Tag: poetry

INTERVIEW: LAUREN CAMP

~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

Lauren Camp is an Arab-American poet.  She is a first-generation daughter of a Jewish-Iraqi immigrant.  Often, she writes about the immigrant diasporic experience and how that personally has influenced her.  Lauren grew up in New York, attended Cornell University ‘88, and now calls Santa Fe, New Mexico home. Before she dedicated herself to writing and being  an educator, she worked as a visual artist in fabric and thread, and was a radio producer and host. During 2022-2025 Lauren was the Poet Laureate of New Mexico. Is Is Enough (2026) is her ninth poetry collection.

Poet, author, and frequent reviewer for the South Broadway Press journal, Shelli Rottschafer, recently sat down to interview Lauren.

SLR: Lauren, thank you for this interview.  I have been excited to ask you questions ever since Is Is Enough was released this past March.

Is Is Enough considers your relationship with your father.  Like so many of us, we have interesting relationships with our parents.  In this case, your dad struggled with dementia.  

In some way, does your poetic verse try to recuperate memory before it is lost?

LMC: Thank you for making time for my new book! This isn’t the first book I’ve written that focuses on my dad. In my earlier book, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which imagines and tracks my father’s childhood in Iraq, I was definitely trying to gather and unfold memories long hidden and had been possibly already lost. 

Alzheimer’s Disease can’t support more than the immediate now. For Is Is Enough, I wasn’t probing memory; instead, my attention was on dealing with a present moment and whatever was happening in my father’s mind. 

Though it was difficult in my father’s last years to “daughter”—to watch what was disappearing, and in more action-oriented ways, to take care of his wellbeing, his finances, and his worries—it was a joy to craft these poems. I got to step to the side of responsibility and simply notice, and find language for, what was occurring. 

SLR: Many writers have the quandary of “do I write about family, or should I not?”  

How did you come to terms with that internal wonder? How would you encourage others to overcome that doubt?

LMC: I never question whether I should write something; I only question whether I should publish it. I wrote these poems for myself. I wasn’t writing for a reader. I didn’t know that some of the 100+ poems I wrote about this time would become a book. I hardly even know they were poems. For a long time, they were only notes—things I wanted to hold onto because they were my father’s behaviors, and charming or devastating. I wanted to tack down and keep what wouldn’t exist the next time I saw him. 

Families and relationships are complicated. I might write something in an early draft that expresses anger or hurt. But by the time I get through the revision process (which could last months or even years, with long stretches of waiting in between drafts), hopefully that emotion has tempered. While still being honest, I can look at any imbalance in my thinking and be more fair in my assessment and presentation of anyone else.

SLR: “Original Hope” was in particular very moving to me.  It seems to consider your father at his final moments.  Family is gathered and remembers.  What is interesting is that certain memories, especially those captured in family pictures, mean one thing to one person and symbolize something much different to another.  Each has their own perspective, their own interpretation.  

Can you speak about this poem for the South Broadway Press audience?

LMC: Surprisingly, I have no other drafts of this poem. I usually revise (quite happily), but this poem was fully formed when I got to the page. By using the impersonal pronoun “one,” the poem could be speaking to or for any reader. The perspective was not specific to the author, or any specific family member. That choice made “Original Hope” feel aphoristic or proverbial to me, and I liked that. When I write about or into a subject repeatedly, I leave behind approaches I’ve exhausted and begin to look for new language or angles to come at the topic. I love this effort and find it revelatory. By the time I get to the 20th or 80th poem I’ve written about something, things get wilder or shift in some other significant way.

SLR: Lauren, your writing has taken you to many interesting places.  Your collection, In Old Sky (2024) was written in conversation with your time spent at Grand Canyon National Park as the Astronomer-in-Residence. While there you worked alongside park rangers and witnessed the Dark Skies.  

Can you tell us a bit about your residency?

LMC: In 2022, I was invited to spend a month at the South Rim. Each of those nights I investigated the shifting darkness that surrounds the canyon, trying to figure out how it felt. My goal was to write for readers who might not know what pristine darkness is like, perhaps readers who live in an urban environment where light pollutes their skies too much to see anything above—and certainly not the Milky Way.  I found the darkness at the Canyon safe and enveloping. I couldn’t get enough of it. I watched as it dropped down and gradually closed off my ability to see. In fact, as that sense shut down, I began considering what was happening with my other senses. What could I hear? What was the texture of the air? 

I wrote a book worth of poems that month, which Grand Canyon Conservancy made into In Old Sky. A surprise gift, that collection. The experience changed my interpretation of self and culture. I now regularly have a perspective of our time and deep time, and I consider/re-consider my place in each. 

SLR:  In the poem, “Bluest” you ask questions of the stars.  

You look upon their sparkle, millions of light years away, and wonder:

How will I greet you when I am back,
the spectrum not yet diminished in me?

This liminality of time, a transcendence of one point in time to infinity, it makes us humans question our time on earth and what we do with that precious time.  

Is the answer ‘open ended’?  Or is the answer ‘be creative with that time’?

LMC: When I left the Canyon, I was challenged by how to shift from a place of endless, deep wonder to a place of ordinary goodness (my home). Whenever I leave a place I’ve loved, whether from a brief vacation or a significant immersion, I want to keep a bit of it for as long as possible, to incorporate it, somehow, into my daily existence. 

At the Canyon, I was reminded of the benefit of focus. Our lives are so full of multi-tasking. In the dark, I would do a single thing: sit on a giant boulder looking into a nearly invisible canyon, or walk, watching only the slight circle the red headlight offered in front of me. 

There’s a generosity in that.

SLR: As Poet Laureate of New Mexico, your project was “The New Mexico Epic Poem Project” and its intention was to visit all 33 counties within the state of New Mexico and to write in place with collaborative pieces from each audience you worked with.  I witnessed this in action myself as I attended your workshop at the Taos Center for the Arts.  

What was it like for you to lead others to write collaboratively?

LMC: I had done something similar while at the Grand Canyon, inviting park visitors to respond to prompts and statements about darkness. It can be scary and off-putting to ask someone to write a poem, but with this approach, individuals are instead encouraged to contribute a few elements to a greater whole. I adopted a similar approach for the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, giving residents a chance to write about the community they call home. Once I had those responses, I worked as an architect, building the poem from the scaffolds and details people contributed. The result presents a chorus of voices. 

