Meredith Stricker, SENTIENCE

 

Sometimes a soul does not know it is a book when living
whose pages can never be completed in a final, perfect, finished sense
but are continually translating themselves just as leaves fall and translate
the forest, chaparral, grassland in succession and no street adheres
to its past self, just as leaves fall and leaves love us and traffic is humanity
surging out of the boundaries of its skin (“I DREAMED I WAS A BOOK”)

The latest from California poet Meredith Stricker is SENTIENCE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2026), a title that follows Alphabet Theater (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), Tenderness Shore (LSU Press, 2003), mistake (Caketrain Press, 2012), Our Animal (Omnidawn, 2017), Anemochore (Newfound Press, 2018) and REWILD (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The pieces in SENTIENCE explore narrative structure and collage, offering echoes of the cut-ups of American poet Susan Howe, as she articulates ecological concerns through elements of both the written and the unwritten, almost outlining an absence as a firm shape. “we are the secret / pinned to a vortex,” writes “ALEPH, BETA,” “raptured     with torn scientia / our little hands / the aleph, the beta / hungtight,   ringing / gone  o o o o [.]” What isn’t overtly there in her texts are outlined and physical, as Stricker layers direct statements and phrases that accumulate into something that leans into a kind of abstract, offering a sly ecopoetic sketchbook of field notes. “language is an animal it howls flees hides and waits watches us to see,” she writes, as part of the sequence “anemochore,” “if we’ll come to our senses in red algae bloom fluorescence or flake flake / flake of plucked pelagic pleading calm then kneeling [.]” She writes of lakes, language and bees across a complex sequence of texts, layering elements of the book across an ecological landscape, citing sentience and climate, whether trees are awake or asleep, whether animals can dream, and a landscape of the book itself.

I’m fascinated by how deliberate Stricker structures her texts, on the surface a kind of sketchbook through fragments, drawings of swirls and hand-drawn scribbles into a complex book-length conversation around our relationship to and inherent responsibilities to the natural environment. As the press release offers: “Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens.” There are elements comparable here to poet, editor and current Vancouver poet laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026) [see my review of such here], exploring not only ecological relationships but actual agency. Or, as the poem “WHEN RIVERS ARE GRANTED PERSONHOOD” includes:

when rivers are granted personhood
are you more or less sentient than whales 

do you hear them laid out and skinned
against the how of oblivion 

hunted and plundered then rendered
yet still curious about us 

___

 

when rivers are granted personhood
we are mortal like glaciers 

 

 

and if trees

 

have no soul

 

then neither
do we

 

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sam Farhi

Sam Farhi is from Ithaca, NY. His book, The Sapsuckers, was recently released by Spuyten Duyvil Press. Recently, his work has been featured in the online lit mags Cable Street and Moral Crema. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University and is currently working on his next novel, The Sweetheart.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The Sapsuckers is my first book published. But the first book, my first draft of the first novel, hitting END was something called Sasha & Adore and I remember feeling like I was a real writer after writing that last page. That changed my life existentially I would say. I would write another novel called Skinny Suzie after that and The Sapsuckers is really my third. 

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

It's all fiction to me. Poetry is part of it, "non-fiction" is a fiction. What the term "fiction" does is give you freedom to express anything as opposed to striving to express facts. How is what I do not poetry? If anything I rely on the term "fiction" for my freedom. Scrutinize me on anything besides fact.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Comes from the voice and sometimes the voice is talking and sometimes it's withholding. I work with very loose outlines of broad strokes, but scenes need to be free to let things happen and to discover. The event The Sapsuckers is based on I had no idea about. I was discovering it as I wrote and the same with The Sweetheart (the book I am currently working on). I will say that the first draft looks nothing like the final though. Whole elements gone, voices change, chapters cut, etc. etc. I revise quite a bit and also cut ruthlessly. 

