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The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an organization of over 700 book review editors and critics nationwide. The NBCC has been operating since 1974, hoping to advance a national conversation around critically discussing and sharing literature. What the NBCC is most well-known for are its annual awards, the National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Last year, the NBCC shared their longlists for each category for the first time in their 50 years of presenting the awards. They’re continuing the tradition this year. Throughout this week, we’ll be treated to an array of finalists in the six categories of criticism, fiction, autobiography, biography, poetry, and nonfiction. There are two additional categories awarded annually as well, as voted on by members: the John Leonard Prize for the best debut book in any genre and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, for the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States.

Today, the NBCC announced their Longlist for Poetry. Poetry is a perennially under-read format, especially in America, but these titles are not only great places to dive back in but represent some of the best of the best, as determined by critics who know and appreciate the format.

Here’s the National Book Critics Circle Longlist in Poetry:

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The National Book Critics Circle will share their winners in an awards ceremony on March 26, 2026. You can learn more about the NBCC and about how to get involved here, as well as keep an eye on the lists as they release the rest of the week. The NBCC announced their Fiction Longlist and their Criticism Longlist on Monday, alongside yesterday’s announcements of their Autobiography Longlist and Biography Longlist.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

The post The National Book Critics Circle Longlist for Poetry appeared first on Our Story Insight.

I was one of those teenagers who wrote and read poetry, who dreamed of being a poet. I still have my teenage poems, the ones I wrote in notebooks between classes, on the bus, late at night when my family were deep in their own dreams. In those poems, I reveal my inner self—fraught with love, loss, and mostly desire—and colored by the world I lived in, my family, my town and the abundant green nature that surrounded me. Poems preserving my youth through the decades like the Jim Croce song “Time in a Bottle” that played constantly on KJR in my early teens.

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In college, I studied English literature and creative writing, fueling my poetic ambitions. And then, my senior year, I stopped writing. I needed money to pay for my tuition and, following graduation, to pay for everything. Earning a living kicked the poet in me to the curb. What remained: books, journals, sheafs of poems locked in a trunk in my parents’ basement for decades.

Whatever writing I did was in service of feeding my family, not my soul.

While I kept on living. I married and (regretting that) divorced, remarried, gave birth and raised three children, moved across the country and around the world. Working long days building a business career to support my family. A career in which I founded several companies, served as an executive for technology corporations and the world’s largest philanthropic foundation, and as a CEO for a global marketing firm.

Could I have written poems in the margins of business plans or client presentations, in the margins of my busy life? Perhaps, but I chose not to. Nor did I choose to keep a journal. Or to continue writing long newsy letters to friends and family once the internet took root. Whatever writing I did was in service of feeding my family, not my soul. Or was that the tradeoff I thought I was making at the time?

Forty years flew by, without a written record. Sure, there are photos in boxes and albums and in the cloud that tell the story of those decades. Or a version of the story—the one for public consumption, mostly posed, smiling. Thousands of photos that give a snapshot of my life. But they fall far short of telling the complex narrative of the life I was living. Until I started writing poetry again at 58.

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I’m often asked if I regret not writing during those decades. Perhaps implying that I resented the work I did and everything else that got in the way of writing. “No, not at all,” I respond. “I loved how I spent those years, the work I did and the life I created.”

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.

Yet, the other day when I read the poem “Will You?” by Carrie Fountain, where she describes making valentines with her young children, I cried. I tried to remember making valentines with my own children—the pink and red construction paper, white doilies, stickers and glitter. I have a few of their valentines tucked in a box in my basement. Proof that we did this: that we cut out hearts and glued them. The doilies now yellowed; the glitter dulled. In some, my handwriting declares “Happy Valentine’s Day” and “Will You Be Mine?” above their squiggly signatures. I try to conjure the scene, the kitchen table (what house was that?), what age were my children? Maybe there’s a photo somewhere of us. But there’s not a poem.

