Lesle Lewis, John’s Table: poems

 

Lake

Doctors say you have only weeks yet.

You go early to bed and draw meadows.

One day remembers a better one as she crawls out of consciousness.

Whatever happens happens now.

Red painted monuments bloom.

It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.

One child ventures out, the child, lovely and bespeckled, the child, a powerhouse, the child grows up, a person capable and remarkable.

Then the ocean comes for the land.

Drought is causing the reappearance of the canyon.

And of the split level house on a lake.

The latest from Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany’s recently-founded publishing enterprise, Piżama Press, “an independent press dedicated to showcasing and uplifting the voices of the strange, the uncanny, the absurd, and the surreal,” is John’s Table: poems (2026) by American poet Lesle Lewis. Self-described as a poet who “lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees,” Lewis is the author of five prior full-length poetry collections: Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and Rainy Days on the Farm (Hudson NY: Fence Books, 2020), winner of The Ottoline Prize [see my review of such here]. Lewis, therefore, is not merely an experienced writer, but one who moves with the quiet confidence of a master, attending the intimate, the small, almost working a tone and tenor, a slow unfolding of a dense and lyric narrative, comparable to the prose details of American writer and translator Lydia Davis. “I’m always working.” begins the poem “Braver,” “I should pause more often. // But to think about not sleeping is not to sleep. // And sleeping takes too long.”

Each poem throughout Lewis’ John’s Table hold single-word titles, hinting at the precision to come, despite whatever broad sweeps and strokes lines might take; each poem simultaneously a kind of moment, singularly caught, as well as a meditation on and around the poem’s subject, much of which is offered through those single-word titles. “I ask myself to give myself.” Lewis writes, to close the poem “Need.” “My intention is to work but the work has no intention. // You photograph the photograph and then photoshop it. // You go to the paint store, the drug store, the cannabis dispensary and buy what you need.” Her poems revel in what appear to be small motions that hold turns and twists and turns, accumulating lines that offer straight lines of narrative but somehow bend and dodge as they continue. There is such incredible density and lightness, such nimble patter within the short spaces of these poems. The graceful assemblage of John’s Table offer sleek poems that defy expectation, articulating a book-length suite of fleeting moments of mortality (a thread throughout that begins to form around illness and the body, however subtle), all of which she holds in conceptual space; fleeting moments, all the more sweet for their brevity.

Pioneers

I’m sorry that I can’t give you more goodness.

The little I have, I need to keep for myself.

And I still live in this situation of my body.

The horizon stretches across all the body.

The solar panels are in their upright winter position.

The red pipe cleaner, our central theme, the other pipe cleaners wrap around.

Pieces of the old truths in the new spiritual lands are tree stumps around the cabins of the pioneers.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with William Lessard

William Lessard is the author of /face (KERNPUNKT Press, 2026). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Experimental Writing, the Beloit Poetry Journal, FENCE, and McSweeney’s. He is the Poetry and Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review. More about him at: www.williamlessardwrites.net.

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 life has become more confusing in a way I can better understand. No book will save you, but the right few words, in the right order, change everything. Have you ever talked your way out of an ass-kicking? This is the bottom-line value of poetry. The ass-kicking can come from a person or a thing; most often it is yourself you’re dealing with. Strangers have written to say how much they like my book. I have also heard from people in the poetry business who aren’t asking anything from me. I never thought I would accomplish anything with my writing, so any praise is strange and most-welcome. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
If I were a liar, I would say it was thanks to the mentorship of [INSERT IMPRESSIVE NAME] and [INSERT PRESTIGIOUS SCHOOL]. The truth is that I squeezed between Jim Morrison lyrics and the skips on Dylan Thomas records I took out of the library. How else does someone like me discover poetry? I’m from the Bronx. Nobody had books in the house.  

3 - How long does it take to start a 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?
Writing is slow for me. Until it speeds up. Until I have something I have something to stretch across the room. Each project is intended as a new experiment unto itself. For /face, I started sampling images and language from Google Patents on facial surveillance technology. My first ten or twenty pieces were nothing anyone cosplaying mid-century Confessionalism would recognize as poetry. That’s the standard I set for myself. That’s how I view “experimentalism.” I was confused but also encouraged when I heard right back from editors who wanted to publish the material. Of course, unlike in the movies, any acceptance was followed by ten more rejections. Anything I achieved with this book came after this 1-in-10 ratio, which, for me, became a game of how weird I could make the work and which snob magazine I could freak out. That was my “journey,” as the kids say. That and a lot of reading and research. Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Shoshana Zuboff. They all rode along in the back seat. In the front was Nancy Spero squeezed alongside Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.   

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?
All poems begin at the bottom of the esophagus, where gastric acids begin breaking down anything I’ve ingested. Nutrients become energy; the rest, the materials that cannot benefit the body; they become poems. Everything starts with a few lines, then a few more. I cannot work without an idea for a “project.” Everything has to be an attack on a larger order, or why am I even bothering? 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings. Feeling the words in the mouth, aiming them at the chest of the audience. I know of no better way to see if the work is working, if a word doesn’t taste right or lands too heavy. 

