Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2026: Julia Drescher, Sarah Anne Wallen + Michael Goodfellow,

Yesterday was a snow day over this way. Were you somewhere warm and safe, hopefully reading a copy of my Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025)? I mean, this is the right time for such. 

We’re kicking off our VERSeFest spring season (leading up to our festival in March) with our Volunteer Recruitment and Appreciation event very soon! Sunday, February 1, 3-5pm at Cooper’s Creative Kitchen (main floor of the Embassy Ottawa hotel at Cooper and Cartier, one block east of Elgin), featuring performances by Myriam Legault-Beauregard, Daniel Groleau Landry, Margo LaPierre and natalie hanna. Might we see you?

Garner NC: I’m always pleased to see new work by Julia Drescher, and her latest is the small chapbook-sequence Notes on Film (Further Other Book Works, 2025). I’ve published three chapbooks by her to-date through above/ground press, and I’m always eager to see more. I’m admittedly surprised she only has one full-length collection to date—Open Epic (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]—given how much work she seems to have worth compiling (although this is a frustration I have with a few other poets as well, including Jessica Smith and Amish Trivedi—these writers are clearly brilliant, why aren’t they getting published more often?). I’m intrigued by Drescher’s endlessly long lines, the way she continues a thought-line, layering movement upon movement. There’s a flow akin to a meandering across this essay-stretch of lyric, writing the ebbs and flows of notes on film and whatever else might slip into her view. “everyone’s middle of wood wound tight around a whistle / & eviction notices.” she writes, mid-way through the sequence. “there’s the edge of something & then there’s water / I feel in you in, you said, like atmospheric variations then / it’s the hardest way, how people enter a room.”

at noon, someone is standing, at noon wide open. there is a feral friend & daunting
wood—flocks of leaves, a copse of birds & unbearable lighting, there is whimsy
& then there is harm. the film gets started after the crowd departs, after the figs & the contact improv,
the ghosts of fallen grasses, drowning.
you said, country is monstrous art is merciless, thus
there’s an ear to do, imperfect. we build boats of rocks & then we burn them. you are walking in a film
& then you are eaten. I said, this is a test, a squandered passage & you said not knowing
where any thing is, we move from building
to building & I said what

Brooklyn NY: I’m intrigued by what appears to be the chapbook debut by Brooklyn poet and bookseller Sarah Anne Wallen, the chapbook Same Day (ugly duckling presse, 2025). Assembled as short poems and extended stretches of lyric, many of which feel variations upon the New York School aesthetic of first-person movement—the poem “DAYS OF THE WEEK,” for example, is dedicated “for Lewis Warsh,” and includes:

Monday the sun comes in hot through the window
Tuesday the heat is off and I can see my breath inside
Wednesday my toes never warm up
Thursday the line for the grocery store goes out the door
          and around the block
Friday I leave work feeling nothing at all
Saturday I think about love letters
Sunday I write a poem about wanting to write a love letter
Monday I do not write

There’s such propulsion to these lines. As the extended sequence “ISSUE OF PULP” begins: “today I feel / like the clouds / deflated / last night / I made / a phone call / dreamed / I had sex / in a laundromat / against the / dryers / warm / when I cry / I go out / on the balcony / press the back / of my hand / against / my forehead / there are other / people / down there / it’s easy / to feel / lonely […]” These poems are smart, wry and observational, sharp and quietly witty. The use of different rhythms is interesting across these pieces, from the staggered layering of lines to the extended stretch, one step against another, offering declaration and observation twirled and parried in delightful patterns. I think I need to see further poems by Sarah Anne Wallen.

