From left to right: Carlos Soto-Román, Soto-Román's book “11,” and Leanne Tory-Murphy.
I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.
You see, sometime back, I came up with a zippy formula meant to clarify how we might arrive at “political poetry.” It goes like this: if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics.
V. Joshua Adams: Let’s start at the beginning. The title of the upcoming 2025 book: WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. It comes from the opening of “Caras y Mascaras,” which juxtaposes the names of poets and literary practices with those of military hardware and politico-historical places and events a total of 14 times, by way of tercets, like this:
From left to right: Laura Mullen, Mullen’s new book “EtC,” and Benjamin Morris.
EtC takes as its subject an iconic bovine mascot who has lived one of the longest and strangest lives of any corporate emblem in history — and whom Mullen here examines in a collection that serves equally as send-up, as critique, and as lament, but above all as trip through the capitalist funhouse: a trip in which, with the knives out and sharpened, we discover there is very little fun to be had after all.
Having recently returned to school as a mature student, once a week I drive from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi on my way to campus, about a three-hour drive. Most of my commute takes place along Interstate 55, along which I often see a truck from one of the Sanderson Farms chicken plants in nearby Hammond, Louisiana, or McComb, Mississippi. These trucks are loaded up with thousands of live birds, their crowded cages stacked ten rows high and twenty rows deep, likely on their final journey ever taken in the open air.
From left to right: Kendra Sullivan, Sullivan’s new book “Reps,” and Louis Bury.
We spoke together on the occasion of her recent Ugly Duckling Presse book, Reps, which uses undisclosed constraints as carrying cases — safe deposit boxes — for the stories humans tell each other to make sense of their many capacities.
Kendra Sullivan operates in the vital tradition of poets who undertake DIY cultural work. She is the Director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Humanities, where she is responsible for initiatives such as Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative and NYC Climate Justice Hub. She co-founded the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Brooklyn, and is a member of Mare Liberum, an eco-arts collective.
After the event, Jose and I chatted briefly, but he had to jet off to class. So we decided to continue our conversation in a slightly more formal context. We corresponded via email on December 31, 2023 and through the first weeks of the new year, first discussing Black Box Syndrome and then Yaguareté White.
In August of 2023, just as the Fall term commenced, poet and scholar Jose-Luis Moctezuma reached out to me about celebrating Latinx Heritage Month at Wilbur Wright College, where he teaches Literature and Composition in the English department. Jose invited me to read from my forthcoming debut poetry collection, Yaguareté White, which was published by University of Arizona Press in February. As a fellow faculty member at the City Colleges of Chicago, I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to spend time with a new group of students talking about poetry.
