12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jordan Stempleman

Jordan Stempleman is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Spilt, awarded the 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press. He has also published nine previous poetry collections, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). Stempleman is the editor of Windfall Room and faculty advisor for the Kansas City Art Institute's literary arts journal Sprung Formal. From 2011 to 2025, he curated the A Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri, and from 2007 to 2025, he served as co-editor of The Continental Review, one of the longest-running online literary magazines devoted to video poetics.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It meant a kind of seriousness, I think. A devotion beyond the statement, the feeling, perhaps, of “I’m telling you, I’m a poet.” My first book, Their Fields, was a book-length poem, the first time I’d ever written anything past a couple of pages or so. The doing of something this long felt vastly different than anything I thought I could endure. Writing has never been something that I find settling or enjoyable while I’m actively doing it. This struggle, an almost anti-flow state, continues until I’m near the end of the drafting process, and then it’s the reading and re-reading that reveal the poem, which then compels me to write the next one. My work now is very much doing what my work from 30 years ago was doing: feeling it all out. Putting it all together, or nearly together, or with the potential of togetherness, and then applying a different mode of attention that stares into what’s now there. 

The fact that I write poetry has changed my life. It’s a means of being with language as much as outside of the poem as within it. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The first poems I wrote, outside of any classroom assignment in school, were about being dumped, total heartbreak. I was seeing, I think, what was beyond the ache of excess feeling. I also think I turned to poetry initially because it felt like the bookish response to music, especially the kind I was drawn to in my teens: CRASS, The Cure, Dead Kennedys, Descendants, Bauhaus, Fugazi, etc. I loved how poetry could channel these excess states of feeling, political repulsion, without even knowing three chords, just the voice and the page. This felt attainable to me and aligned with my immersion in music.  

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?
Rarely does it come quickly. As I mentioned, it’s typically a slog. To mitigate this, I am always trying to accumulate notes and fragments in my phone or give myself constraint-based exercises to generate at least a base layer that has the potential to develop into something down the road. In my poetry workshops, I always show this short video where I started recording my laptop screen after I was finally done drafting a shorter poem, like 18 lines, a poem that I never hit “save” on so I could then hit “undo,” taking the poem all the way back to the blank Word document. The recording states there, so the students can see what line came from my journal to the page, how I left so many awful lines in there for ages because I thought they were incredible or necessary, or just the fact that I spent half a day drafting them. I go bit by bit, trying to add narration to my decision process, noting how the parts become the poem through thousands of decisions. 

4 - Where does a poem 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?
Often, I can sense when a poem will evolve into its own thing: a longer sequence, a series, or a stand-alone piece. I’ve never written a “project.” I write and let the poem do what it wants to do. This is probably why I never had a deep interest in being a fiction writer. What does DeLillo write in White Noise? “To plot is to live.” Or is it, “To plot is to die”? I am awful at engineering plots. I would much rather play and struggle on the page, and see what comes of it after the fact. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy readings. I love hearing other poets read their work. I often get a better editorial ear when reading my newer work aloud. However, even the published work becomes more accessible, less unknown, when I read it alone in my house a thousand times, and even more so when I read it a few times in public. 

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?
I know I’m always drawn to the epistemological and phenomenological, but expressed or released in everyday environments. I am all about the local. It’s the closeness of where I’m at that seems most estranged for me, and I think being here makes me less preposterous in my political sensibilities. I think having an openness to the messes we’re most in are the messes that we make or that are five feet from us. The same with the overlooked beauty and goodness. 

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?
Just try to leave where you’ve been in a little better state than when you arrived. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh, I love it. The experiences of working with editors who are invested in the work are incredible. It’s the best way to not only catch what old tired eyes missed (and I always miss plenty even after a gazillion reads/proofs), but often where I am gifted my final cold editorial eye to remove a poem from the collection, finally rework a line or a stanza to where it needs to be, or to find the language to describe my intentions for doling this or that. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t stop doing. 

