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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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Jzl Jmz's Local Woman, out now from Nightboat, has been described as "lush, nourishing, [and] celestial." I  would add that it's politically potent (the poems comes form "an anarchist jurisdiction"), and incredibly seductive. In the thick…

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Pause the Document is a pause, or a complete rupture, in the workings of Mónica de la Torre’s poetic and political work. We’re asked to consider the documentation of our lives—whether through language, memory, time—and the dissonance in that documentation. The result is a complete paradigmatic break; Pause the Document points us towards other forms of movement (choreographies of words, absences) and meaning-making.  Her conversation is with language and its limits, illness and survival, at once playful and profound—all the while speaking to the intimacies that abound in any interaction with the world around us. She expands on those themes,…

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Marcus Clayton makes his debut with ¡PÓNK!, out now from Nightboat, a genre-defiant testimony of Afrolatino professor and guitarist Moose. He emerges from a South Gate stage surrounded by the two thrashing mosh pits…

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Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive is an interrogation of the archive—its forms, failures, and alternative frequencies—featuring contributions from Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, and others. The editor, Naima Yael Tokunow—Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow—comes to the project having had to reckon with the Black American Record while researching her own familial history. What she found was an absence of “legitimate” records, though an abundance of those considered “illegitimate”—a distinction she troubles to ask, “How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record?” The answers abound. In our conversation below we discuss the archive, its discontents, and the anthology—which allows the past to…

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