Author: dion lissner oreilly

Dion O'Reilly ​third book, Limerence, was finalist for The Floating Bridge Press John Pierce Chapbook Competition ​for Washington State Poets. ​S​he is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024) and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, and Rattle. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads private poetry workshops, and is co-editor of En•Trance Journal. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
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S6:E17 Richard Blanco Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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We discuss a poem by ⁠Rachel McKibbons⁠ and several from Blanco’s fabulous new book, ⁠Homeland of My Body⁠.⁠

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, ⁠Homeland of My Body⁠, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs ⁠FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY⁠ and ⁠THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD.⁠  Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees.  Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University.  In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

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S6:E16 Chopsy Gutowski & Roxi Power in Conversation

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Chopsy Gutowski talks with Roxi Power about her powerful poems freshly submitted for her MFA thesis. As friends who have been writing together in Santa Cruz for years, Chopsy and Roxi laugh and dig in, plumbing the lyrical depths of Gutowski’s eco-poetry, elegies, and political poetry. Mining the difficult moves in Jorie Graham’s book,To 2040, Gutowski invites us to inhabit the present moment, however painful, to find healing and joy. She believes poems have a life of their own with a potential to honor and change the course of our lives as they conjure what is possible for our future.

Chopsy Gutowski is a poet, improv artist, and early childhood specialist who is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific University. She lives in Santa Cruz in the midst of redwoods and seasonal visits from Swainson’s thrushes. In the past month, she has read for the Poetry and Music in the Parks series in Santa Cruz County and the annual Santa Cruz “In Celebration of the Muse” reading. Her muse instructs her: “excavate what’s hidden beneath the everyday, peer into things until they give up their ghosts, then go further.”

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S6:E15 Braving the Body: Julia Chiapella Chats with the Editors

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The Body! In all its pain and glory! Listen to this discussion with editors Pichchenda Bao, Nicole Callihan, and Jennifer Franklin as they read and talk about poems from their anthology Braving the Body. Delving into the body’s experiences, from sex to motherhood to cancer and beyond, Braving the Body culls the best poetry featuring, as Whitman wrote, “head, neck, hair, ears… mouth, tongue, lips . . . bowels sweet and clean . . . brain in its folds inside the skull frame . . . heart valves.”

Braving the Body can be purchased at ⁠Small Habor Publishing⁠ or on ⁠Amazon⁠.

Editors ⁠Pichchenda Bao⁠, ⁠Nicole Callahan⁠, and ⁠Jennifer Franklin⁠ provide candid insights into creating the anthology and read poems illustrating the breadth of content and craft on this timeless subject.

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S6:E14 Santa Cruz County Youth Poet Laureate Poets with Farnaz Fatemi, Poet Laureate

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On April 10th, 2024, Santa Cruz County’s first ever Youth Poet Laureate honor was given to Dina Lusztig Noyes at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, CA. SC County Youth Poet Laureate finalists include Gregory Souza, Simon Ellefson, Madeline Aliah, and Sylvi Kayser. These poets read their work in conversation with Farnaz Fatemi, Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate.

More info about the program ⁠here⁠.

Follow the program on Instagram @youthpoetlaureatesantacruz

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S6:E13 Geneffa Talks with Faris Sabbah & Beau Beausoleil

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Join me for this special episode of poetic witness for Palestine, featuring Faris Sabbah and Beau Beausoleil. Listen as Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools, ⁠Dr Faris Sabbah⁠, shares movingly about his Palestinian background and reads a poem he penned for his late father. We discuss a poem from Beau Beausoleil’s latest volume, WAR NEWS–a collection of poems written daily since October 2023 to witness the effects of hearing news out of Gaza. Beau himself then joins me to read from this collection and discuss these very necessary poems.

⁠AGITATE!⁠ Journal has partnered with the poet to provide WAR NEWS as a ⁠free digital download⁠.