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I make coffee, I drink coffee, and I read news. I head to campus. I prep for class, answer emails, and read. I may write. I eat. I may write. I teach. I may write with my students. I go home. I make dinner and eat dinner with my wife. We do whatever we feel compelled to do or not do, and I try the whole thing over again. Never the same. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I always open up five or six books, and I wait for the charge of language to set in. Primarily poetry, but quite often nonfiction and philosophical works. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I love this question. 

An ever-so-slight smell of nicotine. We live in my wife’s childhood home, and her pop was a pack-a-day-plus smoker. It gently leaks from the walls. 

13 - 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?
Music, big time. I love cover songs, even named a collection after them. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There is an endless supply, which is glorious. So many of the dead ones, the ones now doing, and, hopefully, the ones who aren’t even born yet, who I’ll discover at my very end. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Become 200% more patient. 

16 - 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?
Something to do with end-of-life care. Being there for those who are alone in the final stages of life. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It found me, I think. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Aflame by Pico Iyer. Film: Conclave (There’s an evident pattern developing there, I know)

19 - What are you currently working on?
A poem to fit this line into:

“The dialogue is an endless stream of commas, floor-to-ceiling curtains opened and closed repeatedly to allow one snowflake inside at a time.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī, The Book of Rain, translated by David Larsen

 

No rivers flow into the Arabian Peninsula. Before desalinization technology, all its fresh water originated from the sky. Great tracts of the peninsula were inhabitable only at rain-seasonal intervals, and have until modern times been the exclusive territory of pastoral-nomadic communities. That these communities would develop an elaborate vocabulary for precipitation and groundwater is unsurprising, and yet (cautioned by the fallacy of “Eskimo Words for Snow”) I refrain from supposing a causal link. The proliferation of Arabic words for weather is proportionate to the proliferation of Arabic words for all kinds of things. (David Larsen, “INTRODUCTION”)

I found myself taken with The Book of Rain, “the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words, by early Arabic linguist Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī,” as translated by New York-based scholar, poet and translator of pre-modern Arabic literature, David Larsen (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) (although I would caution him that the people of the Canadian north, in my understanding, consider that particular moniker a colonial term, and prefer to be referred to as the Inuit). The Book of Rain is not only accompanied by an expansive critical introduction by the translator, but a book’s worth of footnotes at the end, adding layering and nuance to the study of such an intriguing text more than a thousand years old (the publisher’s website notes that the author died in “Basra circa 830 CE, at the age of ninety-five,” if you want to have a temporal sense of the original composition). If you want to know a people, a culture, there’s no better way, one might say, than to approach  from the foundation of language, and Larsen offers incredibly detailed insight into the context and reasons for differences both temporally and culturally far distant from most western understandings. As Larsen writes in his introduction: “For Arabic langue worthy of study, there were two funds of evidence. One was historical precedent, as enshrined in proverbial expression, pre-Islamic poetry, the text of the Qur’ān and, to a lesser extent, Prophetic hadith. The other was contemporary Bedouin speech. Certain tribes’ supposed immunity to linguistic corruption gave their dialects a classical authority that was tantamount to the ancients.” Is this a book of notation or of language or of beautiful music? From the opening line of “[NAMES OF RAIN]”:

First of the names for rain is al-qiṭqiṭ “The Tiny Grain.” This is the finest of the rains.

