac undercurrent. Could you speak to what craft elements you feel are vital to achieving the poem’s ultimate effect?

AB: I think that one of the key craft elements that is talked about too little in poetry workshops is when to break the rules for the good of the poem. For this poem, I broke several of my own writing rules and some of the rules I learned from my teachers. The meter isn’t perfect in places, for example. This is a ragged sonnet, as I suspect a love letter of this ilk would be. It’s more emotion than intellect. Because of this, I didn’t want the form to be too perfect. It needed to be a little messy. Had the poem been too manicured, I think the poem’s impact would’ve been lessened. Sometimes when I read a formal poem, I believe the poet to have been more concerned with filling out the line with the correct meter than getting a good line that contributes to the overall emotional heft of the poem.

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

AB: There are several, actually. Obviously, The Shore. But also Hominum Journal, The Adroit Journal and Rust+Moth spring to mind.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

AB: I really love the way that Christy Ku’s “Monster Buffet” and Gus Peterson’s “Frankenstein’s Creature won’t shut up about being” really communicate with one another. If I were an editor, I would’ve placed those poems next to each other. Monsters are humanized and the humans are the real monsters in both. Peterson’s lines, “Go ahead. Christen me / Monster. Unnatural” really gave me pause. The Creature as a vegetarian—I loved it. But I loved both of these poems so much.

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Ash Bowen is the author of one poetry collection, The Even Years of Marriage (Winner, Orphic Prize, Dream Horse Press). Other poems can be found in Blackbird, Rust & Moth, Passages North, New England Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere in print and online.

The Shore Interview #46: Cam McGlynn

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Your poem, “Turning and Turning and Turning,” leans heavily on Yeats’, “The Second Coming.” From its title, to its word choices and, of course, using that poem’s final two lines as the basis for your poem’s Golden Shovel form. Beyond these stylistic allusions, can you speak to how the stakes of your poem are in conversation with Yeats’?

CMG: I always thought that Yeats’ poem was concerned about the direction that the entire world and human history was taking. Yeats was living through hard times: WWI, the Easter Rising in Ireland and the great influenza. As for me, I feel like my life has been wedged between two world events: The Berlin Wall fell a week after I was born and Donald Trump was elected less than a week after my daughter was born. We can’t divorce our art from the events that we consume and are consumed by.

Afterwards, I was left with trying to make sense of my experience of childbirth, being a parent and raising a child in an increasingly hostile country. I think that most of my poems are questions, so this poem’s question would be: What can I offer my child when I myself feel so much despair about the world? How do I continue to turn (to despair) and turn (to joy) and turn (back to despair)?

In preparation for this interview, I brushed up on Yeats’ himself and was surprised to learn that he wrote “The Second Coming” when his wife was pregnant and terribly ill with influenza. So even though I thought of his poem as having high world stakes, I can’t help but believe he was wrestling with the same concerns as me and all other soon-to-be parents: what kind of world am I bringing my child into?

EF: Speaking of the Golden Shovel form, how do you see that form augmenting the meaning of your poem and in conversation with the fledgling tradition of the form itself?

CMG: I write poems best when I have a constraint placed on me. Like many writers, a blank page can be crushing, so when I read Terrance Hayes’ poem “The Golden Shovel,” I knew it was a form that would help me write. I had no grand vision for what this poem would be. All I had were the end words to guide me. I’ll write a sentence and see the words I’m writing edge closer and closer to my end word and have to suddenly switch gears to meet that word. Writing one feels like how I imagine slalom skiing must feel: the constant sliding back and forth towards these disparate flags/words without tripping. The form started just as a means to the end: the way to force a poem to come onto my page.

EF: I am continuously intrigued by the poem’s final line where the speaker addresses, “my darling,” and ends with plural “we.” It seems to open the lone speaker’s position to a shared one, whether it’s with an individual, a collective, or a gesture toward the reader. Where in the drafting process did this move come about and what essential work do you see it serving the poem now?

