Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: A Wilderness begins with an essential self-awareness. You write, “I put a horse in the poem.” And, in the penultimate stanza of the opening poem, you continue with an introspective narrator: “Who was the “I” who wore a white dress and did/ as she was told?” I feel like your speaker grounds each poem in the tangible. How do you see the narrator’s progression throughout the book? Stephanie Cawley: For a long time, I have been very interested in the idea o

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: A Thirst for Salt is a love letter to someone lost and the pleasure of beginnings. What I found so interesting was the insight into the lover, the “you.” There’s a context and history given to her that we are so rarely privy to when the “I” is suffering. The book questions our ability to have something or someone “forever”—maybe even the value of it. Can you talk to us about permanence (or lack thereof) and how it functions in this work? Hannah Leffingw

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: This book is a beautiful meditation on gender expression as deception, threat, protection, absolution, violence, and condemnation. Please tell us about the process of researching and choosing these specific stories to tell. Why was it important for you to tell these stories? Fox Frazier-Foley: Thank you so much for your kind words about my work, Sarah. I’m honored to be having a conversation with you—about my work, and about feminism, theology, and myth

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: In your essay, "Fixed in a Moment of Fierce Attention: 13 Ways of Looking at Claire Underwood," published in Little Patuxent Review, you examine your obsession with Robin Wright's character, Claire Underwood, from the Netflix series House of Cards. You write: "While devouring Wright’s filmography, I am dizzy with the succession of mediocrity, until Claire stops me still—a rupture in the reel." What is it about Claire Underwood that is so spellbinding? H

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: Your gorgeous new book, How to Prove a Theory, was the 2017 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize Winner. It is a meditation on grief and memory and human resilience. I have had the pleasure of listening to you read some of these poems, which made them even more tender and devastating for me. Can you tell us about the process of writing about grief? How long did it take you to write the collection? Can you share some background for this book? Nicole Tong: Sarah, th

Searching for Identity in the Faceless World: Katie Fuller and Paradigms of Power in Valve Doublecross Press, 2016, $10 Katie Fuller’s debut chapbook Valve is a vivid, unsettling examination of feminist identity, power dynamics, and autonomy in an internet-tinted world. Within this beautifully crafted, hand-stitched collection are 13 powerful pieces designed to make the reader re-evaluate self-identity, using the lens of American pop culture. Reminiscent of Alice Notley’s pi

Sarah Marcus: Rachel Eliza Griffiths describes your beautiful new chapbook, Drift, as "a lucid and searing exploration of the female body, pinned against the feral blood of language and myth." Can you talk a bit more about the role of the female body in this work. Did you intentionally set out to examine this theme or did it emerge organically? Brianna Low: These poems were written while I was living in southern Indiana and trying to complete the final year of my MFA. Gradua

Sarah Marcus: Your captivating poetry collection, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, is filled with beautiful, haunting closures, metacognition, powerful imagery, and questions of authenticity. In "Symptoms of Prophecy" you write: "I called to say we have two lives / and only one of them is real." I can't stop reading this poem and thinking about which life is the "real life" in such a scenario. Can you talk to us about the process of writing this poem and arriving at this moment o

Sarah Marcus: I think readers can relate to the beautiful anxiety and obsessive self-reflection in so many of your poems. In the poem, "How To Piss in Public and Maintain Femininity," you write: "...I want what I want/ regardless of social etiquette and the way/ I am ashamed of my unconscious by which I mean/ I say everything out loud in other words/ I never fucking learn my lesson." Should we ever learn our fucking lesson? Is it worth it? Would we gain or lose our empathy? M

Sarah Marcus: To me, you embody a life of Literary Activism. In your blog post for The Poetry Foundation you wrote: "I realized it would be helpful for me to connect the dots in my own evolution in order to crystallize a personal concept of literary activism, but as importantly, to recognize my own limitations and inability to set the industry standard, so to speak, on what literary activism is. So I reached out to a number of activist writers and asked them to weigh in on wh