They write,

War News is a collection of 90 poems written everyday by Beausoleil since 8th October, 2023. The poems in the collection reflect on what it means to bear witness to war, killing, and destruction in Gaza, Palestine. It asks, what it means to be alive at a time when even the death and suffering of children fails to elicit a response strong enough to end the war. This collection of 90 poems is a witness testimony from afar. It is an archive of grief, mourning, and solidarity. It is an accounting of the cost of war. Through these powerful and devastating poems Beausoleil reminds us that we cannot turn away. In the poet’s own words, “[O]ur humanity, our collective morality, requires that we bear witness and then take some kind of action” (agitatejournal.org).

The entire volume may be downloaded as a PDF or read online, providing a useful reference as you listen to this thought-provoking episode.

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Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist based in San Francisco, California. His two most recent chapbooks are: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023). These poems also appear in the online Moving Parts Press Digital Poetry Series as ⁠Poems for George Floyd⁠ and ⁠In Ukraine: Poems.⁠ He is the founder of ⁠Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here⁠, a global arts response to the car-bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street (the street of the booksellers) in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. It is a project of witness, memory, and solidarity with the Iraqi people by poets, artists, and writers. A selection of 24 poems from War News was also published by ⁠Moving Parts Press

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S6: E6 Alexandra Lytton Regalado & Farnaz Fatemi

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“This weirdness swims up…” ⁠Alexandra Regalado⁠ talks to Farnaz Fatemi about teeth as relics, finding inspiration in visual artists, attempting to say the unsaid, writing things in poems that might never get said aloud–and more serious and not-so-serious preoccupations. Our conversation focuses on Regalado’s second book, the National Poetry Series publication Relinquenda, from Beacon Press

Alexandra Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran-American author, editor, and translator. She is the author of Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2022); the chapbook Piedra (La Chifurnia, 2022); and the poetry collection, ⁠Matria⁠, the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Alexandra holds fellowships at CantoMundo and Letras Latinas; she is winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, poets.org, World Literature Today, Narrative, and The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, among others. Her translations of contemporary Latin American poetry appear in Poetry International, FENCE, and Tupelo Quarterly and she is translator of Family or Oblivion by Elena Salamanca. She is co-founding editor of Kalina, a press that showcases bilingual, Central American-themed books and she is assistant editor at SWWIM Every Day an online daily poetry journal for women-identifying poets.

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S6 E2: Sarah Levine Speaks with Julia Chiapella

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Love in all its blissful, blistering forms provides the foundation for lyrical poet Sarah Levine’s new book, Each Knuckle with Sugar. A Massachusettes poet, the conversation runs from love to craft to loss. These surprising poems are made more memorable by the way Levine has skillfully built a world to hold them. You can find Levine’s book at Driftwood Press: ⁠https://www.driftwoodpress.com/product-page/each-knuckle-with-sugar⁠

You can read her poem, “Forgotten Things,” in the Paris American here: ⁠https://www.theparisamerican.com/sarah-levine-poetry.html

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S5 E41: Andrea Hollander and Emily Ransdell Chat with Dion

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Andrea Hollander⁠, author of ⁠six poetry books⁠, moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for fifteen years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for twenty-two. Hollander’s newly released sixth full-length collection is ⁠And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023)⁠. Her fifth, Blue Mistaken for Sky, was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her fourth, Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982- 2012, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first, House Without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and was recently reissued, along with The Other Life, Hollander’s second full-length collection, by Red Hen Press in its Story Line Legacy series. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction), two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2021 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. After teaching for two literary centers in Portland for six years, in 2017 she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home until the pandemic, and now via Zoom.

⁠Emily Ransdell⁠‘s debut collection, ⁠One Finch Singing⁠, was awarded the 2022 Lewis Award and was published in 2023 by Concrete Wolf Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Emily divides her time between Camas Washington and Manazaita Oregon, where she teaches poetry workshops through the Hoffman Center for the Arts.  

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S5 E40: Roxi Power talks about her new book with Dion O’Reilly

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Dion O’Reilly chats with Roxi Power about her new book, ⁠The Songs that Objects Would Sing,⁠ diving deep into a work that that “is aflame, both with the literal wildfires ravaging the American West and with the slower smolder of personal grief.  Power’s response to loss and disaster is a quirky plangent song…shot through with humor and underpinned by a rippling ostinato of lyric power” (Mark Scroggins). 

