By ERICA DAWSON
The month is February and that means
nothing because winter in Tampa is
the same as fall and spring so it could’ve
been easily Thoreau’s “September sun”
or Eliot’s “April is” blah blah blah.
By ERICA DAWSON
and hypersexual and drunk and, how
should I say, easy, when we share a kiss
and Ida B. Wells, well, frustrated
the engenderment of the official record;
crisscrossed the country interviewing
poplars that had been accessories to atrocities,
JANUARY GILL O’NEIL and JOSEPH O. LEGASPI have been friends for almost three decades, since the mid-90s, when they met at orientation in the beat-up lounge of New York University’s creative writing program. The two simply hit it off, bonded over brie, and shared poetics, both starry-eyed on their first venture into New York City.
January is the author of the newly minted collection, Glitter Road, her fourth book published by CavanKerry Press. Her previous titles are Underlife, Misery Islands and Rewilding. She is associate professor at Salem State University and currently serves as board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). The interview was conducted over Zoom in December 2023. Full transparency: Joseph traveled to visit January outside of Boston for a weekend in September, braving a storm that drenched New York City, and arriving three hours late. But instead of “getting to work,” they hung out as good friends do and enjoyed each other’s company, relishing in nourishment, and sustenance.
Winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
I’ve been negotiating my fears with speaking.
After a life of being half-heard;
after half a life of being unheard, I now think of the chaos
I avoided in this abstinence. In some stories Jesus
is not the fool, keeping himself
to himself, knowing only God knows
Haitian-born poet ENZO SILON SURIN gives “voice to experiences that take place in what he calls broken spaces.” These are the spaces he writes about, writes for, and writes from. In his latest poetry collection, American Scapegoat, following the success of his last book, When My Body Was A Clinched Fist, Surin illuminates our opaque relationship with the truest history of Black America. His poems invoke an urgent conversation, which is why the word “interview” here feels unmalleable; Enzo and DAPHNE STRASSMANN had a vulnerable exchange about the inheritance and meaning of a broken space.
In this interview, VIRGINIA KONCHAN talks with NATHAN McCLAIN about his second full-length collection, Previously Owned. Touching on process and craft, literary influence, racial justice, and faith, this rich conversation celebrates the range of McClain’s poetry and the sense of history and place in his work.
JULY WESTHALE interviews ARISA WHITE
In Arisa White’s lyrical memoir, Who’s Your Daddy, she writes of her father’s absence throughout her coming-of-age in tender, genre-bending poems. July Westhale and Arisa White, former teaching colleagues and Bay Area community, approached this interview in an epistolary way, discussing form, family, voice, and taking up space on the page.
“Made of Duretta cloth and sateen, embroidered in silk.
Cotton cord and tassels. Price, each $6.00″
—from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Look up here, the air is Aryan. The moon,
our white hood. Our life must loom large
above that which is darkened in our shadow.
A fate loomed long ago, ours
I could tell you,
If I wanted to,
What makes me
What I am.
But I don’t
Really want to—
And you don’t
Give a damn.
—Langston Hughes, “Impasse”
There are two cops from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department standing in my grandmother’s kitchen. We are all gathered around the kitchen island silently negotiating the power dynamics. Two Black women, two White cops. The cops have come to collect the details for the report, but I’m doing most of the talking. Grammy bears witness.
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