In this space, we regularly invite West Trestlers to celebrate the work of other West Trestlers or to be in conversation with each other about their art, poetry, and life. Of course, we were very excited to share more about Dear Question: A Conversation, as Jennifer K. Sweeney was one of the founding advisors for WTR, and we are big fans of all she does. We're also thrilled to be introduced to L.I. Henley, and we had no idea that their conversation would be such a beautiful window into their book. We hope you enjoy the beauty as much as we do—and if you do, let them know. Leave a comment, buy the book, send a note, write a review. Give them a holler on social media. Now, without further ado  ... 

L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, her books include Starshine Road (Perugia Press Prize, 2018), the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through, and several chapbooks including her recent collaboration with poet Jennifer K. Sweeney, Dear Question: A Conversation.  Her essays on pain, illness, and the Mojave Desert have won the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award, and Terrain.org’s 15th annual nonfiction prize. “A Blur on the Spine,” originally published by Southern Humanities Review, is a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2024. She teaches in the English department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of six poetry collections: Redwood Communal (forthcoming, 2026), Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question: A Conversation, with L.I. Henley, was recently published by Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of many awards including a Pushcart Prize and the James Laughlin Award, she teaches poetry at the University of Redlands in California. ​

I remember hoping
to find hermit crabs the size of the mole on my right side chin.
And if I tethered them to a stick they’d line up by mass and trade shells, find homes
that fit. And there’d be one left without, one torn out. A book said
a scientist leaned into wet sand, watched a torn crab die
in the beak of a gull. I can’t remember if I saw that death or read it. 
I remember
 
watching a wrong castle tucked into a wrong mountain notch on the chin of the sky,
like the hermit mole on my chin
if my face were the sky. “It’s a beauty mark,”
my mother had said, “Don’t pick at it.” I eyed that smoking stranger at the wheel
and dug my nail in
as the Pacific swelled into view that first time.
 
                                    from “The Pacific,” Poetry Magazine, September, 2018

I’ve been writing poetry with my friend, Jennifer Jean, for about 10 years. She was running a workshop at this bookstore in Salem that I joined, sight unseen! I’m not sure if it was our names, or my admiration of her and her work, but we became friends—fellow poets reading work to each other. I followed Jennifer to Big Table Publishing, and then to editing poetry for Mom Egg Review. Jennifer founded the Morning Garden Writers’ Retreat in Gloucester, MA; around that time, she began holding poetry workshops to survivors of sexual slavery. Her work with these women and the work she produced was humbling, awe-inspiring. I’m looking forward to her chapbook, Object Lessons, from Lily Poetry Press, a magnificent collection of poems recounting that time. Jennifer has been honored for her writing and her activism, including: the Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop; a Disquiet Fellowship; a “Her Story Is” Residency, where she worked with Iraqi women artists in Dubai; and an Ambassador for Peace Award.

Jennifer and I work on each other’s poems regularly; she is an exacting editor. I love her line breaks, her quirky language!

                                                           ~ In memory of Jennifer Martelli                                           

Natalia Treviño is a poet, author, educator and advocate from San Antonio, Texas, whose works center women’s voices and their lived experiences, not just their struggles, hardships, and heartbreaks but also their triumphs, joys, and resilient spirits. Natalia Trevino immigrated to Texas at the age of four and became a Naturalized US Citizen at the age of 15. After high school she went on to receive a BA and an MA in English from the University of Texas in San Antonio and, after many years of teaching in the same city, she went on to pursue and acquire an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska. 

Natalia’s first novel, Drinking the Bee Water, which is out on submission via her agent at this time, is the testimony of an immigrant mother's journey to make a living as a servant in the U.S while separated from her daughter. As a poet and fiction writer, Natalia is the recipient of several awards, most notably the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award in 2004, the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award in 2004, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2008 and the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio in 2012.

I first met Natalia years ago, when I sat next to her during a reading for Sandra Cisneros at the San Antonio Book Festival. I had read her book, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, and was a fan, so I was interested in getting to know her. Her warmth won me over, and we spent a few minutes sharing writing life stories and advice before we went our separate ways. Since then, I’ve spent some time with Natalia on a professional level. First, while delivering a virtual workshop for adults with Voices de la Luna and second while giving a workshop for young adults from the Rio Grande Valley in conjunction with the ReThink Institute with Region One. Natalia was a wonderful hostess, both facilitating my transportation to the RGV and then making sure everything I needed to present my workshop was in place at the venue. She did all this, even though she had her own presentation to give at the ReThink Institute. But that is who Natalia is, a sweet friend, a professional colleague, and a sensitive, gracious hostess and advocate for all writers. In the time since my return to Texas, we’ve become friends, and I’ve come to realize that Natalia is more than involved with her writing community, she is devoted to it heart and soul.

