The Poetry Saloncast

Troublefunk is an American Love story, and it’s also about the many things that “push against a relationship and against love.” In his book, Manuel investigates his parents’ love story, what brought them together, what pulled them apart, and how music factored into that story. The poems center around two characters, “Damon” and “Denise,” who are based upon the author’s parents. Set in the 1970’s a...

W. H. Auden says that poetry makes nothing happen. But how do you actually do that? How does a writer embody nothingness? In this interview MT Vallarta discusses her collection What You Refuse to Remember , from Small Harbor Editions. This collection is created of short prose poems separated by large chunks of white space and silence. Vallarta discusses the way that this collection came to fruitio...

Why This Poem Matters: Listen to Tresha Faye Haefner discuss Rita Mookerjee's poem, "The Silor Moon Transformation Sequence." Hear her explain why it matters to her personally, and what it teaches her about the craft of writing poems. 

Inspiration, mental health struggles and what to make with a giant bag of tapioca starch, this conversation has it all. Rita tells me about her new book, False Offering, and a bit about her upcoming book, Banana Heart. She discusses the way her partner, Dorothy K. Chan helped her get back into writing poetry after taking a haitus and how important it is for her to see people with her background re...

“If we can’t face it, we can’t change it.” In our interview, Sarah Browning discusses her latest book, Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). It tackles subjects such as racism and gun violence, but also memories of being a nerdy girl in high school and the year she was lucky enough to live in Italy. What comes through is Sarah’s attention to both the personal and the political realms. Earl...

Please enjoy our interview with Kelli and Susan on their new book! Here are the key take aways I got from our discussion. You don’t necessarily need to go in chronological order. Start with the juciest parts or the most vulnerable poems. Get an outside perspective. It’s the best way to be objective. If you can you identify more than one theme, try organizing and titling your book after one sub-top...

Jose calls his book, Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) “two books in one.” The first section is deeply autobiographical, but the second half is truly surreal. Jose and I talked about honoring his writing and life. In the first section the speaker subverts stereotypes around growing up in economic hardship. Jose notes that though his family was poor they were, “Fucking happy, because his...

Audre Lorde Pleasure Activism adrienne maree brown Octavia Butler Chen Chen, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” Khadija Queen’s “I’m so Fine”  Take-Away Quotes “I thought about (the book) like a jewel setting. The Gettysburg poems were the center ring. The first and last sections would be the side settings. There are memoriam poems, and then there are love poems and happ...

In this interview Nadia discusses her second book of poems, I Say the Sky from published by University Press of Kentucky. You can take Nadia’s 7-Day New Year Writing and Meditation Program, starting January 17th, for free when you buy a copy of her book.

How do you process the passing of someone you love? In this interview, Lindsey Royce discusses her latest collection, The Book of John . Already an established poet, when her late husband, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Royce wrote consistently about what she experienced during his last year of life. Her book documents the tender beauty, despair, anger and resilience of that last year and her...

Tresha talks with Angela Penaredondo about her third collection, nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press, 2022). Angela discusses how personal and world history inspired her book. She relies on reading and research to generate writing, but sometimes allows another voice, less conscious and more magical. She utilizes different parts of her voice, voices of others, and multiple themes to crea...

We're born in a specific place with a specific history. How do these arbitrary facts affect us as artists? In this podcast I talk with Jane Muschenetz about her collection, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay Books, 2023). Jane was born to a Jewish family in Lviv, a city once under Soviet control, now located in Western Ukraine. As a resident of the US, Jane wrote poetry about a variety...

Can a writer finish a book in time to meet a deadline? In our interview with DeShawn McKinney we discuss the genesis of his first chapbook, father, forgive me from Black Sunflower Press, 2003. Deshawn explains that he wrote a large portion of the book in 12 hours in order to meet the deadline for Black Sunflower. How does this help the process and how can other writers learn to work with these kin...

How does a person deal with grief in poetry? In this interview Joan Kwon Glass discusses her first full-length collection, Night Swim , winner of the Diode Poetry Prize (2021), which explores the death by suicide of both her nephew and sister. Glass believed nobody would want to read her book, but she discovered many with similar issues who craved an open forum to discuss them. These are the "Trib...

Do you struggle to make time for your creative self? In this episode, creativity experts and writers Tresha Faye Haefner and Jon Pearson discuss their different approaches to making time and finding motivation for their writing. As Jon notes, the difficulty is not writing but "starting" to write. Get some great tips to use in your creative process, from starting to celebrating, to just making the...

-"We thought we knew a lot about our history. We were wrong." - Heather Bourbeau How do you write poetry about historical people and events? In this interview, Heather Bourbeau discusses the way she tackles the personal and historical in her new book, Monarch . Broken into four parts, the collection illuminate aspects of history that schools often leave out of their curriculum, like the Miss Atomi...

How do we know what other people know? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner talk with Jessica Cuello about her third collection, Liar , selected by Dorianne Laux for the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her book explores issues of childhood trauma that children are taught to lie about or to hide from adults. Jessica discusses her own ambiguous, uncertain relationship with the lyric "I...

In this interview, host Douglas Manuel gets his chance to interview Lois P. Jones, who interviewed him on Poet's Café.  Lois discusses how winter stirs her imagination for poetry (as Wallace Stevens put it, "One must have a mind of winter") because of its mystery. Doug, Tresha and Lois discuss how poems confront readers, challenging them to use their own imaginations, and "complete" the poems as t...

Get inside the mind of poet-activist, writer, and publisher Edward Vidaurre as Tresha and Douglas ask about his book Cry, Howl from PricklyPear Press and his work running FlowerSong Press . He talks about riding the bus to school and seeing others reading; how that inspired him to seek out authors like Miguel Hernandez, Wanda Coleman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Wright, Claude Brown and others. Now...

In this interview Kelly Cressio-Moeller discusses how music, art and cinema play into her writing. As a student of art history and a drummer, Kelly describes how she created flow in and between poems to make her first collection, Shade of Blue Trees! When Pulitzer Prize winner Dianne Seuss gave her advice to "build a section" of her book, she had to make hard choices to cut out her darlings. Quoti...

Does a poem start with an image or with sound? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner ask Ellen Bass about her writing process. She tells us about ways she uses an image to start a poem and her use of tools like sound to distract her "overly logical mind" while her more intuitive mind goes to work. When things don't go right the first time, though, she keeps trying, reorganizing...

How can you cope with anxiety? Try writing a book about it. In this interview Kelli Russell Agdon discusses her latest book. Originally she tells us that the book began with two separate manuscripts melding into one. One book was a collection of poems about the broken world, and another about the broken self. Together they become her manuscript, Dialogues with a Rising Tide , out from Copper Canyo...

Were there certain topics that were off limits to talk about when you were growing up? Any words you weren’t allowed to say? In this interview Diannely Antigua discusses her book Ugly Music, a book where the speaker explores her complicated relationship to sexuality against a strict religious background. Antigua tells us about her transformation from being a girl who didn’t want to fall asleep hav...

In this interview Tanaya Winder discusses the way she has combined poetry and performance with social advocacy to help others feel seen in real life and on the page. Once a student at Stanford driven to pursue a degree in law, Tanaya eventually turned to poetry seeing it as a way to help marginalized communities and survivors of trauma find their voices. Coming from a life rooted in music and cere...

In this interview Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books, 2022), passionately discusses the complexities of love and how profound that experience is as a mother of a four-year-old girl. She says love is, “An enormous braid of hope, fear, longing, joy, exhaustion, disappointment, exhilaration and feeling like a fraud.” People limit themselves because loving is so frightening. “I...