Listen to the episode here!
Listen as Caridad reads poems from her book Tortillera, a work in three parts addressing the journey of a woman claiming her own voice. We talk about desire, the Cuban-American experience, coming out, artist Ana Mendienta…among other things. Tune in!
• Caridad’s website is here.
• You can purchase both the soft and hardcover copies of Tortillera here.
• And you can find out about Ana Mendieta here.
Listen to the episode here!
Gregory Orr buzzes back into the Hive to talk with Dion O’Reilly about his newest book, Selected Books of the Beloved. We talk about John Keats’s “Lines Supposed to Be Addressed to Fanny Braun,” the difference between epic and lyric poetry, and the dangers of the false Beloved.
Gregory Orr was born February 3, 1947 in Albany, New York. He grew up in the rural Hudson Valley. At the age of twelve, he was responsible for the death of a younger brother in a hunting accident, an event that powerfully influenced his ideas about trauma, silence and poetry. When he was fourteen, his family moved to Haiti, where his father worked as a doctor at the Hospital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles. The family returned to the States a year later, after his mother’s sudden death. In 1965, at the age of eighteen, he worked as a civil rights volunteer in Mississippi. During that time, he was kidnapped at gunpoint in rural Alabama and held for a week in solitary confinement in the town of Hayneville. These events of his youth form the basis of his memoir, The Blessing, which tells the story of his childhood and how he came to poetry.
The author of more than 10 collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir, Gregory Orr is a master of the short, personal lyric. His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into at least 10 languages. Observes critic Hank Lazer, “From Burning the Empty Nests (1973) to the present, Orr gradually developed the ability to fuse his incredible skill at visual precision—the signature of his image-based work in his very first book—with an insistent musical quality, joining visual precision with a beauty of sound.”
In this week’s episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, Rodrigo Toscano joins Roxi Power to read work from The Charm and the Dread (Fence Books, 2022) and The Cut Point (Counterpath Press, 2023). We hear about his work in the fields of labor organizing, as well as how his work within Latinx, New Orleans, and experimental poetry communities influence his poetics.
Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with Janice Lobo Sapigao about how the intimate details of our lives are the best way to address big themes in poetry such as immigration, community, connectedness, colonization, and loneliness.
Janice reads new works as well as the poem “Swerte” by Alyza Taguilaso.
Website of Janice Lobo Sapigao
Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores some of these themes.
In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO (Hogarth, September 2022), Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.
Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign.
Jim Moore has been writing poetry for more than four decades. Before Prognosis from Graywolf in 2021, he wrote, Invisible Strings, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the work in that book. Underground: New & Selected Poems is available now from Graywolf Press.
He has won the Minnesota Book Award for his poetry four times. Jim has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Boards, the Loft McKnight and in 2012 from the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared three times in Pushcart Prize Editions as well as in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Harper’s The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and Water-Stone Review.
Jim lives in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy with his wife the photographer JoAnn Verburg. He teaches in the Hamline University MFA Program in St. Paul, Minnesota and is often a Visiting Professor at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He works online individually with poets from around the country.
Jim reads and discusses one of his favorite poems, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” by Adam Zagajewski translated by Clare Cavanagh.
Listen to Nikia Chaney interview the editor and poets of ESSENTIAL VOICES: POETRY OF IRAN & ITS DIASPORA. Christopher Nelson, editor, is joined by Persis Karim, Armen Davoudian, the Hive’s Farnaz Fatemi, and Arash Saedinia to read their poems and translations from the anthology (Sept 2021, Green Linden Press).
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Poet Daniel Summerhill talks with Julie Murphy about his new collection of poems and a writer’s duty to tell the truth.
Daniel Summerhill is a poet and scholar originally from Oakland, CA. His work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. He is the author of Divine, Divine, Divine (Nomadic Press 2021), a semi-finalist for the Wheeler and Saturnalia Poetry Prizes and Mausoleum of Flowers (CavanKerry Press 2022). He is Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action & Composition at CSU Monterey Bay and is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County.
Listen HERE
Editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke discuss their upcoming compilation of Dolly poems, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology from Madville Publishing, due to be released on January 19th, 2023 on Dolly Parton’s 77th Birthday.
Dustin and Julie attended their first Dolly concert in August 2011. Ten years later, they joined forces to co-edit a Limp Wrist Dolly issue in 2021 to honor Dolly’s 75th birthday, and on January 19th, they will release an anthology of poems paying tribute to the great singer-songwriter and cultural icon, Dolly Parton.
Join Julia Chiapella in conversation with award-winning Santa Cruz poet Charles Atkinson. We talk about his recent release, New and Collected Poems, life reflected in poetry, and his clear-eyed embrace of a diagnosis of lewy body dementia. You can purchase the book at Bookshop Santa Cruz or Two Birds Books. Chuck is joined in the conversation by his wife, writer and educator Sarah Rabkin.
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