12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nathan Hoks

Nathan Hoks is a poet whose books include Nests in Air, The Narrow Circle, Reveilles and Moony Days of Being. His poetry has been awarded the National Poetry Series, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Iowa Review David Hamilton Prize. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, Tristan Tzara, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches poetry writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives in Chicago with his family.

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

Publishing my first book (Reveilles) made it possible to write my next book. It made it possible to move on from the writing I was doing in my 20s. It made space, it cleared a pathway. The recent work feels of the same mold. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. But (hopefully) better, stronger, clarified like ghee. 

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

As if I had a choice! Poetry came for me in the thick of the night. Something moved my hand. I couldn’t sleep.  

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?

It feels both fast and slow. I’m almost always writing poems. Most of them are pretty awful. The ones that become parts of books usually have little resemblance to their first drafts. I have many, many notebooks, digital and analog, through which the work is always shifting and evolving. 

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?

Sometimes a poem begins with a phrase or word that gets lodged in my head. Sometimes what happens is I start to mix and match various fragments I’ve jotted down in notebooks. I tend to write clusters of poems and then I try to figure out how they talk to each other, what kind of community they form, and revise accordingly into a book. With most of my favorite poems, I have very little recollection of how or why or wtf was going on! They all involve extended processes and other parts of myself and the cosmos that I can’t always access. 

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

Yes and yes. They are important and yet they are quite distinct from what poetry means to me as a form of solitary writing and reading. I cherish both modes. Readings are communal—they help me feel connected to other travelers, which in indirect but definitive ways is vital to writing poems. In a practical way they also give me a chance to try out new work and go back to the lab with findings. I think I dread them as much as I enjoy them, but the truth is I almost always say yes to them.

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?

How do I make language talk back? What else can a sentence do? What word combinations alter consciousness? What’s living in my basement? Who’s there? 

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 explore the verbal imagination by challenging language and exploring the consciousnesses it makes available. To invent strange or marvelous verbal constructions. To wake us up. These tasks have obvious social and cultural value. Whether or not anyone’s listening is another question. 

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

I am humbled whenever someone gives attention to my work!

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

Start small (Richard Hugo). Gardening, not architecture (Eno and Schmidt).

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?

In my practice, poetry and translation are natural extensions of each other. I approach critical prose the way I approach house work. I like to clarify ideas like I like to have a (somewhat) orderly house; but it ain’t easy.

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?

Like the academic calendar, my routines come and go and are often subject to arbitrary, incomprehensible, and invisible administrative processes and planetary alignments. 

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

Tarot cards. AP News’ oddities. Walking. The Dead Kennedys. The Cure. Meditation. Yoga. Brian Eno & Michael Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cinnamon. Pancakes. Woodburning stove. Windex. Dog hair. Chips Ahoy dipped in milk. Bergamot. Coffee (Metropolis’s light roast, Schweik’s blend).

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?

All of the above. And donuts. But more in a “vibe” kinda way. Moss, for example, influences my process. I aim for airborne spores in going from draft to draft. I spend a lot of time with visual art and music. For my work, the most direct influence is always other poetry.

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

Some things I often come back to include: Wuthering Heights, Blake, Bataille, Ashbery, Murakami, 1000 plateaus, Koch, Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, Kim Hyesoon, Bly’s Leaping Poetry, Tzara’s manifestos, Basho, Issa, James Tate, Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Homer, Hopkins, Keats, Lorca’s Poet in NY, Whitman, Dostoyevsky, the Tao Te Ching. 

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

I would like to get my kids through college.

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?

The answer to both questions is televangelist. 

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

Some weird combination of ego and compulsion. 

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

The Brothers Karamazov. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have a collaborative project with the poet Joseph Bienvenu in the works. Spitball Ballet, the first of a 3 volume set called Bad Arguments for Living, is now out! I also have a manuscript called Astronomic Gargle. Like the cosmos, some days I think it’s finished. Other days it looks like total chaos.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Carrie Olivia Adams, The Book of Marys and Glaciers

 

When she comes to me, I am always alone. A woman alone is extremely herself. A woman alone leaves excess in her wake, every portion too big, in the company of others, she takes up no space, but alone, she is the space. Alone, she watches the dogs of the city, off-leash. She runs towards a foreign language. No longer surrounded by men, she is not mother, not sister, not womb. Not prayers to the fruit of. She is just a woman in blue with a tall glass of wine in a walled city, envying its pigeons. (“The Book of Marys and Glaciers”)

