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Q&A (& #Giveaway) with Poet, Christina Kubasta, Author of &s

“On the backyard firepit, a cicada / anchors itself…it splits / its own back, and emerges, lime green / and terrible: splayed / over the carcass of itself.”
~ from “Reconciliation” in &s

We are days away from National Poetry Month. In early celebration, I’m hosting poet, Christina Kubasta, to talk about her new chapbook entitled, &s (Finishing Line Press). In her collection, Kubasta pairs ideas using juxtaposition: wanting less and yet more, pushing away one expectation only to root oneself in the weight of another. Her poems explore the way we view ourselves, our bodies, in relation to an other; they invite us to consider the truth uncovered in such explorations, even when the truth makes us uncomfortable. Especially so.

Along with her Q&A, I’m offering a giveaway (courtesy of Christina–Thank you!). Click HERE for a chance to win a copy of &s  (deadline to enter is Tuesday, April 4th, at noon)!

Now,  welcome Christina Kubasta!

Christi Craig (CC): I know that collections like this, whether filled with poems or essays, tend to unfold unexpectedly, almost naturally, like magic. Can you tell us a little more about the development of this chapbook and its title?

Christina Kubasta (CK): As I was thinking about the poems in this collection, I found the ampersand playing an outsized role in a number of titles – including the opening poem “Autonomy & the Importance of Empty Space.” I’ve liked the ampersand since a grad-school friend peppered all her writing with it; it’s so visually attractive. But whenever I use it, someone will object – it’s not “professional,” or something similar. But some situations call out for the ampersand, and some resist it.

While I didn’t have a reason why I’d use the “&” as opposed to the “and,” I ran across the essay “The 27th Letter” by Mairead Small Staid (I used a line of it to open the book). In it, Small Staid gives a history of the ampersand (fascinating!), how poets have used the ampersand, and talks about how this character can be used to suggest collaboration. She notes that when two authors’ names are joined by the ampersand it means they worked together on a text, rather than approaching the work at separate times in separate places.

Armed with this idea, I returned to my poems and tried to think about when particular ideas existed side-by-side, inflecting each other, shaping each other, influencing each other. To return to that first poem in the collection, which explores a desire for autonomy & independence, as well as a desire to be enveloped and not desire the empty room or the solitary, those ideas exist together, playing off of each other & informing each other. The speaker of the poem (like many of us, perhaps) wants both “to escape—just for a moment—try a different kind of life,” and also (at the same moment!) to “return to the room // behind the window, behind the awning / and be grateful.” The collection is full of ampersand-moments like this: ideas that exist twinned with other moments, inseparable.

CC: Some of us (and by “some” I mean me) resist change with force and indignation. Many of your poems, like “Reconciliation,” speak to the painful but positive side of transformation: “sometimes we become less than what we were / and it is no tragedy….” Your poem paves the way to acceptance, a theme that runs throughout this book. Is it the writing of poetry–and the poet within–that brings you to a better understanding of body, life, and experience? Or is it in the acknowledgment of the experience, and the resolve that follows, that brings a poem to the surface? 

CK: I would say this too is an ampersand moment, a both/and. I think poets should be honest, above all. I tend to resist the idea that poets have any answers at all – which means also that we shouldn’t pretend to, in our poems or anywhere else. But poets pretend all the time. I distrust that. I distrust the poet’s voice that says to the reader Listen, I’m going to tell you something important . . .

Witnessing a cicada unsheathe itself from itself was horrifying and fascinating to me – we often hear them, and see the husks they leave behind, but I’d never before seen one in the act. We often dream of other lives, but know we shouldn’t admit it, because it will cause pain. We misunderstand each other, often. There’s a line from a Stephen Burt poem that captures a lot of this feeling for me, from his poem “The People on the Bus.” He writes, “if we wish too often, this fall, to have led another life / We do not mean that we would give up ours.”