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 don’t know what questions I want answered until afterwards. For /face, the concerns were how to make poetry in the age of Surveillance Capitalism and the monetization of selfhood. The Romantic Age is over. With the algorithm interrupting everything we do, even if it is autocomplete or spellcheck, makes all writing a post-self form of expression. Poets who work on laptops like they are pinching a quill by candlelight are not getting the job done, no matter how many placements in prestigious magazines they can drop in their bio. 

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?
This is a question I would answer differently, depending on the day. Today, February 15, 2026 at 3:59 P.M. EST, I declare the role of the writer is to be the ice cream truck playing Christmas songs in July. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I don’t have editors, I only have friends. Susan, Matthew. I message them bits at all hours. They tell me if something is working or I am full of shit. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
‘Worry about them as much as they worry about you.’ For me, this is the Chicken Soup for the Soul, Neurotic Poet Edition. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual art to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I love switching. It helps me stop focusing on the how and more on the what. Poetry can hang you up on form. Non-Fiction can open a path. There is a looseness about it, like playing acoustic guitar. Visual art is great, too, especially when you want to do something fun that is beyond words. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I always start writing at the same time every day. Sometimes I skip a day or two. But this is the habit. Writing is a habit, not a practice. I’m not a fucking chiropractor. It’s a nasty, filthy habit, like any addiction or weird compulsion like checking the stove twenty times before leaving the house. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read Marguerite Duras. I am always reading Marguerite Duras, even when I’m not reading her. She’s like Bill Evans. There is no cleverness in her work. Reading her you see her taking a risk saying something that hurts. You see that risk and you root for her. She reminds you that it is beautiful to put yourself in harm’s way. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I’m from NYC, so any time I smell stale piss in a tunnel, it’s always 1984 and the Bronx. 

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?
The news feed. That rush of crap that comes at us every day. That is the form. It’s the only form we have in the 21st century. Everything we do is part of that, or a response to it. Even the most traditional poem about a barn, written by the biggest poetic Luddite, gets screen shot and added to the unending scroll. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I love music bios and crime fiction. They are fun things to read when I want something outside literature. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to go one week without beating myself up. At my age, I have managed a few hours here and there, but I would love to string those moments together into a life I don’t recognize. 

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?
Making money, real money, would be interesting. I’m not one of these people who say money is bad. That’s middle-class grad school nonsense. I’d love to have enough money to make real choices between a good doctor who could help me and another I’m forced to accept because they are “in network.” 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m lousy at math.  

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I read Mrs. Dalloway last year. That book hit me the way hearing A Love Supreme hit me when I was 22. It’s a book that invents a new way to be itself. The same goes for The Mirror by Tarkovsky. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m making something out of blood. It’s the low-tech opposite of /face. My goal is to write a specific experience, so the reader feels like it’s happening to them. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Aja Couchois Duncan, The Intimacy Trials

 

The first word is gesture, is origin, is Gichi-manidoo’s breath. But the beginning is also the end. There are, in every membrane, the cellular markers of death.

We who were once muskrat and owl, moose and caribou. We who are spirit and matter, anima and animus. We who have survived disaster only to find its transcription in our DNA.

Antecedents thread each layer of dermis. We are, each one of us, wrapped in their skin.

When anxious, we peel our fingers until they bleed. We lean over and gnaw the skin of another’s neck. Drumming the flood inside of us. Not beaver but raptor, all beak and wing.

The cycles of time form concentric loops. Reach out and touch the blur of particles, past and future mere inches apart.

Yesterday we walked the pocked surface of the moon. Tomorrow we will be scalded by the fires of Mars.

The earth has been stripped of all her secrets. Each morning Aki wakes, dawn, prying her legs apart. (“(treble)”)

Described in her bio as “a leadership coach and movement capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coach Miwok people,” poet Aja Couchois Duncan is the author of the newly-released The Intimacy Trials (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2026), a poetry title that follows her collections Vestigial (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] in their articulations around what poet and critic Douglas Kearney, on the back cover of this current collection, describes as “a dynamic ecopoetics keen on Indigenous futures beyond survivance.” Set in seven sections of extended lyric fragments—“treble,” “witness,” “bass,” “quaver,” “ritual,” “pitch” and “fissure”—The Intimacy Trials begins at the beginning and expands ever outward. “The first word is gesture, is origin,” as the opening piece offers, “is Gichi-manidoo’s breath.” From there, Duncan expands and threads a storytelling lyric, weaving the past into the present, documenting history and trauma and resilience into the possitibilities of both the present, and a possible future. “We are as real as the perpetual present tense.” she writes, early in the book’s third section, “Our dreams sensorial. Cloaked in darkness, we rummage our bodies until something settles into place. An elbow or breast. The declension of a belly unfed.” Duncan is very good at blending dream and witness, a firm hand and a tale enough to hold everything it requires to seek truth.

