Interviews

C. Dylan Bassett

Interviewed by Victor Florence

In Anti-, you have an Anti-Thesis in which you state that you are “against poems that think they know what they’re talking about.” What brought you to seeing rationality in poetry as something to be pushed against?

Interviews

Ari Banias

Interviewed by Claire Eder and Ezra Stewart-Silver

Your poem appearing in Subtropics 15 is sort of an allegory about memory and experience. How do you start writing about such large philosophical questions? Where did this poem begin?

Interviews

Chris Bachelder

Interviewed by Anthony Luebbert

Were you always this funny? What were your earliest comic influences?

Interviews

Ryan Ruff Smith

Interviewed by David Leavitt

You’re principally a fiction writer. How did you find the transition from writing about (and from the point of view of) people who were not yourself to writing as yourself?

Interviews

Thomas Pierce

Interviewed by Patrick May

The banana is arguably one of the funniest of fruits. Why did you decide to center your story Two Bananas around it and not something else, like an apple?

Interviews

Alan Michael Parker

Interviewed by Olga Rukovets and Tara Tatum

In A Poem for Sally, the speaker “swallow[s] whole / his youngest daughter” in an effort to protect her from the external world and her own inner turmoil. Although you describe the speaker’s act as one of consumption, it brings to mind the image of returning the daughter to a fetal stage. What was your intention behind the speaker’s action in this poem?

Interviews

Jon Loomis

Interviewed by Jackson Sabbagh

The quickie that the speaker suggests to his beloved in Lucky Me seems to be a way to stop dwelling on growing older, a way of having fun right now. Is one method more valuable than the other? Can we have one without the other?

Interviews

Brittany Cavallaro

Interviewed by Ashley Keyser

What I love about Evidence is that it’s both domestic and sinister: these hints of almost ludicrous preciousness (“like I’d fallen and spilled / into little tinsels of gold” or those wee ceramic foxes) combined with that slab of meat at the end (“is it done is it done”) or the title’s implication of a crime. From what I’ve read of your work, for example in your collection Girl-King, you often interrogate different aspects of femininity. Is this poem asking similar questions?

Interviews

Troy Jollimore

Interviewed by Michael Lupi

Since you switch quickly from talking about varieties of happiness to speaking about performance in line 4, are you suggesting that happiness is a kind of performance? If the poem does mean that happiness is a performance, I wonder if you could expand on that notion?

Interviews

Heather Wells Peterson

Interviewed by Janna Moretti

What inspired your story, Blender?

I’m living on a farm in Vermont with my father right now, and he’s been raising sheep for the past few years. Watching the ewes give birth and the ways in which their maternal instincts do or don’t kick in has been really enlightening for me. Even among sheep, some seem to have more of a knack for it than others—one ewe stepped on her lamb’s tiny leg without noticing she was there, while many of them immediately knew to lick the—sorry—fluids from the wool of their newborns (in order to clean it, but also for the nutrients).