While it is true that she is making a big difference in people’s lives as an Assistant Professor of English at North Vista College in San Antonio, Texas, Natalia is changing lives in many other important ways. Much of Natalia’s spare time in the last 20+ years has been devoted to working with different writing groups and organizations in the San Antonio area in an effort to support, uplift, and celebrate writers. Her tireless work with Gemini Ink, Voices de la Luna, and the Macondo Writers’ Workshop is longstanding and certainly noteworthy, but it is her involvement with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center that illustrates her true gift as a nurturer of writers, specifically young adult writers. Her expansive, decades-long commitment, both in and out of the classroom, speaks of her devotion to Texas writers.

It is easy to see that Natalia excels at life as a friend, advocate, and community leader, but her own writing is also noteworthy, full of compassion, love, and light, the kind of traits that make her shine even more brightly under the Texas sun.

                                                                          ~Guadalupe García McCall
                                                                            Poet, Author, Educator & Advocate

The current work of painter Angela Basile recasts portraits of strangers from old photographs found on eBay, recalling an American past. The characters remain posed for conventional portraits, delicately outlined, unnamed in a different time and place. Perhaps the most stunning contrast in these paintings is their vivid, conflicting backgrounds, which employ graffiti and other contemporary visualizations. The estranged background space denies the subjects a predictable sense of place, creating a fascinating dynamic between the real and the imagined. What I love most about these new works is how Basile allows the present to blur into the past: the bold colors of a background may appear in the tie of an unknown man. Graffiti bleeds into the realistic portrait of a young girl, forging a connection between the two disparate styles. Two senior men, painted in pastel tones, stand within an unexpected burst of bright yellow flowers. These techniques also tease the viewer to consider how the brightness of the background might argue with the more subtle, detailed foreground portraits. Are the picturesque subjects enclosed in a surreal container, or is there truly a background and foreground?

I’ve been close to Angela Basile’s artwork since we were both Studio Art majors at Syracuse University in the 1990s. Our long-standing friendship has been grounded in relationship to our creative endeavors. In her previous project, Basile’s paintings were much quieter—they included images of muted mid-century houses, anthropomorphic yet void of any humans. This departure returns to some of Basile’s previous historical subject matter. Still, it embraces bold, contemporary techniques paired with the images of the unknown and forgotten, resulting in works that reflect the voice of a painter who embraces both nostalgia and a turn towards the future.
                                                                                    ~Tracey Knapp

West Trestler Romana Iorga interviews West Trestler Kelly R. Samuels about her new poetry collection, Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press, 2024), a book carried by a daughter's relationship with her mother as they navigate the latter's struggle with dementia due to Alzheimer's  (from the publisher).

Romana Iorga: Language and memory are intertwined throughout many of your poems in Oblivescence. The poem “What We Think of When the Character in the Novel Says There Should Be a Word for Memories Left Unremembered” begins with the lines, “The word is stubborn. / It does not want to be known.” It seems that the disappearance of memory would necessarily bring about the disappearance of language, and yet, that’s not always the case in this collection. Words often serve as “navigational tools” to anchor experience, to provide a map for the fading memory. The line,  “Here’s the trough to drink from to recall, shallow and bloody” in “My Mother as Anticlea, upon Forgetting” seems to indicate that the poem itself has become a talisman against forgetting. How do you view the interplay between language and memory in your work?

Kelly R. Samuels: Language is one of the first casualties of Alzheimer’s. I wanted to illustrate that loss for my mother in particular poems, either fully, as with “What We Think of…” or briefly as in the poem “Metathesis” when I share that she, not being able to quickly recall my name, would call me “you.” For me, as the speaker, language is being used to process what is happening, and as you write, “provide a map,” to orient myself and try and navigate uncharted territory. Thus, the use of medical terms like “Anomia” and “Alexithymia”; those poems sprang from attempts to further educate myself about dementia. I also wanted to show that we all have lapses, even those of us who are more cognitively healthy—either because we are tired or stressed or distracted. And, so, sometimes I would include my own loss regarding language, as in the title poem, when I use the word “something” and then the ellipses to suggest I have either forgotten or cannot find the words. All of the poems, in sum, serve as a record, because that’s what we do, as poets, right? We try and capture something, fix something to the page, with our words.   