As much as this is an assemblage of poems, of lyric sequenses, The Intimacy Trials can be seen as a long poem, or book-length lyric suite, that takes the scope and the scale, the measure, of her own perspective on contemporary Indigeneity, a present that holds far too many ripples across centuries of colonial violence. “It is the business / of treaties. Taking more than,” she writes, amid “witness,” “an agree- / ment be- / tween men.” She writes of witness and resistance; determined, with a particular timeless air. These concerns aren’t purely contemporary, after all, but hold the accumulated weight of the decades since European arrival across North America. As she writes to close the first section: “We are a precarious diaspora. There is nowhere left to go.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Aaron Cully Drake

Aaron Cully Drake was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his debut novel Do You Think This Is Strange? (Brindle & Glass, 2015). Drake is a former newspaper reporter and editor. He lives in Coquitlam, BC, with his wife and two children

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

It didn’t. It carried me along for a while, it was fun for a while, but life moved forward with or without it. I was surprised. I thought that the first book was supposed to mark the beginning of your new life. Turns out it was just a signpost on your real life.

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

Probably happenstance, although very few children come to non-fiction first.

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?

Starting isn’t the problem. It’s always the finishing that kills me. Things come fast, the words fall all over the table, and then I spend the next year rearranging them.

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 like working on the idea of a book. It’s sort of reverse sculpting. I begin with the rough, unpolished form of what the story could be. It’s the sculpture of an elevator pitch. Then I write scenes, characters, and ideas on clay blobs and throw them at the sculpture to see what sticks. Eventually, after I’ve thrown enough blobs that I see the form of something else, I go to work on it. I will spend the next year rewriting it, usually by changing the tense.

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

Right before a reading, I’ll curse myself for not writing any scenes tailored for public reading. I promise myself I’ll do it next time. And here we are all over again.

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 don’t know the answer until after I’ve finished the book, and someone else tells me what it was about. I’m always mildly surprised that they’re right.

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 finish the book and not know what it’s about. Those books are a product of that primal part of us that doesn’t speak in words but in symbols. It tends to speak greater truths than we can. The role of the writer is make the primal part heard, so that someone can point out what the book was really about.

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

It’s always nice to have two parents raising a child. The book isn’t complete until the editor finishes.

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

Always put the toilet paper in the toilet paper holder. You can’t do great things if you don’t do the mundane things first.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (journalism to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I was a mediocre journalist, so I found it quite easy to transition to a mediocre writer.

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

My routine is a multi-step process: I plan what I want to write in a year so I know how much I need to write in a month. Once I know that, I will know how much I need to write in a week. Each weeknight, I set my alarm to get up at 5:30 AM and to write for two hours before breakfast.

A typical day is a one-step process: sleep in.

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

Hemingway knew the answer to this one. I like his writing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Fresh earth turned over by a bulldozer. My father was a heavy equipment operator. The smell of pasture earth, and a sweet scent of diesel. I’m a child again, and it’s summer again, and I can run barefoot, and it doesn’t hurt.

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?

I think books come from disagreements with other books. The primal part of you disagrees with something the primal part of someone else said, and your story is its rebuttal. When you think of it that way, you have a duty to write the book and keep the conversation going.

That kind of dispute comes more easily between books because everything else expresses itself so clearly and vividly, unlike a story made of 80,000 words, which you have to read sequentially. With the latter, your inner self is quite engaged. With the former, it’s just wowed by the pretty colours.

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

Stephen King had the biggest impact on my life because I read him voraciously in my childhood, when I first thought I wanted to be a writer. I’m not sure how it’s affected me because it’s so deep in the code. But I could have had worse influences. History will count him as one of the greatest writers of all time. I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

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

Ride a motorbike across Canada. It will never happen because I know that I’ll hate it after the first day when my back starts to hurt.

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 would have been much more successful if I had not been a writer, because I would have poured that energy into my career. Writing was always a counterweight to my job. They both suffered from the other.

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

As a child, I was a very good daydreamer. I wove great, vivid fantasies and, one day, I thought to myself, “I should write this down.” So I did, and then I read it, and I thought, “I really like reading what I’ve written.” We’ve been married ever since.

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

Shogun by James Clavell. Every decade or so, I find myself returning to it.

The Creator, directed by Gareth Edwards. The baby AI knew all along, and she planned it that way.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A too-ambitious project. 1984ish. Where Big Brother is us. Sort of an Orwellian society regulated by upvotes and likes. A world where the rich live in the Inner City and everyone else is outside the tall black walls that keep them out. The only way into the Inner City is a fiercely competitive, unpaid internship, and our hero, Winston Smith, must find a way to get in to the In.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;