Patrick Coleman Interviewed at LARB

A conversation with Patrick Coleman, author of Fire Season (Tupelo Press, 2018), is up at Los Angeles Review of Books. "I talked with Patrick over email about the anxiety that comes with living in the path of wildfires, working in the cracks between genres, the intersection of literature and visual art, and what Raymond Chandler would be doing in San Diego circa 2001," writes Ryan Teitman. An excerpt from their conversation:

I’d like to talk about the genre of this book: it’s a collection of poems, but they could just as easily be pieces of flash fiction. And, knowing you as I do, I couldn’t help reading this as a kind of memoir of fatherhood, family, and work told through very short essays. Were you thinking about blurring genres as you were putting this book together?

To be honest, I think I was too exhausted all the time to think about genre! I’m glad about that, too. I used to be more genre-territorial, more prone to nitpick when something was X or Y genre. If anyone wants to, they can tell me what this book is. I’m not really sure. I’m happy and humbled to have them called poems. If anything, though, they’re prose poems, which is already dubious in some eyes (though I like Gary Young’s description of a prose poem as a single-line poem, one that extends horizontally instead of vertically). I’ve never especially connected with breaking lines as a tool to create meaning, and when you’re drafting out loud that drive toward line breaks falls away by necessity. And yes, they mix memoir and fiction...

Read the full interview at LARB.