RI: Strong emotions, like fear, are often the ones that stay with us the longest. In “Overwritten (1),” you say, “Fear would have to bring you here— / to what had not been overwritten.” Yet the moments of sadness and violence that follow are, in their turn, followed by moments of joy. Memory seems to be an ally in this instance, rewriting the past to make it bearable. A happier memory, in the titular poem Oblivescence, shows us a mother and daughter canning peaches together. The speaker mourns the fact that she can’t quite remember every detail, “some necessary gestures absent, wiped / away.” Can memory preserve the essence of an experience—either positive or negative—by retelling it in a slightly altered form? By turning it into myth and allegory?

KRS: It certainly can. We know that we rewrite memories and that each time we recall an event, our brain alters it a little, but the essence is still there, and certainly the accompanying feelings. “Overwritten (1)” and “Overwritten (2)” stem from what we understand of fear and memory, and give glimpses of my mother’s two marriages—to my father and then my stepfather—neither of which were what I would call happy. In the last two lines of each poem I wanted to convey something of beauty and happiness as compensation for the violence earlier in the poem—an overwrite or rewrite—as well as work with the idea of how we try and see something good in a terrible situation, perhaps as a survival tactic. So, there is preservation of the negative experience, but also our effort to salvage the positive. And that salvaging could be accurate, or not. I mean, a myth is often defined as something believed to be true, but that isn’t. And, yet, myths matter; they tell us something about ourselves or what we consider to be important. 

RI: The erasure poem “What Rises to the Surface” stands out among other poems in Oblivescence. I was so moved by the source text, particularly the memory of the car trip during which your six-year-old self massages her mother’s shoulders to alleviate the pain of a migraine. And I love the erasure of that text, with its evocative “Everything / is / near/ and / nearly,” and the fact that we can read this poem both by taking it apart (source text, then erasure), or by piecing it together (vice versa). Given the focus of the collection on the process of forgetting, the presence of this poem, and its placement halfway through the text, as an anchor, or a spine, seems meaningful and important. Could you talk a bit about how this poem came into existence and your choice to build the collection around it? 

KRS: I am so pleased to hear you liked “What Rises to the Surface” and its accompanying poem! To be honest, the collection was not built around the creative nonfiction piece; that is to say, in the first iterations of the collection, it was not included. It was this separate piece I had written and which had been published by The Lindenwood Review and then I began thinking about collections that include essays or use erasure, like Traci Brimhall’s Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Katy Didden’s Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland, and I folded it in after creating the erasure poem from it. The title prompted the poem—what rose to the surface, for me: glimpses, fragments. I elected to position it near the middle of the collection to give the reader more information and a different reading experience, as well as to serve as a door into the later half where my mother’s condition deteriorates and we move beyond her death.  
  
RI: The human body is at the forefront of many of your poems, such as “Tending the Body,” with its final heartbreaking stanza: “And, so, how you look at me / with nothing of recognition, trying / to piece it all together. Make it whole.” Is the focus on your mother’s physical presence, the process of remembering what she looked like, an attempt to conjure her more vividly, to make her present and whole? I’m asking because I found myself doing something similar when writing about my mother and grandmother who’ve passed away—I wrote about their specific gestures or looks or ways of expressing themselves, and for a little while they would become more present than absent. 

KRS: I think many of us attempt to recall what a beloved person looked like after they die. It’s why pictures are so important. We find ourselves scrolling through images on our phones or, if older, paging through photo albums or rooting through photo boxes to gaze upon the deceased again. As for gestures, I sometimes find myself making the same as my mother, and in doing so, call up the memory of her. In composing these poems, I hoped to not only illustrate my mother’s struggles with Alzheimer’s, but show something of who she was, as a person—to personalize the experience for the reader, as it was for me as her daughter. Being able to see her or imagine what she looked like, at least somewhat, is part of that. “Tending the Body” is one of those poems that references biographical information—like she broke her nose while sledding as a girl—but, more importantly, tries to draw a picture of what she looked like, or maybe more accurately, the parts of her body I could evoke, the hands being most important to me, largely because when she was hospitalized the last week of her life, I washed and massaged her hands—a moment I could not, in the end, write about.        
​                                                                Romana Iorga & Kelly R. Samuels

​Joanne Godley lives in Mexico City, having emigrated from the U.S. a year ago in search of more ease. She is a physician, writer, poet, and a third-year MFA candidate in Poetry at Pacific University. She is a Meter Keeper in the Poetry Witch Community and an Anaphora Arts fellow in both poetry and fiction. Godley’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Bellevue Literary Review, Mantis, Light, FIYAH, Pratik, The Account, among others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her prose has been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review online, Juked, and Memoir, among others. She has received support from VONA, the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, among others. Her first poetry chapbook, Picking Scabs from the Body History, features poems of witness and resistance. Her second poetry chapbook, forthcoming with Black Sunflowers Press, is an insider’s view of the fascinating and disturbing world of American medicine from the unique perspective of a Black woman physician. She describes the poems as insightful, revelatory, and, perhaps, controversial.

