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;

Hannah Brooks-Motl, Ultraviolet of the Genuine

 

POVERTY MOUNTAIN

a reference qua the epics
an evening
“coming out of my wormhole”
into the hollow
what’s good for the scurfpea
to be like the soul
crisply transpicuous

Not long ago, I discovered, thanks to the chapbook Poem Staple Collage / for Jonathan Rajewski / & Other Poem (Chicago IL: The Year, 2024) [see my review of such here], the incredible work of western Massachusetts poet HannahBrooks-Motl. Her fourth full-length title, and the first of her full-lengths I’ve seen, following The New Years (Rescue Press, 2014), M (The Song Cave, 2015) and Earth (The Song Cave, 2019), is Ultraviolet of the Genuine (The Song Cave, 2025), a book self-described as “an expansive record of time and thought, weaving together philosophy, science, theology, dreams, grief, literary theory, criticism, history, and ideas of utopia—becoming a book that continuously surprises and is nearly impossible to categorize.” “If you think words are made of poems,” she writes, as part of the extended fragment-sequence poem “POET DILEMMA,” “I mean poems made of words / As we’re taught // I know plenty of words / Though I come from the provinces / Where the earth is filled with violence [.]” There’s something remarkable in the swoop and the rush of Brooks-Motl’s lyrics, a simultaneous sense of compression and expansion, one that allows less a narrative trajectory than a sequence of thought-clusters that interconnect across every other moment and cluster across such wider expanse. “In Exeter, England one June or July,” she writes, to open the poem “EXETER,” “we slept on the floor / Rhetorically, sentimentally—I bring / this up— / not to interpret roses or be watched / by the deer on Pulpit Hill Rd. / Yes it is strange / In everyone there is a certain no one / The garden, the blankets     the poem / should be a world, a real world / Savanging the carved stone / Ymaginator / and the demi-angels now / just shapeless blobs [.]”

Across twenty-five poems, some short and some extended, Brooks-Motl clearly delights in extended meditation and play; she delights in structure, delights in how poems get built and are built, across meaning and rhythm and purpose, across avenues of articulated exploration. The strength of her poems emerge through the blend of collision and clarity, set precisely in that foundation of poems built through the building blocks of words, achieving far more than a straight line ever could. With each poem, it feels as though Brooks-Motl is slowly building something incredibly detailed and impossibly large. All of it, as she said, built out of words. “Nothing was plain or open,” begins the poem “MUTTS OF AQUINAS,” “no one / was invited to explain            Chained up all day / you might wonder:       To whom does the good accrue?”

Ongoing notes: early June, 2025: Elizabeth Marie Young + Hannah Brooks-Motl,

We will see you at the ottawa small press book fair this month, yes? June 21, at the Tom Brown Arena; and the pre-fair the night prior, at Anina’s Café? You know you want to. The best of the small press in Ottawa since 1994. And don’t forget to sign up (free!) for the above/ground press substack! There’s even some further big interviews coming up on there over the next few weeks with authors such as Jason Christie, Michael Sikkema, Monty Reid, Micah Ballard and Lydia Unsworth; that’s pretty cool, yes?

Boston MA: The latest from Boston-based poet Elizabeth Marie Young, a poet I hadn’t heard of prior to this, is the chapbook-length poem 349 THINGS I DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT RIGHT NOW (2024), the sixth chapbook by American chapbook publisher clones go home. This poem is exactly what the title suggests, an accumulation set as stanzas, one after another, offering a propulsion of item after item that reads as delightfully surreal. As she writes: “The Plastic Ono Band. Whether a wolf with / polypropylene teeth will drag my dad into the River of / Lethargy. The Backside Rock ‘n’ Roll. What it’s like to be / on fire.” Wonderfully inventive and playful, the poem is expansive, endlessly extensive and ongoing, and after a while, begins to read as reasoning, as mantra; as a listing of ongoing complaints and as, perhaps, a way to centre the mind, the spirit, amid all the chaos. “This is just a feeling,” she writes, a repetitive quartet across a single page, “It does not control me.”