I didn’t kiss my children goodnight and stay up to write that scene, to describe the smell of the glue, my daughter pressing stickers on her face, the earnestness of my oldest son working his fingers stubbornly to cut out a heart, the baby covered in glitter. Or to capture how I felt in that moment—making valentines, little declarations of affection, with my children—to write my love for them. That would have been a valentine to my future self.

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment. Carrie Fountain wrote a beautiful poem, but it’s also the story of one February evening with her children who “are so young they cannot imagine a world/like the one they live in.” In the poem, she preserves a slice of their childhood, even as the poet is already looking ahead “I know they will someday soon/see everything and they will know about/everything and they will no longer take/never mind for an answer.” That time has no doubt already arrived for the poet and her children.

Witnessing even the dull dailiness of our lives through writing also leads to the kind of discovery Ada Limón, our recent U.S. Poet Laureate, describes in her poem “Not the Saddest Thing in the World.” On an ordinary day, she finds a dead bird and buries it, and goes “about [her] day” realizing that the ordinary has been transformed, that “Now something’s/breaking always on the skyline…” Limón’s poem urges us to lift our eyes, to see and record even the smallest events, for they each have significance.

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In preparation to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday, I read through fifty years of her travel journals. I realize that even in the desert of Turkmenistan or in the Mekong Valley, it’s the ordinariness of breakfast, of meeting someone in a market or washing clothing in a bucket that make an experience extraordinary. It is the poetry of being in a place. In her journals, there is an intimacy in the daily details that allow our family to visualize my mother (and my father when he was alive) not only exploring the world but living in it. It’s a gift to her family.

No, I don’t regret putting my dream of being a poet on hold for forty years, but yes, I keenly feel the loss of what is left out of my story.

Recently, I wrote a poetic series called “Time Capsule” that imagines various objects from my life (photographs, a shoe, postcards, newspaper clippings, and other detritus) that might go into a time capsule. Beneath each item and the date, is a very small prose poem. Together the thirty or so poems form a timeline, a narrative of my life so far. And hopefully symbolize that a life, no matter how ordinary or seemingly small in the face of time and history, has import. But the “Time Capsule” sequence can only, at best, be an excavation of frayed artifacts, as it lacks the insight of the moment when filtered through the lens of time and experience.

So, if you ask me. “Do I regret the years without poetry?” No, I don’t regret putting my dream of being a poet on hold for forty years, but yes, I keenly feel the loss of what is left out of my story. That I failed to witness a span of my life in writing. Poetry is of course much more than mere documentation. But a daily writing practice for a poet heightens observational skills, deepens emotional tentacles and alerts all our senses. These days after a walk with my husband, I return with souvenirs of all I’ve gathered: an overheard conversation, the suddenness of a dogwood tree in bloom, the wind’s bite. While he, on the other hand, went for a walk. I can’t wait to get to the page, to capture the fragments.

It’s those fragments that I regret not scribbling in the margins. The lost conversations and observations that if chronicled, I could return to, once I was ready to recommit to poetry. That not writing for those decades, I missed discovering and documenting the deeper meaning of the life I was so busy living.

But who wants to live with regrets? So let me phrase it differently, as advice. Right now open your Notes app or grab a pen and a scrap of paper and write something—an observation, a response, a list of no-regrets, a poem. Consider it a valentine to the future you. To those you love. Write in the margins of your busy life. Maybe it will be the opening line of your next chapter.

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tic tic tic by Helen Seaborn is available from Cornerstone Press.

The post How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

June 5, 2025, 9:16am

Today, the Griffin Poetry Prize—the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry published in English—announced its 2025 winner, chosen from an illustrious shortlist of five. Karen Leeder has taken home the top prize for her translation, from the German, of Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running.

“Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running is a brilliant overview and selection of a poet who satisfies our hunger to be serious, as again and again he finds himself ‘between words and things,’ the judges said. “Karen Leeder’s adept translations establish a new version of Grünbein in English: universal, lyrical, philosophical.”

The prize of C$130,000 will be shared between Leeder, who will receive 60%, and Durs Grünbein, the original author. Each other shortlisted poet will be awarded C$10,000.

