Notes, Reviews, Speculations
EPOCH’s weblog features criticism, craft essays, and interviews by editors current and former. It is updated regularly during the academic year, and occasionally during the summer.
Interview: Aracelis Girmay
“As for revision, there are certain things I always do: I always read the poem out loud, across the drafts. I read to myself and then to my partner, feeling new things in these listenings. I note what feels true or untrue, what feels like mud to move through. I track the energies, what enlivens my thinking and what feels dull. I circle and revise for diction, lately (but maybe always) choosing words that are most daily, bread, and stone. I used to always draft by hand and then print and then draft by hand again, which often helped me to pay attention to the music of the poems and the kind of imagistic possibilities of a line without at first being driven or influenced by the formality or evenness of typography and page.”
One Poet’s Pep Talk to Herself
Rembrandt, Seated Young Woman Reading, c. 1639-40
Courage might mean sitting in solitude for hours, with nothing to do but have faith that somewhere on a back burner in your mind, an idea isbrewing. Courage could also be a matter of loosening the vise-grip perfectionism has on you, easing the valve open to permit the words to tumble out untidy and misshaped. Humility might look like allowing yourself your emotions. If listlessness or boredom threatens to make a meal of you, stare into its dank, gaping mouth, and even if it means letting it have its course, refuse to budge from your seat.
Interview: Banana Yoshimoto
“If you depict the sensory world deeply enough, there is a place where everyone stands on the same horizon. There, the reader is alone, yet sharing the same sensations as the author. This can ease the reader’s loneliness or tension. Just as your mind and body feel softer after stepping out of a hot spring, I try to create a kind of hot spring within the unconscious—a place where, while the reader is there, the terrors of reality don’t weigh on them, yet there's still room for an adventure of the heart.”
The 2026-27 Koch Memorial Editors: Tacey M. Atsitty and Adam O’Fallon Price
Read about the 2026-27 Koch Memorial Editors, Tacey M. Atsitty and Adam O’Fallon Price
On AI, in EPOCH and Elsewhere
Human beings are made to be moved. We respond to patterns. AI generates patterns. When there is nothing of substance there, we use our imagination to fill in whatever will give us what we need. It’s no crime to be moved by it, no more than it was a crime for that orphaned monkey to clutch Harry Harlow’s wire mother. The real crime, of course, is to approach the creation of art, and thus its recipients, with such contempt that you’re willing, even eager, to elicit emotions in people through no effort of your own.
Interview: I. S. Jones
Jumpsuits
For me, a masc man with a masc background and a masc wardrobe, a women’s jumpsuit is a sartorial leap. It shows my butt more than I’m used to, suggests I am perhaps more genderqueer than I usually am, and with its lack of waistband has reignited the middle school anxiety of what to do if you get an erection in public. And where shirts and pants cover, a jumpsuit encapsulates. It’s an outfit in a single article, a complete vibe. And it’s hard to get out of. You can tear off a shirt and pants, but a jumpsuit? For me, it’s a minutes-long chrysalis emergence.
Re-Aliving Yvonne Vera: A Review of Petal Thoughts, a Biography of Yvonne Vera by Her Mother Ericah Gwetai
She could not write the way she wanted to while abroad. She needed to be home, close to her people. In many ways one cannot tell the story of Vera without talking about the city from which she hails, a city that pulled her back each time she left. The city’s worsening state also began around the time when Vera’s health began to fail. She reflected the city in everything she did, the way dressed, the subjects she wrote about, the exhibitions she created. Writing and the city came first to Yvonne and nothing could stand in the way of that, not even a husband.
Notes on Katie Kitamura's Audition
To Kitamura, our agency—and the agency of her characters—is mostly an illusion. “It is proof of the lulling quality of narrative,”Kitamura has said, that we think we have a great deal of choices. Her narrators are stuck within that limited range of motion, and they know it. This tension between passivity and agency thrives in Audition, whose narrator grapples with the boundaries of her artform, as well as the range of constraints women must adapt to no matter the role—young women, wives, mothers, professionals.
The Memory of Water: a Review of Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea
The images evoke a profound sense of displacement that unmistakably recalls the Middle Passage—the forced transatlantic crossing that carried millions of enslaved Africans into the Americas. That historical memory lingers beneath the poem’s surface, shaping its atmosphere of rupture and unmoored identity. The voices that speak throughout the sequence are filled with longing; they belong to people severed from a previous life, suspended between homelands, and searching for a place where they might belong. In this liminal state, their only remaining tether is song, and this is a motif that resonates with diasporic traditions in which music becomes both a survival strategy and a repository of cultural memory.
Interview: Sebastian Castillo
“Even with the most dislikable characters there’s something about them we must feel attracted to, or at the very least, they need a gravitational force that moves us toward them, however much we might be ambivalent about their presence. But I’ve never even felt so terribly against a particular character. It’s just a story, and stories need their devices.”