Grandma energy. Whoever invented sin. Whoever
invented sinkholes. The unsettling glow of the
Bachquellengraben River. Open casket burials.
Indoctrination camps. Resetting interest rates to avoid
financial meltdown. Whoever invented spurs. Whoever
invented your comfort animal’s soft, synthetic fur.
Whoever invented Dolly Parton. Hacking the central
Bank of Japan. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark’s
sexual orientation.

Chicago IL: From Hannah Brooks-Motl, another poet I hadn’t been aware of prior, comes Poem Staple Collage / for Jonathan Rajewski / & Other Poem (Chicago IL: The Year, 2024), the bulk of which, according to the colophon, originally “appeared as part of a text/image collaboration originally hosted by Nina Johnson gallery as part of ‘Recreational Collage,’ a 2023 exhibition of works by Jonathan Rajewski, some of which appear here,” produced in a lovely and graceful (with letterpress covers) edition of two hundred copies. I am curious about the nature of this particular collaboration, if it a proper back-and-forth between the poet and the artist, or if more of a response project, with the poet responding to particular artworks. These poems are extraordinarily expansive, slow and meditative, composing an ongoing line that suggests itself far longer than this particular collection might hold. “The artist works at a simple machine,” Brooks-Motl writes, offering bits of text interspersed with full-colour artworks by Rajewski, “It uses pressure from which flows an arrangement of heavens wrapping around and carrying on—a hand or arm, a foot, a knee— // Pistachios and marigolds on a background of cardboard // When you look at the staple it’s catholic and scattered. An array meaning the town you appeared in with obscure talents at life [.]”

From GS we know that repetition is not just repeating since differences of emphasis always exist

There is a granular non-repetitive emphatic and continuously present view of things that liberates you from story and regret

Time in its plastic wrap and denim, stapling dried blood and dried leaves

Failure which loves holey socks and rags, walnut or rocks

Affects that appear over and over are bother, nervousness, ease

There is a velvety repetitive ambiguous and intermittent prospect—I write in a rush and then I select

The form is choosing, in order to keep choice open

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Caryl Pagel on Rescue Press

Mission: Rescue Press is a library of chaotic and investigative work. We are interested in stories, essays, experiments, poetry, art, and anything else that transforms us.

Caryl Pagel is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Twice Told (H_NG M_N Books, 2014) and Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). She is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press, a poetry editor at jubilat, and the Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She teaches at CSU and in the NEOMFA Program in Eastern Ohio.

1 – When did Rescue Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Rescue Press was born in the winter of 2009. Danny Khalastchi (the co-publisher and co-editor of Rescue) and myself decided that we would like to form an institution—a business!, a mission!, a way of life!—around Marc Rahe’s astonishing first book of poetry, The Smaller Half. That was the start, after which we became a multi-genre, multi-media, whimsical, serious, strange, and curious train of literature. We publish a wide variety of collections: those clearly steeped in traditional forms and influences; those that are elastic and experiential in nature; those that are complex and imaginative, robust and fragile, troublesome, hilarious, and surprising. Our goals haven’t shifted much because our goal was to shift and we’re shifting. We’ve learned that running a press is a lot of work and always worth it with authors as brave and brilliant as ours. We’re a family band.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

Art school, chapbooks, travel, the Dewey Decimal system.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

It’s our responsibility to read well, listen, respond, pay attention, ask questions, and shepherd what we recognize as important literature through the process of editing, design, production, promotion, and ultimately a more expansive cultural conversation. Small presses can offer things that sometimes large publishing houses can’t, or don’t, or won’t, such as a commitment to editing with the author’s priorities and aesthetics in mind, collaboration on design and artwork, and an intimate community of other writers to support and share one’s vision.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

Our aesthetics are fairly broad and rangy; part of Rescue’s mission is to approach each book on its own terms and join forces with the author to create an exciting piece of writing and stunning art object (for example, check out Hannah Brooks-Motl’s The New Years) as well as market the work in a way that is faithful to the form, content, mood, and strengths of that particular artist. We are also interested in writing that embraces neglected or innovative forms. 

