The Host Dispatch: A Literary Podcast Host Publications

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

In this episode, Annar and Claire celebrate one of their favorite literary months, Women in Translation Month, by turning to the work of a couple of the podcast's favorite poets - Yi Lu and Alejandra Pizarnik. Discussing themes of loss, eco-poetry, drama and surrealism, these two poets were a perfect pairing for the celebration of women in translation. 
The books featured on this episode are:
Yi Lu's Sea Summit (formerly featured on the Earth Day episode with Host Poet Julie Howd!)
Alejandra Pizarnik's The Last Innocence / The Lost Adventures 

In this episode, the second in our Adventures in Cover Design series, Managing Editor and cover designer extraordinaire, Annar Veröld, gives us her personal masterclass in all things color! We talk about everything from the ways to use the Pantone wheel to create the perfect color combinations, to the prehistoric origins of Barbie Pink (yup, you heard that right!) 
Here are the color design resources that Annar recommends from this episode:
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours
Dictionary of Color Combinations, Vol. 1
The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
Ithell Colquhoun's Taro as Colour
(check out this beautiful article Annar wrote about this deck!)

This episode asks the age old question: What the Hell is an Em Dash? As the first punctuation mark Annar and Claire cover in the WTH series, it is a fan favorite among contemporary writers, as evidenced by this tweet from author Alexander Chee: “Em-dash is the ‘just belt it and go’ of punctuation. Thus my devotion to it.” There’s even a (particularly nerdy) Distracted Boyfriend Meme circulating. 

So what distinguishes an em dash from other dashes? Why do poets in particular have such a fondness for it? In this episode, the Host team gets to the bottom of these questions and find: more questions, of course! But also, lot’s of great insight into how writers have come to affectionately use this hip punctuation mark. 

These are the books discussed in this episode:

Final Harvest by Emily Dickinson

Sho by Douglas Kearney 

To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis