Tag: interview
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microreview & interview: The Book of Mirrors by Yun Wang
review by José Angel Araguz Reading through The Book of Mirrors (Winner of the Twenty-Sixth White Pine Press Poetry Prize, 2021) by Yun Wang, I find myself marveling again and again at her facility with the poetic image. Across poems ranging in theme from feminism, dreams, literary figures, motherhood, and the universe, Wang’s use of…
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new interview
Just a quick post to share a recent interview up on Grist: a journal of the literary arts! Special thanks to poet friend, John Sibley Williams, for asking such insightful questions and to Grist for helping us find a home for the exchange. Happy gristing! José
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José & the unintended hiatus + interview
First and foremost, apologies for the radio silence. Totally unintended. A lot of life has happened, good and bad. It has been strange not being here in this space. I look forward to doing a bit more now that I’m getting life in order. I’ve got a few reviews in the works as well as…
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microreview & interview: Real Daughter by Lynn Otto
review by José Angel Araguz It seems simple to say that what words can point to and hold is a constant source of meditation for me and other poets. Yet, this type of meditation is a high stakes one as it is in contemplating what words can hold that one also necessarily reckons with what…
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one more from Susan Lewis
In my recent microreview & interview of Zoom (The Word Works, 2018) by Susan Lewis, I discussed Lewis’ deftness with the prose poem as working through a push-pull between familiarity and distinction. The traditional structures of sentence and paragraph are subverted in the poems of Zoom with non-traditional phrasing and concepts. In the case of “In Praise of…
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microreview & interview: Zoom by Susan Lewis
review by José Angel Araguz In a recent conversation about prose poetry, I found myself tasked with defining what makes a prose poem “poetry” exactly. I fell back on my usual starting point, some riffing on Charles Simic’s idea shared in an interview that “[what] makes them poems is that they are self- contained, and…
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microreview & interview: Stonelight by Sarah McCartt-Jackson
review by José Angel Araguz In Stonelight, winner of the 2017 Airlie Prize, Sarah McCartt-Jackson adds to the tradition of lyric narrative collections that includes Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, books that take on the materials of human life and through them evoke human presence. Informed by McCartt-Jackson’s background in folk…
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microreview & interview: Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez
review by José Angel Araguz The Latinx experience is often reduced to ideas of duality. There’s the phrase “ni de aqui, ni de allá” (neither from here nor from there). There’s Gustavo Peréz Firmat’s idea of “living on the hyphen,” which acknowledges the duality of having a hyphpenated identity, in his case Cuban-American. Even one…
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microreview & interview: Phantom Tongue by Steven Sanchez
review by José Angel Araguz Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications) by Steven Sanchez begins with “On the Seventh Day,” a poem depicting the speaker poring over images of male models in the Sunday ads—”glossy men” that “look like my G.I. Joe / if his clothes weren’t painted on”—then cutting and pasting body parts, fashioning ideal versions…
The Friday Influence 