SLR: As a result of this three-year project, which of all the many workshops you led, were you most surprised by?

LMC: Oh, such an unfair question! I couldn’t possibly pick. Each town or rural village—and the libraries, arts centers, coffee shops and other venues that hosted our gatherings—offered something wonderful. Some individuals showed up not knowing anything about poetry, but were receptive. Some showed up to figure out whether what they were doing in secret might qualify as poetry. And others had good experience with the art form already. Because of the format, I gained as much as (I hope) the participants did. I had the chance to learn more about each location through its people. 

SLR: Having had a career in Marketing and as a Visual Artist, how did that prior experience help you promote yourself once you dedicated to write full-time?

LMC: I have learned that full-time creative work is a bit of a myth. If you want to reach an audience, you need to either hire help or do the marketing yourself. When I worked as a professional artist, I understood that I needed to spend nearly half of my time on elements of the job that weren’t artmaking. Everything from correspondence and contracts to exhibit organization and other details; those all take time. 

From marketing classes in grad school, I learned the rule of 7—that it takes that many exposures before someone will register what you’re offering. It can be awfully hard to promote something even once, much less seven times. But this reminds me that there’s no shame in sharing something at least once (and maybe more, if I can stand it). 

SLR: If you could have a conversation with your younger self and knowing where you are now, and the knowledge you have gained as a writer, what would you remind young Lauren?

LMC: From the time I was small, I always knew creativity as my partner. I never veered from that, though the medium I worked in has changed a few times. I’d like to remind the me now that the “making” is always the revelation. The audience’s response is sometimes a side benefit, but the process is the true triumph.

SLR: Many readers of South Broadway Press also are creatives and appreciate a nudge.  

What are you working on now that you plan to incorporate into a writing workshop? Do you have a prompt or advice for our audience?

LMC:  Right now, I’m working poem to poem, focused mainly on poems that originate from a place and its facets. 

Advice? Remember to keep the “making” close to you. Make your poems for yourself, not for an outside audience. There is no formula, no correct way, no need to ever follow any other path than your own. That’s where the answers and excitement are. But also… embrace revision. I believe that’s where the magic is. I believe you (and I) can push a draft further from its start than we ever thought possible. Challenge yourself in some way with each poem. Don’t worry; 

it will right itself eventually. New amazing things come out of that process and the patience to wait for it. 

SLR: Thank you so much Lauren for answering these questions in support of creativity and the creative life.

READ:
SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER’S REVIEW OF LAUREN CAMP’S IS IS ENOUGH

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

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BOOK REVIEW:
IS IS ENOUGH
BY LAUREN CAMP

WHEN QUESTIONING OUR FATHERS:
A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Lauren Camp begins her collection with an epigraph by Anne Carson:

Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.

And this, Camp reminds herself throughout these pages as she grapples with her father, who years ago as a Jewish-Iraqi immigrant to the United States, has now been diagnosed with senile dementia.

Is Is Enough is Camp’s ninth book of poems.  She has many accolades because of her craft having been Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park (2024), Poet Laureate of New Mexico for a three year term (2022-2025), and the winner of the Dorset Prize.

In her poem, “Sanctuary” Camp begins her recollections (5).

I collect another phrase
for safekeeping….
Now he learns the equation
for why I tell him this beginning.

Lauren seems to focus with her own “apple-sized eyes” as she exhales out her father’s “black of day” losses.  He reals with his new life within the diaspora.  It is supposed to be his sanctuary.  Meanwhile, he remembers his origin, exiled from the village he called home and can’t quite seem to embrace this new homeland.

All the while Lauren’s father’s condition reveals itself.  The living between two dimensions, no longer a place of origin verses a place of being, but now the dimension of reality verses the imagined past.  “Prognosis” details this realization, not necessarily for her father, but for her family members (36-37).

My father reminds me
of my father….
For something 
to do, we name…
Name hope
as a pleasantry….
We are not 
doing nothing.  We are planning
the task of letting go

Lauren and her family contend with their own memories of their father.  The colossal figure he once was, juxtaposed to a man whose body is intact but whose mind falters.  Past collides with the present and “what just happened” transcends “the future.”  

This intermixing of time as to reality, perspective as to interpretation is reiterated in, “Given” (40).

Endlessly governed by the endless.
Tangled lines, private pause. Invaluable hours. This is all

Worth repeating: the rise and collapse.  It is still enough for today,
and what will come next will come next.

The same threshing.

Once again “Given” could be taken in a variety of contexts.  The tangled lines of immigration gateways, visas, green cards, passports stamped.  The hours spent determining one’s value in order to be allowed to enter.  The decisions will be made, and what comes next is out of one’s hands.  This too can parallel her father’s dementia which is governed by an endless decline.  His private pauses turn his ability to use words into silence.  Memories are worth repeating so as to prolong them from being forgotten.  Yet, those struggles of reminder tire his body, which has had enough for the day.

Author Lauren Camp

In, “So Much to Reduce” (48-49), Camp and her husband go through the contents of her father’s apartment.  So many things gathered representing her father’s total lifespan, now to be condense into a few bags of junk, to be dispersed amongst the family, to be donated, to be thrown in the trash.

We’ve got three rooms and three days to garbage
or fondle the traces… [of her father’s] 
panoramic past.
…. The messages he’d written
in margins….
with every vision he had of himself

These versions of her father are a mystery to Lauren and her family members.  They only reveal themselves once he is not there to impose his presence upon them.  Rather, they peel back like a layer of onion, a sting to the eyes.

As Lauren goes through his things, she knows:

I’ll never mention any
of this to my father, or I’ll lie, or half-lie,
or pretend

She does not want to make him more vulnerable than he already is within his own dementia.  It would be a killing of the father before his body truly gives up.

All the while Lauren stands, 

At his bedroom door between mercy
and endurance and wish again for this once
boisterous man: his conflict, his rampant
substantial regret.

How does one parent turn to child and grown child now becomes the adult in the room?  These kinds of questions are unanswerable, they just come to conclusions of their own.