How does a title such as this emerge with a poetry publisher? That is a curiosity, by itself, although there are obvious parallels around language and thinking, and critical thinking about language and subject matter in the context of its time and place, its landscape and culture. Larsen, further in his introduction, asks: “Does the Book of Rain count as natural history, or is it a book of language only? The answer depends on your expectations of natural history as a literary genre. In early modern Europe, natural history’s emergence is identified with the purge of folkloric material from inquiry into plant and animal life. A rededicationof language to nonlinguistic knowledge is how Michel Foucault characterized it, saying that natural history ‘exists as a task only in so far as things and language happen to be separate.’ This obviously excludes the Book of Rain, whose sources are purely linguistic.” From the section “NAMES OF WATERS,” as it begins:

Great or small, a river is called al-nahr and al-nahar; al-anhār is its plural. Al-jadāwil “canals,” sg. al-jadwal, are rivulets made to split off from a river to irrigate crops and palm groves. Al-qanā “an aqueduct” is a canal made to flow underground, and is not called qanā, pl. aqnā (or, as some might say, qanat, pl. quniyy) unless it has a covering. Any uncovered watercourse is a jadwal, and a khudad “channel” is similar to it. All three words are used whether they run dry or flow with water.
            Al-kurr is a “holding pool” where water accumulates. (The rope that men loop around the trunk of a palm in order to climb it is called al-karr.)
            To describe water as la’īn “sordid” is to find fault with it. Al-‘udmul, pl. al-‘adāmil, is “well-aged” water, and anything else that is old. Water that does not cover the ankle is described as ḍaḥl “shallow” and ḍaḥḍaḥ “superficial.” Al-raqāq “a thin layer” is used in a similar fashion. Al-barḍ is a “meager” amount of water that you manage to gather, and verb tabarraḍa means “to seek water.”

a bunch of poems, interviews + a new book soon + a review of a prior book + some other things (with a guest appearance by sean braune,

Hey! It's me and Toronto poet (and above/ground press author) Sean Braune! We hung out together recently, the first in a long time, so that was cool. It has been a while since I've done one of these, so thought it worth mentioning that I've a poem up at Pamenar Press online, "Reading Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell by our new inflatable pool," a piece I composed during the same period I was working a review of that book [see that here; remember?]. Otherwise, I had two poems up at Blood + Honey, another up at George Murray’s NewPoetry, a further at Scrivener Creative Review, even more over at Noir Sauna, and another at Colin Dardis’ Poem Alone. An interview I did some time ago, conducted by Victoria Cole for Horseshoe Literary Journal, is now online (I only found out recently! did you see my 2023 post from being out in Newfoundland, for their literary festival?) and interviewed again, more recently, by Mia Funk for the Creative Process. Despite my claim that I've barely been poem-ing, it has been a year for such over here. I'm probably waist-deep into a further collection, ever since returning home from Ireland (and attempting to shape random notes and thoughts together into something coherent).

Don't forget that my fall poetry title, the book of sentences, is up for pre-order (I do have copies on-hand, if such intrigues). Plans are afoot for a fall Ottawa launch in October, so keep your eyes peeled for that (announcing that soon, with a new essay on the collection, over at my substack). And did you see this real nice review that Paul Pearson did of my poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022)?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Angela Antle

Angela Antle is the 2025 Rachel Carson Writer in Residence at Germany’s LMU, an artist and former CBC producer, documentary-maker, host and producer of the podcast GYRE, an interdisciplinary PhD candidate (Memorial University) and a member of Norway’s (NMBU) Empowered Futures: A Global Research School Navigating the Social and Environmental Controversies of Low-Carbon Energy Transitions. Her research intersects climate communications and justice, disinformation, petrocultures, political rhetoric and energy futures. Her first novel The Saltbox Olive is published by Breakwater Books.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
That remains to be seen. The Saltbox Olive is my first novel. I can only compare it to how I felt as a new mother: joy, relief, worry, excitement, and extreme vulnerability.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’ve had a long career as a journalist - writing scripts and documentaries for CBC. That was my training ground - I learned to really listen to what people say and to be faithful to their words and intent when quoting. When I took my first creative writing class with Lisa Moore, I was petrified, until I felt the crackle of energy that comes from writing back and forth over the invisible line between truth and fiction.