4 - Where does a work of prose or screenplay usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I think in books. When I'm asked for something short it's usually from a larger work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I am getting better at them the more I do them. When I'm writing I'm speaking aloud and it can be sort of freakish. I wish I could do that publicly. Maybe one day I could!
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

None. No answers. If anything, more questions. Sometimes an "answer" will occur. I think those are moments of epiphany and very rare. I may start with a theoretical question. For The Sweetheart it's probably, "Is love a system?" but it will end up somewhere completely different with only more questions. For The Sapsuckers it might've been, "What makes a story a story? Is it because it's bizarre it's interesting?" and then turn into something completely different and emotional.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The writer is like Blade, the day walker. They should be able to hold their attention in a world trying to sap it from them. Maybe. Ultimately, I believe reading and writing is intensely private, and that's what makes it so beautiful and different than the other mediums. It should be lonesome, personal, completely living inside of the mind of the one experiencing it. We love our writers because they come into our brains the way no one else can.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential. Though my editor (Eric Darton) for The Sapsuckers really posed questions and looked for clarity issues. He got me and let me be me, but asked the questions a reader would ask. He also read every single draft of this thing and knew the story so well.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"Writers read."- my dad, Paul Farhi (not the journalist).

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (novels to film)? What do you see as the appeal?

Very different. For screenplays you are usually working with a partner or other people. So that alone makes it vastly different. Also, no one is going to read your fancy descriptions in a screenplay. So why bother? Write the scene, the story, the dialogue, and hope some of it sticks. Or don't care if it sticks at all, be open to that. A screenplay is a springboard, it's not the final product. A novel is the film itself.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

5-6 AM every weekday, I write.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Knock on wood, hasn't happened in forever. Sometimes I will open up a book to a dog-eared page and look at a paragraph or the syntax of a sentence, rewrite it completely and start from there.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pines.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I don't really agree with that. I mean, books are part of life and life breeds books. Why interpret an interpretation? When you look out the window of a car on a road trip, and you watch all the people drive by you and notice them, is that not a rhythm of faces? Is that not sentence after sentence of random stories? Do I need the Band of Outsiders opening sequence in the cafe to get that? 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

DH Lawrence is very important to me. The writers I am meeting and speaking with and helping prop up The Sapsuckers because they think others should read it are very important to my work. I never knew writers, any writers, until I started school. Now I meet so many and it really means a ton to me. I'm in awe of most of them.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to publish some poetry one day. I think that could be cool.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well I do have an occupation! I have to pay the bills some way, I have two kids. I've always been a writer since I could write. No idea, I may have been a folk singer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I have a lot of voices in my head, always have. Imaginary friends. They make me write.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Other Flowers by James Schuyler, Scumbag Summer by Jillian Luft, Crush by Richard Siken, Dark Rides by Derek McCormack, Surface Tension by Elaine Equi

Film: Everything Everywhere All at Once

20 - What are you currently working on?

The Sweetheart! I can't stop talking about it. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jean Day, The Elements

I dreamed I saw Saint Augustine
alive as
apparently in error
filling up cups
with the subject of seeds 

whose earliest cells
constrict in the middle
to pull apart like donuts in coffee 

phylum above kingdom below class

Below the tree line light flies straight
Below the lake
peer up
From the primitive streak to the primitive knot
not alone in our determination (“Adamant!”)

If you haven’t experienced her work before, I would highly recommend the work of Berkeley poet and translator Jean Day, a poet I only discovered through her collection Late Human (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2021) [see my review of such here], having missed a slew of prior titles including Linear C. (Berkeley CA: Tuumba, 1983), Flat Birds (San Francisco CA: Gaz, 1985), A Young Recruit (New York NY: Roof Books, 1988), The I and the You (Edgemont CT: Potes & Poets, 1922), The Literal World (Berkeley CA: Atelos, 1998), Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (New York NY: Adventures in Poetry, 2006), Early Bird (Philadelphia PA/Providence RI: O’Clock Press, 2014), Daydream (Litmus Press, 2017) and The Triumph of Life (New York NY: Insurance Editions, 2018). Not everything crosses a border into bookstores easily, after all. Her latest is The Elements (Winter Editions, 2026), a quintet of extended, meditative lyrics, collaged and accumulated into sequences composed across a careful pace of quiet wisdom, exploration and examination. “from birth to billboard / neither stepping quite outside of nature nor / phoning it entirely in.” she offers, deep within the second section. “That’s domestication!”

