The Host Dispatch: A Literary Podcast Host Publications

In this episode, we chat with mónica teresa ortiz, author of book of provocations, the inaugural winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize for Poetry. mónica teresa ortiz (they / them) is a poet, memory worker, and critic born, raised, and based in Texas.

In this conversation, we talk about the origins of mónica’s radical poetry, and how their work has evolved since we published their chapbook autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist in 2019.

Considering themes of liberation, we take a close look at the work of three queer poets whose work we admire, Host’s very own m. mick powell (author of threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks,) Destiny Hemphill, and Cedar Sigo.

This episode dives head first into the age old question: how the hell do you end a poem? Investigating the endings of three poems by poets we admire, we discuss the various strategies poets use to make a grand (or subtle, or repetitive, or mysterious) exit.

To kick off season 5 (!!) we has the chance to chat with the winner of the Spring 2024 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Stephanie Niu about her incredible chapbook, Survived By: an Atlas of Disappearance. 
Stephanie is a Chinese-American poet, digital humanities scholar, and ecology enthusiast from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest, and the editor of Our Island, Our Future: A Zine of Youth Poetry from Christmas Island. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for community archiving research on Christmas Island’s immigration and labor history.
Stephanie regales us with stories from Christmas Island, the remote Australian territory that is woven through many of the poems in Survived By, animating the extinct, endangered, and recovering species of the island through visual poems that chronicle the extinction crisis.
We talk about the possible links between the poetic and scientific practices, what poetry as "atlas" might mean, how her poems try attempt to understand the scale and scope of ecological crisis through a human sensibility, how engaging with other art forms, studies, and obsessions can fuel our poetry, and much more. 
Some things we discussed in this episode:
"What is it Like to Be a Bat?" scientific paper by Thomas Nagel 
Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
Shell hall in the American Museum of Natural History
 

In this episode, we had the immense pleasure of talking with our forthcoming poet and author of the chapbook threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks m. mick powell! We talked about everything from digital collage and it’s relationship to mick’s poetry practice, to the way the organization of a book of poems can be inspired by the way an album is composed. mick’s brilliance and depth as a poet is undeniable, and their warmth as a conversationalist made for an uplifting discussion about poetry and art making!

Hello Wildlings! In this episode, Claire and Annar discuss the idea of the primal in poetry, how and why we might tap into our most raw and instinctive urges in the making of a poem, to explore ”the unknown capacities of the mind and heart” (Dean Young). In a sprawling but intimate conversation about fueling the fire of imagination, empathy and a spirit of desire unhindered by doubt, this episode dives in head first, discussing the work of these brilliant poets:

The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young

Solar Throat Slashed by Aimé Césaire 

Alphabet in the Park by Adélia Prado