The last section of this collection proceeds through Lauren’s morning.  Her father is in hospice, he has only days to live.  She plans for funeral arrangements as he still breaths, dressed in a bright orange shirt.  When it happens, she writes his obituary – given this job because she is the poet of the family.  She knows she will miss the many details that built him into legend.  In her grief, she seeks solace and goes to a garden, whether this is physical space or mental is not the matter (64).  Rather she went there:

to hear the running 
of a small bird…
that single gibbering prayer…
the light against pine bark.

Because in so doing, she witnesses “all the plurals,” and “listened to the ordinary” and came to overflowing emotion, knowing she was at least there in the testimony of her father’s life. 

Is Is Enough seems to be a question: is being, is existing enough to make a mark upon the world and in our community’s reach?  What will our legacy be?  Is it unfolding for us or are we active participants within it?  Perhaps as we are in the midst of it, we will never know.  Only in the aftermath and other’s contemplation of it can those questions be rendered.

READ: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN CAMP

IS IS ENOUGH

BY LAUREN CAMP

AVAILABLE THROUGH TEXAS REVIEW PRESS

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Tough Poets Review 02

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BOOK REVIEW:
TOUGH POETS REVIEW 02

A BOOK REVIEW BY ERIK MORTENSON

The best word I can come up with to describe Tough Poets Review is eclectic. Editors Kathleen Cullen and Rick Schober have done a remarkable job of offering readers a diverse range of work that truly holds something for everyone. As an academic, I am someone who will certainly read an introduction first. This issue lacks one. But perhaps that is for the best—rather than being given a direction or having the goals of the editors explained, the volume sort of left me on my own to encounter the material firsthand. It was a slightly disorientating experience, but ultimately a rewarding one, as it allowed each work to amend and “play off of” the ones that came before it. Meaning emerged not just in response to a particular work under consideration, but in the interstices between them, and themes, images, ideas, and sensations worked together to create a nexus of allusion that was just as productive in the main as it was in the particular. 

The issue contains a variety of genres, with poetry and short prose pieces being dominant. But there are several interviews as well, along with provocative visual images and reproductions of fine art. But this list hides a number of subgenres that challenge assumption and open up new ways of thinking about the material. Some of the poems, for instance, use interesting typography or are ekphrastic responses to visual material. Further blurring boundary distinctions, the volume includes quite a few prose poems, as well as experimental prose work, including various essays that challenge the format. There are interviews, but some are in the form of dialogues or conversations. And this eclecticism extends to date of publication as well. While most of the work in the issue is contemporary, it also includes previously published material like excerpts from Sven Birkerts’s Daybook. 

A glance through the Contributors section at the end of the volume is likewise revealing. Emerging artists (new to this reviewer at least) exist alongside mainstays like Lydia Lunch; more academic writers exist alongside poets, novelists, visual artists, and others. Some present themselves as established writers and artists, some are students, while others are people working in a variety of fields such as carpentry who are nevertheless creators. If that is not enough, the issue is surprisingly international in scope, with contributors from countries as diverse as China, Brazil, Iran, Ireland, Nigeria, the UK, and the US, among others. This diversity makes for an interesting mix, with cultural perspectives, “takes” and artistic approaches multiplying in a dizzying array. 

If you like your reading varied and feel that juxtaposition is intriguing and productive, Tough Poets Review is a journal worth seeking out and keeping an eye on. I am convinced that these engaging issues will continue to provide much food for thought as disparate voices are collated into issues that are fresh, exciting, and above all thought-provoking. I will certainly be watching. 

TOUGH POETS REVIEW 02

AVAILABLE THROUGH TOUGH POETS

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, writer, translator, and Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He earned a PhD from Wayne State University, taught as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany, and helped found the English and Comparative Literature Department at Koç University in Istanbul. His scholarship focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture, with books on Beat writing, Cold War imagery, literary translation, and Allen Ginsberg. He is the author of the memoir Kick Out the Bottom: A Shared Account of a Detroit Mystic and has published translations in Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines.

Book Review: Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster by Tim Mayo

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BOOK REVIEW:
MUSCLE MEMORIES OF LOVE AND DISASTER
BY TIM MAYO

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

This is how I feel: I don’t turn to poetry when things are good. The refuge of poetry lies where the world has deserted, where I have failed to make way under the direction of prose. The first poems I fell in love with were “I Go Back to May 1937,” “History of a Tough Motherfucker,” “Vera, From My Childhood,”. These are poems that are close to you, that sound like things people might tell you over a cigarette, testaments to the fact that whether we choose life, life has chosen us. This is a similar poetics to Tim Mayo, who in his book Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster writes “the business of poetry is not po-biz”. 

Mayo writes, to misuse his words, “from the very bottom/ of the old wishing well.” Set in hospital beds and rehab centers, from the bare-faced grief of losing a daughter to the “Anthropology of Old Age”, it is poetry that feels dragged from the ends of the earth to keep its reader and writer warm. Despite the poet’s remark in “The Sunshine” that “It’s not like I had one of those episodes,” (a near death experience), “and I suddenly feel warm and fuzzy,” the poetry feels decidedly Orphic, from an underworld where death is always resting nearby. 

Mayo’s narrators write alongside a chorus of ghosts collected from a lifetime. The poet writes they are not “a soft touch poet with a heart of gold,” but I can’t help feeling the counselor from the book’s latter half bleeding through. In “The Why Answers”, a narrator, fading in and out of consciousness on “medicine mixing meant to keep me alive,” remarks, “suddenly I want to love in a way/I never knew.” The book is populated with elegies orbiting the realization of death, where the approaching end forces us to appreciate the mess of living. To me, there is a basic desire in these poems to provide fuel to the fire, to discover reasons to live.

The book is split into three sections concerned with the ends of consciousness. The first, a collection of elegies and portraits, imagines the “heightened state/slackened to a palatable point,” the place where the living mind can’t follow the dead. In the second, collections of direct addresses after a near death experience, prove that “memory is life.” The third takes place within the society of a psychiatric hospital, where the poet is Cassandra, trading with figures to “advise…how to thwart the tragedies and mishaps…already lived.” The poetry in this book is largely past-tense, trading on the preparation for a tragedy that has already struck. 

