Map to the Stars (Penguin Poets)

New Price: $13.80
Used Price: $2.92

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

-
January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

‘Poetry’ Editor-in-Chief Adrian Matejka Looks to the Future

-
Just over a year ago, Adrian Matejka became the editor of Poetry Magazine. It’s a daunting job for anyone to helm such a storied American literary institutions, and Matejka, the first person of color to head the magazine, took the job understanding what it has been and what it might be. This year, in addition to celebrating his first anniversary at Poetry, Matejka released a graphic novel, Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, a collaboration with the artist Youssef Daoudi. Matejka has been researching and writing about Jack Johnson since 2005, first for his acclaimed poetry collection The Big Smoke and now for Last on His Feet,which is the result of a deep collaborative process between writer and artist Matejka, the author of five books of poems, has by his own admission been de-centering the writing of poetry. I spoke with him about what that meant and how his work has changed, his deep love for comics, and the recent changes at the magazine. Alex Dueben: We were talking earlier about how often in art and institutions, it’s hard to build something lasting. Last year you took over an institution—one of the American literary and cultural institutions. Adrian Matejka: It’s wild. 110 years. The oldest monthly poetry magazine in the world. There’s so much wonderful history here. And also a very complicated legacy in terms of gatekeeping and the tradition of king- and queen-making. I want to untangle that. I want to de-center our editorial team and make Poetry a space that is more inclusive than it was in the past. And to really center poets and their work. That’s what the magazine is about. The recent editors and guest editors have been good about trying to open up the pages, so what I’m working toward is not some brand new thing. One of the ways we’ve been celebrating and interrogating what 110 years looks like is through archival folios. We’ve been dedicating pages to people who should have been in the magazine before but weren’t given the space. The 110th anniversary issue had one dedicated to Carolyn Marie Rogers, a Chicago poet and co-founder of Third World Press. She had been a finalist for the National Book Award, but she was never in the magazine. February’s issue featured William J. Harris, who was part of the Black Arts Movement. He’s a beautiful poet, has been publishing for 40 years, and had never been in Poetry. The responses to these folios has been gratifying. So I’ve been trying to as best as I can grapple with the magazine’s history—to honor it, but also hold it accountable. And hold us as editors accountable to make some lasting change to the editorial philosophy. AD: The folios have been a great addition. The William J. Harris one, especially, was amazing. I think most people reading know about the Black Arts Movement, but you never read everyone and it’s always a joy to discover someone hiding in plain sight and read their work. AM: William is unbelievably generous on and off the page. He was so happy to be in the magazine and we were so happy to be able to highlight his capacious body of work. And his poems are just fun. That’s been something that I’ve tried to keep in the forefront. As a fellow writer you know writing is not always fun. [laughs] It’s hard work. When I sit down to write I’m not sitting down because it’s going to be a party, I’m sitting down because I have to get after it. Which doesn’t mean that the end result can’t be fun. William’s work was a reminder that this doesn’t all have to be bleak. Poetry can be kind to the reader even as it’s informing and delighting. AD: I’m curious about your relationship to the magazine before you took over. As you came up in MFA culture, in Cave Canem, how did you think about and see Poetry Magazine? AM: I’ll give you a great example of this as a way into the conversation. Poetry Magazine had a holiday party in November. At this holiday party, every table had center pieces made out of old issues of the magazine. The table I was sitting at had issues from 1998, 2000, and 2004. I love books and poetry so of course I picked them up and started flipping through. There was not a single writer of color in any of those issues. Not a single one. It was all the same white male writers. And I know that because some of the poets in the pages were my teachers. I wasn’t just guessing. I’ve studied their work. There was not a Black person to be found in those three issues. Not a Latinx person. Maybe there was some diversity of sexuality that I was not aware of, but it was almost exclusively cisgender white men of a particular age. That’s what I thought Poetry was coming up. A place where there was no room for me. A magazine that wasn’t interested in my stories because the editors showed by their curatorial choices there was no room for my stories. Every once in a while Rita Dove would be in it. Later, Yusef Komunyakaa and