_________________________________________________________________

Joanne Godley's courageous and bold poems awaken my body and teach my mind of the numerous truths that are often forgotten or purposely swept under the rug in our world.  Whether she's writing about the questionable treatment of being an African-American woman physician, how Black lives matter, or about how the Black race handles ashy skin to her mostly caucasian audience who are unaware of such things, it's always fascinating to read or hear what she has written next.

Besides all of her wonderful achievements in poetry and creative writing over the years, she has a most beautiful and loving heart. It's a holy moment to hear her read poems aloud with a captivating voice that only Joanne possesses. It's such a meaningful and humbling experience to hear her articulate her poems each time we have crossed paths over the past six years in poetry workshops or a poetry writing group. Whenever she's present I know I'm going to hear something worthy of being known, and so I'd better pay closer attention not to miss a word.  

                                                                           ~Jerrice J. Baptiste

​Julia Caroline Knowlton: I was glad to hear you were interested in a dialogue. I see you as this young and hip and edgy poet.
Nadia Arioli: I mean, you study fashion in Paris. I’m in a sweatshirt covered in cat hair and baby food so….
​JCK: I still remember. I think as I mentioned my daughters are now 28 and 25, but I still remember that phase ... I was just reading through your book again. I read about the life and work of Kay Sage. She’s just amazing and has some interesting intersections with France and Italy.
NA: Yeah, yeah, for sure. She had an interesting and sad life.
JCK: You know, when I was reading a brief biography, I was thinking, God, I hope she doesn’t die by suicide. But she did
NA: But she sure did.
JCK: A fatal bullet through the heart. I know this is a very obvious question, but how did you come to write an entire book about Kay Sage?
NA: It got a little out of hand. *Laughs* I just wanted to write the one poem! Okay, so, I remembered seeing her painting in a museum as a kid. And I was like, I’m going to remember the name Kay Sage. And then I promptly forgot it. And then I randomly was like who was that? Strong name, who was she? And then I Googled it and was like ah, hah! Then I thought, what if I write more than one poem? And then it just sort of expanded.
JCK: Yeah!
NA: By luck, the defining catalogue came out in 2018 [Catalogue Raisonne by Stephen Robeson Miller, a collection of Sage's art, including biographic material]. Which was when I was in the thick of it, so it kind of worked out.
JCK: Wow. Really great. And one of the many things I admire is the amount that you write, especially given that you combine time with being an editor and have a young child. I mean, this is a substantial book.
NA: Yeah, it’s thick. Thank you. I use a planner for everything. Well, let’s talk about your book. You have a painterly focus too, I think not as ekphrasis, but you know, you talk about Rodin. And you of course, paint, and second one is Life of the Mind, so I don’t know if you want to talk about painting, in your book.
JCK: Well, in this slender chapbook, I talk about basically the breakdown of one relationship, which was my marriage, and the emergence of new relationships to myself through travel and art. It’s the only time I’ve published or talked about my divorce in my poems. One of the things I wrote about is starting to paint. I’m still really new. And I did the cover art. This is my own art. This is my third chapbook. I end up talking about individual art. So this is a cool overlap.
NA: We both actually wrote about Ginkgo trees, so that’s cool.
JCK: Yeah!
NA: So we were both like yeah, those trees are cool. Let’s write about that. 
JCK: Let’s see what else. I guess it’s pretty overt, I talk about the aging process. I’m in my late fifties now. It is of course an inexhaustible topic for poets. I'm glad it seems like now there’s space in American Poetry to talk about aging. When I was young and a student, I mean for a long time, I never saw any poems by middle-aged women talking about what it’s like to get older. I mean, I can’t think of a single one. But then so, you know, I was astounded when I started this book, and one of my many thoughts on this was wow, Nadia’s doing what Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were doing. I mean, of course, you take language further than that. But I was always so struck by, when I studied their work when they had young children at home, and trying to balance all that shit, writing, and having young children, as we know, didn’t turn out so great for either of them.
NA: Oh, did Anne Sexton die by suicide too?
JCK: She did, yeah.
NA: I didn’t know that. 
JCK: Put on her mother’s fur coat, and got drunk, and went out to the car, very dramatically did the … When I was a lot younger, I remember so consciously looking for women poets, American women poets, who did not destroy themselves with drugs and alcohol and/or, die by suicide. So, for me, one of the many things that your collection does, is not only honor the work for Kay Sage, but you’re just right there, you know? Just doing what was so difficult for women to do for so long.
NA: Well, thank you. Speaking of like periods and stuff, my favorite poem in your collection was "My Period at Fifty." I just, really love it, the images, and how like stark it is. I think I wrote a question on that one. What makes you want to write about something that is considered taboo? I mean, it shouldn’t be considered taboo, but like…
JCK: Right. 
NA: HOW COULD YOU!
JCK: It felt really good to write that. Again, not the most common topic for poems. And this little poem went through quite a lot of drafts. I workshopped it when I did my MFA, whittled it down to its current state. I remember you very kindly accepted it for Thimble, and then, I literally got two acceptances the same day. 