Instead of pretending wisdom, I think we should just tell the truth. As painful as a transformation may be, it may just be. And it may be no tragedy, barely noticed. But that doesn’t in any way make it less true as an experience.

CC: In your bio for Marian University, where you are an Assistant Professor of English and the co-director of the Honors Program, you say that “teaching and writing inspire each other.” What is it about teaching that most fuels your desire to write poetry? 

CK: Because I teach research writing, creative writing, and literature to students in all different majors from many different backgrounds, I get to approach texts in new ways all the time. A student who has never read poetry before will often notice something that a more seasoned reader of literature wouldn’t – because the student doesn’t know what s/he should read for, something completely different or surprising comes up in our discussion.

Those moments inspire me to re-read a text in a different way. Revisiting poetry and language with fresh eyes is invaluable, and something my students push me to do.

I’m originally from a small town in Wisconsin. Talking with a friend from high school lately, we were reminiscing about our classmates and where they went after graduation. A few of us left the state for college, most went in-state, some went to a 2-year community college or tech school, and some went right from high school to employment or family. When I’m talking to my students at Marian (many of whom have similar backgrounds) I recognize some of the pressures they face, the names of their small towns, that their spring breaks and summers are spent earning money to support their educations. I’m inspired by them: their drive & passion, their questions, their stories. Sometimes those details find their way into my work (whether poetry or prose).

More often, the idea that what I’m writing should speak to something that matters, because literature should be about things that matter, is driven home by my students and their lives. If a poem is merely pointing out something pretty, or nice –the occasional poem – then it isn’t doing enough. If it is reinforcing a common idea, or a structure of power, without questioning it, then it’s not doing enough. Obviously, much of my work falls short of this standard, but I feel compelled to strive for something more difficult & a large part of that is because what I’m writing should matter beyond the well-wrought image or the well-turned line. That isn’t enough anymore.

CC: What are you reading these days?

CK: Last week was my Spring Break, so I got to finish up some reading – some for school and some for pleasure. I finished Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom, a memoir and exploration of her father’s identity; re-read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (which I’m teaching in a class this semester); read John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester (a pseudo-horror novella set in Iowa), and lot of Mark Doty’s poetry. The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Spring Conference this April in Milwaukee will be featuring Mark Doty and I’m honored to be a part of making that happen. Doty’s imagery is swimming in my head right now – how he imagines heaven for so many people; how often his dogs appear in his work, pointing him toward some realization; how love is present, but also desire (thrumming insistent desire) and we are not diminished by desire and what the body wants, but made fully human by it, whether accompanied or not by love.

CC: Who is one poet you return to again and again for sustenance or relief? 

CK: It depends on the day. I love Dorianne Laux and Frank Bidart for some moments. Catherine Barnett’s “Sweet Double, Talk-Talk” sometimes needs to be read aloud (the cat or dog are willing to sit & listen on those days). More than a particular poet, I have poems snipped & saved for certain days. I have the “worried about X” poem, a poem for when that person “who means X to me” dies. I know where I’ve filed them; I retrieve them as needed. (I know this sounds maudlin, but . . .) I tend to like poems that don’t provide relief exactly, but lance open & cauterize a wound.

~

A Wisconsin native, C. Kubasta experiments with hybrid forms, excerpted text, and shifting voices –her work has been called claustrophobic and unflinching. Her poetry has appeared in So To Speak, Stand, The Notre Dame Review, Pith and Construction, among other places. She is the author of two chapbooks, A Lovely Box and &s (both from Finishing Line); Box won the 2014 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets chapbook prize. All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX [books], 2015) explores the stories of growing up girl in rural Wisconsin in fragments, ellisions and half-understood stories. Her next book, Of Covenants, is forthcoming from Whitepoint Press in 2017.

 She teaches writing, literature and cultural studies at Marian University, is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and is Assistant Poetry editor at Brain Mill Press, where she writes an occasional column, Portaging. She lives with her beloved John, cat Cliff, and dog Ursula.