The prize was judged this year by Nick Laird, Anne Michaels, and Tomasz Różycki, who read and evaluated a total of 578 books to decide on the winner.

Durs Grünbein, tr. Karen Leeder, Psyche Running
Seagull Books

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The post Translator Karen Leeder has won the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize. ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Poetry and bugs should be thought of more often together. My friend, the poet Sara Nicholson, once told me she thought “ants deserve more poems.”

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But ants have a poetic pedigree worth tracking. John Clare wrote about them, and Robert Frost too. All kinds of bugs creep through poems, once you start looking. Blake wrote “The Fly”; John Donne “The Flea.”

There are dozens of poems riffing on Aesop’s fable about the cricket and grasshopper. In the journal American Entomologist, Louis C. Rutledge catalogs and taxonomizes the one hundred and eighty poems Emily Dickinson wrote in which arthropods of some variety appear: lots of bees and butterflies, but also gnats, worms, and of course her famous fly.

Insects have made more recent appearances too. Wong May has an incredible poem, “Zhi Lao,” about cicadas and knowledge. Bernadette Mayer, in Midwinter Day, notes “a small lady bug / with only two black dots on its back” climbing her pen as she writes. Dionne Brand’s book-length The Blue Clerk costars aphids, those other consumers of books.

Bugs are notoriously good analogues for human antics, ethics, and morality. For Frost and for Clare, bugs occasion recognition of “government and thought” as kin to human endeavor. But bugs seem to spark profounder recognition in poets. “Am I not / A fly like thee?” Blake asks.

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Bugs are notoriously good analogues for human antics, ethics, and morality.

Ours are also marginal labors that support larger ecosystems. Cribbing from Deborah Gordon’s work on ants, I maintain that both bugs’ and poets’ “interactions have a rhythm / but no real meaning.” Poets toil as often-anonymous individuals building some greater nest, colony, or hive that might outlast us or end up squashed and swept away unceremoniously.

Contingency is built into effort; effort could very well, almost always does, end in accident. A hand brushes our wing too.

Writing about Cid Corman’s poems, Lorine Niedecker—one of our notable attendants to the creatures—writes, “World news: sun on the sill; a bug.” The bug’s arrival across our human consciousness, the sill of our days, sparks irritation and interest. We share “world news” that way.

The kind of attention we train on a bug, when we do, displaces the inner concerns of a meditating subject or re-places those concerns onto external phenomena. The poet considers unlikeness to generate kind-ness—similarity or analogy, and, in certain poems or poets’ moods, something like gentleness.

“What wonder strikes the curious,” Clare begins his ant poem. We might imagine the poet absorbed by regard rather than ruination of the colony under his observation.

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But bug poems suspend us in a moment of uncertainty too—”pausing, annoyed” as Clare’s poem imagines its amateur entomologist to be—since that look could merely be prelude to murder. It’s not clear how Mayer handles the ladybug who is both participant in and distraction from her epic day of writing, or what the content of Corman’s next actions given the bug in his window might be.

Bug poems in this way are also about the violences of attention. The many bugs that my household shelters don’t irritate (or intrigue) me until I notice them. And then what do I do?

While they provide occasions for the kind of “transitive attention” Lucy Alford catalogs, wherein a poet fixes on a single object and the resulting poem gives rise to states like contemplation, desire, recollection, imagination, bugs also surface something darker about attention’s affects. Annoyance, disgust, anger, fear. “Ticks make me homicidal,” an acquaintance recently revealed.

And bugs’ ignoble practices exert fascination on poets too. David Seung, who first book Silkworm’s Pansori, came out with the Song Cave this March, includes many anecdotes about bugs as footnotes crawling across the pages. Seung writes about these footnotes as “infractions” or “taps on the shoulder to correct posture—reminders that one’s experience and understanding of a poem are dependent on a knowledge of what exists beyond it.”

The content of that beyond is often for Seung a fact about bugs: we read about Taiwanese giant wood roaches who eat their mate’s wings and have their wings eaten in turn; beetles that feast on magnolias with “mouthparts that know only how to chew.” As in Freud, the footnote operates as repressed content, surfacing the crawly world around us (and sometimes inside us) that makes our own go.

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Any good anecdote about bugs features something surprisingly disgusting or nefarious that they do—for example, autothysis, which is essentially a bug blowing itself up to protect its colony from intruders, and which occasioned my own poem, “Ants.” The words scientists develop for these actions and behaviors, the means of discovery they utilize, broaden the purview of the bug poem and entangle it with the discourses and desires of science itself, another disciplinary realm in which noticing cannot be said to remain neutral.

The relevance of bug stories to Seung’s poetry, to poetry, is imagined as corrective outside to the poem’s defensive, beautified exoskeleton, its search for a structure impervious to the basics of feeding, shitting, mating, dying, all upon the beings, livelihoods, corpses of others. One function of bug poems is to remind us that messier and more hideous relations always obtain.

Even a seemingly self-enclosed lyric like Blake’s “The Fly” gets at the peculiar philosophical positions poetry’s bugs support. Blake begins in summer, perhaps he’s in a shady spot in Lambeth, near the Thames, likely full of flies. Unthinkingly, instinctively, he’s made a motion—a brush, a swat—to displace the fly from where it was, his hand, his bit of cheese.

The poem starts there. Addressing the fly, Blake considers not just how he is like or not like a fly but if this fly is “a man like me.” Bug poems often play with scale, flipping human and insect concerns to jiggle perspective, loosen the grip of humanity’s hold as all, only, ever.

In Blake’s poem, this line of thinking is transitive—fly and man both drink, sing, suffer. And they are connected by something we think of as peculiarly human, which is thought. In Blake’s poem “thought is life” and “the want / Of thought is death.” The kind of thinking the fly does is less important than that Blake recognizes thought as the guarantee of life.

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It would be different if he had said, “if life is thought,” since not having access to a fly’s thoughts we could plausibly deny it was alive at all. But flies are alive—maddeningly, sometimes violently so. The fly-human pair exist as equally fragile living, dying creatures.

“The Fly” is a Song of Experience, not innocence. “One kills a bug now and then,” I wrote in “Ants.” “But feels quite perfect because death.”

If poetry’s bugs announced themselves merely as another way to think about poets’ and poems’ perennial labors and failures, I don’t think they’d be as interesting as they are.

If poetry’s bugs announced themselves merely as another way to think about poets’ and poems’ perennial labors and failures, I don’t think they’d be as interesting as they are. Bug poems can’t completely sublimate their object of poetic attention—bugs are too creepy and alive.

It’s that livingness that crawls through the language, whatever language we can find to describe these encounters which are also happening, John Clare reminds us, in whatever constitutes bug-thought and bug-language, “whisperingly / too fine for us to hear.”

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Ultraviolet of the Genuine by Hannah Brooks-Motl is available via The Song Cave.

The post In Praise of Poetry About Bugs ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

May 28, 2025, 10:00am

Last month, the Griffin Poetry Prize—the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry published in English—announced its 2025 shortlist. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Toronto on June 4th, and will receive C$130,000. Each other shortlisted poet will be awarded $10,000.

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In advance of the ceremony, Literary Hub caught up with some of the shortlisted poets and translators to find out a little bit about their reading and writing lives.

Brian Henry, translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Kiss the Eyes of Peace

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What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch immediately comes to mind. It’s hard to describe the effect it had on me: I felt so alive while reading it, overwhelmed with different emotions, not just from what was happening in the novel, but also from Tartt’s skill and that feeling of knowing a book you don’t want to end has to end. I also adore the emotional effect of novels like The Remains of the Day, The Go-Between, and Lie With Me.

Which book(s) do you reread?

I’m always rereading poems and books of poems, so that would be a really long list. For prose, I often go back to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 and One-Way Street, Jennifer Moxley’s There Are Things We Live Among, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Rosa Liksom’s Compartment No. 6, and a few different books by David Markson and Thomas Bernhard.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

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Piggle by Crosby Bonsall. When I was a kid, I liked that she confronted how mean children could be to each other. In addition to the mayhem, Piggle also had fun wordplay.

