Chicago Review of Books Gathers Writers to Discuss Collections

At Chicago Review of Books, Sarah Blake gathers four poets to discuss how they assembled their most recent collections: Ada Limón, Jos Charles, A. E. Stallings, and Kelly Forsythe. Blake foregrounds the article with her own experience compiling a poetry collection, "[w]hen discussing fiction, readers and writers alike are asked to detail the rising action of a story or novel, its climax. When it came time to order my own books of poetry, I found myself considering both how individual poems formed that train of linked pieces and how the train climbed as the book progressed, up, up, up." From there: 

For this sampler I asked four poets to share how they ordered their new books and if they thought about rising action or climax as they compiled their work.

Ada Limón’s The Carrying delves into the deeply personal as the speaker uncovers what might be her infertility. But she is also a body moving through a fragile nation and through a delicate natural world that’s being treated indelicately. The book points us to look at all the things we ask of our bodies, all the things we ask it to carry through this remarkable and unstable world.

Jos Charles’ feeld breaks language into almost unrecognizable spellings so that you have to trust the meaning will come as you sound out the words. The multiple meanings of homophones all come to light before one meaning is teased to the forefront by context. And there is magic in that fluidity. And it makes sense that from this vantage point, the poems can tackle gender and identity.

A. E. Stallings’ Like reminded me of all the reasons I first fell in love with Stallings’ poems—their musicality, their deft use of rhythm and rhyme, their obsession with the old Greek myths, Greek history, and the Greeks themselves. But in Like, a poem will hold both the tale of Icarus and the Syrian refugees coming to Greece on dinghies. The book cracks the past open atop the present and breaks your heart.

Kelly Forsythe’s Perennial lives in 1999, among images of homerooms, bleachers, and Trapper Keepers, as it examines the shooting at Columbine from the perspective of a student who has to return to school as if school is a safe space. The book’s exacting focus makes it all the more overwhelming and maddening in the context of our present, of the escalation of school shootings over the last near-20 years.

Their insights are hugely compelling, and I’m thrilled to feature them here.

Continue at Chicago Review of Books.