12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katie Naughton

Katie Naughton is the author of the poetry collection The Real Ethereal (Delete Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Study (above/ground press, 2021) and A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023), and Debt Ritual (Bunny / Fonograf, forthcoming 2025. Her poetry has been published in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Etcetera, a web journal of poetry and poetics (www.etceterapoetry.com) and a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I really liked having a chapbook (my first, Study, from above/ground press) because it gave me something to give to other poets when I met them. Incidentally, a lot of the work in my new book, my first full-length collection The Real Ethereal, predates the work in Study, which was both composed and published relatively quickly. The Real Ethereal is poetry, whereas Study is a kind of essay form.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I read a lot more fiction as a young person, and hardly any poetry before college, so it was a bit of an accident to become a poet. I found, though, that my attention was inherently attuned to detail, the momentary, and the sound of language, more than narrative or character.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I tend to draft a poem fairly quickly and in a form close to its final version, but it takes me a long time (a few years) to figure out how to frame a collection. So far. I don't know how my next big project will start and am interested in exploring other methods. I've been inspired recently by reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's drafts for Empathy at the Beinecke Library and seeing how the poem emerges from notes, sustained and direct inquiry into them, and iterative drafts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'm not necessarily working on a "book" from the very beginning, but I am thinking about the questions or possibilities a collection of short poems operate in and what else I need to write to fill out that line of inquiry.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am moved by the hushed quiet of a room of people listening. I haven't done too many readings yet, but they feel like a good way to gather with other poets and bring the poems into the mouth.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I'm interested in perception, the relationship between thought and feeling, the relationship between language and experience, and how any of this can become relevant and present to others.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writing can help expand the possibilities of perception and change, even if often only slightly, the way we experience the world and our lives. Writing can also be a friend, sometimes a funny one, to keep us company.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it's such a generous use of an intelligence to work as an editor. I appreciate that someone is thinking with me about what I've made and that I can use their attention and vision as a tool to refine or strengthen the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read more than you write; risk sentimentality. Both Susan Howe via Sasha Steensen, at least as far as I remember it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
 My thought in poetry is never more strongly animated than when I am reading and writing critically, and my work as a critic is deeply informed by the experience of writing poetry. I do tend to have seasons for different projects, though, only because I like to place priority on one thing at a time to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I'm not very good at routines, but I prefer the house to be put in order before I sit down to work. I have to clear a space, for better or for worse.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading, bodies of water, but also, I just wait.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Unfortunately at the moment, stale cigarette smoke that comes through our apartment walls from some untraceable source. I would prefer my answer to be warm pine wood, lake water, or traditionally milled French lavender soap.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Other human structures, like money and cities. I like how visual artists often think iteratively about material or process and would like to emulate this but don't know if I do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Bernadette Mayer, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Robertson, Cass Eddington, Allyson Paty

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Surf (regularly/well)

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Maybe a historian. Which is still a kind of writer. All the other occupations I would have other than writer I do have (teacher, editor, arts administrator, grant writer, publicist . . .).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was what I was best at making, and it was thrilling to make something that I liked and that sometimes other people liked too.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm currently reading Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, though it has moved away from Hardy-the-poet writing about sheep farming and deeper into the romance plot and I'm becoming less interested. Have been neglecting film recently, accidentally, though there are so many good theaters now that I am here in NYC. Enjoyed some Ernie Gehr shorts at the Met earlier this year, with the filmmaker in attendance, and seeing the parallel world of avant garde film and its audiences, glad to know they've been there all along, too, while I've had my nose buried in poems.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My dissertation -- on opacity as a component of experience, and how this is used in poetry.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Katie Naughton, The Real Ethereal

 

the question of address (elegy: apartment)

with you I have reached
the limits of reason with you
described the trajectory
you had two chairs and mine
was never close enough
at breakfast I want to you
close to you be to you
I tell you everything I see
the kitchen every day I map
my heart the morning for you
the cat circles us lies in the sun
the large room at the top
of the old house
everything I said to you failed
it my self and the limits
of what I could know I felt

Following chapbooks through above/ground press and Dancing Girl Press [see my review of such here] (the second of which is folded into this current work) comes Brooklyn, New York-based poet and editor Katie Naughton’s full-length poetry debut, The Real Ethereal (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2024). Set in four sections of staggered, staccato lyrics—“day book,” “hour song,” “the question of address” and “the real ethereal”—Naughton examines fragments, frictions and accumulations, allowing individual points and posits to gather, cluster and group into larger structures that reveal themselves slowly, as the forest through the trees. There is something of the collection that offers itself as a single through-line, a single, extended thought or lyric sentence that runs the length and breadth of it, from one moment unto the next. “the billowing bright day is gone we did not / have the money to keep it,” she writes, as part of the opening section-sequence “day book,” “the picture taken / upstairs the light and heat coming through / the window then the house / torn down the waste mass / of drywall plaster and beams that was the most / money I ever knew and so much [.]” The accumulations are layered, and propulsive: one line and then another in sequence.