WHY 

did the girl
fall off the swing? 

because
she was born 

 

when you’re a dog
your mouth
is your hand 

today in therapy
I talked about birds

Kentville/Lunenburg County NS: One of the final titles by the recently-outgoing iteration of Gaspereau Press (currently in flux as the new publisher sets himself up) is Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow’s chapbook Cleft (Gaspereau Press, 2025), a title that follows his full-length collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Set as a curious sequence of short bursts, the poem holds as kind of call-and-response between two works, interwoven, with one poem furthering on each left page, and the other poem furthering on the right. As the note that opens the collection offers: “The collection contains two interwoven poems. The poem ‘Snakemouth Orchid’ first appeared in Literary Review of Canada (July, 2022) and will also appear in Cape Cod to Nova Scotia: Art, Ecology, Poetry of the Gulf of Maine (Hachette, 2027).” And yet, why offer the title for one but not the other? Presumably “Cleft” sits as an umbrella-title, providing name to the combination between these two pieces, and not, say, an extension composed around the poem “Snakemouth Orchid.” If these are two poems, composed (seemingly) independently of each other, and interwoven here for the sake of a new, third piece, why not include? As the first page reads:

mallow, flower of borders
and western light, where
breeze caught the house’s corners
moonflower, his hands
against your other night, hard
windows double paned
the sky was river bottom, curved
where silt had gathered
wind, none of this could be stopped

Goodfellow’s work is known for a lyric attention to landscape, to his natural environment, crafting sharp first-person meditations around the understanding that humans are part of, and not separate from, the natural world, and these pieces, this piece, continues that exploration. It is interesting to see him working to shift the context between these two poems, interplaying the narrative, the lyric, and the italicized sections, presumably all part of the same “other” poem, offer themselves as curious asides to the main (so called) unitalicized narrative line. Less, almost, a call-and-response, perhaps, than the italicized lines as asides. Either way, the experiment is an interesting one. As the second page reads:

orchid, sky propped,
snakemouthed, July bright 

and star dark
it penciled the sky

 

Leslie Scalapino w Michael Cross: Last Interview & “Poetics”

Cross: Let’s start with your first full-length trade edition, Considering how exaggerated music is (a book that collects many of your early chapbooks). You claim, in Autobiography, that “It was the first time [you were] writing.” In what ways is this writing different from other experiments you were involved with at the time—for instance, your chapbook O and Other Poems—and can you elaborate on your claim that this work is “a light extremity?” [20 June 2007]

Scalapino: I regarded myself as writing ‘for the first time’ with “hmmmm,” because I had the sense of that work being unlike the other poets I’d read, of being my own; whereas O and Other Poems, my very first poems, were similar, as I discovered while in the midst of writing them, to Frances Ponge, a discovery which cut short that writing and prevented me from beginning anything else for a year. The poems in O were as if doing the inside of objects, passionate elucidation of objects, somewhat similar to Ponge (at least that was my intention recognizing the similarity when I read him).

As for why I described “hmmmm” as a “light extremity”: emerging from a violent conjunction of circumstances, I was in a state of shock and “hmmmm” arose from being in that state and waking up in that state. The subject matter of “hmmmm” was not the source, was after what I’m describing as a violent conjunction of circumstances, the sense of the individual’s (my) private context and a violent outside, public context (in that case the Vietnam War) entering or being the same space. Perhaps the vernacular expression “blown away” is similar to “light extremity” and realistic conveying having lost or no longer having your self. Having been dismantled, no longer there, there’s a sense of being curiously free, so even painful circumstances personal-social happening to or in front of oneself (not war) seem very funny. This is not unlike the theme of sensation of objects (as in O and Other Poems) but more wildly felt.

The late American poet Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010) is a name I’ve known for some time as a writer well-respected, well-read and well-loved, and one I know I myself haven’t read nearly enough work by, so I was pleased to recently receive a copy of the small book Leslie Scalapino w Michael Cross: Last Interview & “Poetics” (Further Other Book Works, 2019). The interview, which takes up the bulk of the small book, was conducted occasionally over email from 2007 to 2010, just up to Scalapino’s death; an interview that moved in and out of attention as other matters emerged. As Cross writes to open his introduction:

I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets.