I’m very pleased to see the appearance of a fifth full-length poetry collection by Chicago poet, editor and publicist Carrie Olivia Adams, The Book of Marys and Glaciers (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), a title that follows Intervening Absence (Ahsahta Press 2009) [see my review of such here], Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and DVD, Ahsahta 2013) [see my review of such here], Operating Theater (Buffalo NY: Noctuary Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Be the thing of memory (Flagstaff AZ/Las Vegas NV: Tolsun Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed as a trio of extended sequences—“Blockchain,” “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” and “Dust Cover”—The Book of Marys and Glaciers furthers Adams’ lyric explorations through the long thought, the long sentence; stretching a thread through a subject woven and interwoven across a carefully-sustained trajectory. She writes a landscape of depiction, working medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary and of deserts, glaciers. She writes an ecopoetic traversing temporal and geographic space, seeking the bones of what remains, gets stripped away and what is willfully abandoned. She writes on what gets left behind, after all else is taken. As part “IX.” of the title sequence begins: “We’re breathing in the distance, the fires of history. Hell comes to earth and makes itself so at home some days. A pregnant Mary in the desert, throat choked with thirst and fear. Alone and never so alone. The celestial surveillance; a being bound by her own umbilical cord. What’s the difference between a tether and leash?”

Adams is very good at the extended, meditative thread, held through accumulation, one careful and considered moment followed by a further moment. “I wanted to write about Mary,” she writes, as part of the title sequence, “but then I became distracted by the glaciers. The things that glaciers do.” Blending attentions and concerns across detailed, propulsive passages, Adams’ lyric is attentive to not only thought but movement. As with other of her works, there’s a sense of the monologue, the gesture, that one might hear each of these three sequences performed in full on stage, providing a different sense of cadence. The intimacy of her lines are somehow broadened through the possibility of such a performative approach. “I keep running myself disappearance.” she writes, early in the opening sequence. “A pound and a pound. Isn’t this how to lose weight? Is regret still as heavy?”

In the cave, you know your own lies, the stars up your sleeve. A universe made from your own dust. On the floorboards, in the eaves. Even now, I make a cave with my knees. Meanwhile, I grow old in pencil shavings. The chalk of a week of eat & repeat. A season of burial, low tide, replete. My body washed up on a sheet. There was no sleep, then only sleep. Remember sadness immovable. Remember my palm a foreign thing.

                                    What said the strangers when we could not read their lips? (“Dust Cover”)

There are echoes one might compare to Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s marybones (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], as Adams works through her extended articulations around depictions and expectations around women, dipping into and through medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary, writing her own extended prose movements through research and lyric passage, and the prose poem sequence. As she writes to open poem “XI.” of the title sequence:

I don’t want to tell anyone all about me. Mary keeps her silences. Even if no one else does.

 

George Bowering, Pearl

  

Years

He was the boy
watching his mother
paring a big apple at the kitchen sink,
trying to release the peel
in one piece. 

A year or two later, whatever
she was doing at the kitchen sink
window, she tried to
retain her cigarette ash
in one cigarette length. 

When he was already
an old man,
he received the news
that she was still alive
at one hundred years.

There’s a mournful touch to Vancouver poet George Bowering’s latest poetry title, Pearl (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), a collection self-described as an assemblage of “last poems,” named for his late mother, who died in 2016, nearly three months after her one hundredth birthday. In her “Postscript” to the collection, Bowering’s wife Jean Baird describes the process of assisting George write and edit the poems and assemble the collection, as his eyesight diminished, writing that “[…] nothing prepared me for bearing witness to George slowly losing his sight and the many consequences of it.” What happens when a writer, especially one so prolific for so long, loses the ability to see, to write, to read? She writes, a bit further on: “Some of the poems in this collection were written when George had sight to use his computer. When that was no longer possible, he wrote poems long hand and very large, and I would type them up. I was now the one using a magnifying glass to try to decipher the scrawl.”

Regular readers might already be aware that Bowering’s work has been a touchstone of mine for some time, a poet I latched onto during my twenties and learned much from, and a handful of titles I’ve reviewed over the past few years include Good Morning Poems: A start to the day from famous English-language poets (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Soft Zipper (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], Taking Measures: Selected Serial Poems by George Bowering, edited by Stephen Collis (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] and MyDarling Nellie Grey (Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here].

