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Aditi Machado's Material Witness—out today from Nightboat Books—asks the reader to reconsider the material world around them, to reveal the attachments between human and non-human matters. A flame “kisses you with the kiss of its mouth,” the sun is president, and all of it is seen by a “militantly aroused / resident alien of every which nowhere.”  In our conversation below we discuss materials as relational, plural, and contingent, and ask what that means for language and politics—and Machado's poetic practice. All photographs are courtesy of the author. —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the word material. Here you challenge…

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Out today from Nightboat Books, Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) mixes lament with liberatory outcry. Raha’s poems live in the first-person plural, pushing against “authors who could not / conceive us,” a collective self-organizing and…

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All of Mark Hyatt’s work—as a “filthily sexy” poet, in John Wilkinson’s words, and also as a writer of prose—was produced both because and in spite of his background. Incarcerated in prisons and asylums, illiterate into his adult life, othered by his Romani heritage, and also his sexuality—Hyatt’s work responded to a world in which he was rendered precarious, and yet insisted on pleasure.  Love, Leda—out today from Nightboat—is his only known novel. It survives, the same as Hyatt’s other work, because of the intervention of poets and lovers. I spoke to Luke Roberts, an editor of both Love, Leda…

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Consider the Rooster—out today from Nightboat Books—is a collection that both celebrates and challenges the pastoral. The titular rooster refers to one Bendorf cared for amid the COVID-19 pandemic, whose crow could “scare away the…

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“What is the opposite of devastation?” Dawn Lundy Martin asks in Instructions for The Lovers (out now from Nightboat). Her answers are both thorough and tender, having been conceived through the course of the COVID-19 lockdown. Martin writes of a “horny contentedness” found outside of heterosexual monogamy; the “sensation of one’s own vernacular background” as resistance to grammars of subjugation; her sister’s arm draped around her, and the “worlds in that drape.” Moments of pleasure and precarity are seamlessly placed together, as Martin points towards all the possibilities of “loverness.” We consider some of those possibilities for "loverness"—and political community,…

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Dances of Time and Tenderness—by Julian Carter, out today from Nightboat—is concerned with what Carter terms "the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds." It's an amalgamation of sex, sainthood, Dolores Park, archives of Peter Hujar’s pornography, politics that are affective, ancestral; all with a proximity that's personal, intimate. The connections become chains which become “an inter-generational praxis of intimacy and care,” as Juana María Rodríguez writes of Carter’s work. In our conversation below we discuss chains and choreographies, both real and almost real. "Ideally," Carter writes, "you're breathing hard." —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I'm drawn to the word "dances,"…

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A boy makes a suit out of fur for the first day of high school. An adult softball player is considered “lesbian royalty.” A woman is surgically attached to her dog after a car…

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Lonespeech is a writing through (or into, around, against) the correspondence between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, the two of whom had an infamously fraught relationship to language. Jäderlund takes this correspondence and turns it into something else altogether; she finds in the letters a strange, sparse, pastoral lyric that challenges our assumptions about what it means to come into contact with another person.  Below is a conversation with Jäderlund’s translator, Johannes Göransson, wherein we discuss the language of Bachmann, Celan, and Jäderlund; its failures, its historical undercurrents, its discontents. Look to Lonespeech—out today from Nightboat—for more of language's "heightened…

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