CMG: I never know where my poems are going until I get there. In addition, I do very little editing. The poem you have in your hands is almost exactly the same poem as when I first wrote it with just a few phrases changed to make it flow. After I wrote the poem, I was able to step back and realize that the poem was about processing my experience with becoming a parent and bringing my child into a world that I was not proud of. So the simple answer is “my darling” is my child and this move happened the instant I wrote those words.

But I wouldn’t write poems if I was only interested in the simple answers. I’m a big believer in the death of the artist and that the reader becomes a collaborator in the meaning-making process of the poem itself. I include myself as one of those readers. The me that wrote this poem was in a darker place than the me that is now reading it. When I wrote that last line “Still, be/ bold, my darling. We were never meant to be earthborn.” I was faking an optimism that I didn’t truly feel. When I re-read this poem, I now see myself reaching my hand out to me—my current self sending a message back through time that I will make it through and my past self reaching a hand out to remind me now that I survived.

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

CMG: Rattle is a treasure trove that keeps me writing. Besides reading the magazine, there are endless ways to find inspiration from them: weekly poetry prompts and podcasts, monthly ekphrastic challenges and poems based on the news. I hold a special place in my heart for lit mags that have poet interviews alongside their poetry. I love to learn the process for how other poets write. Besides The Shore, this list includes Only Poems and Sunhouse. I also love weird poetry that makes me question what a poem is. The weird journals I've been enjoying recently include whiptail, #Ranger, JAKE and HAD.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

CMG: Abigail Cloud’s “On the use of Gonepteryx rhamni…” transforms the act of identifying a moth into an augury. The moth guide book is now a “brimstone book” whose discolored edges mark the presence of past scientist-witches performing the same rituals.

Matthew Wood’s “Aufheben” also feels like a spell. The poem has a strong voice commanding us to repeat magic words “lazurite,” “snowdrift” and “grief.” The meaning of the individual words are less important than the sounds that they produce. But the real alchemy happens when absence combines with absence, when voice combines with silence, when a room combines with what enters the room.

Both of these poems take seemingly mundane subjects (moth identification and the minutiae of pronunciation) and transform them into magic.

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Cam McGlynn is a writer and scientific researcher living outside of Frederick, Maryland. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Art, Molecule, Open Minds Quarterly and Cicada, among others. She likes made-up words, Erlenmeyer flasks, dog-eared notebooks and excel spreadsheets.

The Shore Interview #47: Mary C Sims

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: The title of “Stasis” primes the reader to think about stillness and/or equilibrium, but it is this very “and/or” in the meaning of the word “stasis” that the poem seems to be creating tension with. Its couplet form offers a sense of completion, while its varying line lengths and unconventional dialogue complicate that sense. Can you speak to the process of settling on this poem’s title and form and when you knew they were doing the work you wanted from them?

MCS: Oh, this is such a wonderful question! Thank you so much for asking it! Toward the end of my MFA, I started to lean toward couplet form when I wrote pieces intended to convey a set emotion, which was a deviation from my usual rebellion against form in general. I was afraid I would end up caged in or sacrifice something important to the poem to adhere to a set pattern, so I typically just avoided set form altogether, which left my poems either in one stanza or spread across the page accompanied by plus signs, extra space, or even brackets. But what I realized when I was writing “Stasis” was that I wanted a cage. I wanted the speaker and reader, trapped, having to stand and face the poem’s devastation without having a means of distancing from the main subject. To be able to look away from something is a privilege we don't realize we have until it's gone. For “Stasis,” a poem that not so much hinges on grief so much as it is consumed by it, I wanted the reader and speaker’s positions to blur as both of them can only see what they know and are bound by the sense of knowing there’s more they can’t see. As for the title, I tried to mirror that same sentiment of a fixed positionality dictated by one’s inability to look away from something because now, that event is in everything.

EF: “Inexorable” contains many surprising phrases like, “you walked / kitchen’s hilt” and “neighbors peel light” to state a few. What layers of meaning do you find lines like these emphasize and are there writers who have inspired this approach to language?

