four poems from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

 

Hanging a frailty on a flame.

An impulse, light enough. Drawn close. Must we break, divide? Childhood. The frequency of green, articulates. Articulations. Clock beside my bed, an apparatus. Thumb, to finger. Rhythm. Out of the word. Ambiguous, mezza. Preposition. Hillside, bespoke. Articulate. Thus, pronouned. Alpine, outlined. The signs, of course. To settle down, surface. To love, unblemished. This risk of falling. May not be enough.

 

 

How to regain the solitary mist which endorses inner rooms?

Repeated, structure. Decentred lungs. Among the folds of words, sense. Come to their senses. I descend some steps. I descend, from. What have you. Ancestors, declarative. Each tiny fibre, mechanized means. Atonal. Blood, a moving picture. Critical perception, walls. An ocean. Action. Shush your shushy mouth. The literal figurative. Index. Bathe, in serious light. Tactfully. To ask a question, to move like a statue. Start again.

 

 

, or a series of waves in air.

To be literal. Weight. The shape of this vowel. With one left eye. I connect one gesture. Blur. The very edge. Reluctant, compatible. To venture, a line. This green promise of spring. Disposition. A distance, untold. This space between projects. Illuminate. Voice is no help. How to eat fish, slice bread. A tomato. Precarious. You could not read the paper. And yet.

 

 

Thirst sung.

Fingertips. Some chords, scorched. Subdivided. Half snow, rain. To compose, in the light. We hold these curiosities. Shoulder. I am not parallel. Beams. In America, does. The narrows, of family. To drop this veil. The world is not logical. Wine moms, rejoice. A slight breeze on a rock. Minnesota, strong. Sing it. Shout it out. Whirls our vertigo, ferment. Whirls out forever. Must the language? Such ambition, hark. The morning, silver. What will come of it.

 

 

Fair bodies of unseen prose is an homage text for, around and after American poets Laynie Browne and Rosmarie Waldrop, furthering my exploration around and through the lyric sentence and prose poem. All poem titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken in order from the last line or phrase of each poem-in-sequence of Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2019), itself an homage text to Rosmarie Waldrop, with all of Browne’s titles taken from Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons Press, 1994). As my own sequence progresses, echoes of texts by both poets resound throughout, especially from Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens and Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press, 2023), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight (New Directions, 2003) and Gap Gardening: selected poems (New Directions, 2016), as well as the collection Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited/translated by Norma Cole (Burning Deck, 2000).

In early 2023, I reviewed three recent titles by Laynie Browne, and quickly realized just how much affinity there was between her work and my own, an element of which is certainly due to our shared love of, and deep influence from, the work of Rosmarie Waldrop. Browne and I soon exchanged books, and In Garments Worn By Lindens prompted this response.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Lippmann

Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology, Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible, from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. Her new novel, Hidden River, will be published in 2026.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Doll Palace put me in conversation with readers for the first time. it gave me a kick to keep going (tho i'd likely keep going anyway.) My forthcoming novel Hidden River actually feels closer to my first than others -- all have dealt with predation in some way, but these two really explore the set and setting (i.e. the perfect combo of socio-cultural-environmental factors) that prime the waters. Also, Hidden River is structured in flash-like sections, and it was flash that spurred my initial return to writing (years ago) in the first place.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Ever since my first workshop in college, it's been fiction all the way. Careerwise, I started out writing for magazines, so I've done my share of nonfiction (although writing for men's magazines as a young 22 woman is its own form of fiction) but it was always the short story. I enjoy the ability to hide while telling the truth, to get out of my own way, to yield and recede in service to the story.. 
 
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 takes forever because I'm scattered and distracted and terribly disciplined. I work in fits and spurts. When I do sit down, I puke out a mess. So 90% of my writing is through revision.

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 love this question. How do you know what container to lend to a particular narrative? I don't really know. I can share that the seedlings of this novel Hidden River were planted in a Kathy Fish flash workshop many years ago. I was just noodling around, playing. I tested the waters with a few flash pieces, a short story about this stuff. But there was more to say. It just kept at me, whispering in my ear. Then I realized the fractured flash structure actually made a ton of psychological sense for the internal makeup and movement of this project, so I doubled down on it.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
As a kid, I was terrified of public speaking. It's something I've written about, but ironically, it's become a part of my job, both as a former host of a reading series and now as magazine editor hosting events, and as someone who values those live connections with readers and listeners. It's all part of the larger conversation.
 