With ease and humor, Dion and Roxi draw on postmodern and Buddhist theories, debating whether the presences that sing within the objects of Power’s lines are “essences.”  “I feel you in the glint of objects sometimes.  That’s all I know.” The white “ghost piano” on the book’s cover, painted by her sister Sky Power, summons her mother’s musical influence within the titular elegiacal poem. Power conjures and “unpaints” the psycho-geography of Texas and Wyoming, filled with the “ghost-scratchings” of memory that, like de Kooning’s paintings, peak through to the surface of the “cinematic fictions she sews from scratch.” She bends time in poems such as “The Aftermath of Future” where “Now is just one fold in the snake skin of time.” 

Dion and Roxi discuss Power’s trans-genre work and why she has been drawn to recombinant forms since her MFA work at Cornell University that include music, visual art, and film. Power has taught for 25 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she founded and edits the trans-genre anthology, ⁠Viz. Inter-Arts⁠. Her next book is forthcoming from Carbonation Press in 2024.

Power organizes national “Trans-Genre Cabarets,” and her own trans-genre work includes Live Film Narration (Neo-Benshi) performances of original scripts across the country, including the Tennessee Williams Festival, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, REDCAT, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project.  Her next Neo-Benshi performance is Feb. 22 at Satori in Santa Cruz.  

Power organizes events and makes podcasts for ⁠The Hive Poetry Collective.⁠  Her ⁠most recent podcast is with Brenda Hillman.⁠

Farnaz Fatemi writes: “With both musical and emotional intelligence, not to mention a linguistic virtuosity, Power conjures hope amid her sonic discoveries—while still bearing lucid witness to personal and community grief.”

C.S. Giscombe writes, “The first line of Roxi Power’s incredible burst of poems lays down the law with one hand and sets things in motion with another—that is, she writes as if to remark on the coming noise made by fire, death, love…The many motions of this music, of these songs that objects would sing, will brush the reader with a difficult and worthy and joy.

You can order her book ⁠here.⁠

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S5: E39 Poets of Palestinian Heritage, Hosted by Julia Chiapella & Farnaz Fatemi

Listen here as Farnaz Fatemi and Julia Chiapella read poems by Palestinian poets and those of Palestinian heritage to amplify and bear witness to the range of their perspectives and the richness of these voices. We found the reading of these aloud to each other to be profoundly moving. Please see the extensive show notes for links to the poets, their books, many more we couldn’t include on the show and other recent resources.

In this order–⁠Fadwa Tuqan⁠, ⁠Lena Khalaf Tuffaha⁠, ⁠Zeina Azzam⁠, ⁠Mahmoud Darwish⁠, ⁠Mosab Abu Toha⁠, ⁠Maya Abu Al-Hayyat⁠, ⁠Noor Hindi⁠, ⁠Naomi Shihab Nye⁠ were featured on the show. 

We mentioned the following anthologies during this hour: ⁠We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage⁠ (Zeina Hashem Beck and Hala Alyan, editors); & ⁠Modern Arabic Poetry⁠ (Salma Khadra Jayyusi, editor). 

Since recording our episode a week ago, the Palestinian academic and poet ⁠⁠Refaat Alareer⁠⁠ was killed in Gaza; we want to bring attention to the ⁠⁠story of this poem, his last⁠⁠. 

We additionally want to highlight the work of ⁠Deema K Shehabi⁠, ⁠George Abraham,⁠ ⁠Nathalie Khankan⁠, and ⁠Fady Joudah⁠ (also see Joudah’s recent “⁠meditation⁠”), among many, many others. For one additional resource about poets, see the Instagram account, The Palestinian Poetry Project, ⁠poetrypalestine⁠.

The LA Review of Books recently published a ⁠small folio of writing⁠ from poets of Palestinian heritage.

We recommend ⁠Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide⁠.

Vox Populi published a “ceasefire cento” solicited from poets globally. You can read it ⁠here⁠.