An experimental writer that blurred the distinctions between poetry and prose, Scalapino was the author of, according to an online bio, the author or editor of “thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays, including a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books, 2010); It's go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 (University of California Press at Berkeley, 2008); Day Ocean State of Stars' Night (Green Integer, 2007); Zither and Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); It's Go In/ Quiet illumined Grass/ Lands (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002); a collaboration with the artist Marina Adams, The Tango (Granary Books, 2001); ORCHID JETSUM (Tuumba, 2001); and SIGHT (Edge Books, 1999), a collaboration with the poet Lyn Hejinian. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.” Even as it moves through time, pausing for weeks and even months at a time, Cross’ interview attempts the range and breadth of Scalapino’s creative work, a work clearly dear to his attention.

The interview is thick, and her responses can often go on for pages, moving through theory, language and influence, and Scalapino is clearly game to engage with such an open-structure as a multiple-year interview. As she responds: “You give a multitude of possibilities—I like all of them to be in operation at once. Even if they are conflicting they are questions in the mind and the response of the reader, not needing to cancel each other but jostling.” As well, almost included as “bonus material” at the back are two essays on poetics by Scalapino, adding to the heft of this small but enlightening and, dare I say, essential collection.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Aditi Machado

Aditi Machado is an Indian poet who lives in the United States. Her first book of poems, Some Beheadings, appeared from Nightboat Books in 2017. She is also the translator of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action Books, 2016) and author of the chapbooks Route: Marienbad (Further Other Book Works, 2016) and The Robing of the Bride (Dzanc Books, 2013), as well as texts appearing in Western Humanities Review, Jacket2, Volt, and The Capilano Review, among other journals. She edits poetry in translation for Asymptote.

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 chapbook was called The Robing of the Bride. It won The Collagist Chapbook Contest in 2012 and was published by Dzanc in 2013. At the time, the great change in my life was to have this object in the world that I had made but which was also made by others, physically. It was a gift. But now that you ask this question, I realize also that that was my first long poem—or one that got into the world somehow. I wrote the early drafts for a class called Poetry and History taught by Carl Phillips and it forced me to engage certain materials and ideas for a prolonged period of time, so that the form of the poem was also prolonged. And though I think I write differently now (less narrative, more meditation) I’m still primarily writing long poems. And they keep getting longer.

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

When I was a child I wrote all sorts of things. When I was sixteen I wrote a novel which I was certain would rock the very foundations of “literary fiction.” What happened actually was that I got something out of myself that was necessary to get out, so that I could look at it and realize I had no real affinity for narrative or personality. Toward the end of high school and through college I mostly wrote poems on/for the internet and realized that’s what I wanted to do.

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 don’t write often. I used to. But in the past two or three years I’ve slowed down considerably. Typically, I’ll write a few lines or brief stanzas almost every day for several weeks; then I’ll rewrite that material several times, with long breaks between successive drafts. But I do occasionally get certain sections “right” the first time.

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?

The current manuscript I’m working on, tentatively called Emporium, I knew would be a book even as I wrote the first poem. Each poem is fairly long, because an image or line or word gets poured over, re-examined, and transformed over the course of several pages. So I suppose it begins with an image, line, or word. But words, especially. I learned some Old English and Latin recently, which makes me ever more curious about the life of certain words. I told some of my students, thereby shocking them, that I was obsessed with the word “cunt.” But it wasn’t meant to be shocking. The OED entry for “cunt” is fascinating. Among other things, in medieval times, a particular flower was called “cuntehoare” and, at another point in time, the word “quaint” was used as a variant of “cunt.” It remains to be seen whether I’ll work this into a poem …

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

I love reading 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?

