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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 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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Dances of Time and Tenderness—by Julian Carter, out today from Nightboat—is concerned with what Carter terms "the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds." It's an amalgamation of sex, sainthood, Dolores Park, archives of Peter Hujar’s pornography, politics that are affective, ancestral; all with a proximity that's personal, intimate. The connections become chains which become “an inter-generational praxis of intimacy and care,” as Juana María Rodríguez writes of Carter’s work. In our conversation below we discuss chains and choreographies, both real and almost real. "Ideally," Carter writes, "you're breathing hard." —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I'm drawn to the word "dances,"…

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A boy makes a suit out of fur for the first day of high school. An adult softball player is considered “lesbian royalty.” A woman is surgically attached to her dog after a car…

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Lonespeech is a writing through (or into, around, against) the correspondence between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, the two of whom had an infamously fraught relationship to language. Jäderlund takes this correspondence and turns it into something else altogether; she finds in the letters a strange, sparse, pastoral lyric that challenges our assumptions about what it means to come into contact with another person.  Below is a conversation with Jäderlund’s translator, Johannes Göransson, wherein we discuss the language of Bachmann, Celan, and Jäderlund; its failures, its historical undercurrents, its discontents. Look to Lonespeech—out today from Nightboat—for more of language's "heightened…

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There's an arbitrary, arguably American distinction between style and survival. Joyelle McSweeney's Death Styles—out today from Nightboat—makes the argument that the two are inseparable. The poems craft a portrait of loss and livelihood, of "audacity and absurdity"…

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Boiled Owls—by Azad Ashim Sharma, out today from Nightboat Books—interrogates our narratives of addiction and recovery, as it imagines other possibilities for life and collectivity. What would it mean to consider addiction as part of capital's promise? How do you craft a narcopoetics? In my conversation with Sharma we look at language, political consciousness, and what Bhanu Kapil calls our "cadences of survival." —Dante Silva Dante Silva: You describe recovery with the word stuplimity, which refers to a sense of “overwhelming excitement and stultifying boredom emanating from the same object.” Could you say more? What have you found in the regular,…

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"What do you want?" is a difficult question to answer. Laura's Desires—by Laura Henriksen, out today from Nightboat—makes a rigorous attempt. What comes forth is an appropriately playful, phantasmagoric set of poems about our individual and collective desires, what makes and unmakes them, where they lead us. It's all intimate and honest and incredibly hot. In our conversation below we discuss desire, its contents and discontents, as well as doubt and Nan Goldin and tennis—the latter of which Laura is decidedly against. —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I’m curious about the expansive, rigorous citational practice here—the flirtation of criticism and a lived, sustained…

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