MCS: This is such a thoughtful question—thank you! In undergrad, my professor’s first suggestion was to always make our work more unexpected, to increase the tension or to keep a reader intrigued or to paint your own story better, and I ended up building my writing philosophy on that. I think it's a tactic that not only builds and prolongs tension within a poem by changing the readers sense of unreality, but it is also another way to accentuate poetry’s ability to explain the unexplainable. There's something so captivating about having defamiliarized something mundane such as a rain storm or an untidy room into swatches of unrelated images and to have someone else intrinsically understand what that image is, while coming away with a new vision or insight into it. For “Inexorable,” I actually wanted to convey the other side of what I intended for “Stasis” in that I had the speaker look away from their main subject the entire work. They paint their positionality from the outside of an otherwise suffocatingly intimate situation; they face small details or distractions or notations of even mundane activities like walking before they can reveal a source to themselves and even then, they are not looking at what they’ve revealed. The speaker moves, never slowing down but always speeding up, as if they cannot bear to be stuck with one conclusion alone because they are afraid of what they already know: it will haunt their life. Again, to face what you know means to understand that there is even more that you don’t and I found the opposition of the two speakers going through similar events but completely different reactions intriguing.

Poetry's ability to create languages indefinitely through association, intricate queues and other modes of artistic experimentation, make the craft something to return to. Some writers who wield this brilliantly are Brad Trumpfheller and Ocean Vuong. When I first discovered Trumpfheller in Adroit, I felt something click; their ability to weaponize the familiar into the almost disturbing unfamiliar entranced me. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a collection quicker in my life, which was a similar reaction to Vuong’s work as well. Not only was he one of the first poets I encountered, but his work felt electric in a way I couldn’t—and still cannot—pin down. I think his brilliant manipulation of language to craft images that feel both so far away and right at home, as if you didn’t know you were missing something until you are told you have been missing it, is a masterpiece.

EF: Although the two poems work beautifully on their own, I find they also lend themselves to being read together. There’s an opposition between the two titles, there are shared pivotal images of water, gods and a sustained undercurrent of loss for a “he,” plus a sense of exile from the speaker, particularly in the lines, “there’s no return / to return to,” or in opening dialogue, “No one gets twice.” How much do you consider this synergy when it comes to your own poems, whether in a project or appearing discreetly in journals, and what do you think readers could gain from reading across poems outside a poet’s intentional groupings?

MCS: I'm very fortunate that my writing derives from fixation. Whether it's an idea, specific word, or direct emotion, I go through a phase where I will produce work solely from that fixation, which usually results in about 6 to 8 poems, if I'm lucky. It's both very fortunate for grouping works and also very unfortunate for my kind poet friends who get to review what I have been interested in. Though I think synergy is something vital to keep in mind, I've found I'm more inclined to the chaos approach of diving between topics, emotions, and overall situations throughout my writing. Much as I try not to be a fickle writer, I have begun to accept that I am. I have to really be moved by something or have the desire to move someone else to produce something I would ever share. As both a reader and writer, I find it beneficial to read poems across and outside of a poet’s intentional grouping because it not only allows you a deeper insight into the poem but an exploration of the extent of a work, by which I mean how each piece of knowledge or art that we consume, create, or interact with, continues to build our understanding and perceptions as we continue to grow. I find synergy to be beneficial for longer pieces such as collections, as I am a very big fan of thematic collections and concept albums, my continuous obsession over artist Ethel Cain’s work and concept albums solidifies this, but I find that readers tend to gain more by venturing outside what they expect to encounter; it makes us have to reset and question and reevaluate ourselves outside of the routine and conceptions we can find ourselves moving within.

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

MCS: I am always a huge fan of the journal Image. In undergrad, a writing club teacher sent me a link to a poem Image published and it is a poem I have bookmarked on every single electronic device I own and printed out on my wall. It’s Jennifer Atkinson “Canticle of the Penitent Magdalene” and I will never forget those final two stanzas: “Even so I dreamed the dream that Samson dreamed—honey oozed from a skull. / The taste? Like honey. I poured it into my palm and licked.”