How do you decide what to read next?

I keep new books in different places—on my desk and on a table at work, on my nightstand, on my desk at home, on a specific bookshelf, on a side table—so that I always have a new (or at least unread) book in reach. There isn’t much of a method, except I tend to keep novels together in order to avoid having two novels going at the same time.

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young?

The Catcher in the Rye. I didn’t read it until I was 31, when I was asked to write an encyclopedia article on J.D. Salinger. I liked the book, but I know it would have affected me more if I’d read it as a teenager. I felt like I’d missed out on something.

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Carl Phillips, author of Scattered Snows, to the North

Who do you most wish would read this book?

Maybe my younger, differently confused self – it might have made me realize that people never stop asking questions about who they are or should be or might be – and that it’s okay not to know the answers. On the other hand, if I’d known that, I might not have written my poems in the first place…

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

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That I don’t have a writing routine at all, unless you count dinner prep, walking a dog, and reading for several hours every night.

Which non-literary piece of culture – film, tv show, painting, song – could you not imagine your life without?

Pop, indie, and alternative music.

Which book(s) do you reread?

So many of them! I reread all the novels of Barbara Pym every year. Linda Gregg’s first book of poems, To Bright to See. I love Bright Moon, Perching Bird, a translation of the poems of Li Po and Tu Fu by J.P. Seaton and James Cryer. Middlemarch. I’ve read War and Peace twice, and I’m thinking of trying that again…

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Top choice: to be the lead singer in a band. Second choice, to be a backup singer for Sade.

Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry

Who do you most wish would read this book?

I dedicated Modern Poetry to my reader, and I meant that. There is a bond between the writer and the individual reader who dedicates their time and imagination to the reading of a book of poems. I wish one of those readers could be my father, who died when I was seven. I didn’t have the time to know him beyond how it felt to be with him, so I’m not sure if he would have been a reader of poetry, given the chance. Of course, had he lived, this would be a very different book, or would not exist at all.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

If I feel lost or generally low energy in my creative life, I set an assignment for myself, usually hinged upon writing into my weaknesses and in opposition to my habits. For instance, if I’ve been writing longer narrative poems, I’ll assign myself short poems that are centered in music or write several poems in a compressive traditional form. If I’ve become habitual in using “I,” I’ll commit to a sequence using “we.” I’m currently brewing up an assignment that will disallow the music-heavy poems I’ve been writing in the last year. Basically, knock yourself off course. Do what you haven’t yet done or have thus far refused to do.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

Right now, music—song—is crucial to keeping me emotionally and spiritually alive. Music is so potent that I can barely listen to it. It resurrects on a cellular level. Music awakens in me what I believed was long dead—the feeling of romantic love, for instance, and the thunderous nature of grief. Whimsy. Hilarity. Even hope. Little Feat’s “Willin.’” Lead Belly’s version of “In the Pines.” Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” The B-52’s “Dance this Mess Around.” Ronee Blakely’s “Dues.” Patti Smith’s “Pissin’ in the River.” Nick Cave and P.J. Harvey’s “Henry Lee,” and Nick Cave’s wonderfully obscene version of “Stagger Lee.”

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

My answer to this question changes as I change. Right now, I’d say the horse books by Marguerite Henry. I think Misty of Chincoteague was the first one I read. It’s hard to explain, isn’t it, the immersion experience of a first beloved book. I wanted a horse, and knew I would never have one, but somehow the book was bigger than owning a horse, bigger than owning anything. In that sense, a book is anti-capitalist, especially if you borrow it from the library.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

Probably the nature of the place where I was raised. It was a strange, numinous time, place, and situation. Hallucinatory, yet concrete. The details bloomed into images I’ve carried with me through my long writing life. The village cemetery next door to our little gray rental house, the lane to the graves lined with pines, and leading, of all places, to Babyland, where infants were interred, and off to the north, built into a woodsy hillside, a cave for storing dead bodies in winter, when a shovel couldn’t break the frozen ground. Just past the border of rhubarb and black raspberries, the cement block Church of God, to which I wandered on Sunday mornings and where I was uselessly saved seven times before I was four years old. The rusty horse-shaped swings at the base of the blank screen at the outdoor movie theater. The compelling lack of television. Lack in all its guises and disguises.