In my first book, Some Beheadings, I think a lot about thinking. I’d been reading Etel Adnan and Geoffrey Hill who are both very philosophical writers whose intellect is incredibly, though differently, sensuous. So I got caught up in this question of what it would it mean to feel your own thoughts and whether those feelings change in relation to different landscapes (it turns out they do). Right now I’m writing more about haptic encounters, especially in marketplaces. And I’m wondering what it does to us to collapse distance as against seeing across distance. The wondering seeps into my non-writing life (if not the other way round), so when I’m shopping, I’ll think about the difference between paying with cash (and how you pay with cash—do you place it on the counter or into the cashier’s hands and how long you take to count your money) and paying with virtual money.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

In some ways I think writing is the culture, if one thinks of writing as a kind of making-of-the-world that’s happening all the time, even in speech. It’s just that the culture doesn’t recognize this about itself. I also keep noticing that ideas have been alive in language even before they have put forth as ideas. So maybe all writing is speculative, even when it’s looking at the past, and the role of writers is to speculate and to be always avant, without even knowing it? I mean, let’s be bold.

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

I can’t think of a single bad experience I’ve had with an editor—maybe I’ve been lucky? I’ve certainly been lucky working with Nightboat, Action, and Further Other Book Works. It’s like having an incredible and detail-oriented conversation about language. I would say good editing is an art and, as art, is essential.

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

Maybe something like: practice kindness.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Translation is a salve. You get to make all of these intricate decisions at the level of word, syntax, and sound (and, well, more), but you don’t experience the psychosis of the supposed “starting from scratch” that writing your own poems precipitates. Or maybe it’s a different type (pleasanter?) of psychosis. And of course, I don’t really see translating and writing as oppositional moves. This is to say, I’ll often work on translation and my-own-poetry projects simultaneously and sometimes also translate for the sake (=fun) of it.

Critical prose is another matter. I hate most of it and hate writing it. I do love essays and nonfiction, particularly when they’re, at heart, poetic: as in, they make something, or enact discovery or thought in some way. A small amount of critical prose does this and I don’t have a good sense of my own capacities here. The few essays I’ve written that I go back to are about poets I love, so it’s a way of reading them ever more deeply.

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?

It depends on what other work (adjuncting, etc.) I have to do, but I’ve learned to stop feeling ashamed that I don’t have a set routine. I’m answering this question in December, when I’m off-term, so these days, I’ve been writing an hour or so in the morning and I try to do some translating in the evening. It’s lovely.

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

Books, movies, walks.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Petrichor. Also, there’s a particular kind of soft, humid breeze on a temperate day that is very precisely Bangalore (where I’m from), which I very occasionally experience in the United States.

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?

Maybe not nature exactly, but landscape, yes. I’ve written a few site-specific texts and felt very deeply the thinking I was doing in those places (dense, extremely biodiverse, tropical jungle), and felt it shaped by what was around me. And cinema. I love a lot of French and Russian cinema, and almost everything by David Cronenberg and Todd Haynes. I like movies that are incredibly spare (Robert Bresson) or terribly excessive (Paul Verhoeven)—they seem to operate like poems, with multiple systems of meaning not reducible to elements of narration.

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

Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Everything by Etel Adnan, Lisa Robertson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. A. K. Ramanujan. Arun Kolatkar. Beckett’s Trilogy. J. G. Ballard’s Crash. Rosmarie Waldrop’s incredible prose poems, her translations of Edmond Jabès, and everything about her, really. George Steiner’s After Babel. Frantz Fanon. Walter Benjamin. Beowulf. Ray Ragosta’s A Motive for Disappearance. George Oppen. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Marguerite Duras. Beverly Dahlen. Michael Donhauser’s Of Things (trans. Andrew Joron and Nick Hoff). Inger Christensen’s it (trans. Susanna Neid). And editing poetry in translation for Asymptote.

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

Travel dangerously.

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?

Fine-dining chef. (Would attempt; not inevitable).

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

I don’t think I was good at anything else, really.

