contemporary poetry
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!
T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in âA Letter from The Seaâ with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?
T.Liem: The Whole Catastrophe was a pleasure to read. With my pencil in hand, I was tracing ideas, underlining phrases, and noting recurring lines. There is also so much sound-joy in reading it aloud, hearing your patterns of assonance and slant rhyme. It is this musicality that lets readers draw themselves along the earth with your speaker. These are poems which also feel like invitations. Congratulations on this publication and thanks for taking the time to talk about it with me!
Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
By ErĂn Moure
House of Anansi Press 2023
Reviewed by Bill Neumire
From the Immediate to the Timeless: A Conversation with Maya Clubine
Life Cycle of a Mayfly chronicles more than the life of a river bug. Maya Clubineâs collection, winner of the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Award, takes mayflies as a departure point for thinking about ecosystems, interdependence, and the lessons that we pass down through generations. Clubine considers the growth of a fly from nymph to imago alongside changing seasons, bird migrations, a fatherâs passing, a daughterâs return. Along the way, cycles tangle like a fishing line. In this interview, critic Rosie Long Decter talks with Clubine about structure, repetition, and the relationship between the cosmic and the minute.  Â
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
in the first photo
the apple is whole
my sister is dying at times she states it
her life parsed
phrases/phases terms/terminal …
âIntellectual curiosity about oneâs own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery,â: so writes the American poet, novelist, and essayist Siri Hustvedt. So quotes the Chilean-born QuĂ©bĂ©cois poet, novelist, and essayist Nicholas Dawson as he investigates his own illness, pushing through the multiple layered skins of depression, turning it over to examine it in this light and that, as a prism that might allow some strand of light into the complex, ailing self.
âThe problem is that Iâm a stranger to myself,â DĂ©lani Valin writes halfway through her dĂ©but collection Shapeshifters, in âWhat are the Ethics of Picking a Stinging Plant?â The third paragraph of this clever, subtle prose poem continues…
Interview by Lauren Turner A contemporary study of the institution, Gravitas boldly explores academiaâs tendency to tolerate gendered abuse. Amy Berkowitz lifts the veil on the ordinary violence that female students are subjected to â violence that goes so far as to interrupt their writing practices and distort their relationships to words and literature. Illuminated […]
