An Interview with GC Waldrep
by Lisa Tallin Black Warrior Review: So first of all I just wanted to ask you—you had a reading last night, and how do you feel reading your work out loud? GC Waldrep: How do I feel? I like to read my work out loud. I trained as a singer and the idea that poetry should be performative on some basis—that it should live in the tongue—is important to me. There are poems that don’t do that—or don’t do that primarily, that are meant to be transmitted through the page. But I hope for my work that the sound quality is important. In Archicembalo that was all there was: the sound...
Read MoreAn Interview with Noy Holland
by JUAN CARLOS REYES BWR: There is no particular way to get this started. I usually start with an icebreaker question… How are you enjoying Tuscaloosa so far? NH: It’s good. I met a lot of nice people. Yeah, I like the trees. I like the trees a lot. I’m admiring the trees. And it’s been good to meet the students. That’s really what I’ve been doing. And to talk again about writing. I’ve had a little break from teaching and mostly, you know when you’re writing it’s more interesting to talk about writing and when you’re just teaching and not writing you...
Read MoreSound Art 37.1 – The Degeneration Issue
Issue 37.1: The Degeneration Issue. Welcome to the sound art component of Black Warrior Review‘s latest feature – Degeneration. Below you’ll find an interpretation of degenerative music by critic Brendan Finney as well as original tracks from some of our favorite sound artists: Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Lawrence English, Margareth Kammerer and Claudio Rocchetti, Jon Mueller, and Zane Trow. Each artist’s composition was designed for The Degeneration Feature and is available exclusively on our website. To read more about the artists who contributed to this...
Read MoreAn Interview with Sabrina Orah Mark
by JUAN REYES BWR: How does setting play into your writing? SOM: I generally like the sleepy towns, the quietness. I’m living in Athens, Georgia, now, which is filled with ghosts, so that becomes inspiring. I lived in Iowa City for two years and I was writing very intensely there. But, for me, it’s not so much the landscape; I live so much in my own head. BWR: How do your formative years play into your work? SOM: I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in an orthodox Jewish community. I went to Yeshiva, a Jewish day school. At Yeshiva, we studied a half Hebrew curriculum: half the day in...
Read MoreReview: A History of Waves
Haines Eason New York, NY: Poetry Society of America 25 pages. 30.00, paper Reviewed by J. KIRK MAYNARD Haines Eason’s first chapbook A History of Waves (selected by Mark Doty for the 2010 New American Poets chapbook series) begins with a displacement: Who touched who with which mouth? If I remembered backward it would go something like “his gentle answers stir me up to anger for a want of time.” Should you share me? This begins the first poem of a crown of sonnets—a sequence whereupon a line within one sonnet is repeated in the consecutive sonnet—that retraces the emotional and...
Read MoreReview: Find the Girl
Lightsey Darst Minneapolis, MN: Coffeehouse Press, 2010 80 pages. $16, paper. Reviewed by FARREN STANLEY The sexualization of women—and a girl’s desire to achieve power by becoming an object of sexual interest—is one prevalent sign of a seriously ailing culture. In drawing the reader’s attention to this symptom in Find the Girl, a self described “expose of girlhood, obsession and the CSI industry,” one has to wonder what the aim is. Poems about the treacherous, seductive, terrifying coming-of-age years for a girl is one of the book’s loosely-constructed narratives; the other...
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