Isabel Meyers

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Leaving New York City: an Interview with Cathy Linh Che

January 1, 2017 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews CATHY LINH CHE

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split, winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, the 2015 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2016 Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Che is a Vietnamese American poet and teacher, originally from Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Poets House, and The Asian American Literary Review, among many others. Her poems have been published in Hyperallergic, Hyphen, poets.org, and AAWW’s The Margins. Her work delicately probes the liminal spaces between cultures, identities, nationalities, and bodies.

Ask a Local: Antti Tuomainen, Helsinki, Finland

December 29, 2016 Interviews

With ANTTI TUOMAINEN

One of Antti Tuomainen’s favorite places in Helsinki is the beautiful Kaivopuisto park and the Baltic shore on the southernmost tip of downtown Helsinki, pictured here on a December morning.

Your name: Antti Tuomainen

Current city or town: Helsinki, Finland

How long have you lived here: 44 years

Friday Reads: December 2016

December 16, 2016 Reviews

By EMILY EVERETT, ALICIA LOPEZ, MEGAN TUCKER ORRINGER and SARAH WHELAN

To round out 2016, we’re reading novels new and old for December’s Friday Reads. Explore the social dynamics of male friendships, the black experience through generations and continents, the loneliness of a haunted orphan, and the self-consciousness (or self-destructiveness?) of the writer. After all, the dark days of winter are perfect for tackling big questions, and these towering works of fiction are perfect for raising them.

Recommended:

Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder, and Despair by Vladimir Nabokov.

Making Space for the Common Cyborg: an Interview with Jillian Weise

December 4, 2016 Interviews

T. K. DALTON interviews JILLIAN WEISE

Jillian Weise is the author of the novel The Colony (2010) and the poetry collections The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007) and The Book of Goodbyes (2013), the latter of which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Clemson University in South Carolina.

An Ivoirian Writer Takes on Genital Excision: An Interview with Fatou Keïta

November 26, 2016 Interviews

JULIA LICHTBLAU interviews FATOU KEÏTA

On a recent trip to Côte d’Ivoire, I walked into the Librairie de France, the crowded, chaotic bookstore on the Plateau, the downtown business district of Abidjan, and asked for books by Fatou KeÏta. They directed me upstairs, where I found most of a bookcase filled by the popular Ivoirian writer’s works. Fatou Keita has written 25 books for children and two novels, including Rebelle (Rebel), about a young West African woman who escapes genital excision, which remains common, despite efforts to eradicate the practice. According to a 2013 World Bank report, “To Be a Woman in Côte d’Ivoire,” 14% percentage of Ivoirian girls under 14 have experienced infibulation, the most traumatizing form of genital excision.

Friday Reads: November 2016

November 18, 2016 Reviews

By MAX FREEMAN, OSTAP KIN, and ANNA BADKHEN

November’s Friday Reads features selections from three Issue 12 contributors: poet Max Freeman, translator Ostap Kin, and essayist Anna Badkhen. All three are reading and recommending poetry this month, verses of otherness, foreigness, complexity, and intelligence. In this month, in this year — when the easy, the soundbitey, and the distorted seem to dominate us — we’re happy to endorse these thoughtful recommendations.

Recommended:

Chord by Rick Barot, Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach, Garden Time by W.S. Merwin, and Dark Archives by Andre Bradley.

The Drama of the Will: an Interview with Elizabeth A. I. Powell

November 13, 2016 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews ELIZABETH A. I. POWELL

Born in New York City, Elizabeth A. I. Powell is a Vermont-based poet and editor in chief of the Green Mountains Review. She is the author of two poetry collections: The Republic of Self and, most recently, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, and many other eminent publications.

The Storytelling Animal

November 1, 2016 Essays, Issue 12, Issue 12 Essays

By ANNA BADKHEN
We are in the market square in Djenné, in central Mali. Ali the Griot holds court on a low wooden stool by the pharmacy. He chants:

“The Fulani came from Ethiopia: first the Diallos, then the Sows, then the Bâs. The Bâs had the most cattle; their cows are white; they give the most milk; from that milk comes the sweetest butter.”

The Afterlife of Stars

November 1, 2016 Fiction, Issue 12, Issue 12 Fiction

By JOSEPH KERTES

Beware, O wanderer, the road is

walking too.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

On October 24, 1956, the day I turned 9.8, my grandmother came to take me out of school in Budapest’s 6th District. We were in the middle of reviewing decimal points because of a mistake a classmate named Mary had made. Other parents and grandparents were arriving too with the same aim, although no one had come yet to get Zoli, the boy who sat beside me.

11 Warnings: How to Avoid Talking Politics at Parties

November 1, 2016 Issue 12, Issue 12 Poetry, Poetry

By DENISE DUHAMEL & JULIE MARIE WADE
Adult Supervision Recommended

When your partner comes home with you for the first time, try to prepare her. Explain how they still see you as a child: cake and candles, streamers and balloons, bubblegum and colored pencils as parting gifts. Though you’re twenty-three, your father insists, “You won’t be grown up in my book until I’ve walked you down the aisle.” Expect jokes about Clinton’s impeachment and Hillary’s headbands. Anticipate talk of bootstraps—how “some people” have never learned to pull themselves up. On the refrigerator, George and Laura Bush grin inside a heart-shaped magnet. The radio plays Rush Limbaugh all afternoon.