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Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

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The Editors

In response to anti-Black racist violence, help us support Black lives through literature and art, as well as efforts for justice in Houston, by donating to or supporting these organizations.


D.A. Powell on "The Mad Place" of Poetry

Justin Jannise

"You can use language and be absolutely true to what you’re saying, and at the same time people have an opportunity to misread it as something scintillating or shocking or surprising."


Engaging the Mystery: The Anagogic Poetry of Lucie Brock-Broido

Eric Farwell

Last March, Lucie Brock-Broido died at the age of 61. She left behind four collections, and the work within was characterized as “spooky,” “haunted,” or some version thereof when she was eulogized in every publication from The New York Times to The Paris…


Dora Malech makes her entrance into experimental poetry

Despy Boutris

To “stet” is the act of making a textual change and then changing it back and so on and so forth. In the spirit of “stetting,” Stet also acts as a means of reinventing language, just as Malech attempts to reinvent her own voice through this collection.


You Are Here: An Interview with Eduardo Portillo

Sheila Scoville

“When I built my first stretcher, it was like finding a big surprise. It let me reinforce what I had been doing with painting, which was playing around with points of tension, ideas about the canvas as a fabric, as something I could manipulate and explore different possibilities with, not just within the gallery but also with the rectangle. Painting didn’t have to be just rectangular—I really wanted to challenge that.”


Mass Culture and the American Poet: The Poem as Vaccination

Tony Hoagland

I once drove around southwest Arizona with a photographer named Pedro, from Mexico City. His specialty was making ethnographic forays into North America, and on this trip he was studying the culture of RVs—recreational vehicles—and their owners. In the…


Travels with Steve, and Good Writing

Tony Hoagland

My old friend and former teacher Steve Orlen and I walked many miles together along the wide avenues of Tucson, Arizona. Our promenades usually took place after the dinner hour, in the evening, when the blazing heat of the Sonoran day had at last relented. An evening breeze would finally have arisen, and the little desert sparrows flew back and forth between the lofty crowns of the palm trees that line those streets.


A Microinterview with Dorianne Laux

Despy Boutris

I think of poetry as musical language, close to every day speech but of a higher order, with a system of notation.


Experiments with White Heat

Melissa Mesku

That exalted moment when, out of nowhere, you are obliterated—completely, blissfully destroyed—by a voluptuous euphoria. A lightning flash of inspiration. That is white heat.