Of Poetry Podcast Han VanderHart
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- Arts
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Kitchen table conversations with poets, hosted by Han VanderHart.
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Amorak Huey and Han VanderHart (River River Books): Of Choosing Abundance, Creating a Small Press Community, and Weathering Manuscript Rejections
Read: Amorak Huey's "Estuary, Delta, Confluence, Mouth" and Han VanderHart's "Larks"(Up the Staircase Quarterly)
Purchase: Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021) and What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021)
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His previous books are Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks. He is recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems appear in the Best American Poetry anthology, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, the Norton Critical Edition of The Odyssey, and many print and online journals.
Han VanderHart is a genderqueer, Southern writer living in Durham, North Carolina, under the loblolly pines. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry podcast and edits Moist Poetry Journal. Their aim is to live, edit, and write with transparency, care, and warmth. They love rescue pitbulls, and send a hello to your dog.
RiverRiverbooks.org
Recommended Reading/Listening
Lauren Camp
Rachel Edelman
W. Todd Kaneko
Carla Sofia Ferreira
Jennifer A Sutherland
Joe Wilkins
Corrie Williamson
The Line Break podcast with Bob Sykora and Chris Corlew
The Black Lily Zine
Noa Fields
Nic Anstett
Jason B. Crawford
Stephen J. Furlong
Octopus Books -
Carla Sofia Ferreira (Of Elegiac Odes, Semicolons, and Witness)
Read: "Ode to the Empanadas on Pacific & Elm, with Apologies to William Carlos Williams" in Okay Donkey Mag
Purchase: A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024)
Carla Sofia Ferreira (she/her) is the daughter of Portuguese immigrants and a teacher from Newark, New Jersey. Author of micro-chapbook Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press, 2019) and debut poetry book A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024), her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her writing in The Rumpus, Glamour, EcoTheo, underblong, Okay Donkey, december, and Washington Square Review, among others. On the internet, she’s @csferreira08 on Twitter and @csferreirawrites on Instagram. She believes in kindness, semicolons, and the permanent abolition of ICE. She has now successfully taught her cat Moonshadow how to fetch. She dislikes writing bios in the third person but is saving for her overthrow of societal norms for other causes.
Recommended Reading:
Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia
Ross Gay, Be Holding and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Gwendolyn Brooks, "Paul Robeson"
Roberto Carlos Garcia, [Elegies]
Benjamin Garcia, Thrown in the Throat -
Catherine Rockwood (Of Pirates, the Event of the Image, and Angelic Sex)
Read: "A Poem for Retired Lighthouses," Little Blue Marble
Purchase: And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death (Ethel Zine Press, 2023)
Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Their poetry chapbooks, And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death (2023) and Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion (2022) are available from the Ethel Zine Press.
Recommended Reading:
Our Flag Means Death: A Brief Excursus on Tailors and Tailoring by Catherine Rockwood
A review of Our Flag Means Death by Catherine Rockwood (Strange Horizons)
Ethel Zine Press
Stephanie Burt, We Are Mermaids
Brian Teare, Doomstead Days
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller -
Tom Snarsky (Of Minisons, Math, and More About Long Poems)
Read: Neutral Spaces, for more of Tom Snarsky's poetry
Purchase: Reclaimed Water (Ornithopter Press, 2023)
Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him @tomsnarsky on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky, and you can find the reading series he coordinates @night_light_poems_ on Instagram and @nightlightpoems on Twitter. If you're a poet, he would love to hear from you!
Further/Recommended Reading:
The Minison
The Minison Project
C.T. Salazar
Noelle Kocot's Ascent of the Mothers (Wave Books, 2023)Jon Anderson's The Inner Gate -
Carolyn Hembree (Of Long Poems, Inger Christensen's Alphabet, and Writing Disaster)
Read: Carolyn Hembree's poem April 2020
Purchase: For Today (LSU Press, 2024)
Carolyn Hembree's third poetry collection, For Today, is forthcoming from LSU Press. She is also the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
Recommended Reading:
Jennifer Shaw's visual art series Flood State
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (novella on the 1918 flu pandemic)
Inger Christensen's alphabet, translated Susanna Nied
Spring and All (facsimile edition with introduction by C.D. Wright) by William Carlos Williams
[By the road to the contagious hospital] by William Carlos Williams
Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
"An Anatomy of the Long Poem" by Rachel Zucker -
Rachel Edelman (Of Memphis, Geology, and Water)
Read: "Dear Memphis," at Terrain.org
Purchase: Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2023)
Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee whose writing explores diasporic living. Dear Memphis, their debut collection of poems, will be published by River River Books in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals. They have received material support from City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.
Further Reading:
Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series
Alicia Ostriker
Customer Reviews
Love
I really enjoy listening to this podcast. The interviews are rich and conversation feels organic. - MG
Poets Talking Poetry
Han VanderHart’s latest contribution to the poetry community should not be missed. They are a wonderful interviewer, with thoughtful questions, a wide frame of reference, and equally impressive guests. This is a must-listen for me, week in and week out, and I’m sure I’ll return to my favorite episodes for a long time.