Kevin Young. That’s one of the things that’s changed while I’ve been part of the poetry hustle. When I started writing poems, Rita, Yusef and Gwendolyn Brooks were the only Black poets who had won a Pulitzer Prize. But you look at the last 10 years, things have changed! Tracy K. Smith and Tyehimba Jess and Greg Pardlo and Natasha Trethewey and Jericho Brown. I love the fact that in a decade more Black poets won than had previously in 100 years. Things have changed radically and in the best way. The institutions have been opened up by Cave Canem and Lambda and other groups. Now there are people I came up with who are in leadership positions and they’re able to curate from different perspectives. Which is not something I ever imagined would happen. I see it now, the real, tangible changes in access and equity. I’ve seen it over the past 10 years. But before that, I never would have imagined. I certainly never would have imagined that I would be here at Poetry Magazine. AD: So what changed that? What made you want this job and just see it as a possibility? AM: When they approached me about this job, I said no. I’m from Indiana and I lived down the street from my mom and family in Indianapolis. But my wife said, How are you going to say no? You say you want more challenges in your life. Can you imagine a bigger challenge than this? Nothing like being called out to make me rethink things. But I originally said no because wasn’t sure that I was the right person for the editorship. I wasn’t sure that going back to editing full time would be good for my writing. Then I met the other editors and Michelle T. Boone, the Poetry Foundation president, who’s visionary. I could see her vision and what we might be able to do for the readers and writers of poetry. That’s when I started to think seriously about how I could change the aesthetics of the magazine. The thing is, the magazine was already changing when I showed up. It’s important for me to acknowledge the work that the editors were already doing when I walked in the door. They’re all writers too, and we’ve been able to build an editorial ethos as both readers and practitioners. I’m not writing a lot of poetry right now. But part of that is because I was finishing up Last On His Feet and that took up a lot of energy. The graphic novel is why I haven’t been writing a lot of poetry. I was working on the page proofs most of last year. It was a lot. AD: It’s a lot. And you’ve had a busy few years doing a lot of different things. AM: I guess it was 2017 when Map to the Stars came out. When I finished that book, I remember feeling like I needed to do something else. I felt as if I’d done everything poetically that I knew how to do at that point. The book allowed me to I embrace the fact that I am from Indiana and have to deal with that complicated racial legacy whether I want to or not. Once I worked through that, I felt finished with poetry. Not in the sense of “I’m leaving poetry,” but I just got to a place where I didn’t know how to do anything more than I’d already done on the page. I started writing song lyrics with the musician and artist Nicholas Galanin. I ended up collaborating with him and another visual artist Kevin Neireiter on Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain, a mixed media text about Funkadelic. I worked on a sculpture with Dario Robleto, a fantastic artist in Houston. Around that same time, Youssef and I started working in earnest on the graphic novel. Basically, I started doing things that weren’t poem, that I knew I was going to fail at so I could try to learn something. [laughs] I de-centered poetry in a way in hopes of coming back to it with a new perspective. Then Covid happened and I didn’t have anything else to do but write. [laughs] So between March and October 2020 I wrote almost all the poems in Somebody Else Sold the World and all the poems in the Funkadelic book. I wrote almost every day. I wasn’t teaching. I was on research leave. Just like everyone else I was stuck at home with no place to go. That’s when I realized that there were things that I still needed to explore in poems. I also wanted to try to figure out how to synthesize what was happening around us at that time. COVID was—and is—exhausting. It is terrifying. Do you remember those early days when there were no planes and no one was driving? It was so quiet. We would just sit on our front porch and it felt like being in a movie about an apocalypse. The only way I could survive that was jumping into poems. I couldn’t find the same catharsis in essays or the graphic novel. Poems were the only salvation. AD: Maybe that’s a good segue into Last On His Feet. In 2013 you published The Big Smoke, which is an incredible book of poetry. I don’t know how many years you spent writing and researching it. AM: Eight years. I started in 2005. I spent two years researching Jack Johnson before I wrote any poems. It was a really long project. This is going to sound like a flex but I came up with the idea for Last On His Feet at the National Book Awards. [laughs] AD: You just happened to be at the National Book