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?
I’m pretty slow, but I’m writing things all the time in my phone, in various paper journals (I have a sort-of system) and on my laptop. Some days it’s an article for theIndependent.ca about Energy Futures, some days it’s academic writing (I’m doing an interdisciplinary PhD in energy humanities and I’m interested in climate disinformation and speculation). Although I find both those worlds extremely generative for fiction writing - it can be hard to make the switch to fiction writing. As cheesy as it may sound, if I’m having trouble, I use the pomodoro method; set my timer for 20 minutes and write without stopping, that can usually move the internal lever from non-fiction to fiction. Walking also helps.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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 write a ton of short pieces, sometimes it’s just dialogue or quirky things people have whispered to me. It’s like quilting. I have a Scrivener file that holds all those scraps and I go back to it often to rework the pieces and darn them onto other pieces to turn them into something longer. 

Although, when I started The Saltbox Olive, it was always going to be a novel, one that I’ve wanted to write for a long time, but I had no idea how to do that. I was fortunate to have the support of Trudy Morgan Cole through the WritersNL Mentorship program. That helped me get started. I just kept writing and writing until I arrived at characters and a structure that felt authentic and meaningful.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m a big believer in the power of readings to foster community, but I haven’t read The Saltbox Olive yet! I’m in Germany on a fellowship and just this week received a physical copy. There is talk in the farmhouse I share with the other researchers, that there’ll be cake and a reading this week which will be nice. The first official reading will be at Writers at Woody Point this summer - I’ve been a co-host there for over a decade and I’ll be interviewed by my friend and former CBC colleague Shelagh Rogers and it will be like reading to family.

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? 
All my work: art, journalism, research, and fiction is eco-critical and explores how language can mask injustice, manipulate, disempower, as well as set the stage for the future. In short, I’m interested in the abuse of power - a topic that will (unfortunately) always be in vogue. I try to illuminate that in my work and give readers a chance to get closer to a more embodied kind of truth.

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?
To challenge stasis and connect readers with the world’s injustices and beauty. 

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 
Put your characters in peril. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to journalism to filmmaking)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t know about easy, but moving between genres can be quite generative, when I’m writing journalism, I get ideas for research and fiction and vice versa and I hope that it all makes me a better thinker and writer. 

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?
I sit up in bed and start. If I can’t shake off the sleepiness, I get a coffee and get back in bed and keep writing. At some point in the day, I’ll be embarrassed that I’m still in my PJs; get dressed, and migrate to my desk. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I draw or paint or garden, look at art, and read about it - that always loosens the cogs. When The Saltbox Olive stalled, I looked at WW2 photos from the Imperial War Museum’s digital collection, they have 11 million images! I think that’s where I discovered the work of South African photographer Constance Stuart Larrabee upon whom I based the character Barbara Kerr.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 
Blackcurrants. 

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? 
l studied a lot of archival military maps and used Google maps to explore parts of Italy where the men of the 166th fought and lived; that’s how I put together the puzzle of where they were at different points in the war - a spacial timeline - I mostly stayed true to; you can’t exactly make up a new date for the Battle of Cassino! I also used that timeline to create an itinerary for a 166th research trip that I took with my husband in 2018. 

The other medium that influenced the characters was audio. Through the MUN folklore archive, I was able to listen to a 1940s  radio show Calling Newfoundland that aired taped messages from the men while they were overseas. Hearing the gentle hesitation in their voices helped me write Arch, Slade and Tom (Tombstone) in contrast to the hero soldier archetype we often read or see via American media.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? 
All the generous, creative, and collaborative writers in Newfoundland, as well as philosophers TimothyMorton and Rosi Braidotti…and the brilliant Naomi Klein.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
Farm. In Emilia-Romagna. 

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? 
See above. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? 
Reading Death on the Ice, River Thieves, and February. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 
I absolutely love Ali Smith’s writing and am reading the last of her seasonal quartet of novels. Truth be told, I’m not actually finishing, but sleeping alongside the book, and putting off reading the last chapter, because it’s so wonderful, I don’t want it to end.