I’ve been trying to read more archived work from journals as well so I’ve been venturing into older issues of Adroit, the Cortland Review and wildness, which wildness recently published some of Richard Siken’s latest work and I will forever be mesmerized by him and his ability to build worlds from individual poems, so I jumped right back in.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

MCS: Annie Przypyszny’s “Walking the Meditation Labyrinth in the Dog Park Near My Apartment” and Derek Chan’s “Future-Perfect” converse through a constant revisitation of the present through the lens of their perceived past and an understanding that they are the ones in control of its recollection. Both speakers revolve their narrations around a lacking of something that goes on to shape their understandings of themselves and their situations. For Chan’s poem, what shapes and reshapes the speaker is a notable absence of their subject and how the shape of the poem and the present surrounding it have been shaped by that: “I am carrying your absence / like a wet briefcase.” Both poets visit recollection with the idea that one’s understandings of the past are incomplete yet their effect is permanent in what we allow it to dictate. Przypyszny’s speaker goes on to navigate their present through redefinitions of understandings, realizing how their positionality dictates the extent of their own internal investigations: “I was wrong / about my own / linearity.”

Both poets bring discussions of memory, time and consequence to the forefront by presenting a doubling of their presents: that there is the present that exists how they know it (and therefore how they tell it) and a present that exists regardless.

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Mary C Sims is an MFA graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared in The Shore, wildness, Josephine Quarterly, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly and more. Currently, she splits her time between working as an Assistant Editor, Journalist, Poetry Editor and Freelance Photographer when she is not, once again, traveling to visit her friends.

The Shore Interview #48: Ammara Younas

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: In your poem, “a paleontologist discovers my father’s fossil,” there are a couple of details that haunt me as a reader: One is the sparse mention of the speaker. My or me occur only three times, one of which is in the title. Can you speak to the importance of this minimized I and what meaning hinges on the presence of that I? And an optional addendum to this question: how is the story of Lot in conversation with that I?

AY: Thank you for such a wonderful question! I tend to minimize the first person when writing about something personal. This poem is about the absence of a father figure, an absence so complete it extends even beyond death. I was a child when my father died, yet even in life, he felt distant, almost spectral. We occupied the same space, but he was never fully there. This poem stretches that absence further, mythologizing it to the point where, even ages later, when time should have fossilized him, there is still nothing—just a hollow where he should’ve been, a space within space.

The minimized I reflects this mythology. If my father had truly become a fossil, I wouldn’t exist to unearth him. And yet, I do exist—small, almost negligible, in the face of this absurd, larger-than-life narrative. My presence is not central because, in the end, this absence does not revolve around me. I am only here to witness its shape.

The story of Lot has always unsettled me. A man willing to offer up his daughters to the wickedness of Sodom. A man who could flee, but whose wife—human enough to look back—became salt. When my father died, he left behind his wife and daughters. My mother is brilliant, ambitious. She could have fled too. But instead, she chose to stay, to turn back, to calcify into responsibility. And isn’t that the most human thing? To look back, knowing full well what it will cost? She became a pillar of salt not because she was weak, but because she was willing. That choice, that sacrifice haunts me still.

EF: One of my favorite moments in your poem is the line, “an ampersand without the words it joins,” which makes an explicit connection between the process of fossilization and how language is preserved, it made me even consider the work of etymologies, semiotics, etc., shares certain qualities with paleontology. In hindsight, how do you now see this line working within the broader stakes of the poem and, more broadly, what attracted you to the topics of this poem?

AY: Thank you so much for this thoughtful reading of my poem. I love your connection to etymology and semiotics—both fields, in a way, involve excavating buried meanings, much like paleontology uncovers what time has attempted to erase. The poem fails to fossilize the father because his language couldn't be preserved. To become a fossil, a body must not decompose completely. To become a memory, the language must not decay.

