October/November 2018 
A Conversation with Richard Hoffman
Renée Olander
I write hard stuff; sometimes the veil of dissociation drops, the fight or flight mechanism kicks in, and I’m done.
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The Ram in the Thicket: Midrash and the Contemporary Creative Writer
Marjorie Sandor
Midrash itself is a concept with multiple meanings and a rich history. It refers at once to the enormous collections of these interpretive pieces...
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Remembering Lucie Brock-Broido
Marie Howe, Sumita Chakraborty, Kathy Fagan, & Dorothea Lasky
...a series of appreciations and remembrances from poets who knew Brock-Boido and her work as students, colleagues, and friends in the art. Through their words, both critical and personal, the memory and brilliance of Brock-Broido’s life of poetry will not fade.
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An Interview with Inara Verzemnieks
Sarah Stephens
Having the language, the imagery, the symbolism of these poems come through in the book was my way of infusing my writing with this style of thinking that’s carried through Latvia all this time.
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Intensifications of Life: The Radical Narratives of Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers
Brian Brodeur
Both Frost and Jeffers provide an alternative to the disjunctive aesthetics of poets like Stein, Pound, and Eliot, whose work insists on textual difficulty, elliptical organization, stylistic fragmentation, cryptic allusions, a cosmopolitan attitude toward the world, and an almost wholesale abandonment of traditional verse forms.
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Beloved “Yous” In the News: Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs
Ruth Williams
What might happen if a poet sought to write the news, as we traditionally understand it, into a poem? In other words, if poetry possesses something essential to our emotional and spiritual wellbeing, how might a poet harness this power to help shape our feelings in relation to the facts of the news?
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Atmospheric Pressure: Using Setting to Create Atmosphere and Emotions
Sarah Van Arsdale
In writing fiction, the writer is asking the reader to drop everything that’s really far more pressing—work, family, Netflix—and move into this make-believe world. To fully inhabit a story, the reader needs the physical embodiment of the emotion the writer wants to elicit.
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