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Hirmoi Ito is one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary writers, and has been since her debut, Kusaki no sora (translated into English as The Plants and the Sky). Her work has always shared an affinity with the plant world — in a previous interview, she’s stated that plants  “teach us how to think differently about our own existences, our own belonging and our own mortality.” This collection — Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, out now from Nightboat — does just that.  Below is a conversation with her translator, Jon L Pitt, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at UC Irvine. We…

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Photo Credit: Bobby Abate Happiest of birthdays to one of Nightboat's own, Douglas A. Martin! To celebrate their 50th, we had a conversation with the renowned poet, novelist, scholar, and educator (and surely all of…

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Brian Teare’s Poem Bitten By A Man—published today—collages the work of Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and others whose work is part of a broader conversation (on art, affect, and all that comes with those). He writes in the penultimate poem, “I believe care’s the core of interpretive work, fragment of an immense form of mending together.” When I asked him about this process of assemblage — how he put his own notebook practice on the page, and how he worked with/through our understandings of temporality — he said it was “Fucking magic, as far as I’m concerned.” Eileen Myles agrees…

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We recently spoke with Nightboat's inaugural Editorial Fellow, Naima Yael Tokunow, about the creative process of editing, how she found her way to the a/Archive, and what she looks for in a piece of writing. We’re so excited to publish her anthology project, Permanent Record, in 2024. Nightboat: What led you to an interest in the a/Archive, as both (as you describe it) “the commodification of shared cultural recording” and as a “counter-practice”? Naima Yael Tokunow: The recorded lives of Black American families are like spider webs—ephemeral, tenuous, glittering—so often, we have not been afforded the privilege of remembrance, and so…

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In 2020, Kimberly Alidio published two essays on the Poetry Foundation's blog that reflected on her relationship to Language poetry, a movement whose avant-garde poetics have been dismissed by some as apolitical, academic, willfully…

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Eric Sneathen’s Don’t Leave Me This Way — published today — takes an expansive look at the AIDS epidemic and its (ongoing) aftermath. The collection is an interrogation of this history, as Sneathen collapses familiar markers of place, person, and any conventions of “normalcy” to move towards something else (“I’ll call it ecstasy,” he writes). In Sneathen’s words, “each poem is a room of sorts, a sanctuary of objects, privacies, and associations.” All of them resonate.  Our conversation below is similarly expansive — we discussed lyric intimacies, poetic collage, and what a collective project of sexuality could look like. Make…

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In March, I arrived too late to hear Dior J. Stephens read from CRUEL/CRUEL at a packed Nightboat event at the Rendezvous in Seattle. So, when the opportunity arrived to have this conversation with Dior about their recent collection, I leapt at the chance. As a new fan of Stephen’s poetry and the way CRUEL/CRUEL simultaneously feels like an art object and performance, I wanted to hear more about the poet, their process, stories leading up the book’s release, and what’s on the horizon for them! —Thomas Dunn, Poet Thomas Dunn: “Once Again” begins your debut collection in an impactful way.…

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