Don’t forget: Enter the Giveaway by Tuesday, April 4th,
for a chance to win a copy of &s!

* Photo credit for black and sepia ampersand: media.digest via Visual hunt / CC BY 
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Q&A (& Giveaway): Amy Kurzweil, author of Flying Couch

“I ask myself, Was I born from a stone? Do I still speak Jewish? Does Jewish still exist? I try to say the words to myself. Maybe somebody should hear me. I try to picture a face. My mother’s face. If I could draw, I would draw her. Just to bring her back to my eyes.” ~ Bubbe in Flying Couch

cover image for Flying CouchMemory. Identity. Art. Amy Kurzweil blends all three together in tight unity in her new graphic memoir, Flying Couch (Catapult/Black Ballon, 2016). Using her artist’s hand, she tells of her journey to illustrate the story of her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust by living with gentiles and claiming she was not Jewish. Alongside her grandmother’s memories of the War, Kurzweil depicts the dynamics of mothers and daughters–then and now–in a mix of illustrated heartache and humor.  She proves that while memory is fluid and fades, art brings back its form, returns us to our core, and helps us reconcile what has been lost and gained.

I’m honored to host Amy Kurzweil today, where we dig a little deeper into story and form. And there’s a giveaway (thanks to Catapult!). Enter HERE for a chance to win a copy of Flying Couch (deadline to enter: Tuesday, Dec. 20th, noon).

Now welcome Amy Kurzweil.

Christi Craig (CC): As a writer and teacher of writing, what do you appreciate most about the style and architecture embedded in graphic memoir as form?

Amy KurzweilAmy Kurweil (AK): I love the immediacy of drawing, how it connects to our emotional life so directly. I have to bring a certain quality into my arm when I want to make a line that expresses a certain emotion. My arm has to shake for a shaky line, has to tense for a rigid line. I can’t draw a sad face without frowning myself. And I love how with graphic memoir, the self is split in two: There’s the writing self, the narrator, the self reflecting here and now, and then there’s the figure I just drew on the page, the 2-dimensional me, an embodiment of memory. I think all memoir writing has this kind of splitting of the self, the past and present sharing the page, and I just love how comics makes this literal.

CC: In a post on Jewish storytelling, Erika Dreifus highlights this quote from Avraham Infeld’s “The 5 Legged Table” on Memory: 

While history is about what happened in the past, memory is about how that past drives our present and our future. 

Your book is an exploration of memories pulled from time spent with your grandmother and her stories about surviving the Holocaust. Now that you’ve published Flying Couch, how does memory, this narrative of your grandmother especially, fit within the framework of your life moving forward?

AK: That’s a wonderful quote. It resonates so well with my ideas about memory. Memory is one of the most interesting things in the world, I think. It’s still mysterious to me exactly why we remember what we do or exactly what our memories say about the facts of the past, but it’s certainly true that memories communicate what we once found and continue to find important. I’ve heard every time you remember something you change the story a bit, you rewrite the experience – the roots of the word remember literally mean something close to “rebuild,” or “refill” – but I don’t think this means our memories can’t be trusted, only that they may tell us more about ourselves than about the world. What’s also true about memory is that the more we recall certain events, the more we reinforce the narratives those stories support.

This is all to say that whatever compelled me to write this book has certainly reinforced my connection to my grandmother and her history, and whether that was necessary or inevitable I can’t say. Not everybody in my position wants or needs to do that. But I will say: having now understood my grandmother’s experience in the holocaust as deeply as I feel I can, having reflected on the psychological inheritances of this history, has made a lot of the horrible things that happen to people all over the world, all the time, less abstract and less distant. I don’t think that means anything specifically for my life moving forward other than a possibility that my writing and my art will be infused with a certain authentic empathy, and hopefully, in the best case scenario, this empathy-into-art does it’s tiny infinitesimal drop-in-the-bucket job to ease other people’s pain, and my own.