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 can we release from the grips of experiences that haunt us? This book concerns itself with the scars of private v. public trauma and the intimate and proximate experiences of both, so the ways in which our society is not only complicit but sanctioning, driving the predatory impulse is another central concern. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer holds up a mirror and in so doing confronts and challenges the larger culture, but the only "role" of the writer as I see it is to grapple honestly with the deep mess of what it means to be human. Once the writing becomes moralistic or pedantic or cleanses itself of paradox, contradiction and nuance endemic to the human experience, I'm out.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven't worked with one though I often do work as one. As a developmental editor, my goal is to pave the paveway for deeper discovery and a fuller experience of the work. To that end, the experience of working with Jerry at Tortoise was so wonderful. The ways in which he engages closely and intimately with the text makes the writer feel seen. He's been a great partner: challenging the work where it needs to be challenged, and underscoring where it needs to be sharpened. I've also never had another editor riff hilariously and personally alongside the text in the margins, which solidifies the feeling, the hope that the work you're putting out, is fostering coversation.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My thesis advisor in college, Meredith Steinbach, told me to sit up straight. Sure, I might have had crap posture. But she meant stop hedging or apologizing or shrinking but to take up space. Take what I had to say seriously. (not too seriously;) It's been some version of Own Your Shit ever since.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
With my last book, LECH, I cheated on it with short stories so compulsively that I wound up pooping out an entire story collection (JERKS) alongside it. Which is to say, it all feeds the work. Go wherever the energy lies. I like to move between flash and longer projects, or stories and novels, flirting with the essay every now and then. Working cross genre can be energizing, especially when stuck in that seemingly interminable murky middle of a longer thing.

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?
When I am generating, I need to do it before the critical brain wakes and starts hollering that I suck. So if it doesn't get done first thing, it won't get done. At my most disciplined, I'm up before dawn. That hasn't been happening lately. But I do host these (free!) Ungodly Hour Writing Clubs periodically on zoom, which is a way to hold us all accountable as we show up for ourselves and our work. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I pick up poems. I do morning pages. Maybe I'll play around with flash, my first love. I go for runs. I live life. I allow myself the space around the work. I have lonnnnnng fallow periods. I used to fight it or feel embarrassed by this, but I've come to accept, as my rhythm. It's okay. Plenty of writing happens while you're away from the page.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My parents' house smells like old newspapers. My hometown smells like the inside of a WaWa.

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?
Music. I was one of those kids who grew up with an ear glued to the radio, waiting for their song to come on to push play in the tape deck. I grew up in front of MTV, waiting in line outside the record store for tickets to concerts, attending live shows. When you get to my age you can't listen to a song without it triggering a specific memory, so it's that movement -- of being simultaneously in the present and in the past, that enveloping emotion, which is also akin to how I experience narrative, so I try to capture some of that time fluidity on the page.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Where to begin. Reading wise, A.M. Homes, Grace Paley, Roth, Malamud, Baldwin, Nabokov, Salinger, I mean so many of those formative writers turned me on to writing at a young age through their singular voices. Meg Wolitzer got me back on the writing horse after a long absence. Steve Almond has taught me more about craft than anyone. Peter Orner's work breaks me and puts me together again. I could go on and on.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
run a marathon. write another book.

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?
Mental health. I'd probably go into clinical psych work or social work. Character work, how and why we do what we do, etc, it's all related to the work of a writer.  

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

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished The Tavern At the End of History by Morris Collins. I'll be his conversation partner for his NYC launch in February. It was fabulous. Brillant, challenging, gorgeously written and aching and wholly inventive. 

As for films, I am hopelessly cinematically illiterate. It's actually a running joke between a friend of mine, a film critic, because I cannot keep up. That said, we just showed The Godfather to my kids when they were home from college over break. It was wonderful to revisit that classic, and to see it fresh through their eyes.

20 - What are you currently working on? 
Sadly, I'm not. There is a new project calling me, but a lot of life and day job duties have been coming between me and the work right now and I haven't been touching it the way I want to be. I know, I know, discipline, habit, but I'm trying to be gentle with myself at the moment. This is my goal for 2026. To put down more words, one after the next.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet

 

            Do you remember the Phantom of the Opera original cast recording? That white mask, that red rose? Of course you do, you were probably gay once too. The “Overture”—that’s what this is, get it? I’m setting the scene. I used to listen on cassette. My mother took me to see the production in Toronto—her friend worked with a theatre producer who later went to prison for fraud and so we got great seats, right under where the chandelier swings cinematically. I want you to be hearing a pipe organ. I want you to be waiting for a chandelier to fall.

