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Guest Editor Tomás Q. Morín: A Special Feature
“When West Branch invited me to be a guest editor, I told Josh I wanted the story if it was still free. This time, to my absolute delight, it was.”
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Guest Editor Joy Priest: A Special Feature
“I asked a few poets from these spaces to send me work and this folio is the result of that request. As I read what they sent me, a theme emerged. Each poem that reached out toward me was a site of longing.”
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Ghosts in the Archive
“History devours the individual. One life at a time, it amalgamates individual voices into the maw of broad historical narratives.”
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An Interview with M.G. Leibowitz
“But this power to … communicate the full weight of a paradox, to ‘say’ in one stroke and “unsay” in the next—to me, that’s poetry at its best.”
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Document(s)
I chose “Document(s)” as a topic during a time of uncertainty— during an era of dis/misinformation, as the 2020 election approached, with ongoing civil unrest and police brutality, in the middle of an ever-evolving pandemic.
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Protactile Poetry
One of the outcomes I expect from the enterprise of translating American Sign Language poetry into English is that it would disappoint many readers.
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Maurice Carlos Ruffin Introduces Kristina Kay Robinson, Emilie Staat Strong, and Ran Walker
I met Emilie Staat Strong in a coffee shop around 2008. I was writing a short story, and she noticed the stack of craft books on my table. “You’re a writer,” she said. I said I was, and she said she was too.
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An Interview with Amy Gustine
“Short stories are rarely about the moment of crisis. I think that’s because what happened is just a fact.”
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Guest Editor: Sabrina Orah Mark
“Baugh and Scheckler are distinctly different poets but one thing they have at their center is the desire to heal by reaching all the way into the most wounded wound.”
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At the Gate: Poems of Friendship
“Poems, I think, are encounters: between image, volta, syntax, and other implements of craft, and between reader, speaker, and poet.”