*CW: This post contains discussion of sexual violence. Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: Your captivating new book, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, out this September from The Ohio State University Press, does an outstanding job of blending memoir and relevant mental illness history. Can you talk to us a bit about the importance of striking that balance? What was it like to examine your own personal narrative within the greater context of America’s problematic treatment background

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

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: Firstly, thank you for your incredible work in creating such a vital resource. This anthology, which you edited with Melissa Hassard and Gabrielle Langley, is filled with poets that I adore (Naomi Shihab Nye, Shaindel Beers, Melissa Studdard, Heidi Czerwiec, Metta Sáma, Karen Skolfield, Sivan Butler-Rotholz, E. Kristin Anderson, Trish Hopkinson, Lisa Lewis, Rebecca Foust, and too many others to name). The introduction of this collection addresses the mu

Jamie Klingensmith: Many of your stories, such as “Checkmates” and “Good Times,” which appear in your collection Insurrections, explore the question of masculinity. Since Gazing Grain Press is an inclusive feminist press, how do you think this question of masculinity, or what it means to be a man, a son, or a father, relates to inclusive feminism? Rion Amilcar Scott: So many of the men in Insurrections suffer from their own mistaken assumptions about what masculinity is. For

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

The Art of Work Noemi Press, 2016 $15 Paperback ISBN-13 978-1-934819-57-9 http://www.noemipress.org/catalog/poetry/fitzgerald/ Jen Fitzgerald’s The Art of Work is a collection that encompasses collaboration, shared experience, and common struggle. Opening with a literal “Glossary of Terms,” this is a book of definitions, or rather, the act of redefining terms. Fitzgerald’s book not only calls the concept of ownership into question, she also addresses the entities that get

Laura Sims Staying Alive $12.00 Ugly Duckling Presse Laura Sims’s fourth collection of poetry, Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016) enters the conversation of dystopian literature with a challenging meditation on the language of collapse and resilience. Staying Alive is composed of three sections and an afterword, beginning in eerie abstraction after the action of apocalypse has begun. At the reader’s arrival, we find already “The red glow from the East the burning dock

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