I would presume that Naughton would be well aware of the implications of composing such an opening sequence, especially writing from Buffalo (where she has been a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program, only recently relocating to Brooklyn), as an echo of the late Robert Creeley’s infamous A Day Book (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). While it has been more than fifty years since the publication of that particular work, Creeley’s shadow looms large across contemporary poetics, after all, and nowhere more than Buffalo, where he taught for thirty-seven years as Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetics, from 1966 to 2003. “the image world shimmers in our neighbor’s windows / the vacant house,” she writes, “and who left it / pink hearts and red a sugar crystal glitter / in winter [.]”

Naughton begins this collection with her “day book” poems, suggesting a movement through time, but the poems of The Real Ethereal hold to an immediacy, a perpetual moment across the American present through parsed and penetrating short-form lengths. “morning takes me take the street traffics / daily time through me though morning,” she writes, to open “my love in strange places,” the poem that begins the second section, “comes already strange and I leave / the choirs of history and their small bells [.]” Her lyrics really do propel with their expansiveness, their ongoingness, offering a simultaneous, infinite and open-ended present. “dawn is not mine day still breaks yellow,” begins the poem “warming ending what it may you persist.” Naughton seeks questions of elegy and address, between what is real and what is less than, and what makes the difference, striding the line between concrete and abstract. She seeks questions around the complexities of ethics vs. capitalism, and what can be held, or held against; seeking answers to how not only to be present, but to somehow survive. As part of the sequence “a second singing,” set in the final section, reads:

Some days are my inheritance
gray and November I want
to see out of them and also
to be inside them though
the endless dissipation the body
turning to heat to waste pass
or spend a life its imagined
or remembered textures. So most time
stopped to remember happens
in an empty room with the internet
the flat word of the screen
standing in for some other place
where something happens. The
news is who stays poor in
the necessary rooms waiting
for dinner. I’m in some threshold
looking through two doors.
The rooms are empty but feel
like weight   like world.

Ongoing notes: mid-December 2023: Jack Davis, Katie Naughton + Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (trans. Ryan Greene,

I sure have been picking up a bunch of chapbooks lately (but I would welcome further, as you probably know).

Calgary AB: Parry Sound ON: The debut publication by Monica Kidd’s Whiskey Jack Letterpress is the gracefully-produced Guillemots Gillemets: AUDUBON IN LABRADOR: some poems (2023), by Parry Sound, Ontario poet Jack Davis. There’s much to celebrate in this lovely and sleek publication, including the fact that Davis’ work is not only searing in its attention to detail, and the fact that he doesn’t publish that often [see my review of his full-length debut, Faunics, published in 2017 by Pedlar Press, here]. A note at the end of the chapbook offers that “This piece is composed solely of words contained in select entries from John James Audubon’s journal of his travels along the coast of Labrador in the summer of 1833, making illustrations to complete his BIRDS OF AMERICA.” What is it about Audubon that always gets the poets worked up? Not long ago there was Béatrice Szymkowiak’s full-length debut, B/RDS (Salt Lake City UT: The University of Utah Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] set as an erasure project of Birds of America (1827-1838), and even Andrew Steeves mentioned an Audubon project he was working on as part of his own ’12 or 20 questions’ interview (whatever became of that project, Andrew?). There is something intriguing about how Davis moves from the short, sharp lyric moment to a continued moment in this particular seven page, seven poem piece, offering a detail of small somehow stretched or continued. The small moment, touching and touching down once more, again, and continued. As well, there is something reminiscent of Robert Kroestch’s own The New World and Finding It (1999) in terms of letterpress, book structure and poem structure, each page and poem of Davis’ work three couplets long, set on the right page:

Inside this linen enclosing a skin of tolerable French
braided with a grouse for its maker

I am of a peaty nature fed by the drainage of
decomposed truths and opinions I would call a song

What I know full well is renewed every few minutes
like the shy accuracy of drawing ‘somewhere’ on a map.

