Tag: Interview
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OCTOBER INTERVIEW with EDWARD SALEM
Edward Salem is a poet who hasn’t lost his sense of humor. “Palestinians,” he shares in our interview, “are insanely funny.” It’s this sense of humor that jumps off the page of Salem’s debut poetry collection, Monk Fruit, surprising readers, even as he’s tackling topics like the occupation of Palestine, American imperialism, torture, and genocide.…
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SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with LIZA HUDOCK
Addiction, death, and loss are everywhere in Liza Hudock’s debut collection, Reveille (released by Flood Editions in August), but they are not its actual subject. Instead, the poems wrestle—as near as it can be stated—with the world the speaker inhabits. Whether she turns her attention to a moth, the comparison between a pumpkin and a…
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SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with Julia Thacker
Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was recently awarded the Anthony Hecht prize by Paul Muldoon. The book makes its way through the wilds of New England, grieving the family born and buried there. To Wildness is enamored with the world of sense, yet lingers close to the realm of the dead. It is elegiac,…
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JUNE INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN ESPADA DAWSON
Late to the Search Party is the debut collection of Steven Espada Dawson, exploring the individual and precise depths papered over by common nouns like ‘grief’ and ‘family’. The elegiac collection delves into Dawson’s love and grief for his dying mother, the decades-long absence of his addict brother, and the absence of a father, with…
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JANUARY MONTHLY: INTERVIEW WITH MARIA ZOCCOLA
Any reader with even a cursory understanding of Greek mythology will recognize her name: Helen of Troy—daughter of Zeus, the most beautiful woman in the world, a “face that launched a thousand [war]ships.” Now take that image and fast forward about, oh, 3200 years, and you get Maria Zoccola’s raised fist of a debut, Helen…
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DECEMBER MONTHLY: INTERVIEW WITH JIMIN SEO
Jimin Seo is the author of OSSIA, his debut collection of poetry. Winner of the The Changes Press Book prize, judged by Louise Glück, OSSIA blends the voices of the dead with the living, resulting in a symphonic exploration into migration, dislocation, familial bonds, love, and loss. Seo textures his manuscript with poems in both…
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OCTOBER MONTHLY: Interview with Salvatore Pane
We’re excited to share a new series of interviews exploring craft. In these conversations, we’ve asked writers to take us behind the scenes of their finished works, showing us the process behind the poem, the scene, and the story. Last month, we spoke with Jessica E. Johnson, on her memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on…
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SEPTEMBER MONTHLY: Interview with Jessica E. Johnson
We’re excited to share a new series of interviews exploring craft. In these conversations, we’ve asked writers to take us behind the scenes of their finished works, showing us the process behind the poem, the scene, and the story. First is our conversation with Jessica E. Johnson, on her memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on…
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INTERVIEW with Khairani Barokka
FWR: “To enter the indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise,” you write in the first section of amuk. Reading forward, you show readers how Indonesian tenses permit a simultaneity of temporal possibilities not included within the narrower scope of English; traveling through time or existing beyond the limits of time altogether. What does it…
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INTERVIEW with AE HEE LEE
Ae Hee Lee is a Wisconsin-based poet whose debut collection, Asterism (Tupelo Press, 2024), was selected as the winner of the Dorset Prize by John Murillo. In Lee’s poems, heritage and belonging are examined rather than embraced. Visiting her father’s old home in Chungju, Korea, she asks the flowers growing there to “remember [her] from…
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INTERVIEW with ROBIN LAMER RAHIJA
Robin LaMer Rahija‘s first full length collection, Inside Out Egg, was released in April. Ada Limón writes that “each poem contains the whole unbound strangeness of the human experience–the offhand remark, the blur of being in a body– all of this is written with a humility and understated wit that both growls and sings….” We were…
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AN ENGINE FOR UNDERSTANDING: AN INTERVIEW WITH Willie Lin
Willie Lin’s debut poetry collection, Conversations Among Stones, will be published in November 2023 by BOA Editions. Simone Menard-Irvine interviewed Lin for Four Way Review. FWR: I would like to start out by first asking about what it’s like to be publishing your first full collection of poetry? What was the process of writing and…