NA: That happens! And Rust and Moth is wonderful, and we ended up taking the other one, so it worked out. I just really like that.
JCK: Tell me about how your work as an editor dovetails. Tell me how and when did you start Thimble.
NA: That was six years ago. So 2018. I actually co-founded it with someone who dropped out. He did a lot of the like startup work: Here’s the format, here’s what we’re doing. And I was like okay! I was just hoping and seeing where it goes. It’s definitely an adjacent hat [to writing] but not the same hat. It’s one of those things that’s like oh, I have poems [that I read for Thimble] I really, really like. So I want to write poems that I would enjoy reading.
JCK: Right, I have a file on my computer called “Poems I love.” And I keep track of them. And I have started teaching poetry in the school where I teach French so I can pull them out. But I think it would be really exciting to do what you do. But I doubt that I would ever edit a literary journal, because it’s such a labor of love, right?
NA: Right. I do have great help! I have readers, you know, who read as well, and I most definitely couldn’t do it without them.
JCK: Tell me more about your book. Was it a very organized process of looking at the paintings and organizing the poems, or was it kind of hopscotch?
NA: Well, it started off kind of hopscotch because I could only find, let’s just say, forty of her paintings online, so I wrote the poems for those. And then once [Miller’s] big book came out, I went through methodically. First I looked through the paintings and just sticky-noted the paintings that spoke to me or were historically important. And I went in order.
JCK: Okay, cool. So, one of my favorites in your book is on page forty: "Near the Four Courners." I am really astounded by the power of this poem. Did you write it quickly?
NA: It was an early one, actually. This is the first one I think got published by Gasher. I think I did.
JCK: Are you pretty happy with it? Because it’s amazing!
NA: Oh, thank you. I just feel like there’s not enough poems about women orgasming, so it’s about time.
JCK: Yeah!
NA: I guess, yeah, I’m happy with that one.
JCK: The enjambment. Was that very deliberately? 
NA: I think so! I can’t say what exactly I was consciously doing, but I wanted like a halting, awkwardness to it.
JCK: It’s just extraordinary.
NA: Thank you. For your book—it doesn’t really segue from that, sorry—but for your book, I noticed you definitely have a style, right. You have shorter poems. You tend to write in the present tense. And they tend to be like little, tight poems. So what drew you to tight, little rooms?
JCK: That’s a good question. I have had poetry teachers challenge me to write poems that are longer, poems that take up more than one page. Well, I love couplets. I often write in couplets. I’m really intrigued by relationships. I’m certainly no expert at relationships. But whether it’s mother and child, or romantic partners, I love to play around with couplets while I’m thinking about relationships between two people. I’d like to do it not quite as much. I mean, we all have our obsessions, right? But, you know, the possibly more philosophical idea behind it is by definition poetry is not prose. So I like to just take it down to its bare essence. Again, I would like to try to put more fur than just bare bones poems. I always admire people, I mean, I would have a hard time writing more than a hundred pages. It’s really great. Do you have any special time of day that you write? Or is it kind of catch-as-catch-can
NA: That’s a good question, because if I try to be organized relative to a time of day, it stresses me out, because if I miss the window, I’m like “It’s off, the whole thing is off. I blew it!” But then I was like, why am I stressing myself out over imaginary deadlines? What am I doing? But if I do set a goal of writing something every day, it tends to go better. Or like for the Kay Sage book, I tended to look at it in weekly chunks. Like, just write one poem, or two poems a week, which is doable, right? Like, spend a day brainstorming, let’s say a day writing, and a day editing. Do you write the same time of day?
JCK: Well, I have settled into the early morning, before I go teach, and before, you know, the day starts fluttering about me with all the things the day brings. So I do have this sacred early morning time. But I am more of a fits and starts. Well, a few weeks ago, I wrote A-Z Poems for Babies.
NA: Oh fun!
JCK: I’ll see where that goes. I think it’ll just be terrific to write poems for babies learning the alphabet. So I did that. That came out in one fell swoop. Lately I’ve just been fiddling around with painting and not writing ... I always seem to keep things going. But kind of like you described, I try not to put too much pressure on myself. At the same time, I do need enough of that. Sort of like a pilot light on a stove. I need enough of that to keep me going.
NA: Yeah, so like, a loose structure. Like a big project. Right now, I find myself without a project. So I was like well, what am I … what do I got next? 
JCK: I completely relate to that feeling, and it causes anxiety. Like, oh what now? I was reading about Louise Glück. Evidently, she would go through periods of two years, nothing. 
NA: Wow.
JCK: She would understandably get pretty freaked out. But then more poetry would appear. So tell me about your visual art, because that’s something else we have in common.
NA: I do various things. I go through various projects. I never got the hang of painting. I can’t get the paint to do the thing. Do you do oil painting?
JCK: No, I’m doing acrylic.
NA: Oh okay. Yeah I did the cover for Kay Sage. I wanted to do like an homage to Sage, not like a gross copy—because that would kind of invite criticism. Like, this is what this poem thinks Kay Sage is? Wow. Imagine what she did in her poems! So I did that with oil pastel, and then I actually photoshopped it and inversed the colors to get that green.