CC: In this interview on for The New School Writing Program, you say, “The reason Flying Couch was published is because I worked on it a lot for a very long time (eight years) and then I got lucky. I think that’s the only true story that you can tell about a published book.” For writers and artists alike, perseverance is the key. But is there another word, mantra, or even image you turn to that urges you on when “The End” seems eons away?

AK: I suppose I remind myself almost everyday that I actually enjoy writing and drawing. I mean I just viscerally and emotionally relish the act of making marks on paper, seeing the mess of my thoughts and feelings transformed into words or shapes. That seems like a requirement of this work. For me, making marks a basic need first, and an ambition second.

So it’s been important for me to separate career anxiety from writing anxiety. Of course career anxiety is tied to money anxiety, but just about every writer needs another job (publishing a book doesn’t necessarily change that!). Then, just holding all those anxieties apart from one another is helpful. Finishing a project, especially a first project, is important if you want to get on the literary map, if you really want lots of attention. But for most of us, our writing practice is not primarily about getting attention. I write for insight and understanding. What really gets me down is when I lose the private thing, when I’m unable to illuminate or understand.

You asked for images. Ok, let’s say my mind is a landscape: as long as it’s a field in bloom, who cares how long it takes me to collect all those wildflowers – it’s an enjoyable task. It’s when my mind is a barren desert that I really feel awful. So if my mind-field feels razed and empty, I have to go do something else. Reading or traveling usually helps fertilize the field.

CC: What are you reading these days?

AK: I see that what I’m reading now is quite disparate and a lot at once: I’m about to finish – and have been reading for months – Nabakov’s autobiography Speak Memory. It’s slow and to be savored. Next I will read Jonathan Safran’s Foer’s new one, Here I Am. I sometimes foolishly try to read from my boyfriend’s book piles (he’s getting a PhD in Philosophy) so right now it’s Personal Identity (essays by Hume, Locke and others). Comics-wise I’m reading Sarah Glidden’s Blackouts and I just assigned The Arrival (Shaun Tan) and Un Océan D’amour (Lupano and Panccione) two silent graphic novels, for my class at F.I.T. On train rides, I tend to read on my phone, usually essays published online, so right now: George Saunders’ piece on “The Incredible Buddha Boy” about a kid in Nepal who had apparently been meditating and fasting for 7 months (!). Oh and I just read my sister-in-law’s draft of a young adult dystopian novel. (Think: the next Harry Potter). And always: lots of peer and student work-in-progress.

CC: What’s your favorite drawing tool and where’s your favorite place in which to create?

Aamy-kurzweil-author-drawing-web-res-1K: Hands down my Pentel brush-pen, with easy refillable ink cartridges. I think a brush is important for getting that connection I was talking about in the first answer: between mark and body feeling. I know it sounds a little pretentious, I mean, you can draw with anything, but the ink needs to really run or your lines get stunted. So for me a brush is more freeing. But I hate redipping. Thus: brush-pen.

I usually work at the tilted drawing table in my bedroom. It’s not a perfect setup – there are eraser shavings in my bed, but you can’t beat the commute.

If you’re interested, I just wrote/drew this essay about my process, which features a drawing of this table with all my supplies labeled.

Amy Kurzweil is the author of the debut graphic novel Flying Couch (Catapult/Black Balloon, 2016), which received a Kirkus star and is a Junior Library Guild pick. Her comics appear in The New Yorker and other publications. Her short stories have appeared in The Toast, Washington Square Review, Hobart, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and comics at Parsons School of Design and at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Amy lives in Brooklyn.

Do check out her essay on her process and DON’T FORGET to enter the giveaway for a chance to win Flying Couch!