“It’s a bushy book,” Bowering writes, as part of his introduction to this new collection, “meaning that it’s made up of a lot of singularities. It doesn’t have a consistency.” Consistency, as Bowering suggests, is important, especially for a poet well-known for dozens of poetry collections built as self-contained projects, or, as he’s called them, “baffles.” He’s built a poetry (and beyond) career through the bricks of individual, self-contained long poems, book by book by book, although any assemblage of these self-described singularities isn’t a new structure for him. He has poetry collections that work as long poems, as projects, but just as adamant a thread through his work are the collections of loose poems, put together into a singular manuscript of recent or recent-enough, as a collection of strays. One could go back to In the Flesh (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), as he wrote to open the introduction, “I Never Felt Such Love,” to that slim volume:

            The following collection is made of magazine verse written after I turned thirty. It seems to me to be not of a piece necessarily, but of a period that was entered upon & is done with. For already in my early thirties I was no longer writing magazine verse, or occasional verse. Nearly all the poems I have written in the past few years have been a book long. When I’m kidding around I refer to this present as my symphonic period. But not really kidding—you know that.

I’m reminded of Michael Ondaatje’s variation on Jack Spicer’s mantra included in his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1978): the poems can no longer live on their own than can we. It would seem that Bowering has always composed stand-alone orphans, eventually clustering them together every so often into book-length manuscripts to keep them out of the cold. One could point to further volumes such as The Catch (McClelland & Stewart, 1976), Another Mouth (McClelland & Stewart, 1979), Smoking Mirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1982), Urban Snow (Talonbooks, 1992) and the more recent Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Could Be (New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It feels quite a trajectory of Bowering regularly gathering his orphans, consistently inconsistent, one might say. Most readers wouldn’t have noticed, most likely, due to how many other long poem poetry titles of his were appearing in print around and through the same period, obscuring this particular thread of his work. Many writers might have one or two collections of strays, or even a career’s worth, but George might have more than a dozen, buried in the seventy or eighty other poetry titles he’s published since the early 1960s. These are Bowering’s occasional volumes of occasionals, poems that didn’t necessarily fit together but were assembled thus, needing (one might say) a house of their own. As the preface to The Catch begins, offering:

Any collection of verse is really a recollection. The mind in composition is a gatherer, a net dropt into a river or spread upon the sea. In one’s early years of learning to write, the collection may be a springing from consciousness, out of the inconstant world of external surprise. One Sunday I was driving past some retirement apartments, & saw two old women in full Salvation Army regalia getting into a car that bore a huge bumper sticker reading: HELL’S GATE. A few blocks to the west I drove by an old folks’ recreation place with a block-long sign that declared: TERMINAL CITY LAWN BOWLING CLUB. A true story a satirist such as Earle Birney might have made much of.

For Pearl, the book is assembled as sections, some as short as a single, one or two page poem: “Divergences,” “Writing Recibiendo,” “How I Learned, Am Learning: An Essay,” “Some Last Poems,” “David Robinson,” “Pearl,” “Stuart Ross,” “Light Verse,” “Kent Johnson” and “Life Sentences,” with preface by the author and “Postscript by Jean Baird,” Bowering’s spouse and co-conspirator. Some poem-sections sit as prose poems, others as clusters of shorter lyrics. There are poems for friends, a process he’s been composing for decades, and throughout multiple collections, stretched out a bit here, from the purely single-poem to the chapbook-length cluster. There are echoes, as well, of the short, first-person poems that he composed through Teeth, and even a nine-part sequence referred to in its title as an “essay,” offering a cadence of visual cadence and line-break comparable to “Desert Elm,” Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number Nine (Coach House Press, 1976), Delayed Mercy & Other Poems (Coach House Press, 1986) [see the essay I wrote on such here] and “Do Sink.” As the sequence begins:

Greater than his brother Joe,
Dominic DiMaggio
                                had signature
octagonal centre field wire-framed
eyeglasses. 

                        I didn’t have my specs
yet, but I agreed with the Fenway
song, knowing objectivity might
get you somewhere in baseball
business, but look, we Red Sox
swim in caramel-thick sentimentality. 

                                    People,
old and young, think they know
something, discount us for
writing poems about baseball.

The Romantic Poets and baseball and his mother, as Bowering gets as close to the bone on his life’s work through poetry as might be possible in a single collection, attempting something fresh by moving as much back into his own history as into the future. It is interesting that Bowering’s “Phil Hall” poems, produced in 2025 as a chapbook by Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press [see my review of such here], don’t appear in this collection. It is interesting, also, the framing and feature of the author’s mother, given the section of her poems but a slice of the overall collage of this collection, very different, say, than Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s book-length long poem for his own mother, Irene (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2000) [my review of such buried in the Globe and Mail online archive]. What one might say about boys and their mothers, perhaps. There are further examples, to be sure. Bowering’s mother purposefully sits at the centre of this assemblage of clusters, one might suppose, around which all else swirls. Or, as the piece “Stuart Ross” begins, writing:

The first time I laid eyes on Stuart Ross was from the north shore of Slocan Lake.

