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imogen smith's evanescent second collection raw & zero enters the world "in an epoch of pandemic, genocide, mass war, poverty, corruption, & environmental destruction," yet “in the center there is / hope," steamy, sexy blossoms of hope. smith's prosodic virtuosity and visual poetics bring the reader into her world of herbalist gardens, political organizing, and protest, without letting you forget "How would i love you if i didn’t love your pleasures?” —Lina Bergamini & Stephen Motika Lina Bergamini & Stephen Motika: You say, “raw & zero entered the world in an epoch of pandemic, genocide, mass war, poverty, corruption, & environmental destruction.” How do you…

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In Residual, Tisa Bryant weaves together memories, scenes from the life of her late mother, and her own research into the lives of other Black women writers and artists into an intimate hybrid memoir.…

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In Perennial Counterpart, Yongyu Chen’s debut poetry collection, reading, like friendship, is “a way of life.” With an elliptical, contemplative voice and a scholar’s critical disposition, Chen attends to all things that both connect and separate: tunnels, membranes, clothing, screens, pages in a book, a blank space between words. Poems act as intimate explorations of the ever-shifting nature of relation itself, with “being-together-alone” emerging as a sublime mode of connection. Here, we discuss difficulty & reversibility, influences & non-influences, and “the lettery feeling of friendship.” —Lucia Kan-Sperling Lucia Kan-Sperling: The poems in Perennial Counterpart meander through time—dated between 2021 and 2025—and…

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Soham Patel's The Daughter Industry is at once an imagined performance, hauntological confession, and polyvocal chorus. The cast of "players" includes Sasmita ("limber, gender-fluid, jesterlike"), Sajani (a "venerated femme mother"), and Sarah ("likely a heavenly Pisces"), all living, breathing, and bickering in the interstices of language and culture. Their conversations and soliloquies span wedding markets, yoga studios, and ultrasound rooms, collapsing all of those into a charged, often surreal meditation on how gender is produced, performed, and policed. "The daughter is at once at risk and always arriving," Patel reflects in our conversation below. We also discuss the collection's many…

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In E, Noa Micaela Fields takes on Louis Zukofsky’s monumental long poem “A,” placing it in the register of the trans-autobiographical. Working in, and against, the tradition of homophonic translation, Fields transposes Zukosky as heard through her hearing aids, amidst the soundscape of trans nightlife—like a hijacked, hormone-induced game of  “Telephone.”  Here, we discuss mishearing as radical methodology, and the "unruliness of straying towards other, unheard sonic alternatives." —Dante Silva Dante Silva: How did you come to Louis Zukofsky’s “A”? How did “A” become E? Noa Micaela Fields: I found a beat up copy of Zukofsky’s objectivist long poem “A” in a local…

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