Vancouver BC/Chicago IL: I’m always pleased to see new work by Vancouver-based American poet Katie Naughton [see also her above/ground press title], and her latest is a second singing (dancing girl press, 2023), a chapbook-length extended suite of lyric fragments, stanzas and moments extended across an ongoing stretch and thread and thought. “this is the moment / of crisis / this is / the crisis” she writes, mid-point in the collection, offering grey spools of lyric across climate, capitalism and the “formal histories” of personal space, geography, being and loss. As she speaks as part of a recent interview for the Colorado Review blog, referencing her pre-Vancouver time in Buffalo: “At Buffalo especially I’ve been exposed to very socially conscious poetry, or work that is very interested in thinking about positionality and forces beyond the individual that shape the conditions of individual life. I started thinking about how to contain those in poetry, and how to write from a place of relative privilege or being somewhere in the middle in a way that doesn’t just reinforce the oppressive system that you are both negatively affected by and also, at least relatively, rewarded by.”

look at the trees their August shade
from the window of your life your one window
from the bedroom from the stairs
you went up and won’t come down again
the heat, the house, the laundry and breath
done there
your minutes transit the house from the bed
of all Augusts
same silent heat wind sun shade still
of time gathered there, that room
I lay on the floor
your child and not
the blonde wood and white linen
soap and ceiling
you had a room once
a bicycle a dusty road
the oak shade the sun
in another state
as children
as I did
do

Houston TX: I’m intrigued by the chapbook WORD HEART (2023) by Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet (currently studying in Japan) Yaxkin Melchy Ramos, translated from Spanish by Arizona poet and translator Ryan Greene. According to Greene’s author biography, this chapbook was produced as part of a project to translate (and presumably publish) the first three books of Ramos’ five-part “constellation-book,” THE NEW WORLD. I’m intrigued by the lyric Ramos (via Greene) offers, one filled with beautiful optimism; open-hearted, writing light, especially across the dark. Ramos’ narrative “I” is one filled with resolve and optimism, even when wading waist-deep in grief.

BLANKETS

I’m out of my mind when I sleep
because poetry is a song
where your axles sing over the asphalt

I travel toward the thought of your mouth
when I see how the hills run and
                                                        I leave them in my dust
I travel by night
while your stomach is your heavy heart
and it rolls down the highway like a ship across the Moon

and you hear an identical word
and tomorrow will be the day the beds
in the houses
in the hospitals
in the bedrooms
in the childhood kneeling on the blankets
will end up in our heart’s folds
piling up day after day unwashed.

 

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Sandals, Best, Austin, Wallace, Mody, McKinnon + Naughton,

Anticipating the release next week of the thirty-fifth of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-fourth issue: Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon and Katie Naughton.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-three issues (more than two hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming thirty-fifth issue features new writing by: Garrett Caples, Sheila Murphy, Stuart Ross and Brenda Coultas, and a collaboration between Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-four issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Etcetera : some commentary, and a few new(ish) poems,

Thanks to Katie Naughton's Etcetera, I did some short write-ups on particular works by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Susan Howe, Joshua Beckman, the anthology on grief co-edited by George Bowering and Jean Baird, and the infamous 1960s Canadian poetry anthology by Eli Mandel (through which I discuss Bowering and John Newlove), all of which you can read here (alongside two new poems, as well). Also, Nate Logan was good enough to post a poem of mine (originally composed for Scientific American, but I couldn't figure out how to submit to them) up at his buffalopluseight. So many things!

P-QUEUE #18 : Glitch

 

Last year, we explored movement—we moved together and saw how the pieces moved us—in our thinking as the pandemic took hold. This year, we only had the present: any sense of futurity was unknown and remains so. Our collective uncertainty propelled us toward the reliance on technology and redefined how we experience community. To glitch is to interrupt the present and imagine a future. The glitch evades time and makes time visible to us. It opens us to chance and possibility, calls on us to respond to its behavior. This issue, we experimented with an open-call, glitching P-Queue and its editorial process. Opening ourselves to how people might respond, we left the theme and its interpretation to our writers. P-Queue itself was a glitch and it demanded a response from its contributors and editors.

A glitch is a slippage, something that finds its way through the crevices and into shared space, the networks that pull us together. In lieu of our insights into each writer’s work, this editor’s note leaves guided explanations behind the interface, makes visible the reader’s own attention and proposes the act of thinking as remedy.

In the spirit of glitch, the works have priority in staging their own interruptions while imagining futures otherwise. (“EDITOR’S NOTE”)

Given it took two attempts for editors Dana Venerable and Zack Brown to send me copies of the latest volume (originally I received an empty envelope in the mail, as the glue-seal had become undone), I was highly amused to realize that the eighteenth volume of the annual P-QUEUE out of the English Department of SUNY Buffalo is subtitled “Glitch.” I mean, that’s just perfect, right? (Maybe too perfect: was that original mis-mailing part of a larger promotional ploy?)