Where a kayak hove into sight.

Wait, I murmured to myself, who is the gink with the curly white hair who is plying that double-headed paddle?

Can it be the Ontario poet who had to stop his car high in the West Kootenay highway because he realized that he had been driving with his eyes closed by abject fear for twenty kilometres?

Sure enough. I watched the figure plying his craft across the lake, and I was filled with envy.

A sin, don’t you know?

What became the final chapbook by Saskatchewan poet John Newlove (1938-2003), THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999; twentieth anniversary edition, 2019), a baker’s dozen of new and previously uncollected poems, can be read as pieces that each correspond neatly to a thread of Newlove’s own work to that point: the hitchhiking poems, the sonnets, the epistolary poems, and so on. Through Pearl, Bowering offers a sprinkling of some of his own structures and concerns, from elements of reading history to the Romantic poets, peers and baffles, first-person observational moments, sly jokes and asides, and character studies. As begins the poem “Carol,” a piece composed for his friend Carol Reid, the recently-late widow of Vancouver poet Jamie Reid (1941-2015): “My friend Ian Dunne / made a candlelit shrine to the poet T.S. Eliot. / Then he died on a highway in Ontario. / So I published a poem about him in The Atlantic. / Soon I met his little sister, / who was wearing his beautiful face, / and before I knew it, she married / my friend Jamie Reid, the poet, / who later died at a keyboard of his choosing.” Inasmuch as these poems are poems, Bowering’s pieces throughout this collection exist as responses: to his mother, his friends and his reading, as well as to any particular experience, caught in the moment. One hopes these poems aren’t purely last, of course, for such a curious, expansively-playful and engaged writer and thinker as Bowering, but the signs are there, and he and Baird have done a worthy job of putting such an assemblage together. While one doesn’t wish for a closure, it is a worthy one, and a book that leads off into all the directions that had come before.

A Spoon

A spoon
on a table 

that’s where
I sit down 

on neither.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sam Wiebe

Sam Wiebe [photo credit: Mel Yap] is the author of the bestselling Ocean Drive (2024), as well as the Wakeland novels, one of the most authentic and acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Sunset and Jericho (2023) and The Last Exile (2025), the fifth book in the series. Guns Across the River, the sixth book in the Wakeland series published in March 2026. His work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award, the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus and City of Vancouver book prizes. Wiebe lives in New Westminster, BC.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was very gratifying, but it also made me realize this is a business. You have to work to write something you care about, and then work to get it out to people. Guns Across the River is more polished and has been a terrific experience.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Reading what my parents had around the house. Crime novels, mostly.

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?
Guns Across the River took three or four months for the first draft, about the same for revisions, and then a month of editing.

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’ve worked both ways, but mostly I set out to write novels.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t mind doing readings.

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?
The story always comes first.

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?
No idea!

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love editors. Derek Fairbridge at Harbour has caught some terrific gaffes.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“You have to start on insufficient knowledge.” It was in a Robert Frost documentary my American Lit prof showed us. 

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?
Up at 4:30, at work into the afternoon, walk, teach or tend to business.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Mostly books, both in my genre or far-flung.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Coffee and tea.

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?
All those things are interesting.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Ross Macdonald and John D MacDonald are both influences.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Pay off my mortgage.

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?
Film editor or piano player.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s really fun. And cheap! 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
James Kaplan’s Frank: the Voice and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I really liked the new Naked Gun. 

19 - What are you currently working on?
Screenplays, film articles, and procrastinating my way towards a new novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Renato Gandia, Jeremy Audet + Rachel Robb,

For a while now, I’ve taken it upon myself to interview the shortlisted poets for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, as run by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. I mean, why not? Always good to get some new voices into the mix. See my 2025 interviews with Nicole Mae, Dora Prieto and Cicely Grace; and my 2024 interviews with Ashleigh A. Allen and Faith Paré. So much emerging! And be sure to watch for debut collections by each of these writers, I’m sure.

I’ve done other shortlist interviews over the years for further poetry-specific award shortlists, in case you weren’t aware, including the Trillium Book Awards, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. If such intrigues, scroll through each of the links to see interviews with some very compelling contemporary (and award-nominated/winning) writers.

So here are my newly-posted interviews with this year’s Bronwen Wallace shortlist: Calgary-based Filipino-Canadian poet Renato Gandia, Montreal poet and editor Jeremy Audet and Toronto poet Rachel Robb.

Good luck to all! This year’s winner will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.