As for film, I loved Christian Sparkes’ Sweetland - the adaptation of Michael Crummey’s novel. 

20 - What are you currently working on? 
I’m writing a speculative podcast script about a post-oil future on a North American archipelago. It’s called Hag Islands and it’s part of my PhD project. I do hope to turn it into a novel. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Paul Vermeersch, NMLCT: Poems

 

Hello. The wetware is at it again, synthesizing mythologies from monstrosities,
hobgoblin cognition from thin err. On Golgotha, the hippogriff is singing
“Mandinka” to children. Let’s telecommunicate, cool? Let’s watch TV collectively
across a desert of broken antennae. Let’s ache for obsolescence. Let’s go. (“On Monstrosity”)

The latest from Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch, following his Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is NMLCT: Poems (ECW Press, 2025), a collection very much constructed as a book-length project, one that opens with a helpful “NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF TERMS”: 

“MCHNCT” is pronounced
machine city 

“NMLCT” is pronounced
animal city

As I’ve written prior—referring, specifically, to Hamilton writer, musician and editor Gary Barwin’s charming creatures: poems (ECW Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—I’m always intrigued to see the first collection by any poet, following the publication of a selected; to look at a new work composed after having examined, and self-examined, even if rather broad in scope, the length and breadth of a career in poetry. “Words say there is another place.” the poem “ESCAPE FROM MCHNCT” begins. “But who will make it there?” Vermeersch’s eighth full length poetry collection (if one counts the selected, which seems only fair), it is interesting in how his work has evolved from articulating echoes of nostalgic looks at once-imagined futures from the mid-twentieth century into this assemblage of four-lined stanza blocks, themselves accumulating into a narrative structure of speculative fiction, setting a conflict between animal and machine. “Submerged in celestial shadow,” the poem “THE SECOND MOON BEHIND THE FIRST MOON” writes, “saturated and rattling with frags / of cyborg nightmares, the collective unconscious of artificial life, none / of this will be remembered. But it can be recovered.” Throughout the collection, Vermeersch builds his bricks of lyric narrative in lengthy and even gymnastic lines, more oriented in propulsive, almost staccato, sound than in his prior work. He builds his bricks, four lines per, whether through sequences of four poems, one to a page, including the opener, “On Monstrosity,” and to close, “Deep Water / Amnesia,” with the bulk of the collection, not to mention a further interruption or two, made up of self-contained poems, each of which, themselves, as quartets of these poem-blocks. His structures are rhythmic, even propulsive, offering line breaks when needed to maintain that particular four-line shape.

After ejection from a mirrored box, where you have spent your entire life,
will you understand that you have arrived in a forest—or will you believe
that you have become a forest, and the wooded landscape that you see all
around you is just the reflection of your new body inside the mirrored box?
                                   (“Inside A Mirrored Box”)

And through this assemblage of stanza-bricks emerges a book-length narrative umbrella composed to examine the tensions in that imagined future, between the binaries of machine (“MCHNCT”) and animal (“NMLCT”) (humans are most likely on either side of that particular binary, I suppose, depending). “Here you are.” the poem “WELCOME TO MCHNCT” writes. “Everything you love is now customizable with cutting-edge / character tech, but there’s always a faint trace of some remnant avatars embedded in / the most recent blueprint of MCHNCT. We’ve made some changes for your security / and convenience.” The tension is palpable, shifting between an optimism for humanity or sense of doom, interspersed throughout. Or, as his opening sequence of broadcast signals continues:

Hello. The dead will be recast. The dead are imaginary animals in the forest
of broken telephone poles. Electrified crosses are bearing what an era needs
to calm itself. The dead are source material, the end product of homeostasis
converted to narrative. The dead all have their I’s X’d out.

Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology (and vice versa, of course), including elements of artificial intelligence programs that continue to propagate, seemingly against our will, this collection furthers a growing (and intriguing) thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry, one that also includes Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e’s full-length poetry debut, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], an anthology shaped around speculative fiction, exploring ideas of consciousness, being, artificial intelligence and technology, and Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith’s own full-length debut, Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Much as with Smith’s work specifically, Vermeersch’s poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present, of where this all might be heading, akin to James Cameron’s original 1984 film, The Terminator. As the sequence “The Forest” offers:

Deep beneath Antarctic ice, a forest has waited ninety million years for its rebirth.
This is not Eden. This is the end state of every ecology. Every sprout is the crown
of this realm trying to breach our own. Great pines of epochal growth climb beneath
primeval glaciers. They signal always to the upper world their need to breathe again.

As addendum, the acknowledgements at the end of Vermeersch’s collection provides that: “No part of this book was created with artificial intelligence, chatbots, language models, or any similar technology.”

Grace Nissan, The Utopians

 

bring any country     to a standstill
take the same form    with everyone 

say it’s hard to find
it’s hard to find 

hold up their hands
their hands 

start thinking up arguments
and that’s farming (“The Utopians”)

I’m intrigued by this title by New York-based poet and translator Grace Nissan, The Utopians (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a book that but hints at the structure of the constraint used, through blurbs offered by Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel and Ted Rees. As Black offers: “Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times.” Gabriel, also: “Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want?” It is only through the publisher’s website that one might find this (arguably offering little more than what the blurbs provide, and not assisting to spell out Nissan’s specific constraints through this project): “Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called ‘THE WORLD’ about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.” Or, one can seek through the text itself to hear Nissan’s own thoughts, set close to the end: “that the dead mix freely / in a spirit of reverence // this translation is based on / death / terribly well, I must admit // they cremate the / discussion / to accept it [.]”

Nissan is also the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii), and their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.

“I feel almost ashamed to send you this little book about the Utopian Republic.” (That’s how you started Utopia—with a letter, to introduce Utopia through its messenger, Raphael.) “Some people say that he has died somewhere on his travels. Others that he has gone back to his own country. Others again that he has returned to Utopia, partly because he felt nostalgic about it, and partly because he couldn’t stand the way Europeans behaved.”

The bulk of the collection exists as “The Utopians,” with two further sections—“THE WORLD” and “Passages 1, 2, 3”—interestingly enough, are interspersed throughout the collection, held as fading text (something Ellen Chang-Richardson recently played with as well, through their recent above/ground press title) and even text set backwards. The interplay, the interlay, feels akin to less a series of interruptions than a layering, held as a critique of where we currently are, but through the translated and transposed language of English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, statesman, theologian and writer Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), and their infamous book originally composed in Latin, and published in 1516. “Utopia / wasn’t retailing,” Nissan writes, “like a talented   author / had seen absolutely    nothing // to get an even clearer picture / died somewhere    on his travels / and whispered / More [.]” There are few poetry titles, one would think, responding to texts by one simultaneously held as Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII and venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. If More’s Utopia offered a fictional, perfect, island republic or commonwealth, Nissan’s The Utopians writes of a population set within a bubble, offering an articulation of and counterpoint to contemporary western society. How does any utopia turn in on itself, and twist its own impulses? How can any society find its way out of such dark? Held as critique and counterpoint, The Utopians occasionally write directly to More, writing out his limitations, his declarations, through lyric fragment, layering and narrative interplay, and into what More could never have imagined. Or, as Nissan writes:

What I mean is, transmission hurts. Utopia was not always an island, you wrote, it was a peninsula first. Because your new world is dripping with passage, territorial lust and imperial phantoms, as well as all that could not come into being. Thrilling call for the abolition of private property. But you are sullied by the name of one (yours), puppeting as total social structure. You are sullied by personage itself.

Sometimes it helps to think like a child. More: there is no point outside the world, there is only mouth.

Let me enter the picture. Notice me like a low and constant breeze. When it stops.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hannah Brooks-Motl

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts.