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

Sweat, muscle, word of mouth, gossip, libraries, readings, independent bookstores. They all work. A few months ago I walked into a bar and saw a poet drinking a beer and reading Vinnie Wilhelm’s In the Absence of Predators. I have no idea how he came to know and love that book. Last spring Michael Silverblatt interviewed Jonathan Blum—author of the novella Last Word—for the KCRW fund drive (listen here!). What a wonderful way to collaborate in an effort to draw attention to Jonathan’s book, Rescue, and Bookworm (one of our long-time favorite literary institutions).

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

Both. The job of an editor, in my opinion, is to understand exactly that: if a certain work requires line edits, organization, word changes, rearrangement, tonal shifts, or nothing. I try to offer my authors both suggestions for revision and a reading of their work; a reflection on and response to the piece of art that they at that point have spent so much time already considering.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

We distribute through our website, independent bookstores, Amazon (sigh), and SPD. Print runs depend on the time of year, budget, genre, and predicted sales.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

Our staff is made up of myself, the managing editor (Danny Khalastchi), our creative director (Sevy Perez), two editorial assistants (Zach Isom and Alyssa Perry), and occasional interns. We recently collaborated with Kevin Gonzalez and Lauren Shapiro on our first anthology: The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and Hilary Plum and Zach Savich are the editors of our Open Prose Series (their first pick was Anne Germanacos’ astonishing novel-in-lines Tribute). They are all smart, generous, essential.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

I read all the time, all day long, everything I can find. I can’t point to a specific way that my writing or thinking has changed, but I know so much reading can’t hurt.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

Danny and I haven’t gone this route; we’re mostly sick of ourselves and we enjoy spending time with and learning from other writers’ work.

11– How do you see Rescue Press evolving?

Rescue is always evolving in response to the specific authors we bring on board, our readership, our interest in certain genres, the ideas of our staff, and our desire to read differently. I’d like to continue to publish work that is thoughtfully bizarre.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

I’m still feeling especially proud of our anthology, The New Census, because it was such a time-consuming and massive undertaking and so many wonderful people were involved in making it happen. The 40 poets, obviously, for not only trusting us with their work, but also answering a series of informative and at times goofy “new census” questions. We have Sevy Perez to thank for his gorgeous design work and Lauren Haldeman for the amazing drawings. Kevin Gonzalez and Lauren Shapiro for their selections. Alyssa Perry and Zach Isom for editorial assistance. Dara Wier for such a considerate intro. Our frustrations are too boring to tell you about.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

1913, Action, Ahsahta, Canarium, Fence, Flood, Octopus, Omnidawn, Sarabande. To be honest, I’ve found a lot of strength in the examples of such innovative, visionary, and resourceful publishing ladies as Sandra Doller, Joyelle McSweeny, Janet Holmes, Robyn Schiff, Rebecca Wolf, Kathleen Rooney & Abby Beckel, Emily Pettit, Rusty Morrison, and Sarah Gorham, etc. These are just a few of the badass women who have built astounding literary institutions around their love of writing and editorial intelligence.

14– How does Rescue Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Rescue Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

Rescue currently operates out of Iowa City, which is a wonderful home for any writing-related endeavor. People in that town read and then talk about what they’re reading. We are forever indebted to Prairie Lights for supporting our books and hosting events. Outside of IC, I would say we aim to converse with Factory Hollow, Essay Press, Letter Machine, H_NG M_N, McSweeny’s, Featherproof, and the aforementioned presses.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

Yup; we try to sponsor or host at least a few readings for the launch of each book.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

The what?

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

We read poetry manuscripts in June of every year for our Black Box Poetry Prize and we read prose of all sorts in January as part of our Open Prose Series. We are looking for wit, wonder, humor, formal intrigue, variation, tradition, generosity, research, and intense attention.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

We just released three new collections of poetry: Bridgette Bates’ What Is Not Missing Is Light (which Timothy Donnelly calls a “a muse’s dream-votary”), Lauren Haldeman’s Calenday (check a film for the book other great artwork here), and Andy Stallings’ To The Heart of the World, one of the most mesmerizing and transformative books you’ll encounter.

12or 20 (small press) questions;