Conversations

Doug Carlson: Halfway into “Stamp Fever,” the reader suddenly realizes that things aren’t what they seem; that is, a different level of reality has taken over. As the boy’s world becomes more magical, his need is more apparent and our …

Doug Carlson: When I read the typescript version of “Golden Gloves” for the first time, I confess I was most of the way through before I noticed something odd about its shape. And only after I looked back did I …

Laura Solomon: I find your mark-making deeply expressive and uniquely unpredictable—at times even messy—and yet simultaneously highly economic—sometimes, with regard to your approach to figures, a bit like Egon Schiele’s. In my introduction to We Dust the Walls, I …

Thibault Raoult: “Auto-Duet” is heartbreaking, illuminating work, which, while possessing airtight transitions, nonetheless leaves me, as reader, bouncing around in the ideational echo chamber you so seamlessly build. Rather than continue to bounce around (poignant as that may be), I’ll …

Jenny Gropp: “The One I Get and Other Artifacts” lyrically documents your family’s painful experience living in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, during and after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings on December 14, 2012. In the essay, you unfold the reactions …

Thibault Raoult: Upon first encounter with your new book Broken Cup, I’m taken back to Donald Hall’s Without—his poetic confrontation with the death of his poet wife Jane Kenyon. The circumstances are different in each book, to be sure, …

Gina Abelkop: “L is for Leaves,” your poem in our Summer 2014 issue, begins softly, with a meditation on daily routine and watching the leaves outside through a window, but ends with a darker finish with the narrator “not …

John Brown Spiers: Your essays are layered almost impossibly well. Not only are they never about just one thing (or even just a couple of things), they very rarely meander, or “essay,” in the sense of a journey without a …

John Brown Spiers: From the outset of “Secret Information,” you inform us that you’ve written the essay because “I feel obligated to relate something about that ominous place I had been taken to under the Nevada desert, and the abyss …