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Laura Moriarty’s Which Walks, out now from Nightboat, confronts aging and its discontents with the old adage, “If you leave off you are lost.” Walking, and “witchiness” (“I’ve hosted a few covens,” she says below), become the means for Moriarty to probe compounding personal and political crises. In our conversation we discuss the project’s origins and inspirations, from art criticism to archaeology, and the “other magics” of poetry. —Daye Jung Daye Jung: Within Which Walks are poems of intense attention to time, of the present and its echoes. When, where, and how did Which Walks begin?  Laura Moriarty: I began writing Which Walks…

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If Aurora Mattia’s first book, The Fifth Wound, is an autobiography as vision, her latest work Unsex Me Here—which came out this past April—offers itself as an autobiography of vision. Seductive, spiritual, and prismatic,…

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Aaron Shurin's Elixir: New and Selected Poems, out now from Nightboat—and which follows Unbound and The Blue Absolute—collects his work at the forefront of publishing, politics, and poetics. From the Gay Poets collective and the Gay Liberation movement, through the San Francisco circles Shurin has belonged to throughout his life (and in which he's been referred to, by Kevin Killian, as a "gay shaman"), here is "a combination of distilled essences found nowhere else in American poetry" (Brian Teare).  The themes are the same throughout: the pulse of a historical lineage, from Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, his beloved mentors,…

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Eight years after Field Theories—Samiya Bashir’s third book, which won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry—comes I Hope This Helps, out now from Nightboat. Bashir’s work, both individual and collaborative, has been published, printed, and performed across the U.S. and abroad—and appears here in a culmination of her multimedia practice. In our conversation below, Bashir discusses the project's origins (personal and political rupture), its life as a "poetic mixtape," and her many modes—all attuned to the compounded crises of our present.  "This book cracked something open in me," she says. "I’m not trying to close it. I’m trying to live inside…

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Roșie Stockton's Fuel, out now from Nightboat, works towards and against calamity, both personal and political. In poems shaped by psychoanalytic thought, the pandemic, and petrocapitalism—and punctured by The End—Stockton asks how we might "find livable forms for our suffering," and seek out political horizons that meet out moment. In our conversation below we discuss apocalyptic phantasies, the pleasure communists, and how "fracking is a crazy verb." —Dante Silva and Lina Bergamini Dante and Lina: Let’s start with The End—which is, in your poems, at once a place, a political construct, a departure point. How do you write to The End with love? Rosie…

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