Awards because you happened to be nominated that year. AM: It sounds like I’m bragging, but it’s not. I’d already not won when I had the idea! [laughs] Because I’d lost and I didn’t have to give a speech, I was having a martini with my editor Paul Slovak. The Big Smoke looked so different because of all of the conversations I had with him. I showed him a draft of the book in 2011 and he said, we’ll take it as it is, but I have some suggestions for you. He gave me fantastic suggestions and encouraged me to build out the book in a different, more narrative way. Anyway, at the awards they have all of the finalists’ faces and book covers rotating on video screens. While I was sitting with Paul, Gene Yang’s Boxers and Saints came up and I said, The next book needs to be a graphic novel. I wanted it to be a different book in every way from The Big Smoke. I didn’t want to write another book of poems. I’d already answered the poetry questions I had and didn’t want to do that again. But a graphic novel? I read them all the time. I’ve collected comic books since I was a kid. How hard could it be? [laughs] And here we are almost 10 years later and the book is finally in the world. I spent 18 years total working on these two books about Jack Johnson. AD: Reading Last On His Feet, I know what you mean about not wanting to write him in monologue, but Jack Johnson’s voice defines and shapes the book. Was his voice easy to find and to let these projects be shaped by his voice? Or was it a struggle to get right? AM: Youssef and I worked on this narrative together, and he believes that making art is just a different kind of storytelling. So we kept going back and forth trying to encapsulate the story in a way that wouldn’t be repeating what I’d done in The Big Smoke. How could we create something that would add to the myth of this guy and the people around him? It was tough to find the equilibrium, but it wasn’t hard to slip back into Jack Johnson’s voice. The hard part was trying to figure out what to do with it, if that makes sense. AD: It does. Reading this book, you can tell that you didn’t write a script and email it to him, this was the result of a very close collaborative process. AM: It was an absolute collaboration. To the point where we were working on it all the way to the last pass. The editorial team knew what we were doing, but I imagine it was a little frustrating for them. The book was supposed to come out fall 2022, but we just wanted to get it right—especially the artwork—which is why it got pushed to the spring. AD: You guys were fiddling with the pages to the very very end? AM: The very end. If I can say this about something I was involved in creating: I’ve never read a book like this. Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye was an inspiration for both of us. It shows the different ways media can be used and how varying styles within a book can create texture. It’s not the same thing. Liew has an imagination full of shifting perspectives and visual intentionality. Youssef used archival media to create the texture of our book. He was always thinking about the different kinds of artifacts we might be able to include. We had hundreds of documents and photographs and videos we were going through to create the world of the book. AD: There’s a lot of elements to the book and you can see Youssef playing with media and texture and form in different ways and how that informs the voice and storytelling. AM: Sonny’s book was a big influence. Also Kyle Baker’s book Nat Turner. I love that graphic novel. There’s like 40 pages of art before we get any text. I kept telling Youssef, We need to do this. And he said, Nope! [laughs] Jack Johnson’s voice needs to be the driver. We can’t go that long without hearing him because he’s the center of this story. But both of those books were really vital. Especially because I’d never written a graphic novel before. AD: Now that you’ve said it, I can see the Nat Turner influence. Last On His Feet opens with all these other characters and voices defining the world and building this space for Jack Johnson to inhabit before he shows up and the match starts. AM: As a writer as an editor I’m a big fan of people wearing that influences proudly. I love it when I can tells someone is a fan of Yusef Komunyakaa or Gwendolyn Brooks in their poems. I try to do that same thing. I namedrop Emily Dickinson all of the time to let people know what a fan of hers I am. [Laughs] As for the graphic novel, I hope people can tell that I have the entire original run of Black Panther comics. I have the entire original run of Luke Cage Hero for Hire. They were the only black heroes around with their own comics when I was a kid. So when I wrote the script, there were a lot of exclamation points in the dialogue and all this performative stuff because I was thinking about dialogue the way I discovered it in those comics. When I showed Youssef the original script, he said, “I can’t draw this. This is what I need you to do.” And what he needed me to do was write an actual movie script. So I read the script for Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, which reads like an elegant novel, and I used that as my model. I spent almost a year rewriting it before Youssef began making the art. AD: I wanted to just circle back to the magazine because one of the things you’ve been committed to—and as we were saying before, there’s a difference between Poetry in recent years versus 30 years ago—is publishing new poets. AM: I want poets to feel like they’re welcome in the magazine. Sometimes that requires saying things like “Everyone is welcome here,” in the tradition of Poetry founder Harriet Monroe. But it also requires a more determined approach and willful way of space-making. As an example, we’ve set it up so that we’re only publishing poets once a year. We’re committed to not seeing the same names in our pages, which frees up space for new voices. I love Terrence Hayes. I would love it if we had Terrence in every issue. But that takes space from poets who may not have had that same opportunity or that same visibility as Terrance has. Our goal is to have 50% of every issue be new poets. Over my first six issues, the percentage has been more than that—around 65%. So the first step was limiting the number of times people can be in the magazine. The next part was being mindful about trying to find poets who haven’t had the opportunity. To meet poets where they live and work rather than waiting for them to find us. It’s not hard. It just takes being deliberate. Because there are so many poets. And so many good poets! We get 12,000 poems submitted to us a month. It’s an astonishing number and speaks to the breadth of the poetry community in 2023. "I want poets to feel like they’re welcome in the magazine." AD: Poetry Magazine is a big deal, and you pay, so why not submit! AM: It’s free to submit and we pay a lot! For the world of poetry anyway. That’s something we’re committed to maintaining or trying to increase. I don’t like the term editor-in-chief because it feels uncomfortable, but that’s what I am. I manage the print and digital content too. One of the first things we did when we merged the digital editorial team with the print editorial team was make sure that everybody gets paid the same, so whether you appear online or in the pages of the magazine, the checks are the same. We’re interested in putting money in the pockets of writers, both as an editorial team and as a foundation. We recently started a grants program for organizations who support poetry. We’re give out $9 million in grants over the next three years. As we all know, there’s not a lot of financial support for poets. Nobody’s getting rich off of poetry unless they win the MacArthur. [laughs] AD: I know a couple people who have been published for the first time since you took over, but I will say that the magazine feels a little different. The standards have not changed and maybe as a non-poet I’m not the one to assert this, but it feels more representative of the conversations within poetry than the magazine used to. AM: Thank you for saying that. I hope so. We‘ve tried to. My editorial philosophy is that we want to be rigorous, but also available and inviting. That’s my charge to all of the editors, whether the digital editorial team, the archives editor, everyone. We need to be more available and accessible. Some of that has manifested in direct ways like publishing people who haven’t been published in the magazine before. But it also manifests in the kinds of work that we publish now. It’s a little less didactic I think. I want to be respectful and not compare the aesthetics of the magazine now versus before I got here, but I value legibility and readability. I don’t want it to be niche. We’ve gotten essays or pitches from people that were too insular. I couldn’t imagine anyone being excited about the pieces because they weren’t available unless you have a PhD. In the first issue I curated, we had an essay by Ross Gay called “On Time” from his new book. It’s beautifully written and rigorous, but it’s also available for people. Ross wants the reader to stay with him sentence to sentence. Editorially, we’ve tried to approach both poems and prose as invitations. We don’t want it to be exclusionary or showcasing poems you have to spend your whole life studying to understand. There is a place for that work and there is room in the magazine for it, but it’s not where we start. The March issue just came out and it is already sold out. It is front-to-back a statement on how we’ve evolved as an editorial team. It’s a gorgeous issue. I feel comfortable saying that because none of my work is in the pages. [laughs] We curate everything as a team. I’ve de-centered myself and the lead editor position. I’ve never said at a meeting, “We’re going to take this poem.” Every poem we’ve had in the magazine has been a group decision by all the editors. That’s how I want to do the work, as a community, not as a monolith. That’s how I was taught to edit by my mentors Jon Tribble and Allison Joseph. That everything is done better together. We are a group of writers trying to support other writers. [millions_email]