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Conversations in Poetry, Lessons in Life:
Q&A (& Giveaway) with F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis

“recall the repose / of your curling posture in my thick arms / my thumb praising your eyebrows / and forehead   your baby skin   your hand / around my pinkie as I move   gripping / solid as in–safety  as in–safety”
~ Brown and Davis in “Second Sleep”

Poetry isn’t my finest skill. I am a writer of short fiction and essays, a laborer of novels, a dreamer of stories from beginning to end. But I am drawn to writers who master the art of condensing life and experience into the lyrical style of stanzas and breaks, who form a new understanding or seal an image onto the reader’s mind in just a few lines with the same strength found in the weight of a 300-page novel. I am drawn to poets who give witness to Meena Alexandar’s claim about the purpose of the genre when she says, “the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist.”

cover image Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3Cave Canem Poetry Fellows F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis shine with such “tenderness and grace” in their new chapbook, Begotten, one of three collections of poetry published in the Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3 (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2016). Begotten turns a poetic lens on fatherhood, examining how fathers and sons thrive, how they falter, how they learn.

I’m honored to host Brown and Davis for a Q&A. And I’m grateful to Upper Rubber Boot for sponsoring a giveaway. Enter HERE by Dec. 6th for a chance to win a copy of The Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3, which includes Begotten, as well as Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee’s Northern Corn and Enid Shomer’s Driving Through the Animal–three chapbooks in one!

Now welcome, F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis!

CC: In the Notes at the end of Begotten, you talk about the process of writing these poems, saying you “borrow from one another’s poems, both in structure and in dialectic,” you “lift lines to create new lines.” What was the biggest challenge you faced when writing in tandem, as well as the greatest gift?

F. Douglas BrownF. Douglas Brown (DB): Well, in many ways we BEG, BORROW, and STEAL. We BEG and plead with God, history, our own fathers, our kids, each other—  in hopes to revise what has been said or experienced. As parents, we are not afraid to throw up our arms and exclaim, “God help, us.”

We BORROW, mostly from each other or other Cave Canem folks. We appropriate and/or subvert forms, lines, titles from one another’s books and poems. Sometimes I will read Geffrey’s work and I slam the book closed, “Goddamn, he’s good!” A line of his will strike me down, and when I use it, his works electrify the piece; either the actual words or my attempt to raise my work to the level of that which I borrowed.

Also, poets are somewhat competitive, and we are writing in a time where the poetry that is being created is at an all time high. The amount of first publications is staggering but they are really that good. Our Cave Canem brothers and sisters are leading the way, so in many ways what we write pays homage to them, their voice, the work they are doing. I guess that’s us borrowing energy and effort, which is different from African American and POC writers of other generations. They had to support each other not only for the merit of the work, but because the world wasn’t reading or publishing the titles as readily as today.

We STEAL, not often, but mostly from those we admire or see as guiding lights. Our first books, we both took from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” From Hayden we took the regret, the venerable speaker who is trapped at seeing a narrow sliver of who his father is, and the famous line, “what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices.” In Begotten we use a gesture from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Geffrey explains this best.   

Geffrey DavisGeffrey Davis (GD): The gesture that Doug’s referring to is the influence of Van Clief-Stefanon’s punctuation—in particular, her combination of the em-dash and the colon (“:—”  or “—:”) throughout her book Open Interval. If we think of the em-dash as having a stronger pulse forward and the colon as having a stronger pulse backward, this grammatical push-pull on language simultaneously confirms and yet questions the progressions toward meaning—in our case, urgent and yet uncertain conclusions about parenthood.

And I think the biggest challenge of collaboration was ultimately the greatest gift. For a long time, I couldn’t see very far beyond the most fraught shades of my experience of sonhood and, as a result, didn’t really trust what I thought I had to say about the word Father. Hell, the idea of Father still terrifies me. I only found a path to my first book by way and light of poets (like Cornelius Eady, Terrance Hayes, Stanley Plumly and Sylvia Plath) who challenged me by showing me ways of speaking about reality according to a fuller range of emotional and intellectual perspective, especially when engaging a difficult or troubling father figure. In no small way then, for me, poetry was a kind of collaboration from the jump. Really, though, it was working together with Doug on Begotten that highlighted, extended, and dynamized how I understand poetry’s integrity—like parenthood—to be the product of collaboration, challenged by internal and external connection, leavened by internal and external combat.