Karen Leeder, translator of Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your literary education?

When I was thirteen and set to pursue Maths and Physics and become an astronaut or an engineer, I encountered the German teacher Mr David. He was new in the rather conservative British girls’ grammar school. He wore his slick black hair in a fringe over one eye (Hitler-style, it seemed to me) and would march into the room, slam his briefcase down onto the desk, sweeping the room with a stare, and intoning ‘So!’, as we all lumbered to our feet.  He was terrifying and hilarious in equal measure. That was it: German it had to be. And with that the course of my life changed. Even when later it was clear I would go on to study literature rather than physics, that encounter meant that it was German literature, a whole different tradition, different voices: Goethe, Büchner, Rilke, Brecht, Celan, Bachmann.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

I grew up without literary books around me at home. There was a tiny 3-shelf book case with my father’s rocket books, a little book for spotting birds and another for flowers, and the first (free) part of a set of encyclopaedias: ‘From Abbey to Arab’.  But there was one book, I am not sure where it came from, The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900, a dark blue hard back with gilt lettering, published in 1915 and edited by the man with the resonant name: Arthur Quiller-Couch. That book I pored over, learning poems by heart, hearing so many strange voices, not understanding many things. It seemed a missive from another world. Later of course I found my way to the local library and everything changed, but those poems, those rhythms, have stayed with me.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

Translation is very good for writer’s block. At times when the deadline or the blank page is crippling and I cannot write in my own voice, either creatively or critically, it offers a way through. To translate is to use the some of the same energies and strategies, but always with a readymade starting point and end goal in sight. There are already words on the page, the fear is less. Sometimes the results are not worth very much, but sometimes they go off to all kinds of new places. And the motor has been started.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

Read the text out loud. For poetry its essential.

Which book(s) do you reread?

For a long time when I was teaching undergraduates German literature, it was Kafka. Every time you read his short stories there is something extraordinary, something new, some absurd detail of the universe captured in a rhythm or a glance.  At the moment for a new project it is Rilke. But that is no great hardship.  And then always, all the time, Shakespeare, Auden, Woolf, Bishop, Heaney.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Astronaut or actor.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be working?

Reading new poetry.

Aaron Coleman, translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

It’s exciting to see the ways folx are starting to ask about this now, but I always want to talk more about the relationship between my work as a poet and my work as a translator. My translation of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo and my second poetry collection, Red Wilderness, just came out within six months of each other, so I’ve been reconsidering all that’s going on between the zoo and wilderness…I was working on these books at the same time but it wasn’t until a conversation with my partner that we realized: it’s all ancestral work. My translation of Guillén’s great zoo is, I hope, honoring a distinct and vital poetic voice of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. And Red Wilderness crafts a multigenerational chorus of poems that speaks to fragments of my family’s history since the U.S. Civil War and throughout the Great Migration which led my family to Detroit, exploring how their legacies and the aftermath of their decisions still echo through my body. I think similar questions about the consequences of (neo)colonialism, the complexity of community, and how to imagine a more just world animate both my poetry and translation practice. Each strengthens the other as I remake my relationship to English and Spanish, learn new poetics techniques to grow my voice, and consider the possibilities of what a poem can do and be.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

Over time I realized that reading work and looking at art that piques my curiosity is usually what unlocks my own writing. And there are so many different genres and types of books that I rely on in different situations: when I need to find my way back to the music of language it’s rhythm-driven poems and translations from other languages (often Spanish and French in my case) that helps me hear anew all the possible sounds systems in language. When I can’t find my way into writing sentences that feel fresh, I look for nonfiction, fiction, and micro-essays that lead me to sense syntax and voice in new ways. If I want to free myself from overworn patterns of thought and arrive at new ideas, I’ll wander around in theoretical and academic books that help me reconsider the context or history of the issues that matter most to me. And I just love stumbling into a bookstore and looking through artist or photographer books so I can soak in fresh visual art.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

Given how much I love music and sound, and how integral those elements are to The Great Zoo and Red Wilderness, maybe readers would be surprised by how much I love silence. Silence is so important to my routine and finding ways to listen to ambient sound when I’m walking in nature or in a city is crucial for my writing and honestly for my mental health, too. I seek out silence and the time and space to relax my mind and open my ears so that I can actually listen to the world more closely. When I pay close attention to the quiet, I can sense whatever patterns in sound arise in me naturally.

How do you decide what to read next?

For me, this question feels so connected to the one about writer’s block: I like to cycle through books from different genres and different locations and time periods. I see reading as this ever-open opportunity to stretch my mind and grow myself, so I’m always looking for diverse ingredients to add to the stew. I try to make room for my curiosity and let it lead me where it wants to go. What book might lead me into wondering more about what I don’t know I don’t know? I love the way a poem or a story or an essay or an article can alert me to my own blind spots, emotionally or intellectually. I’m so curious about what I can read that might help me see around some of the corners in my own mind…for example, right now, Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poems are mixing in my mind with Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Who knows what may come of that alchemy?!

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

When I was a lot younger I wanted to be an architect, which is interesting to me now given the question of how to build structure in a poem and my fascination with functional yet aesthetically striking structures in the physical world. But during my undergrad years I majored in psychology and I very nearly went the route of becoming a counseling psychologist. I’ve always been drawn to how we tell (ourselves and others) the stories of who we are—and there seems to always be a shortage of therapists, especially for black and brown folx. Can I share a more fun one, too? Some friends and I have this pipe dream of opening a bed & breakfast/community art space/artist residency near a beach somewhere…I’ll just leave this note here in case we can make that dream possible at some point down the road.

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I have a tendency to spiral down the long, dark hole of uncertainty into the anxious spaces of my mind. Maybe you know this experience, which is a real drag and a sucker punch to the quality of one’s life. Over time and alongside therapy, I’ve found a few tried and true coping mechanisms that work for me–creative writing, exercise, reading at night until I’m too tired to lie awake overanalyzing everything, mindless television. The challenge is finding something I can turn to quickly–say when I’m in the middle of my work day–some way to snap my attention elsewhere and disrupt the spiral–and I believe I’ve hit upon it. The exercise of reading a certain kind of poetry (which I now keep on my desk) soothes my troubled soul while offering positive distraction, and this is the collection that initiated my new practice.

The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), translated by Wendy Chen

It’s not that I’ve never read poetry like the verses I found in The Magpie at Night. In fact, the familiarity of the collection might be what kept me turning the pages, at least initially. I found it comforting as I find the poems of Emily Dickinson comforting, in particular the calling up of nature for rumination. When I read about plum blossoms, withered red petals, or the “autumn sadness” in Li Qingzhao’s poems it’s in hushed tones, like a warm breeze across a quiet lake.

There’s a great tradition of writers like Dickinson and Qingzhao–Mary Oliver too–who turn the practice of reading poetry into meditation, and the brevity and simplicity of Qingzhao’s poetry makes that practice accessible to a pleb like myself whose goal isn’t to prize deep meaning out of the oyster, but to let the words sink in and release some tension. And while the poems were obviously written so long ago, they are so inward looking they don’t require you to have a lot of historical context before you start reading. That said, it’s always a great practice to learn about the author and their time because context can provide useful perspective on the work, and Li Qingzhao was a fascinating and groundbreaking writer well worth getting to know.

I didn’t know what to expect with this collection and certainly didn’t predict it would be a balm in troubled times but, as it turned out, Li Qingzhao’s vivid imagery transported me from my troubles, lifting me from the doldrums and giving me something beautiful to behold so I could carry on.

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