I am very pleased to see the smart, self-aware and delightfully-playful full-length debut by Montreal poet Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2026). Following the chapbooks FLORALS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2022), My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet utilizes as its central prompt the real fact of the author’s great-grandfather having danced ballet, and jumping from there to an expansive and even explosive exploration on Jewish identity, possibility, history and queer desire. “In a hotel room in Burlington, Vermont,” the poem “The Limits of Fiction” begins, “I try to get my grandfather to tell me if his parents ever told him stories about the old country, but he just wants to tell me about Lill St. Cyr at the Gayety.” As the back cover offers, the collection “is a daring, erotic, and humorous exploration of queer longing and Jewish possibility at the turn of two centuries. In a captivating series of narrative poems, Misha Solomon entwines an alternate memoir of his great-grandfather in pre-Holocaust Romania with a contemporary gay life in Montreal.” The poems unfold around the central core of that lifted fact, swirling a structure that might hold elements of narrative scaffolding and narrative building tools, but also elements of sound, repetition, visual gesture and playful chant into something far larger than anything pure narrative could ever provide. “the man man man man man men men / men men men men” he writes, as part of “OVERTURE,” a stretch of repetitions that flow into “men men men men were / in love, are in love, I move them across a / stage and their love seems so true I / convince myself for a moment that I really / do exist [.]” Earlier, in the same poem-section, writing:

a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
came here and they changed his name

The collection isn’t structured into sections per se, but there are poems highlit in the table of contents that suggest themselves the openings of new groupings, new directions, across Solomon’s book-length suite: “OVERTURE,” “THIS ISN’T A GAY POEM.,” “THIS IS A POLITICAL POEM.” and “THIS IS A CULTURALLY JEWISH POEM.” As opposed to offering distinct, separated sections, Solomon composes a book-length suite with an ebb and flow, a rhythm across the book as a whole. “I was supposed to be the mayor at minimum and now my daily / achievement is holding off on jerking off until I can write an / erotic poem about my great-grandfather,” begins the poem “Belongings III,” “or some made-up / version of him, writing this poem instead of that one, even, / because googling ‘1940s name for male sex worker’ felt a / little too close to ‘old-fashioned word for semen,’ the search / that was on my screen when Guillaume walked into our home / office the other day […].” The poems accumulate together into something large, built purposefully from a series of disparate and different parts, all circling that central core as a kind of mosaic or narrative collage.

Certainly, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet follows a trajectory of other recent full-length poetry debuts through Brick Books that play off and through family archive, offering book-length explorations through new and unusual structures, and allowing the shapes of the poems to provide startlingly fresh perspectives on the otherwise-familiar complications of family, cultural collisions and the disappearance of stories. I’m specifically thinking of titles such as Montreal poet, editor and translator Darby Minott Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself (2021) [see my review of such here], Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Nova Scotia poet Nanci Lee’s Hsin (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], although Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet offers the added layer of fictionalizing elements of family story, for the sake of doing something simultaneously more specific and far more expansive. “You asked why I liked / you,” the poem “To my colleague Ernest, for his eyes only, in response to his confidential queries, 1934,” “or in fact you asked why I was wasting my time with / you, and when I rolled my eyes, you rephrased, but the reason / I didn’t answer isn’t because I don’t know the reasons. I know / the reasons. I like you with all of my senses.” Solomon offers a heart and a lyric that flows, naturally, carefully, delicate and precise, writing family elements as an entry point to a larger exploration on Jewish and queer themes between the past and the present, and all the glorious complications, lovely patter and potential dangers that surround. Or, as the poem “Yoo-Hoo” writes:

Yoo-hoo, do you see me, do you see me over here? I wore this tomato-red shirt so you could see me, yoo-hoo, you with the well-dressed baby, you look like you know nice shirts, yoo-hoo, do you want to tell me you like my shirt?

Over there, you over there, yoo-hoo, do you want to ask me what I’m working on? I just bought this new notebook to write one poem per day, but, yoo-hoo, I’ve only written the date and my name and now I’m staring thoughtfully past you hoping you’ll think I’m actually staring at you and you could say “yoo-hoo, why are you staring at me” and I’d say “how embarrassing, yoo-hoo, I’m actually staring past you, thoughtfully, thinking thoughts, by the way, do you have the time, I didn’t bring my phone, I’m trying to be more present?”

Yoo-hoo, do you have the time? Yoo-hoo, do you want to know why I need the time? I don’t look like someone who needs to yoo-hoo for the time, isn’t that intriguing?

Yoo-hoo, do you want to know?