Contributing Editor Vievee Francis talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“IN FOREST PRIMEVAL, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Vievee Francis summons a wilderness — equal parts the wilderness of America and the wilderness of the interior — that takes us off center. I know and love that particular North Carolina wild that Vievee has described, having lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains myself for a stint, too. Vievee and I have both since left those mountains, and during our conversation, which took place during her weeklong residency at Claremont Graduate University, we laughed about living in a place where there might be snakes on the porch or stinkbugs nestled in the curtains. That is, a place where that wild thing in the world and in the self feels nakedly present and abundant; one has to face it. And it is so, in this book: a segue from Vievee’s vivid persona poems, those extraordinary masks, into an articulation of her own personhood — a speaking of the black female body, this marvelous, terrified, joyful assertion of her name in a broken country that would otherwise un-speak it.”

Read at LARB.

We’re proud to announce our 2017 Pushcart Prize nominees!

From Issue 9

This is why I Need a Goddess by Angela Penaredondo
Lambing by George Kalamaras
Mare Frigoris by Rachel Brownson

From Issue 10

Reprieve by Jenny George
Argument for Loving from a Distance by Katie Condon
Drinking Game by Marlin M. Jenkins