Author Tim Mayo

Though, of course, this is a simplification. The book is interspersed with landscapes and portraits set apart from the rest, operating as introductions and footnotes. A heron insists on reality despite our attempts to resurrect the dead, a hurricane floods unseen, elms grow despite their apparent extinction, and an eagle rests outside the window of a complicated psychiatric hospital society. The interjected poems speak to nature’s seeming indifference, either to human despair or human fantasizing, or perhaps to gifts to which we are oblivious of in our groping for safety, a “bouquet of storm-fed jetsam/the jumbled world must have offered us.” All of them struggle to make sense of disaster and recomplicate the human griefs at the book’s center. 

The book finds some formal variation. Poems like “A Game of Cards,” where a character conceit emitted from wisdom and memory becomes “a higher force from a not so ancient past,” then secretes back into an off-kilter reality, feels playfully loose and winding. Other poems, such as “Self-Portrait with Trache,” with its “Grief is a black parrot in my throat,” find itself downstream from Dickinson in a more pruned lineage. It’s hard to notice at first the way the collection is sculpted, with memories seeming to wind in an out of their own accord, but Muscle Memories gives itself over to second and third readings, where the relationship to death throughout the book is repeatedly complicated, welcomed, mused about, and feared. 

Modern poetry seems obsessed with space, with stanzas blown to pieces, erased and abstracted, or left to secrete on the page. Entering Muscle Memories I was nearly overwhelmed by the welcoming received from the writing. It’s a collection, again, not interested in “po-biz”, that I feel is all business. The collection has no time to waste between the reader and the portraits of loved ones in the book, the proximity to death in the collection requires immediacy, making sense of days when “you just lived./Each day must have been the same.” It is a book, in some ways of twilights, and any reader interested in survival after survival, in “Muscle Memories of Disaster”, will find refuge here. 

MUSCLE MEMORIES OF LOVE AND DISASTER

BY TIM MAYO

AVAILABLE THROUGH BAINBRIDGE ISLAND PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Queens, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Trans Mag.

INTERVIEW: MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

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Maya Jewell Zeller’s most recent publication is Raised by Ferns, a memoir-in-essays released by Porphyry Press (March 2026.)  Raised by Ferns details how Maya became a creative, a writer, and an advocate for the wild.  She now lives in Ellensburg and Spokane, Washington with her children.  She teaches English at Central Washington University, and is Faculty of Poetry and Nature Writing within the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado.  She can be found wandering huckleberry lined trails, gazing up toward towering ponderosa pine trees, and sniffing roses in city botanical gardens. https://mayajewellzeller.com  

Poet, author, and frequent reviewer for the South Broadway Press journal, Shelli Rottschafer, recently sat down to interview Maya.

SLR: Dear Maya, thank you for this interview.  

I am excited to learn from you about where life has led you and how your path has influenced your writing.  

It seems to be clear you have a keen sense of play, especially in how you teach.  I have seen this in your collaborative academic text written with Kathryn Nuernberger.  At the end of each chapter you both encourage students to experiment, you give “invitations to reflect,” and even provide writing prompts on “remixing nursery rhymes.” 

Can you talk about the importance of play in writing?

MJZ: Thank you for underscoring that, Shelli! I am a huge fan of the pedagogy of play. When I taught high school, I used to introduce Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” by reading aloud the children’s book Henry Climbs a Mountain, by D.B. Johnson; and in my in-person poetry classes at the college level, we often begin study of duende with a campus scavenger hunt (spanning art and science buildings and programs). In both cases, play opens up the brain and body to experiment and adventure—two of the aspects of a healthy curiosity that allows learning and growth. In writing—as we know—playing games and making our own rules can sometimes lead to new discoveries. If we approach ‘received forms’ as play—as in a nursery rhyme remix—we can also discover.

SLR: In that co-edited text – Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. NY: Bloomsbury, 2024 you have a chapter on the “Poetics of Spells.”  You use that practice in your poetry collection, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (2017).  Throughout it you create incantations, you invoke chants, and you weave in textures almost making your words touchable.  

How are repetition and sensory details additives in verse?

MJZ:  I love it when poets interview poets, spellmakers convene with spellmakers! I know that you also practice repetition and sensory details in your work, so you know: spells are poems and poems are spells; they are small powerful incantations, whether we call them charms or not. Poems make something happen, through repetition and invocation—saying something over and over can feel like summoning or conjuring, and the sensory world translated into verse can make us FEEL it viscerally, as if we are experiencing it. A spell-poem is a translation of desire for, or protection from, the tangible world and its beings. 

SLR: Your 2023 collection, Out Takes / Glove Box, which was the winner of the New American Poetry Prize, teaches a unique form of poetry–the Out Take Poem.  

Can you explain this inventive form?  How do you select your “golden lines”?

MJZ:    Yes. Merriam-Webster defines out take as “something that is taken out: such as a : a take that is not used in an edited version of a film or videotape, or b :  a recorded musical selection not included in a record album.” In a craft talk I give on this concept, I define out take three ways, the first of which is:  “the images, narrative, or other materials behind the poem or the final image; those materials which did not make the printed version, and which may be less formal/ polished/ directly narrative/ contributing to a clear and direct discourse, but which may access a layer of the psyche or subconscious hinted at but not explored in the original image” (Jewell Zeller, “Out Takes From the Making: The Story Behind the Image”). Put simply, a poetic out take is simply taking unexplained or mysterious allusions/ images from a parent-poem, and then unfolding what’s behind them—kind of like giving those images an origin story. My “out takes” were invented when I took a poem I’d written, called “Documentary,” and then pulled images to make seven other poems, the “Out Takes From the Making” of the documentary—like cuts from the final film. That series was first published in Juked in 2017, but folks could also pick up the (2023) book and see how the images scatter through other poems. Thanks for asking about it!

SLR:  Both Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (2017) and The Wonder of Mushrooms: The Mysterious World of Fungi (2025)—which is a Foreword Indies 2025 Finalist in the Nature Category, are beautifully illustrated. Alchemy pairs each of your poems with visual artist Carrie DeBacker’s nature-based paintings. The Wonder juxtaposes illustrator Jenny deFouw Geuder’s woodland scenes with your descriptive prose.

How does ekphrasis tell a herstory rooted in m(other) nature?