Interview: Askold Melnyczuk
“When I was about nine I contracted an illness—eventually diagnosed as pericarditis (water around the heart) which kept me from attending school for over two years. […] This unstructured time gave me a wild freedom to play in ways I might never have attempted had I been burdened by the routines of public school. My father bought me a toy typewriter and I put together magazines—the first was called Horror Magazine (I was a huge fan of the old Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolfman movies, as well an avid reader of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland) and later, as I moved on to comic books, I typed out another magazine focused on being a detective. I copied out ads that were published on the inside covers of comic books back in those days. Needless to say I wrote all the features for both publications—which were published in highly limited editions of one.”
Interview: Ishion Hutchinson
“I think that the writer’s failure drawer must be deeper than the success’s. Because you have to go through it. Whatever it is that comes upon the writer to bring it out, maybe it’s just duty because you’re so disciplined, you sit down and write, and then you step back and you look at it, and you say, okay, this is interesting, it can go somewhere, and then you keep at it, and then over time, you realize that, oh my God, it has a long way to go if I'm truly conscientiously thinking about what has been offered to me as a writer. I've been gifted this thing, and I have to honor it. It means the time, the patience, and so on, to see through it, to make it arrive at a place that, once you’ve let it go, your conscience doesn't bother you. You have done the best you can, to your capacity as a writer. Then that's when you stop.”
Interview: Richie Hofmann
“I think there's a reader who might read my work and think oh my gosh, this is shocking and very naked! And you might have another reader read the same poems and say these are so prudish and buttoned-up! I´ve had both responses. This is not only true for subject matter but also true of how you deploy your form. I think some people look at the poems and say these are so messy and off-hand, there´s no craft here! And someone else might look at the same poems and think these are so hemmed-in and artificial, there´s no authentic feeling there, but to me it´s the same poem. It´s hard to control how it will be viewed. What matters to me is the entire book creating an aesthetic world. Is there a texture, is there an atmosphere in the book that the reader wants to enter and linger in?”
Review: Good Want by Domenica Martinello
What is goodness? What is want? What are the stakes of either? This collection is interested in both the moral and economic valences of wanting: “What does it mean, / to want good things?” What does it mean to “like something from nothing”? Good Want understands want as both a desire for something and a lack of it, a not having.
Mapping the Formless: A Meditation on the Poetics of Fiction
Think of a story as a vehicle. Its sentences are the outer body, the shiny thing that makes one want to get in and experience it, the thing that carries the plot. A portal of absorption. A body of water, if you will. If a reader is going to go for a ride in a vehicle that you designed, should not everything about said vehicle be distinctly you? Malignant, sure, infectious, unubiquitous, unique in the way that you see things. [featured image: Agnes Martin, Mid Winter, oil on canvas, undated. Via the Harwood Museum of Art.]
The 2025-26 Koch Memorial Editors: Emma Catherine Perry and Daniel Peña
Read about the 2025-26 Koch Memorial Editors, Emma Catherine Perry and Daniel Peña.
Create, Flee, Forget: a Review of The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan
What gets forgotten, why, and who gets to decide are some of Nathan’s central concerns. His vivid prose imbues these questions with multiple strains of pain: the pain of losing parents and lovers, the pain of having one’s sexuality render him an outlaw, the pain of being a rootless Hungarian Jew. George writes earnestly about the tumult in Budapest—screenwriting is just something he does for income—but even this must be done in secret; he tells Madeline, “I’m putting some thoughts together, that’s all.” While the news about Hungary soon disappears from the front pages, its revolution “no longer stimulating to American readers,” it cannot fade from George’s heart or mind. In this endeavor he can succeed as neither artist nor criminal: he is forced to remember.
With No Story to Save Me from Myself: A Conversation with Matthew Nienow
“Though there is a place for poetry-writing-as-personal-therapy, it has always been important to me to make work that rises beyond my own small life toward something universal, regardless of whether the poems are beautiful or brutal, carefully crafted or wild and flawed. […] As the past cannot be changed, I find the resistance of neat endings hopeful—solace in the messiness of shining a light on regret and remorse with no expectation of a palatable and overly-simplified forgiveness.”
One Author’s Unusual Path to Immortality
Having become fascinated by Pessoa three years before, I was now living, by happenstance, a few blocks from his house, walking at odd hours through the same streets that Pessoa himself must have traversed countless times. The sense of “desassossego,” or disquiet, that gives Pessoa’s most well known work its name, was as familiar to me as the half-destroyed leather jacket I wore everywhere. Sometimes, especially when I write, I feel real, vital, charged with energy; sometimes I feel half-real, like the heteronym of some other author who has neglected me for a while to write under another name; sometimes, not under the influence of alcohol like Pessoa, but after hours of aimless walking, I can start to float, and it feels like there is no “me” there at all.