Composed as five extended sequence-sections—“Adamant!,” “Ex Ovo Omnia,” “Swing State,” “Intolerance” and “And Now This”—there’s an unexpected rhythm to her lines and line-breaks, prompting a curious play of cadence, one that pushes for slower, more careful reading, in case something important might be missed if one isn’t careful. As she writes close to the opening of the second poem-section: “Now we come / to the fruit of our labors / tired of economy but bound by a fog / the ballet of which / in the wallet of [.]”  Day stitches together, one might say, the biographical elements of her life, building blocks as a means through to a lyric end, allowing her narrative to be propelled by the curious bends of language and sequenced-thought, offering moments along the way to hold the shape of her examinations. “To stop / before stopping comes / anadromous,” she writes, within the final section, “in cloud form / to chant / or deposit If / crosshairs / cross hairs / flak is the frame / lost / in the up / again [.]” Attending simultaneous minutae and big moments in carved lines, Day articulates a narrative of moments, but as building blocks through a narrative and propulsion of language, and the further one reads through her work, the more one discovers. This is an incredibly rich, subtle and attentive lyric. Or, as the opening page of the poem-section “Swing State” reads:

If the state is a reason
the bud is its cause
on the way to make sense of the sun
leaving us to wonder
where to lay down our tools
and when to extract
bird from birdie
in a game we’ll never learn how to play.
The field of Amanita
on the other hand
seemed fiction to the figure (farmer) (singer) (sister) (son)
who paused by the water to consider
a break in the chain (the great one)
caused by a marriage
to whom you were not supposed.
The plan was hatched
but the rivers would go awry.
Who knew
where the facts would lead us.
God didn’t make the little green apples,
we observe,
and the Wabash is a river of unsteady habits
even now

Ongoing notes: The Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair (part two, : R. Kolewe + Erin Conway-Smith,

See part one here, of course. 

Toronto ON: Oh, how lovely to see this new title by Toronto poet R. Kolewe [see my review of his latest here], the chapbook HOLONOMY (Toronto ON: knife fork book, 2026), a cluster of fourteen delightfully-packed and short prose poems. “Porch sketch, penciled showers slant with the scent of rosemary. Postscript rather than prelude,” begins the opening poem, “Rosemary,” “moist hours mix eternity into fallen ordinary order and escape. Can you name the clouds all grey and dusky?” Kolewe’s work has long been known for expansive projects across the long poems, composing large works underneath the umbrella of a big idea or turn of phrase, and the internet provides that holonomy (a word I hadn’t known prior) refers to the change in a line or object’s orientation when returning to itself, such as running a line across the earth’s equator. The holonomy is the curve itself, as the line or object returns back to that point of origin. “Rare earth remainders scuttle,” begins the poem “Lively,” “worn scow flocks skew wings named widening full scarlet Geneva. Pause fluid lustral stochastic review.” Are there more of these pieces, somewhere? Might a larger, full-length manuscript be in the works? Kolewe works quietly, it would seem, but rarely in such small containers, so I would hope there are more of these on the horizon.

Narrative Approach

Sheer diffract predestination cover, stratocumulus portcullis memory alembic door ajar. Pale glow effect. Beginning future chiptone plastic, unbegun catenary cross canvas melancholic two-step (three four time.) Proof suspended: every edge derivative: bereft infinity knifeblade uniform field fiction patch, no torsion etc. Ambient classical approximation. Laurel ardour triage. No probability amplitude, no perpetual help, no polyhedron forever oyster idol factory isn’t about anything is. Communities stir and name themselves. The human heart alas, the neighbourhood, the pitcher broken at the fountain. Too fast.

Johannesburg, South Africa/Toronto ON: From poet Erin Conway-Smith, born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario but living in Johannesburg, comes the chapbook-debut, the extended poem VELD SENSE (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a curious two-sided structure on each page, with single, chapbook-length line running mid-way between, comparable to how Darren Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000) held a single, book-length line along the bottom of each page, alongside the main element of the book’s text. The main thread of this particular work is assembled via a curious assemblage, almost a collage, of short lines and phrases, allowing sound to playfully bounce around through language, geography. “Cape Town with cousins,” she writes, mid-way through, “not mine.” Or a bit further down the same page: “You get / a new pair of shoes, // you experience a minor lift.” As the chapbook-length sequence opens:

Heavy hung the spiral
in early but not that early
air. This is me, after all.
Yesterday was so loud.
To my right, tray go-away birds
mobbed a sleepy owl. To the left,
a 15-foot-high water feature
after some oke crowbar’d 

the meter open for the metal.

 

A generating unit each at Tutuka and Majuba have tripped. Reminder to

 

The air cut with spirals this season,
repeating at medium distances
at regular through not predictable
blips. Perception: least of my problems.
Sprung graffiti insistently tug.
The sound is sideways-turned, shaggy to even.
The quality is tin.
A spiral doesn’t settle, it just stops. 

But it is March, and still they haven’t.