JCK: Wow, looks good.
NA: Thank you. I would say I’m more of a magpie when it comes to art because, I think I’m good, but it’s not so tied to my identity. Like, if someone said, “You’re not a real poet,” I would clobber them and cry. I would be so upset. Whereas if someone said, “You’re not a real artist,” I would be sad because they’re being very rude, but it wouldn’t be like my identity is at stake. So it’s kind of freeing. I can kind of do what I feel like.
JCK: I do feel that with painting as well. I mean, I don’t have a degree [in painting]. I’ve just been admiring painting for years, and it’s fun to explore. Well, this is another thing we have in common. We both did the visual art! 
NA: And also we have the same publisher! I guess we could have started there: Kelsay Books. 
JCK: As one person would say, we’re litter-mates.
NA: Oh, that’s funny. I liked working with them. They were like very commutative. They were on top of it. I’ve had some publishers—I’m not going to say who—where it was like, um, omigod. 
JCK: Did you have two books at the same time?
NA: I had a book picked up last week, but it’s not coming out until 2025, which is a relief. I have a chapbook allegedly coming out later this year. I haven’t really heard from them. I need to follow up.
JCK: I did see on Facebook that you signed the contract. Congrats! What book was that?
NA: Thank you! It’s called Mother Fur. One part’s is about being a mom, one part is about Grendel’s Mother, and the third part is an essay. I sent it to, well, I don’t want to speak too soon, because I haven’t actually published a book with them yet, but I really like Fernwood Press so far. They’ve been wonderful. That’s why I’m without a project. What’s next for you?
JCK: Kelsay Books does accept proposals for children’s books, so I’m going to work on my Poems for Babies—A-Z, one poem for each letter of the alphabet, which was an easy way for me to structure the manuscript. And I’m hoping they might like to publish it. It would be really exciting to think of my audience of being babies in the midst of language acquisition. I would just delight. I am trying to take a pause for more mature, adult poems, if you will. I’m going to work on painting for a while. I’ve sold a few paintings, so I’m kind of interested to see where I might go with that. I am writing individual poems again. Thank you very much—you’re going to publish [with Thimble] my Proust poem. I’m very grateful. As long as I have like a slow dribble, and then I don’t panic too much. 
NA: I have some more questions. For putting a book together, did you sit down and be like, okay, I’m going to write a book, or were you like what poems kind of go together? Or kind of both?
JCK: Very much the second. I just write poems and then start grouping them together. I know there’s been this trend for a long time in American poetry to write the overall, thematically connected book, like a collection of poetry that tells the story of a murder. There’s a historical basis to it. I don’t do that quite as closely. But I know the importance of having a book go together. Kind of like having the ingredients in the kitchen; it all has to go together. I just have it come about as naturally as possible. How about you, for the same question? 
NA: Kind of between. I’ll write some poems, and be like I’ve noticed I’m on a kick about writing about motherhood. Or Grendel’s Mother. That was pretty easy—Grendel’s Mother is a joy to write about! What else has she been doing? I find it easier to have a loose structure. Most of books have themes, but one chapbook, like a four-way split of a book, I didn’t have a theme. I was like, I’ll just find 30 pages of poems I have. That was so tricky. What order? And what poems? Does it make sense?
JCK: It makes me think of cleaning out a closet. Like, ah, lot of stuff happening. I wanted to ask you, at what age did you know you wanted to write, needed write, etc.?
NA: I guess at age 10. I was really little. I read this book—I had to look it up, it was by Jean Little, about kids who wrote poetry, and I thought I bet I could do that. And then I kept doing it. I had some good encouraging teachers. How about you?
JCK: I also was about 10 when I wrote my first poems. I was in high school when it started to become more of a deeper necessity. And like you, I had teachers who told me, you’ve got something going, keep at it.  Especially because I had to teach full-time, it’s so meaningful to think of those teachers who encouraged me. It sounds really sentimental, but it’s true.
NA: I found a poem I wrote in college. It was like in a little Poetry Club publication or whatever. And I dug it out, and I read it, and I was like, well, thank god those teachers saw potential in me, because OOOF. Woof. 
JCK: Listen, you’re going places for sure.
NA: Well, thank you. I mean, this year I had a good opportunity—because I don’t work outside the home. So it’s not like I’m not working because it’s a full time job, but I don’t have this third other thing. Like, I’m not trying to keep my baby, my poetry, and my job. I’m just trying to take care of my poetry and my kid. I will go back to work once he’s in school, so I’m trying to make the most of this time but not, you know, burn myself out.
JCK: Well, I watched your narrative on Facebook of moving up to New England. It’s cool.
NA: Thanks, glad I’m not working in an office anymore.
JCK: I would have a hard time. In fact, I did have a hard time. When I was out of college, I worked in an office for a couple of years. I didn’t want to keep doing that, so I went back to grad school to teach college level French, and that’s been the bread and butter. That’s working out.
NA: Yeah
JCK: Anyways, this has been great.
NA: This has been good. WE DID IT!
JCK: Yay, perfect. 

