Of Poetry Podcast

Listen: On Spotify, Apple, Google, and Elsewhere

Read: “Dream, with an interior” in Moist Poetry Journal

Purchase: World’s End (ARP Books, 2023) and groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013–2023 (Invisible Publishing)

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Recommended Reading:

Neil Gaiman

Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer

Lydia Davis

Russell Edson

Sarah Manguso

Nate Logan

Ben Niespodziany

Rosmarie Waldrop

Cole Swenson

Rachel Zucker

Lisa Robertson

Norma Cole, Writing on Writing in French

Listen here: On Apple, Google, Spotify, and elsewhere

Chris Corlew is a writer and musician living in Chicago. His work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Whisk(e)y Tit, Kicking Your Ass, Cracked.com, and elsewhere. With Bob Sykora, he co-hosts The Line Break, a podcast about poetry and basketball. With Brendan Johnson, he is ½ of Lazy & Entitled, the band that writes novels. You can find more Chris on Bluesky @thecorlew, a storiesfromvine.com, or at shipwreckedsailor.substack.com.

Bob Sykora is the author of the chapbook I Was Talking About Love–You Are Talking About Geography (Nostrovia! 2016) and the forthcoming collection Utopians in Love (Game Over Books 2025). A graduate of the UMass Boston MFA program, he teaches at community college, edits with Garden Party Collective, co-hosts The Line Break podcast, and curates the KC Poetry Calendar.

Han VanderHart is a queer writer and arts organizer living in Durham, North Carolina. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast, edits Moist Poetry Journal, and co-edits the poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey.

Poems Read on the Show:

“Utopians in Love” by Bob Sykora (Cotton Xenomorph)

“Bottoms” by Jenny Johnson (American Poetry Review)

“What the Kids Don’t Know” by Jill McDonough (The ThreePenny Review)

“Elusive Black Hole Pair” by Alina Pleskova (Toska, Deep Vellum)

“Last night I was sexting and reading June Jordan” by Han VanderHart (unpublished)

“human pastoral brick” by Chris Corlew

Listen: On Spotify, Apple, Google, and Elsewhere

Read: “Ode to the Empanadas on Pacific & Elm, with Apologies to William Carlos Williams” in Okay Donkey Mag

Purchase: A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024)

Carla Sofia Ferreira (she/her) is the daughter of Portuguese immigrants and a teacher from Newark, New Jersey. Author of micro-chapbook Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press, 2019) and debut poetry book A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024), her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her writing in The Rumpus, Glamour, EcoTheo, underblong, Okay Donkey, december, and Washington Square Review, among others. On the internet, she’s @csferreira08 on Twitter and @csferreirawrites on Instagram. She believes in kindness, semicolons, and the permanent abolition of ICE. She has now successfully taught her cat Moonshadow how to fetch. She dislikes writing bios in the third person but is saving for her overthrow of societal norms for other causes.

Recommended Reading:

Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia

Ross Gay, Be Holding and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Paul Robeson”

Roberto Carlos Garcia, [Elegies]

Benjamin Garcia, Thrown in the Throat

Listen: On Spotify, Apple, Google, and Elsewhere

Read: “A Poem for Retired Lighthouses,” Little Blue Marble

Purchase: And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death (Ethel Zine Press, 2023)

Catherine Rockwood  (she/they) lives in Massachusetts. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Their poetry chapbooks, And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death (2023) and Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion (2022) are available from the Ethel Zine Press.

Recommended Reading:

Our Flag Means Death: A Brief Excursus on Tailors and Tailoring by Catherine Rockwood

A review of Our Flag Means Death by Catherine Rockwood (Strange Horizons)

Ethel Zine Press

Stephanie Burt, We Are Mermaids

Brian Teare, Doomstead Days

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google, and streaming

Read: Neutral Spaces, for more of Tom Snarsky’s poetry

Purchase: Reclaimed Water (Ornithopter Press, 2023)

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him @tomsnarsky on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky, and you can find the reading series he coordinates @night_light_poems_ on Instagram and @nightlightpoems on Twitter. If you’re a poet, he would love to hear from you!

Further/Recommended Reading:

The Minison

The Minison Project

C.T. Salazar

Noelle Kocot’s Ascent of the Mothers (Wave Books, 2023)

Jon Anderson’s The Inner Gate

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google, and Elsewhere

Read: April 2020

Purchase: For Today (LSU Press, 2024)

Carolyn Hembree‘s third poetry collection, For Today, is forthcoming from LSU Press. She is also the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. 

Recommended Reading:

Jennifer Shaw’s visual art series Flood State

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (novella on the 1918 flu pandemic)

Inger Christensen’s alphabet, translated Susanna Nied

Spring and All (facsimile edition with introduction by C.D. Wright) by William Carlos Williams

[By the road to the contagious hospital] by William Carlos Williams

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

“An Anatomy of the Long Poem” by Rachel Zucker

Of Being Numerous (excerpt) by George Oppen

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google, and Elsewhere

Read: “Dear Memphis,” at Terrain.org

Purchase: Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2023)

Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee whose writing explores diasporic living. Dear Memphis, their debut collection of poems, will be published by River River Books in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals. They have received material support from City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.

Further Reading:

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Alicia Ostriker