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

My first book came out in 2014. I had the sense that something else should happen then, so I did a variety of things that now seem unbelievable to me—danced it, chanted it, etc. I haven’t pursued such activities with recent books, but the experience relaxed my relation to ideas about “the work” generally. I’d say it helped me welcome contingency, accident, potential embarrassment. Otherwise, there’s a general kind of vibe that persists across the books, sort of earthy and philosophical (I hope).

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

As a reader, I came first to novels. My family took many cross-country drives when I was a kid. I read for the days it took us to get somewhere. Non-stop, fully immersed—that’s my dream. Poetry arrived in the form of my much older sister, who was a poet then (now she’s a forensic pathologist); her 90s poet life seemed impossibly glamorous. She let me hang out in bars with her and her writer friends when I was a teen.

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?

I write a lot in notebooks, accruing language and concerns. At some point the feeling mysteriously arrives that a poem should result. The poems undulate across the many days or weeks of gathering and jots. I sort of find them there, lead them out. 

4 - Where does a poem 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 wrote one book “project,” involving the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Mainly now I let reading, practice, life be my guide.

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

I like readings, sometimes very much. Sometimes a poetry reading will manifest and crystallize the happy, nervy, hopeful energy of people together, yearning to be.

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? 

One concern is with poetry’s rescue of discourse, where the poem, or the kind of thinking a poem is, can be a true statement, albeit one that we only very briefly inhabit or are allowed. Recently, I’m invested—to my surprise—in rehabilitating the old quarrel between Shelley and Wordsworth, via Mill, poems of the head vs poems of the heart, to ask: why choose? As in, why is that the choice we are asked to make again and again? There’s (always) questions of what reading is good for; in what ways does poetry do a kind of (moral) philosophizing; interest in humans, their behaviors and reasons (actual, believed), and the lives of creatures.

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?

Writers and artists and thinkers I admire tend to believe in some different or other reality, the pursuit and discovery of which language, image, aesthetic expression uniquely allow. Art is a bridge one walks on and toward—an earthy, clumsy substance and a spiritual, extravagant one. It often encodes a personal longing but it’s also social, environmental, historical, political. Who but writers and artists will honor these stubborn, modest, generous dreams?

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

I am a scholarly editor—I mean I edit monographs, edited collections, journal articles. I was an acquisitions editor for a university press full-time for years, now I do free-lance developmental editing. I have lots to say about editing and its importance, but yes, I think working with editors is essential.

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

I have a poem in my latest book that includes the line “Keep going + believe = ‘advice.’” It’s a joke but not a joke.

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

Most days I get up very early to write. People used to sleep differently—a first sleep, an interlude around 3:00 am, a second sleep. This historic interlude is where a lot of my work’s language arrives.

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

Philosophy. Biography. Walks in the woods.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cut grass, violet skies with a thunderstorm somewhere, slight farm.

13 - 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?

Working and being with animals. Listening to the anecdotes of others.

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

Iris Murdoch, Marguerite Young, Lorine Niedecker, Paul Valéry, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ernst Bloch, Paul Goodman, Wong May, Dan Bevacqua, Peter Gizzi, Emily Hunt, Sara Nicholson, Ben Estes, Alan Felsenthal, Kai Ihns, Hai-dang Phan, Patrick Morrissey.

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

Hike the AT. Live in France. Write a play with my husband and stage it in our house.

16 - 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?

I frequently wish I had been an ethologist. It’s the science of, someone has said, interviewing animals in their own language.

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

My other artistic talents were minimal. Other forms of more regular or professionally legible work leave me feeling half-alive.

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

Last great book was Unclay by TF Powys; last great film was a rewatching of The Souvenir by Joanna Hogg.

19 - What are you currently working on?