It was the winter of 2021 in the latest lockdown in Northern England. I was deep into therapy, grieving, and had started the rich seam of writing which would be the start of it all. Relatively new to social media, I saw a call out for Northern, working-class writers to submit a poem written in Northern vernacular. Somebody like me. From my background. It was rare and surprising. I’d been asked to take elocution lessons as a lecturer in English Literature and often damped down my flat Yorkshire vowels in the rarefied worlds of academia, then yoga, but this was something different. This was a call for me to be myself, to honour the culture and place I was from and more than that, to celebrate it.

My grandparents had been on my mind so a poem poured out in the inky light from the TV, written on the back of a newspaper. It was a tribute to their lives, their love for me and all they had meant, so the poem’s title was their address. I submitted it and forgot about it. As a new poet, I had no idea whether what I was writing had any value, I was just grateful that this specific and inclusive call-out had inspired me to write about my grandparents for the first time.

And that is how I met Rebecca Kenny.

The poem was accepted, not with a dry nod and direction for a short biography, but with warm, effusive, genuine feedback, warm as an Eccles cake, and oozing with all I had meant the poem to be. It gave me confidence, made me feel seen and valued, so I read further. Rebecca was the director of Bent Key Publishing, so named because she had been in an horrific car accident which left her dazed, hearing her own bones crack, her neck chip in two places, her pelvis and sternum break as the cold rain beat a tattoo on her face. She nearly died. When she eventually got back to her home, she found her front door key bent in her coat pocket; a symbol of all that would come after. New starts, risks, a new life carved out with bravery and generosity despite her broken body and traumatised mind. She was a gifted poet. She wrote an ebook The Girl Who Broke Her Back and her magnificent collection Crash & Learn as she recovered from her injuries. She didn’t stop at that. She founded her own publishing company with the aim of representing writers often marginalised from traditional publishing. She’d lost her job and had no government support but this is what she did at a time of great uncertainty for herself and during a global pandemic.

Her collection makes us all cry. There is pain, joy, grief, tiny moments in time peculiarly Northern which chimed at our hearts, these hearts being her team. The fragile but talented writers she has championed who have been brought together by her, lioness, fierce, cubs behind her every step. I had the confidence to submit the collection I had written to Bent Key Publishing and it was accepted. The joy of this and the warmth of the acceptance was an indescribable feeling. The dream of being a writer I had carefully shelved at the age of eight was alive again and more than this, I knew she thrived on this, making people feel appreciated and happy. She is a good person. We met for a Bent Key Showcase. I arrived just in time to see her opening set and stood transfixed as she performed without notes or hesitation. Her oratory filled the cloisters of the beautiful old church, our venue, and I knew, if I hadn’t known already, she was one of a kind. I went up to perform, faltering, and oh lord there’s a microphone. She adjusted it quietly and cheered me all the way. As she cheered all the poets and as she continues to release collection after collection for all the lost poets, despite the continued physical, mental and emotional fallout from the crash that nearly did for her. I’ll always be grateful we met.

