Mike White: “I love to write about sports and other games that we play. It seems only half correct to suggest that sports can serve as a metaphor for life. As any sports junkie can attest, it’s at least as true the other way around. I had already written and submitted ‘Southpaw’ when Ron Koertge’s life/basketball/life poem, ‘Things and How They Work,’ from Rattle 77, turned up on my porch—but his is a poem that sets the bar, and sets it high, for this sort of thing.”
Lisa Suhair Majaj: “On December 7th, Gazan writer Refaat Alareer was killed along with family members in a targeted Israeli airstrike. Refaat was a professor of literature, a poet and writer, beloved inside and outside of Gaza for his words and for his role in the non profit organization We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led project seeking to tell the stories of Gazans. Scores of Gazan poets, writers, artists, musicians and journalists had been killed in the past months. In a recording made before his killing Refaat said, choked with tears, ‘The situation is very bleak. We don’t even have water …’ Days before his death Refaat pinned this poem to his Twitter account.” (web)
M.L. Clark: “Taking a literal approach to actor Alan Alda’s declaration, ‘you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition,’ I recently moved to Victoria, British Columbia to Toronto, Ontario.”
“Self-Portrait as Elizabeth Holmes” by Carrie ShipersPosted by Rattle
Carrie Shipers
SELF-PORTRAIT AS ELIZABETH HOLMES
In 2015, a series of investigations exposed as false Holmes’s claim to have developed a device to perform fast, inexpensive blood tests on miniscule samples. In January 2022, she was found guilty on multiple charges of fraud.
Carrie Shipers: “I’ve been fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes since I read Ken Auletta’s profile of her in 2014. Her actions are obviously despicable, and yet I understand, I think, how it feels to want something to be true so much that you’re willing to ignore all available evidence and to keep doubling down on your denial because you’re afraid of being exposed and humiliated, and that’s what I wanted to explore in this poem.” (web)
Taylor Mali: “In both of the books of poetry I published after Rebecca’s death I tried to include a few poems about her. But they were always so unlike the rest of the manuscript that they couldn’t stay in. I’ve known for a decade that all my poems about Rebecca would need to be published in a collection by themselves. The Whetting Stone is that collection.” (web)
Gaetan Sgro: “I’ve never had much vision when it comes to career planning, arriving late to my medical training with only an English degree and an ear for stories. But the compulsion to write, to engage in this often frustrating, occasionally sublime, and ever-evolving process, has always been with me. It will always be with me because I will never get it right.” (web)
Tony Trigilio: “Within a two-year period, I got divorced, moved twice, and lost two close family members: ‘Four Guys and a Truck’ emerged from the awe and exhaustion of impermanence.” (web)