DB: The Bop as a form seems to be a gift of collaboration as well. It sits somewhere between that which is lent and a theft. However, to lift a song lyric that is not yours so it can be reshaped into a new mode of understanding, is a bit of hip hop sampling. The samples become reimagined as lyrical poems, but like our nods to Eady, Hayden, Hayes, Plumly, Plath, and many others, the samples also pay homage to the challenge these writers (as well as the music) present to their readers. Personally, I think Geffrey stepped up to the challenge before I did. He sent me the Bop, “No More Your Mirror: My Wife’s Fugue,” which floored me to the point I was asking myself was I really there in the poems I was writing. Am I hiding within the form, or is the form helping me to be my most honest, real, and/or venerable self on the page?

CC: While the chapbook as a whole is rich in lyrical and conversation between father and child, I am particularly drawn to “Love Letter to Rashida Jones,” which pushes the discussion past the intimacy of family and into the hearts of those in the distance:

when she speaks / of you she verifies your facts to hers / she dreams they are a dandelion away / I know this is supposed to be a love letter / and so I’ll beg:–I need you Rashida / please tell her that black bodies are a blessing / like rain–: / like cinnamon–: / like Tupac and Sandra Bland.

This poem is powerful and important; its meaning clear even in the few lines above. But I imagine there’s more you’d like to say. What else do you hope readers will take away from your poetry, as written and spoken and shared among other fathers, sons, mothers and daughters?

DB: Thank you for the kindness and keen eye. Love Letter to Rashida Jones attempts to use what poet and friend Marcus Wicker sets up in his Love Letter poems from his collection, Maybe the Saddest Thing. One of the ways Wicker uses this vehicle is to address pop icons directly, starting first with humor, and then taking a subtle turn to more serious or delicate matters: lost language, revised masculinity, sex. This swipe is an imagined plea, and a variation of real conversations I have had with my daughter regarding being mixed. I am a product of the sitcom generation, a latch key kid whose tv protagonist not only saved any given episode day, but also dropped some knowledge or infused morality (at times cheesy knowledge and Brady Bunch morality). The poem tries to step out of the facade of tv-land and into the reality of the day. As African-American/mixed fathers ourselves, there is an urgency needed in the discussions we have with our children. Often, as parents, when the world seems to be spinning out of control, we are supposed to make sense of it for our kids. Many times we can’t. We don’t know why 2014, 2015 and 2016 became a killing season for blacks by police officers. We don’t have answers for our kids other than to stay vigilant, and be as aware as possible.

Lastly, as teachers, we have been trained to seek relevancy as we discuss a particular subject. Video games, movies, music, social media, “the internet”— offer relevancy, and yet these are vilified by parents, and marked as either distractions, pacifiers, or a boon to win favor. All that being said, what I hope is that maybe parents can use the “vehicles” presented before us, as triggers or springboards to talk to their children about real matters of the day. Our hope is that all the poems help parents re-imagine particular instances, especially the moments when silence unfortunately takes precedence.

GD: Word. And help—I want readers to understand we need more help, in poethood as in parenthood. I hope they see this as another of many contributions to the ongoing imagination, an imagination that they too are responsible for flooding with more healthy light and questions.

CC: With this chapbook released and out on bookshelves, what new projects are you working on?

GD: I’m working on finishing my second full-length book of poems, which I think will be called Anything but Hunger. I’m also shopping around a critical study of twentieth/twenty-first century American poetics, called Idiomatics, that explores the languages between poetry and criticism. Most recently though, while at the Vermont Studio Center earlier this year, I started a collection of personal essays that meditate on my experiences as an angler.

DB: I too am working on my second full-length. I am examining the abolitionist and my name sake, Frederick Douglass as seen through the work of Harlem Renaissance painter, Jacob Lawrence. Many of the poems have been published or forthcoming in journals. Some of the newer poems will be collaborations with poets, but nothing to the extent of what Geffrey and I have compiled in Begotten. I think collaboration is necessary and appropriate because it mimics the work Douglass was doing with others, as well as how I imagine the process Lawrence delved into as he imagined Douglass.

