Nelly Arcan: Speed Dating
In 2007, under the direction of Jérôme Garcin, Seuil published an anthology titled New Mythologies. The anthology’s title was a nod to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, which had been published fifty years earlier. The 2007 collection wished to explore the mayhem of the 2000s. Nelly Arcan was asked to contribute and she chose a timely theme:...
Indigenous Literature: Book Interview by Waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy
Ceremonies for the Dead, Giles Benaway. Kegedeonce Press, 2013 I want to share my thanks and appreciation Giles, for allowing your first published collection of poems to be a dwelling place for the Dead. How did the Dead manage to get such space and why is this space ceremonial? The title “Ceremonies for the Dead” is...
Poetry Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Rachel Rose
Rachel Rose has won national awards for her poetry, her fiction, and her non-fiction. She has published poems, short stories and essays in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Japan, including Poetry, The Malahat Review, and The Best American Poetry and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry. She is the author of three books...
Words into Pictures: An Interview with Julie Doucet
By Frederik Byrn Køhlert Julie Doucet is a Montreal-based artist who reached an international audience with her personal and innovative comics from the ’80s and ’90s. While her comics work is considered groundbreaking and continues to influence new generations of artists, Doucet quit drawing comics around 1999 and has since worked in a number of...
George Elliott Clarke: Three Poems
John Wentworth, Governor of Nova Scotia: Libertine I. My Lady’s Champagne sex— bubbly, prickly, toasts a garden-party orgy. Madame sports cake-frosting lace, but she’s just perfumed pork. Dark, greasy vermin rapture her flesh. They hold her; cuckold me. Don’t she love to pivot upon a bull-headed, bull-thighed, bull-cock...
Stephen Burt: Three Poems
An Atlas of the Atlas Moth Now I am an adult & I will never eat again. All the weight & elaboration that ever took in a morsel of anything save air & sex have fallen away & remain in my soft cocoon, whose lost array of silk will last longer than I do....
Marcella Durand: 4 Poems
Pastoral leaf and leaf and leaf and leaf and leaf and branch and leaf and leaf and leaf and leaf and leaf and postcard of greenish sunset and leaf and leaf and leaf and bag and twig and leaf and bee and leaf and leaf and branch and leaf and branch and leaf and...
Charles Bernstein: “Misfortune”
Misfortune after Nerval’s “El Desdichado” My morning star’s dead and my disconsolate lute Smashes in the blackened sun of torn alibi. In the tomb of every night, memories of Venetian reveries raw rub the inconsolable Pitch of the dark, where over and again I love you. __________________________ Charles Bernstein lives in New York and is...
A Guy on the Rack, Falling in Love: An Anti-Interview with Jim Smith
JIM SMITH’s many books include the recent Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press, 2009) and Happy Birthday, Nicanor Parra (Mansfield Press, 2012). His magazine, The Front, lasted from about 1972 to 1980, and the spinoff Front Press published books and pamphlets in the ’80s by writers like David McFadden, bpNichol, Wayne Clifford and Stuart Ross. Between 1979 and...
Dana Ward: “God Only Knows That I Can’t Look Away”
God Only Knows That I Can’t Look Away for Sarah Valentine is still my favorite word. But really ‘and’ is. ‘and’ & ‘or’, as well as ‘anyway’ like ‘anyway…’ & ‘so,’ As in ‘Anyway, my favorite word is Valentine so I’m writing one to you & I’ll die if I don’t so you’ll know &...
Vanessa Place: “I Will Fuck You in the Ass”
My favorite love poem was originally by Mike Tyson, though I have since appropriated it. It captures all the ambivalence and drive of desire that cannot be quenched and will not be disarmed. I Will Fuck You in the Ass I will fuck you in the ass I will fuck you in the ass...
The Artist Is Present: J. Mae Barizo on Marina Abramović
By Melissa Bull I met J. Mae in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2007. We were both enrolled in writing classes with Summer Literary Seminars. J. Mae’s poetry workshop was in the classroom beside my fiction workshop, and we invariably arrived bleary-eyed to school each day, clutching our plastic cups of bitter koffe, nodding to one...