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

Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. David Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A book of poems tentatively titled Emporium. A translation project that isn’t official yet, so I won’t name it. Various syllabi.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with José Felipe Alvergue

José Felipe Alvergue is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017). A graduate of both the Buffalo Poetics and Calarts Writing Programs, he teaches and lives in Wisconsin.

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

I suppose that depends on what I consider my first book. I’ve moved recently and had to take stock of old things I might throw out and came across some very old projects. One in particular reminded me of a chapbook I made back in the early 2000s. I’d taken a video camera and walked down a particularly busy street in my hometown, San Ysidro. I remember taking the footage and drawing portraits of faces and then writing short prose/poetry pieces. Really just descriptive passages of place and person. If that were my first book I’d think that it changed me by revealing new ways of envisioning a politics. I’d been a political theory major in undergrad and I’d planned on becoming involved with both law and later politics, but writing offered me something that a life in politics wouldn’t have, which is a sort of immediate availability to the symbols through which politics becomes ‘the political’ identity of a group, nation, community, etc. I think I’ve been tracking this throughout. Even with my last book before precis (gist : rift : drift : bloom). On the surface it’s described as a book on the last wild passenger pigeon, but it’s also about gun law, space, and the religio-moral impressions left behind by the various cultures that have settled the Midwest, and their etymologies. I’d say precis feels different in the stability of readership that comes with the publisher. Omnidawn is an amazing press and they work very hard to promote both their authors, but more importantly poetry. And poetry as a plural and diverse poetics at a moment when commodification puts a lot of pressure on various art forms to accommodate to the consumer. I feel like I’m part of a larger community than I’ve ever really been a member of before.

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

I remember two impactful events. First, reading Leaves of Grass in a political theory course taught by Tracy Strong––I remember reading it at Monument Park, which is a park at the border wall where it recedes into the ocean (where I did most of my reading for school while in college). And second, I remember becoming acquainted with the Taco Shop Poets in San Diego and getting involved in local projects, meeting artists and poets. Even then, however, I understood poetry to be about story telling, even if in a performatic, or non-fictive disclosure. In fact before writing mostly poetry I’d been writing sort of macabre short stories all taking place at the border––both as an actual geography and imagined space. So it’s not so much that I don’t see genre. I do and I think genre is important in many ways, but the boundaries are more porous than we, culturally, recognize. In short, I came to poetry later, but even while writing short fiction, I was I think already writing poetry throughout the syntax and movement of the pieces. I realize now that my MFA advisor, a novelist (Steve Erickson) might’ve been telling me all along to try poetry more concertedly.

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 wouldn’t be able to say one way or another as all of my projects have had different lifespans. I start with research and sometimes this takes a long time, sometimes it takes less time. Then the writing. After, sometimes during, also the arranging. I don’t writ- discrete poems. I work on sustained projects that are from the beginning a ‘whole’ so I think the most time-consuming aspect of how I work is the arranging––the making it all into a book so to speak.

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?

Definitely the latter.

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

For a short period I became really invested in performance art. It was a way of interrogating terms I was also writing about critically, like ‘the body’ or ‘space’, ‘becoming’, etc. So a lot of my work involved my body and temporality rather directly. My readings now continue to think about the relationships between language and embodiment I suppose, and they have involved different interruptions to sonoricity, space, breath. I’d say that I enjoy doing only a few readings because they take a lot from me and each one is very specific. I read differently each time. I basically re-compose or re-arrange the work so that I truly feel like I’m performing the initial response of the poetry each and every time.