MJZ:    I love that you’re picking up so directly on intersectional feminist undertones, Shelli. So for Alchemy, it was a true collaboration—we sent poems and images back and forth and composed in response to one another’s work. The ekphrastic responses were true makings based from another woman’s work, as well as Lorca’s “deep spirit of the earth” coming up through each other’s art. Then our publisher arranged them for the final draft of the book. 

In The Wonder of Mushrooms, it was less ekphrastic and more of an illustration. Jenny and I were both contracted for the book by AdventureKEEN, who also worked with me to set an outline of topics/ phenomena they wanted covered. While Jenny did wait to get the final copy of the word file from me before painting, it was more about illustrating content than making something up in response. So, it was probably more rooted in the earth than in our creating from it—a kind of mycelial response. 

SLR: Throughout Raised by Ferns your poetic-lines come through the prose.  An example of this is your essay, “Sestina for Foragers” which is a fusion of the haibun with the sestina.

There are other examples of this inventiveness within your writing as well. 

Raised By Ferns, Mayz Jewell Zeller’s new memoir

Why experiment with different forms?

MJZ:  That’s so brilliant. I hadn’t thought of “Sestina for Foragers” as a haibun, but I love that you are making that connection—and of course it is there!— the essay is about place and journey as much as it is about mystery and repetition. I have another essay, that precedes the ones I wrote for this memoir, called “Lower Columbia Watershed Haibun: Field Notes on Going Home Again,” first published in Passages North, that I am sure was a predecessor to “Sestina,” and which didn’t make it into Ferns. So to answer your question, I love it when a received form gives us permission to play in another genre: it’s like a fun puzzle, trying to see what fits and where and how—except that in addition to the already structured edges of the puzzle pieces, you can invent shapes while putting the others together. So there’s a bit of magic in that process. Making a poetic sestina, which repeats six words in a predetermined pattern in six sestets and a final tercet, into six sections and a prose envoi, is like creating that final picture—but with some surprise deviation from the predetermined pattern: like following a map to treasure but remaking the map in the process. It’s another way to discover, to play.

SLR: In the essay “The Privilege Button” in Raised by Ferns, you quote Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. You both call to break with traditions, and in your narrative you use creative leaps to say what is often left unsaid, that liminal space between the lines. 

Could you share with us why this resonates with you?

MJZ:  Lorca wrote that “In order to live, a metaphor needs two elements: a form, and a radius of action. A central nucleus and the perspective surrounding it. The nucleus opens like the flower that startles us by its strangeness; but within the radius of light we learn the name of the flower, and we get to know its perfume.” In my Advanced Poetry textbook chapter on duende, I wrote: “I think of Lorca’s form as the image or figurative language that carries the concept, and the radius of action as how the metaphor moves in the poem. The startling occurs when we are transformed or transferred through the process so that we are able to experience it synaesthetically and feel its embodiment viscerally—a relationship with image that transports us, as if by magic, what we first felt in art and then spent the rest of our lives attempting to find again and recreate” (Nuernberger and Zeller, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology). In deep image poetics, this arrives as the mysterious image, such as those in Out Takes. In Ferns, there is an echo of this with the rhizomes brought up throughout the book, and coalescing in the various forms, and later footnotes of the title essay. The leaping of Lorca resonates so deeply with me because I am also made of “thistle and terminal stones” like he references in “Theory and Play of the Duende.” 

SLR: Your memoir is a heavy self-gaze.  It’s a chronicling from creative youth to creative adult, a herstory of resilience.

In hindsight, what would you tell young Maya now?

MJZ:   I think I’d tell her she’s going to face a choice in young adulthood, and she’ll think that one path is the way to stability, to security, but that instead, she could be her own anchor. That she is the stabilizing factor she seeks. I’d tell her to choose herself….  [and that] art isn’t a wildness you have to prune or garden in secret between the things other people need; it’s the wildness you should cultivate by going into it. 

SLR: You have relationships with young creatives because you are a mother and an educator.  

In our hard times as we face challenges with international conflict, climate change, and juggling to have and to have not,

what could you advise your audience? 

MJZ:   Shelli, thank you for this beautiful set of scaffolded questions that pay such deep attention to my lineage and canon of work, in our world that pulls us in so many directions. I think my last answer (above), about art and wildness is part of the advice I’d give, but I also think there’s something in advice that is particular to each individual, and to the worlds they inhabit and in which they might create and act to protect others. 

So this is [what I would say in] general: make something that gives you joy, and that probably, in that discovery, will also offer joy to others. Make it out of scraps if you can, but don’t think you only deserve cast-off scraps. 

And of course try not to use up everything: leave some huckleberries for the bears, and leave some for the next people who come to pick. And remember that you don’t own the land you’re walking on, and that if you do take something, you better give something back. If you feel yourself being erased by someone else, don’t imagine they will color you back in later, or that you don’t deserve to be all the shades of yourself that you are. 

SLR: Maya, thank you for reminding us that we all need to make space for others, that we need to pay attention to ourselves, and that all children and animals and plants are sacred. Thank you for gathering upon the page with us here at South Broadway Press.

READ: SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER’S REVIEW OF MAYA JEWELL ZELLER’S RAISED BY FERNS

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Raised By Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller

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BOOK REVIEW:
RAISED BY FERNS
BY MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Raised by Ferns begins with an epigraph by Diane Seuss:

I am so hungry

for the song that grows tall like a weed

grows, and grows.

Zeller yearns for her words to grow, and they do.  They dig roots down to briny delta water.  They spindle outward like invasive but naturalized blackberries that are common in the Pacific Northwest.

Maya’s story begins in the myths she has been told, in the wondering of, “What’s Real, What’s True, What’s Worth Retelling” (20).  She was born into the hands of midwives.  She was cradled in Mayan-wool blankets her German-born father imported from Guatemala to the US.  Her rural childhood taught her the necessity to forage, accept the ghosts of worn down farmhouses like additional family members.  She and her family lived itinerantly, a mobile and hybrid lifeway able to call various shelters home.

Zeller’s ability to find home in a variety of ways also informs her writing.  Her prose is fed by her poetry.  Her poetry is nourished in nature.  Her human nature is scribed in stanza, strophes, and verse-filled metaphors.  Her stories are a herstory; a seed that begats its next iteration:

The Himalayan blackberry came to the United States from Eurasia

in 1885, and it spread into the hills….