CC: Who is one poet that you turn to again and again for sustenance or for relief?

GD: As a teacher who influences reading practices and, by extension, reading possibilities, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my own reading developed. Like many newcomers, I used to read blindly (which is to say, abstractly) and had a reading list largely populated by teacher recommendations or what our literary institutions had determined was of quality. Today, however, my reading practice is increasingly embodied; I can’t even keep up with the books published by the writers that I meet or that I know. This might seem like I’m answering a wholly different question, but since Cave Canem and since being out in the world as a poet making contact with other working poets, I find myself in the fortunate position of having several individuals in my personal life who are both wonderful people and wonderful writers, and I experience those live connections as invaluable extensions or continuations of the sustenance or relief I gain from them on the page. Which is a long way of saying, more than anybody else, I have that communion with Doug, and it’s saving my life. Because I need there to be less of a boundary between art and life, because art and life are of a similar survival for me, there’s no greater sustenance or relief than the conversations and meals we share between his poems.

DB: This kindness you started Christi is spreading…It’s true, I really lean on Geffrey just as much— his keen intellect and scope, as well as our general kinship and brotherhood. We hold each other accountable on and off the page, and it is good to have someone like that. We trust our process, and our ability to meet a deadline (most of the time); we trust the directions in which we push each other’s work, that is, the care of each other’s eyes and hands when handling early and late drafts of poems, or the agony of arranging poem order of a manuscript. I have worked with collaborators before, but it has never been this holistic and generous (from the beginning until now).    

In terms of other poets, I know we both have plenty of poets we go to over and over, many of them mentioned, many of them friends. Mostly because we are teachers, our goal is to expose our students, and burst the seams of their writing wide open with long lists of poets, which is growing every publication or award cycle. For me, I teach an African American poetry class, so that list is largely made up of POC writers who are either Cave Canem or Kundiman poets. However, thanks to this Floodgate collection, my new go-to poets are Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee. These guys really mesh with what Geffrey and I are attempting to capture: brutal honesty, reimagined or broadened masculinities, how to find or revise language, what brotherhood and family and place engender. There is so much heart-work in their poems that it feels right to be connected to them, forever, in this slim tome.

~

F. Douglas Brown of Los Angeles is author of Zero to Three (University of Georgia 2014), the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize recipient selected by Tracy K. Smith. He also co-authored with poet Geffrey Davis, Begotten (November 2016), a chapbook of poetry from Upper Rubber Boot Books as part of URB’s Floodgate Poetry series. Mr. Brown, an educator for over 20 years, teaches English at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. He is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Bat City Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review (CQR), The Southern Humanities Review, The Sugar House Review, Cura Magazine, and Muzzle Magazine. When he is not teaching, writing or with his two children, Isaiah and Olivia, he is busy DJing in the greater Los Angeles area.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. Davis also co-authored, with poet F. Douglas Brown, the chapbook Begotten (Upper Rubber Boot Books 2016). His honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His poems are forthcoming or have been published by  The Academy of American Poets, Crazyhorse, The Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New South,  The New York Times Magazine, Nimrod, and Ploughshares, among other places. Davis grew up in Tacoma—though he was raised by much more of the Pacific Northwest—and now teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

About the book: Published by Upper Rubber Boot Books, Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3 collects three chapbooks in a single volume: brothers Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee’s Northern Corn invites us on a trip across an America of dust, trains, poverty, dignity, and dreams; Begotten, co-written by Cave Canem fellows F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis, bravely and tenderly explores fatherhood in the era of Black Lives Matter; and Enid Shomer’s Driving through the Animal lovingly moves between unflinching witness of destruction and hope for the future.

Purchase a copy here today or enter the giveaway by Tuesday, Dec. 6th.