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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…

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Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing—by Eleni Stecopoulos, out now from Nightboat—intervenes in our cultural, historical, and political narratives around healing, which Stecopoulos imagines as a "collective orchestration." The work combines cultural criticism, collaborative research, and poetic practice, all set in the context of our contemporary moment—one wherein life is commanded, consumed, made collateral. In our conversation below we discuss the project's origins and inspirations, from antiquity to the present; language as "neither defense nor apology"; and the distinction between the chronic and the acute, which Stecopoulos troubles to ask, “How do people create spaces of solidarity and care…

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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…

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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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All of Mark Hyatt’s work as a “filthily sexy” poet, in John Wilkinson’s words, was produced both because and in spite of his background. Incarcerated in prisons and asylums, illiterate into his adult life,…

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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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“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…

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