It’s not that I don’t remember anything my father said—I do recall a few sentences. And he spoke a lot. I remember his mouth moving, but not the words. Maybe I’ve forgotten things. But if he were forgotten completely, there would be no memory at all. The memory exists, but it’s hollow. So I’m trying to reconstruct him from the visible spaces he left behind rather than from his material form. There’s either a fossil or utter decay, but in the mythology of the poem, he evades both preservation and decomposition by not being there at all. That he's the ampersand, linking the past to the future, but there's a lack of words, of answers, on both sides.

I was drawn to the theme of this poem because of its speculative nature. There are things I can't understand, so speculative poetry helps me shape them into something concrete—something I can picture. I’m learning to know characters I don’t fully know, like my father, through poetry. I’ve written a chapbook of poems on the same theme and this poem was the last I wrote in the series.

EF: Your poem contains so many formal and mechanical choices, including almost all lowercase letters, almost no punctuation, varying longer and shorter line lengths and occasional horizontal movement in a mostly single stanza, which particularly emphasizes the gap before the last two lines. What can you tell us about your process to arriving at these decisions and what you hoped they would add to the layers of the poem?

AY: Form is very important to me. It's also something I don’t consciously stress over while writing. I usually start with an idea and let it guide me toward whatever shape it takes, both in structure and meaning. I sat with the idea for this poem for weeks before writing it. When I finally did, it took only 20 minutes and I didn’t edit anything. What you see is exactly what emerged in the first draft. I think the choice to leave it untouched came from the fact that I don’t quite know how to write about my father’s absence. So, I let the poem tell me what I can’t tell myself. Looking back now, I can see all the things you pointed out and how so many choices reflect a portrait of his absence.

The poem exists in a perpetual state of motion. Just when I think I can grasp it, it slips away, disappearing through the many gaps between my fingers. It’s breathless, restless, unanchored, fractured—always fleeting, as reflected in the final two lines. It’s escapist: when I begin to see something take shape, it quickly dissolves, replaced by something equally mercurial, fickle and intangible before vanishing into smoke. Just when I begin to construct a portrait of my father, the poem tells me, “Hold on, not yet,” before plunging me face-first into the reality of it: that he is a space within space.

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

AY: Aside from The Shore, I absolutely adore Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Every poem there is so different, so imaginative, so passionate—I have yet to read something I didn’t enjoy. I also love the vibrant poems in Palette Poetry. Rattle is an all-time favorite. Only Poems is another journal that’s always open in one of my browser tabs. I love that writers have more space there compared to other literary journals—that as a reader, you’re constantly aware of whose work you’re engaging with and, by the end, you have a concrete sense of the writer’s body of work.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

AY: This issue features stunning work, and the way it begins sets the tone for what follows. I want to focus on the two opening poems: “Children Jumping into Deep Fryers” by Sagar Nair and “Elegy for a Dress, Broken” by Sierra Hixon. While Nair’s poem explores the act of wanting, Hixon’s examines the experience of being wanted.

In Nair’s poem, there’s a restless, almost reckless hunger for desire itself—“we want to want.” The speaker and their companions long to throw themselves into deep fryers, to sizzle, to learn pain as a language, to seek out addiction. Their desire is an active force, self-inflicted and consuming. Hixon’s poem, by contrast, turns this idea inside out, questioning the nature of being desired: “And to be loved is to be swallowed, and to be wanted / is to be real, because how can you want something that doesn’t exist?” If Nair’s speaker craves the burn, Hixon’s warns that to be consumed is to be devoured, reduced to something chewed and swallowed.

Both poems suggest that desire—whether it’s the longing to feel or the longing to be seen—demands something from us. Nair’s characters are willing to be singed into holiness, while Hixon’s speaker is apprehensive about eventually becoming “forgotten flesh.” In the end, both poems reveal the same truth: we allow ourselves to be consumed so that we don’t disappear, so that “we are holy.”

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Ammara Younas is a poet and writer from Gujranwala, Pakistan. Her work has found a home, or is soon to, in spaces like Rattle, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, wildscape. literary journal, Gabby & Min's Literary Review, The Imagist, Small World City, Lakeer and Resonance.