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Nat RahaInterviews |
October 15, 2024

An Interview with Nat Raha, Author of apparitions (nines)

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 self-formalizing into “a threat to the tone & / image” of neoliberal politics. Dancing through the constraint of the niner form, apparitions plays with punctuation as a syllable, a visual cue, and an intercession against Anglophone lyric. We discuss this new poetic form, Raha’s political and performance practice, and more in the conversation below. —Morgan Levine Morgan Levine: This book is a series of “niners,” poems with 9…

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Interviews |
October 1, 2024

An Interview with Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Consider the Rooster

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 devil and rouse the dead back to life,” and whose presence led a neighbor to call the police. The response—a carceral one—led to a radical shift in his political and poetic life.  We discuss that shift in our conversation below, and the call to "slow down, pay attention, and tend to what remains." —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I’m interested in the literary lineage of the rooster; you reference…

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Interviews |
May 28, 2024

An Interview with Lauren Cook, Author of Sex Goblin

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 accident, and attempts to hire a sex-worker in spite of this. At the center of it all is the sex goblin—a feral, somewhat-fictitious creation Cook works with, an amalgamation (and indictment) of shame and abuse. To read Cook is to see the world with all its strange, surreal components, some of which come up in our conversation below. Sex Goblin and I Love Shopping are now…

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Interviews |
April 2, 2024

An Interview with Joyelle McSweeney, Author of Death Styles

There's an arbitrary, arguably American distinction between style and survival. Joyelle McSweeney's Death Styles—out today from Nightboat—makes the argument that the two are inseparable. The poems craft a portrait of loss and livelihood, of "audacity and absurdity" (and other, stranger affects), to conclude that style is "not a what but a way." In our conversation below we discuss style, its aesthetic and political implications, and the "impossible seam" that is poetry. —Dante Silva Dante Silva: You’ve previously stated you set rules for yourself in order to complete Death Styles: “1) I had to write daily 2) I had to accept any inspiration that came to…

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News |
March 15, 2024

Announcing Nightboat’s 2023 Poetry Prize Winners!

Announcing the Winners of the Nightboat Poetry Prize! This year we received over 950 submissions to our annual poetry prize. We are excited to announce that the Nightboat editors have chosen three manuscripts for publication in 2025 and 2026! Read more about each of the prize-winning manuscripts, and find a list of our finalists below. The winners of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize are: B-Dragon Suite by Stine An Perennial Counterpart by Yongyu Chen Monk Fruit by Edward Salem Congratulations to our winners! Read more about each of the prize-winning manuscripts, and find a list of our finalists below. B-Dragon Suite by Stine An "In Stine An's radical debut, translation isn't a one-directional or objective…

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