This is the second volume edited by Venerable and Brown, after last year’s “Movement” [see my review of such here]. I’ve long been a fan of the journal, and am still hoping to fill the holes in my collection, if possible [see my reviews here, also, of sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, ten to thirteen, seven and eight, and five], so if anyone has copies of, say, issue nine or six or four or three or one (I had work in volume two), please let me know. The excitement of seeing a new volume of P-QUEUE comes from knowing there is a consistent level of quality and highly engaging work in every volume, predominantly from writers I’m being introduced to for the first time (most of whom seem not yet to have produced a full-length collection, so this really is an opportunity to catch work by emerging writers around SUNY Buffalo as it is happening). This volume includes the same, as well as two writers I’m already familiar with: Rebekah M. Devine, J.B. Stone, Courtlin Byrd & Brent Cox, Alice Hall, Ariana Nadia Nash, Nathan Austin, Kathy Lou Schultz, Jed Munson, Brooke Bastie, Nat Sufrin, Callie Ingram, Barrett White, Corey Zielinski, Katie Naughton and Nathan Alexander Moore. There is always such an enormous amount of energy in the works contained in each volume, always with an impressive range of style and structure between the poets included, offering an incredibly high quality of work.

I’m fascinated by Los Angeles poet Nathan Austin’s (who apparently had a publication recently from Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree) four poems included in this issue, which offer a simultaneous play of visual and sound, working to potentially disrupt and entangle meaning while possibly even offering a phonetic play of what could be mispronunciation or a heavy spoken accent—I immediately imagine someone versed in Scottish Gaelic, for example, being phonetically translated from their spoken English into written form.

if-”ou want

if-”ou want. Illllt be olnuhly rIIorning-glories
                                                    properly markt”t

Hw pl’esput paper            ei a lesiless night, lie 

All ‹‹lif- e

                        for the wilter hits All-tinsel
submerged by the iII’l’lad conceptionis of myriad

in the icy confetti sent from the skies

‘crease

  

to hear it ag:lin,

I’d already been aware of some of the work of Buffalo poet and critic Katie Naughton, having produced a chapbook of hers, so it is good to see further work. I’m fascinated by her poems included in this volume, such as the poem “from Paralegal,” set as an evocative tower of phrases, one set on top of another:

When the contract workers leave the office
at the end of the day and exit like
anyone into what might be called life
if you aren’t so cynical as to call it leisure
or luxury though there are many fees
this is the payment for
being unasked that is
slipping out of corporate existence
from five to nine every day and
into everything else there is for
people unauthorized to work overtime
the paralegal does not know
where they go when they take
the train through the jostling speed
of the tunnels or the light or
skyline breaking through its windows
over the bridges what kinship
might exist in the city what
decades of neighborhoods places
made without consultation of market
research firms but because
of what one person knew how
to make or do it might
be romanticization the paralegal
remembers her landlord-neighbors
raised in the boroughs working for
the MTA the old man with
her same birthday across the street
leaving packages at the corner market
and also what she did before this
at the job without overtime or
a company cellphone leaving into
the city with the ten dollars left
for the day the donation yoga
the meditation circles the falafel
sandwiches the place to buy
a half-pint of beer friends and just
walking the lights the streets
were for everyone in summer in snow

I don’t know how else to convince you that these volumes generally, and this one specifically, are worth picking up and reading if you aren’t paying attention. I could mention the staccato lyrics of Buffalo poet Alice Hall, displayed in the handful of poems included here, as the poem “F.T.L.” opens: “the water leaking in Penn Station, dressed / like arm loops. such / collapse in the knees of revision.” There are the long, languid contemplations of Austin, Texas-based Nathan Alexander Moore (another recent above/ground press author), including the opening to “Looking in the Mirror as a Form of Time-Travel,” that reads: “I look at you & wonder what it’s like on the otherwise of / sharpness. / Are you coming to meet me from some distant past or an / unsettled future? / Does time flow backwards or forwards for you?” There is the sense of structural play on the visual/lyric “glitch” of Callie Ingram’s “To Me Good Used To Be,” and some very cool erasures by Ariana Nadia Nash. Or the powerful rhythms and thoughtful cadences of the poems by South Dakota poet and scholar Kathy Lou Schultz, such as her piece “Peaks,” that reads:

Sentences give rise to duration. Dilation. An opening.
How many centimeters measured.
            Counting not consciousness.
Duration. Or waiting. The medicine doesn’t arrive.
Women have been doing this.
            Haven’t we figured it.
Waiting. A black line peaks. A pressure. Rates race, reduce.
            Oxygen: Saturated. Or unsaturated?
Pain peaks unrelieved. Only needles then. If only a kind word.
Why couldn’t you?
            You had one job.
Peaks or piqued. Stimulated or irritated? They do this every
day so they don’t
            See my face.
Irritated skin rubs cuts. Taped together like a broken doll.
You don’t
            Hear his cries.
Cuts unform the body. Not dilated but opened. Exposed to air.
The body
            Reforms angrily. A scar.