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January 14, 2025

An Interview with Bianca Rae Messinger, Author of pleasureis amiracle

What are the logics of pleasure? Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle makes, if not an argument, the architecture of one (contoured by her preoccupations—language, sound, the sacred). “I think one of the book’s goals,” she writes, “is to be true to pleasure, which means to be unpredictable, latent, emerging.” There’s a collage of references—from sonic mediation practices to religious heretics—that challenge and compound pleasure, and its discontents. Messinger expands on those references, and others, in our conversation below.  You can order pleasureis amiracle—something “ravishing and graceful,” to quote Elizabeth Willis—here.  —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the word pleasure, which…

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News |
December 10, 2024

Announcing the 2025 Nightboat Editorial Fellow!

We are thrilled to announce that we have selected Terry Hudson as our 2025 Editorial Fellow! Nightboat's Editorial Fellowship is designed to provide an aspiring BIPOC editor with $10,000, along with the resources and mentorship necessary to develop and publish a book project of their choosing over the course of two years. We are thrilled to work with Terry on their project. Over the course of their Nightboat Editorial Fellowship, Terry will work to bring a long out-of-print work back into the world. *** Terry Hudson (they/them) is a genderqueer poet, writer, and archivist raised on a Dexter cattle farm in Climax, NC.…

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Interviews |
November 11, 2024

An Interview with Funto Omojola, Author of If I Gather Here and Shout

Funto Omojola's If I Gather Here and Shout, out this month from Nightboat Books, places Ifá divination practices alongside incantatory prose poems, to interrogate the concept of illness in a Western context. What comes forth is a ceremonious shout: “Ceremony is survival,” Omojola writes. “Survival is joy.” In our conversation below we discuss survivance and its discontents; language, and the estrangement of language; and the different frequencies of their work (as a poet, performance artist, etc.), all of which resonate. The image that appears here is courtesy of the author. —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I’m curious about your visual/performance art practices, and how…

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Interviews |
October 22, 2024

An Interview with Aditi Machado, Author of Material Witness

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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Interviews |
October 8, 2024

An Interview with Luke Roberts, editor of Love, Leda

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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Interviews |
July 12, 2024

An Interview With Dawn Lundy Martin, Author of Instructions for The Lovers

“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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