Cancer spreads not like a military but like a blackberry….

Cancer isn’t militant so much as fruitful – it produces globules of black gold.

The globules of berries are not unlike the beads of sand on my fingers while I eat berries on the beach near where I was born (21-22).

And so, Zeller’s prose is born through her ecopoetics.

Maya recalls her parents as “free spirits” and she and her siblings as semi-feral, but there is more than meets first glance (25).  A father with addiction, a boy-home escapee, a mother stepping out of a Midwest confined in Catholicism; both were determined to do things differently than their previous generation.  Perhaps, this desire to do things differently has rubbed off on Zeller as well.  She vacillates between what Wallace Stevens states as “of two minds” (8).  To have, and to have not.  To choose a lifeway, or to choose another life.  To gain education painstakingly, or to pretend one has always had privilege and access.  As an adult, Maya now knows both painfully well.

Zeller states, “I learned early the advantage of keeping my opinions to myself, and then later to be heard I’d have to yell them…. I learned to search for patterns and shape them to my advantage (27).  Maya’s navigation gives her strategy in her writing, what she reveals and what she weaves.  This she learned through books, the public library often was her teacher.  Libraries gave access to things, worlds, and concepts that otherwise would not have been available.  For young Maya the library was what, “some kids in cities might anticipate the ice cream truck… new flavors.  I could almost taste the books” (28).  Books and the stories they held were her cherry-on-top.

In her writing, Zeller is, “not interested in another pastoral that shows you the honey but not the sting” (33).  She wants the real, “the pus and entrails,” the busted stitches to the finished quilt (33).  Like the squares that are darned together to make a whole, each essay is part of the patchwork that makes her memoir.

Folks often ask Zeller, “how [she] got from there to here” (40); it’s not a vertical trajectory. It’s muscle memory, like water in a flood plain, it remembers.  A fibrous rhizome that spores out in order to survive.  Maya has gotten where she is through hard work, elder knowledge passed onward, and personal tenacity.  What engages her is to find wonder.  Curiosity in the wild, in glancing through fern leaves, in observing her own children – this is what feeds her well.

Author Maya Jewell Zeller

As her reader moves through her various essays, Zeller peals back her pain.  The discovery that her life partner is having an affair, the nudging on her psychosis that the friend is more than a friend.  Her world is up-ended, but she has, “had a lot of practice in overcoming shit” (226).  Yet, the full reveal takes time.  There is more to it all and she asks of herself, “What does the body know that we don’t? (229).  

As a child, she learned to lean on herself and the world she created through storytelling.  As an adult, she, “learned, by unlearning to love… that her mind and blood and babies” half belonged to him (230).  How could she reclaim her stardust, her hours, her life?  She could do so by writing her own herstory.  That is what Raised by Ferns is, a telling, a gathering of all the things she has thus far learned.

In her Epilogue Zeller wonders what is both “Real and Not Real” (231).  What are the myths she has been told, what are the stories she has created, and what is the legacy she hopes to carry forward for herself, her children, and her reader?  

There are times of epiphany, when once something brought pleasure, she realizes a thing she normally loved needs to be left behind.  These are the tough but necessary goodbyes.  Maya explains, “I couldn’t help but note some proximal off-ness,” a layer that must be shed (231).  She knows, “the body holds each fact” and needs to flush itself of dead skin, even one that has been intertwined with her own.

This is the moment, she asks her ex-partner to be honest with her when he is unwilling to be.  To be direct with what he wants when he is only capable of directly being hurtful. It takes more than two and a half years, but Zeller learns to make amends with herself knowing that – most importantly – she needs to be honest and direct with herself rather than accept, “the Numb” (235).  Maya lays it plain, “I’m navigating something psychologically unmooring – something complex and monstrous and technical and ineffable” (239-240).  An unraveling of the stability she was determined to create as a reaction to the “free spirit” and unsteady ground of her own childhood.

Zeller realizes it is difficult and a false equivalency.  She questions, “How can I help my children trust themselves, develop ways to cope and self-regulate in a world that isn’t getting better?” (241).  

Her answer is that she still has hope in a world with snow falls, an ocean replete with sea stars, and summer-time blackberries that stain lips with sweet.

READ: AN INTERVIEW WITH MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

RAISED BY FERNS

BY MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

AVAILABLE THROUGH PORPHYRY

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: missed connections with tall girls by Gwen Aube

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BOOK REVIEW:
missed connections with tall girls
BY GWEN AUBE

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

It’s the poet’s right, according to the Russian Futurists, to use “arbitrary and derivative words”. For Myakovsky, in fact, it was a “social command”, a requirement to translate colloquial speech onto the page following increases in literacy after the Revolution. Similarly, as trans presses do away with the market-oriented eyes of cis editors, beautiful phrases lurch out of Omegle chat rooms in knee-high socks and cat ears. We are blessed with language that is not only geared towards trans audiences, but would hopefully piss off, confuse, and be unintelligible to most cis ones. 

Gwen Aube’s missed connections with tall girls is a book that spoils us with such language. A collection of vignettes of “oddball trannies”, it is filled to the brim with bawdy colloquialisms, manifestos, and general debauchery of every kind. It has “girldick”, HSTS vs AGP kandi, traps, “kkkanada”, and blood pacts. It is the sounds of dolls awkwardly crowding into bars, Montreal train yards, and half-bird girls smuggling away hamburgers. It is a book that is warm, and loud, and will make you cackle so heinously your roommate asks what you are choking on.

The poetry is funny, and carries so much character, that it is hard to realize how earnest it is. Aube brings the poetic voice of a self-identified “flop-house bitch”, yearning after eponymous “missed connections” of a cast of stragglers, vagabonds, and cast-off trans women. The politics of the poetry throughout are a working-class evangelical trannyism, with shade reserved for those that would scorn solidarity for the sake of upward mobility i.e., girls on their snobby stealth or true transexual bullshit.