More poems and a novel about a self-taught artist in rural Illinois. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jumoke Verissimo, Circumtrauma: Poems

 

after war
a mother and her family of four
            arrive in an airport taxi: a body of feudal songs

broken people              in dirty wrappers
            a fluent suffering body

we are of same material
our               body also collects feudal songs
before and after war     our body collects feudal songs

  

we know no sleep        we collect only fear. (“1001-a / 1001”)

From award-winning Toronto-based Nigerian poet, novelist, children’s writer and critic Jumoke Verissimo, following the poetry titles I Am Memory (Lagos, Nigeria: DADA Books, 2008) and The Birth of Illusion (Nigeria: FULLPOINT, 2015), as well as the novel A Small Silence (London UK: Cassava Republic, 2019), comes her first full-length Canadian title, Circumtrauma: Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book-length poem that captures and articulates the details and ripples of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970). Histories such as these have rippling effects throughout a population across years, and history forgotten, after all, dooms to repeat. As Verissimo writes as part of her preface to the collection: “I began researching the Nigeria-Biafra War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War) because I wanted answers on why the conflict has stayed on the bodies of even the unborn. How does one capture the unacknowledged edged pain that resonates across generations and may even inform the lens from which social relations are formed?”

There are structural echoes of Verissimo’s accumulated lyric articulating witness comparable to Kingston, Ontario-based poet and critic Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s full-length debut 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], a collection of one hundred poems through one hundred days of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, or even, to a lesser degree, the full-length poetry collection articulations of history and the ripples of trauma through working archival materials of further recent titles such as Montreal poet, editor and translator Darby Minott Bradford’s full-length debut, Dream of No One but Myself (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] or Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ full-length poetry debut, Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Through Verissimo, her lyrics hold together precisely because of the way she pulls them apart, focusing on individual moments, elements and parts of speech, collecting together to form a far wider and complex tapestry. The length and breadth are entirely held though such deep attention and precision. “a rickety train pulled up / heads disappeared,” she writes, early on in the collection, “our brothers left home / for a godforsaken place / our brothers returned / with a gunshot in the head [.]”

Held with a short preface and hefty afterword, “METHOD NOTE, OR CIRCLING / THE WOUNDED,” the body of the collection Circumtrauma is structured as an assemblage of poem-fragments, an accumulation of short, layered poems titled via a numerical system, akin to government records that acknowledge a great and dark archival depth. Thoroughly and heavily researched, with an afterword that expands upon details within her poems, as well as a bibliography of primary texts and works consulted, Verissimo centres her storytelling across language, offering what is exactly necessary, with all that might be extraneous stripped away. As the poem “00010101-a” includes: “silence thickened our saliva / we cannot defend our children / when trouble come // uncertainty is a bomb / we do not want to die like chickens.” Or, as the opening section, “A TWEET, A TIKTOK, AND A LINGERING WAR,” of her afterword begins:

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II sparked widespread commentary, but it was a controversial tweet by a Nigerian American professor, accusing the queen of complicity in the genocide against the Igbo people during the Nigerian Civil War, that particularly caught my attention, sharply highlighting the enduring impact of that conflict. For many like me who did not witness the war, the stories from elders, fiction, and history books were how we learnt about the war. As of today, the war is no longer taught in schools, due to the exclusion of history lessons. In fact, generations younger than mine only came to actively know about the war following novels like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

There’s a lot to admire about literary work that attempts to deliberately uncover and examine such brutal history, especially for those stories buried, overlooked or simply forgotten (I was first made aware of Ottawa’s “Mad Bomber of Parliament” in 1966, for example, somewhere in the 1990s, thanks to a poem by Judith Fitzgerald, from her 1977 Coach House Press poetry title lacerating heartwood). The stories might fade, but the body remembers, even across generations. Facts and stories matter, and to lose the stories of such brutality is to render an entirely different violence. “we were all brothers / massacred / albeit      on a very small scale,” Verissimo writes, as part of “10111110-b,”  “we are all memory’s children / superior in our pain [.]” Circumtrauma swirls a lyric notation of accumulated moments, offering archival moments across and through a devastation that continues, rippling across generations. Or, as she writes early on in the collection: “our body is a people:           before and after [.]”