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 have many. I try not to distinguish between scholarship and poetics, though obviously there are many important distinctions. But my questions pertaining to voice, place, and personhood are always coming from the same place of my experiences with politics, diaspora, alienation, and force.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writing is essential now. Communication is essential and relevant. The problem I think is that we don’t tend to value communication in the moment––as a wide community––yet later we orient ourselves to lasting words and sometimes even make national holidays commemorating their events. I hope that contemporary communicators can change this and we should be open to how communicators use media, for instance, to interrupt the temporality within which intimacy becomes public. Some problems that I see, especially in academia, is a distance between thinking and the community. But this movement towards the public humanities offers an opportunity to re-work the affective binds between what takes place in the classroom and what takes place outside the classroom. We need to “feel (for) each other” as Fred Moten and Stephano Harney write in The Undercommons, and by this I mean to both invest in the reality of the theoretical discourses we create, while permitting ‘the real’ world to trust in the intellectual labor of clarifying authentic histories from the fabricated narratives meant to gloss over historical reality.

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

I think it’s great because they see or hear what I miss. And they’re invested in aspects of the poetic that as a writer I can sometimes miss while being so focused on certain parts of the project. Gillian Hamel was my hero at Omnidawn in this regard.

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

I don’t know about best­­­––I think anything that inspires work is good. Though I think the worst advice I often hear poets give creative writing students is that poetry isn’t about ideas. It’s always about ideas. Even if this is not what we mean when we say it to students, we shouldn’t really say it so carelessly in that it’s utterly not true.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between text and performance? What do you see as the appeal?

See 5. As for appeal I don’t know. It’s a fairly old tradition I think and at many points in literary history readings have signaled the emergence of Community. I think a cool trend that’s come back are house readings. David Hadbawnik re-invigorated this practice in Buffalo while he was there, and Jordan Dunn and Andy Gricevich run a series in Madison called Oscar Presents. I think the appeal of house readings is more authentic for me than bookstore readings, or things of that nature. Then there’s the collaborative events Susan Howe and David Grubbs have been doing, or Cecilia Vicuña readings that disrupt what readings are or have been in many ways. Different readings have different appeals I guess is what I’m saying. What I don’t like are readings that are just sort of impersonal, industry-necessary readings. I think also the kind of stuff Douglas Kearney has been doing for a while, which might explain his turn to experimental opera now, has also pushed out a new space for performance/text to explore each other.

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?

My day begins with changing diapers, making breakfast, dancing, and singing songs to my child. My routine now is about letting go. Treating time in a less compartmentalized fashion and being present where I am needed by someone else for however long that takes. I’ve been working on a project from my research on casta paintings and casta in general throughout Latin America, and it started before the birth of my son, and from me thinking about his being biracial in America today. So my being present for him I think is an extension of the thinking I was doing in his prenatal absence (though he’s always been present as an extension of his mother’s body). My present as unconditional love is now the impossibility of writing from the same or towards the same unconditionability of love despite the over-conditioning obligation of position, race, body, labor, colonialism, etc. While I haven’t written as much as I’d like to have written, I’ve felt the project in a way that I hadn’t realized I should be during the time when I was mostly writing.

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

Netflix.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Contaminated water. Seriously. Rotten beach smell, and onion fields.

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?

Always the natural world. But in terms of books, Jean Toomer’s Cane and Theresa Cha’s Dictée are books I teach and think about often. I listen to a lot of music, and a lot of different genres and styles at different stages of writing––reading, composing, revising, etc. From son jarocho to EDM, Argentinian and Mexican punk/ska core to Kendrick Lamar, musique concrete, opera, Richard Skelton, post-rock, and so on. Different tempos are conducive to different moments of thought I think.

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

See above I suppose.

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

Write.

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?

I like observing so maybe something observational/conjectural, like a sort of animal biology (though I don’t like extreme temperatures so it would have to be of a rather uninteresting species).

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

An urgency to draw attention to, to understand for myself, to regain myself from capitalistic and nationalistic obligations to give away my self.

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

A tie between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on something that explores the racialized/sexualized body, land, and the emergence of civil laws pertaining to the governance of boundaries between them I’m calling casta for now. It started from looking into and teaching casta paintings in my classes, and from a collection of ekphrastic poems I had lying around related to baroque paintings I’ve had the opportunity to stand in front of throughout the years.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;