The first section holds stories of rebuffs and missed connections underscored by class or social anxiety, but transitions to a second interspersed with a chorus of all-caps stanzas laying out the voice of “AN OLD GENDER CRITICAL FRIEND”. Aube’s double ventriloquism satirizes the far-right conspiracy theorist while simultaneously proclaiming the warmth of T4T collectivism:

COME YE NEEDY AND BROKEN
GIRLS—BRAID TOGETHER YE
WEARY BODIES— BATHE IN

THE GIGGLING COVENANT—

Aube explores the part Western transsexuality plays in the imperial project. When a group that relies on solidarity for its survival finds state legitimization, what purpose could it serve? The poet reflects on the infamous but mythological “Lockheed girl”, on the CIA-backed PEN International giving Aube a literary award, and on the fact that western queer claiming of the Greek Galli opens Mount Ida for Canadian mining interests. Among this horror, the poet longs for pre-legitimization, to be declared a “freak unfit for labor” outside the tools of the Western project. Yet, the voice proselytizes this is the place we stand once again, amid an apocalyptic “HETEROGENOUS REJECTION” which leaves “PURSES CUT, OUR TEMPLES DESTROYED, OUR CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED”. But this is rarely a poetry collection settling into despair, and it is here, in this post-Revelations world, that bourgeois trans life rediscovers its fetishized “underground”, reapproaching the place where “LOVE WINS” is more than a bumper sticker.

Author Gwen Aube

However, Aube’s poetic voice is too compassionate to assert that a direct confrontation with fascism will be a net positive if it creates class love among trans women. The third section is, among other things, a guide on mogging the welfare office. In the different presentations Aube’s narrator has in the chapter, wearing a fur coat to the welfare office, getting stared at for the holes in her shoes by “the state itself”, or living off arts grants “before I even had a book out”, we see the poet leveraging what is meant to be a static class/caste system. Combined with For Herma, the longer ekphrastic poem making up the last section of the book, it becomes clear that, for the poet, love already overwhelmingly exists in trans life when it is separated from capitalist values. The poet works to reckon with “tranny wiping poopy ass—tranny attending the PTA meeting—tranny pushing the stroller” but is easily able to resolve to “find some boy in an alley and groom him to be my daughter”. For Herma makes connections to family in all its forms, it is the poet’s reckoning with growing into an elder through queer or conventional motherhood. A deep love orbits the vignettes and portraits of the book, for all the girls that she fails to connect with, for Nevada, casey, syb, and for the traps and dolls that populate the book’s pages. It becomes clear that uncoupled from institutional validation, bourgeois aspiration, and the nuclear family love is still intertwined with survival. However, it is a love that is subject to state indifference, if not violence, and generally deserves the downfall of the West to prosper. 

It is an important book for anyone interested in what trans poetics can do. If the goal is to repudiate fishy girls that run away with boys, or the ones that tell you to fuck off in doctor’s offices, if it’s to support the spirit of grooming as a beautiful plot to increase the warmth of the trans project, then it succeeds. It’s a book I felt too bougie, too Statesian, and a little too young to fully get. Aube’s hilarious writing is a layered satire, using joy and irony to explore transness and class at multiple levels. If it stumbles anywhere, it’s that the written poetry can’t match the energy of Aube’s readings, existing between page and voice to demand gathering. It is a book inline with Bambara’s irresistible revolution, proselytizing love in the corners where the state can’t or won’t reach, a collection that dreams pretty, audacious, blasphemous dreams. Dreams that are summed up best in some of the final lines of the book:

“let no woman be without sister…

let rains bless the women

which have made themselves women

for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” 

MISSED CONNECTIONS WITH TALL GIRLS

BY GWEN AUBE

AVAILABLE THROUGH LITTLE PUSS PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Queens, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Trans Mag.

Book Review: SOFAR by Elizabeth Bradfield

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BOOK REVIEW:
SOFAR BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sofar is Bradfield’s fifth collection of poetry and it demonstrates how her craft has come so far.  In it she intertwines her love of nature, her understanding of ecology, and how the waves off Alaskan shorelines as well as her Cape Cod home have shaped her.  The sea floor, its swells and dimples, peaks and trenches are, “proof/ that what’s hidden can still be sensed” (3).

She comments on her life, how her emotions list like a boat, swaying from one side to the other. Tipping, “At/ the edge of what felt right.  And now, / here we are” – she learns to float, to lean into herself and her being, to selvage after a storm (5).  To pick up the pieces that have been discarded like flotsam.

Bradfield notices seasonal changes and “the change” of her body.  Both are unexpected (6).  She compares this strangeness with the surging emotions of her adolescent self as compared to the retreat that she now is experiencing upon reaching five decades.  Her poems give testimony to her coming out and her understanding as a queer woman in a misogynistic world.  Each tide are transformative and, “as capable / of damage as any / ungiving thing” (6).

In “Marlinspike” she observes herself and the many lives she has had, as boat hand, as naturalist, as poet – “despite the fact [that she] was a girl” (27).  Bradfield is compelled to go forward to keep moving, to follow her bait line so she, “can drift at last / from what holds us tight, what / binds us to such boring normalcy” (27).  And clearly in stating this her life’s path is everything BUT a complacent normal.

SOFAR Author Elizabeth Bradfield

Rather she embraces her voyageur-self.  “Vagus means wandering.  My days vaguer / and vaguer.  Was it yesterday or last year…. Where did time go?” (46). Bradfield recognizes she is buoyed, lifted up and jettisoned. An estrogen-related propulsion, a uteral roam within a world she wishes to explore.  

Her sights are added by, “Ded Reckoning” (48).

To know where you are and when

you’ll get where you’re going,

to deduce via reckoning, look to landmarks…

The known….

Which hold unknowns.

And through these renderings Bradfield has come to, “know / roughly where [she is]” (48) proving that life lessons are a constant moving equation.

In “Held/Treasured/Secret” Bradfield carries fragility within her.  She knows life is fragile like a paper nautilus.  She cups it in her hand, fingers curl shell-like.  By doing this, she understands that what she holds dear is a responsibility.  Picking it up, carrying it this far, requires a vigilance.  Yet decerning when it must be set down is the ultimate lesson of letting go.Elizabeth Bradfield furthers these lessons as an educator.  She teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and is the Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Gunnison.  Her work is heavily lauded.  Interpretive Work won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry.  Approaching Ice was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award.  Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry was a winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award.  She also is the Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided in which Ekphrastic Poetry is in conversation with artwork.

