Blog
Post: Andrew Durbin Remembering Kevin Killian (1952-2019)
Last month, the poetry community lost a dear friend and comrade, an important voice and mentor, with the passing of Kevin Killian, novelist, poet, editor, and reviewer. Killian, along with his partner Dodie Bellamy, played an undeniably central and indispensable role in both the San Francisco and national literary scenes, giving boundlessly to others with […]
Post: Sarah Riggs: Five Questions on Etel Adnan’s TIME
This month here at Nightboat we have the pleasure of releasing a new English translation of the beloved and inimitable painter-poet-philosopher Etel Adnan’s “TIME,” orginally written in the French. Born of a series of postcard correspondences between Adnan and her friend, Tunisian artist Khaled Najar, “TIME” enfolds forms both familiar and new as Adnan poetically […]
Post: The Faggots & Their Friends: 40 Years Later
In 1977, the radical sounds of a commune near Ithaca, NY resounded from within a little red book: “…there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.” The zealous words of Larry Mitchell hovered there above […]
Post: Ciao, For Now, to Our Spring 2019 Interns!
As the spring season approaches the balmy threshold of summer, we’re saying so long to our fabulous, wonderful, super-awesome spring interns, Caelan and Alma. Read a little about who they are, what they did with us, and where they’re headed as, with a tender smooch, we send them off with newly groomed wings through the […]
Post: “Personal Volcano”: Laura Moriarty Shares From Her Travels
Ahead of the release of the beautiful and devastating Personal Volcano, a collection of ecopoetics that boils form into living igneous before cooling and ultimately erupting again, poet Laura Moriarty shared journal excerpts and photos with us from her sojourns to volcanic territories. The excerpts reveal a poetic topophilia and orogenic sounds of the collection […]
Post: “What I Knew”: An Interview With Eleni Sikelianos
Eleni Sikelianos, prolific poet, professor, and author of the new antigrowth epic, What I Knew, was gracious enough to talk with me about the latter’s themes, her travels, the uncapturable, and of course (sorry, not sorry) astrology. This week, I’m sitting with and stirred by Eleni’s assertion, “Poetry holds the place of ferality in language,” a notion that […]
Post: “Action in the Orchards”: Fred Schmalz’s Ekphrasis of Proximity
On his new collection, Action in the Orchards, Fred Schmalz remarks, “…I have resisted the tag ‘ekphrastic’ to describe the poems in the book. Sure, encounters with artworks (sometimes overt, sometimes oblique) happen. But they serve more as catalysts for other connections than as conceits for the poems.” In further flourishing and celebration of that quasi-ekphrasis […]
Post: Chad Sweeney On “Little Million Doors”
Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly said of Chad Sweeney’s stirring new book, Little Million Doors: “Sweeney masters the art of understatement in this book of forthright and delicate poems…What knowledge we gain, the poet hazards, might be found through absence and negation.” rob mclennan adds, “Meaning becomes, if not fluid, something that shimmers, concurrently in multiple, […]
Post: jayy dodd’s “The Black Condition ft. Narcissus” Playlist
One of our favorite books this spring at Nightboat is jayy dodd’s The Black Condition ft. Narcissus. By way of the classically fatal beauty Narcissus, jayy has fashioned a collection of poems that is at once biting and delicate, biblical and diurnal. Parallel to her poetics, jayy works within the myriad mediums of performance art, […]
Post: “Pet Sounds”: An Interview With Stephanie Young
“I wanted to write a love poem that didn’t leave out all the problems, that inhabited this form of address to do other things at the same time: music criticism, historical analysis, thinking about gender and labor and real estate,” says Stephanie Young, author of the new book-length poem Pet Sounds. Ahead of her NYC book […]
Post: “Doomstead Days”: An Interview with Brian Teare
Brian Teare’s new collection Doomstead Days figures itself an oblong baritone shape, a cargo ship of poems and various other fuels barrelling towards us. Opening with the clamor of a container ship’s collision into the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the subsequent fallout, the book is as much witness and chronicle as […]