                                                       ~Emma Conally-Barklem

In February 2020, I had the good fortune to spend two weeks at the Vermont Studio Center. It turned out to be their last residency session before the Covid lockdown forced them to close their doors, but we didn't know that then, and I was ignorantly happy to write all morning and hang out at meals and evenings with my new friend and housemate Vaune Trachtman. When I visited her studio, we laughed as we sipped gin from tiny paper cups meant for mixing chemicals. All around us, hanging from the walls on great sheets of heavy paper, was her work: gravure prints, layered black and white images that combined Vaune's photographs with snapshots her father had taken in the 1930s. The resulting images are haunting, surreal, and intimate, blurred with time and memory. Yet their details--a man's stare, a woman's profile, a boy's threadbare shirt--are so sharp they could cut you open. 

I'm lukcy to have had that time--one last pre-pandemic moment--to have worked among a community of writers and artists, and I'm so lucky to have met Vaune Trachtman and to have experienced her work. She takes my breath away.

                                       ~Juliana Gray 

​I heard Dilruba Ahmed’s work before I ever encountered it on the page, which seems fitting, given the masterful way she attends to sound and music in her work. She was reading poems that would become part of her debut collection, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf 2011), at a summer multi-genre reading at the low-residency program I was attending at the time as a (poet-disguised-as) fiction candidate. She leaned towards the microphone and, a stanza in, I felt the room lean forward.
 
A few months later, I would take leave from the program and I wouldn’t write anything for almost a decade, but I kept my memory of that reading as a bright spot and continued to seek out Ahmed’s work. In 2020, when the state of the world revealed/re-revealed poetry as an essential coping strategy, I picked up her second collection, Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020). 
 
Whether she’s writing about the personal, the environmental, or the political (and their various intersections), Ahmed’s work embodies a deeply sensory presence that echoes timelessly. Her attention towards the world is clear-eyed and piercing and (still, somehow) open-hearted. The range of her subjects and formal approaches diffuses texture, imagination, and surprise throughout her collections. 
 
I’ve also been lucky enough to experienced Ruba as a teacher (at Hugo House’s and Murphy Writing of Stockton University’s online classes) and I can confirm both her sharp insight and generosity. My work has been enriched by the time I’ve spent with hers. 

                                                                             ~Violeta Garcia Mendoza

I walked its length more than once, stopping to study the honeycomb and the delicate seed pod, to make out what one book that one card spoke of. There’s a blurry picture I took of the egg—what I think might have been a quail’s—and another from the end, showing the gentle curve of the cards that called up for me, then, memories of water and a pier stretching out into the distance. Now, when I think back, the cards, lined as they were, resemble the underside of a Browning Parasol mushroom.
 
Whiting’s work, overall, focuses on the environment, something that matters to me. Her framed pieces that use human anatomy textbook illustrations and geologic survey maps illustrate the connection we have with nature. As she writes on her website, “Our impact on the land affects human health since air pollution and disposed waste will ultimately lead back to us.” Her installation piece Deforestation is a room full of tree stumps made from vintage law books. Like Catalog, the tight packing of paper—its semblance to another form—readjusts our view and, more importantly, provokes us to think carefully about what we are doing to save this place we inhabit.
​
                                                                                             ~Kelly R. Samuels

Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed

Camille T. Dungy, "Trophic Cascade" ​
Kenyon Review 

I encountered Madge Evers and her spore print art at a neighborhood festival a few years back. Looking at her ghostly, exuberant work stole my breath, and I knew I couldn't take it in the way I wanted to while standing under a makeshift tent at a folding table in the last minutes of a one-day event while my kids begged for popsicles. I pocketed her card and not long after she invited me to visit her home studio. 

Thi Bui's dynamite graphic memoir The Best We Could Do skyrocketed onto my all-time favorites list instantly: it's an intimate family story strung out on the pitiless frame of history, the way the membranous part of a dreamcatcher is stretched across its hard outer frame, such that every reader is drawn in -- implicated -- caught. Bui's visual art, not only in The Best We Could Do but also in her award-winning illustrations for the children's book A Different Pond (by poet and author Bao Phi), has a heartstrings-tugging watercolor-like tenderness: it's amazing to find an author so equally gifted with words and pictures. Many of us children of refugees have heard our parents tell stories bearing similarities to the tales Bui tells, but it takes talent to make the scenes spring to life the way she does, often with just a single thoughtfully chosen visual detail or scrap of dialogue. 

                                                       ~ Jenna Lê