SOFAR

BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

AVAILABLE THROUGH PERSEA

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Editor Interviews // Devon Bower

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DEVON BOWER

Devon Bower (she/her) is a poet, editor, and bookseller in Northern Colorado. She has a BA in English literature from Colorado State University. Her work links lineage with landscape, often experimenting with eco- and docu-poetics. Devon is proud to have served as an editor for the Front Range Review and has a forthcoming publication with Blood+Honey.

Art is what helps us survive. It is truth among lies, hope among pain.

Devon Bower
SBP: WHAT IS FUELING YOUR CREATIVITY RIGHT NOW? WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE MOST CREATIVE?

DB: I place a big focus on landscape in my writing, so I often feel most creative after experiencing or researching my immediate natural world. Change—good, bad, or in-between—inspires reflection, making nature a prime source to energize my imagination.

SBP: WHAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY?

DB: My peers. I’ve learned from them that poetry isn’t just an expression of personal creativity—it is an ethos. Poetry is a way of living. It’s in our rituals and in our chaos and in our care for one another. I always used to think of myself as someone who just wrote poetry, until a writer friend called me a poet. This simple yet powerful distinction encapsulates the kind of art we inspire in each other.

SBP: WHO DO YOU HOPE FINDS YOUR POETRY? WHO IS YOUR ART FOR?

DB: My poetry needs to be for me first, but I hope it finds the person who is farthest from myself. I hope it finds someone who is the total opposite of my person and acts as a bridge between our two minds.

SBP: IF YOUR WRITING WERE A KEY, WHAT DOOR WOULD IT UNLOCK, AND WHAT WOULD YOUR READERS FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE?

DB: Whatever the door is that my writing unlocks, I know where it leads: outside. Outside the home, outside of stagnancy, outside the self. The door opens to the backyard, to the forest, to memory.

SBP: WHAT POEM THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN RECENTLY WENT TO A PLACE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING, OR WHICH WAS THE MOST/LEAST CHALLENGING TO WRITE?

DB: I never thought I’d write an ars poetica poem, but a recent piece didn’t quite make sense until I added in that factor.

SBP: WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU JOY THIS LAST YEAR?

DB: Building more of a writer community has been really important to me this year. From casual weekly workshops to book clubs to attending readings, my small but mighty cohort brings me joy and comfort.

SBP: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT OBSESSION?

DB: My past, current, and always obsession is my cat, Benny. I adopted him in 2021 as a kitten and have loved growing with him.

SBP: WHAT MAKES SOMETHING HARD TO WRITE OR CREATE?

DB: The more personal the poem, the longer it takes for me to “get right”. But once either I or it have had enough time to put the words together, the more fulfilling the poem becomes.

SBP: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

DB: Art is what helps us survive. It is truth among lies, hope among pain. Andrea Gibson wrote a beautiful poem called “Yellowbird”, in which a line reads: “We have to create. It’s the only thing louder than destruction”.

Book Review: What the River May Bring by Erin Robertson

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BOOK REVIEW:
WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA BY ERIN ROBERTSON

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Robertson gathers her words to advocate for the land and the confluence of both the Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers.  During her time in the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge she was embedded with biologists, collaborating with her craft through the Artist-In-Residence program “Voices of the Wilderness”.

Her poetry draws us in, witnesses to her experiences upon this land, and helps us envision her impressions of interior Alaska.  It all begins, “when the float plane’s buzz fades” as she first settles into her sub-arctic residency.  She meets the, “devoted swans, tender loons, [and] dancing cranes.”  She follows moose tracks and moss lined trails.  These relationships with the other-than-human creatures she encounters bring her company.

Glaciers, and clouds, and wild country greet her.  Upon arrival in the Alaska Interior she leaves behind “creature comforts” and chooses a new freedom; trading suburbia, her partner and children, for a growing winter white and jagged mountains.  It’s a new opening, a new era of possibility for her.  “Wilderness Eve” seems to recollect a childlike wonder, a new version of awaiting gifts below a Christmas Tree:

waiting to see

what this wilderness holds

sleepless and sleepy

dreaming the space

and the silence (21).

Her time in Alaska and her observations while there is an unveiling where she comes to realize: 

I knew I hit the lottery

but hadn’t quite known

how many riches there’d be (25).

Robertson marvels at nature’s natural wonders.  For her, the Yukon River inspires just like Georgia O’Keefe’s infamous cloud-scapes or French Impressionists’ swirling lines.  The river:  

It bends and dapples and distorts…

Adding and subtracting shades (27).

Still, “You never know what / the river may bring… Everything comes down the river / if you watch long enough” (29).  And yet, like the old adage, one can never step in the same river twice, its purge and rejuvenation brings new waters that can both cleanse and drown.

Author Erin Robertson

In her poetic meanderings, Robertson also takes on the persona of “Other Animals” like otter, caribou, peregrines, and Swainson’s Thrush.  She watches their lives, their passage onto new territory, and their passing into the beyond.  It’s a moment, a flicker, a stillness juxtaposed to the more rapid pace of her life back “home” in Colorado.

Fire, too is a constant, not only in the Alaskan Interior but throughout the Mountain West like Robertson’s home upon the Front Range.  She notes:

after the fire

naked birches are

black and white tapers

all blown out (56).

Even after a “Severe Burn” she comments on the stark beauty:

The burn dazzles

despite a blackened past (57).

Seemingly, it is a reality that we all have to come to accept because out of destruction, the ashes can reinvent a newness, a regrowth, another possibility.

Robertson’s experience as an Artist-In-Residence is a testament to her “Vocation” (105).  She embraces where this has taken her:

so many options open

when you go where you’re called

when you do what you love

when you toss every last bitter pill aside…

the earth is humming

with so many ways to play

what will you try next? (105).

This is the challenge that she sets before us.  In her closing poem, “Accounting for Awe” she sets us straight, like one hiking boot in front of the other and asks:

What is the sum of these days of devotion?

An accounting of the endless ways to direct awe.

Anywhere you look there’s a one-inch bit of wonder…

To not let it all burn yet (107).

Here is our reason, in our act of love for nature, we will find compassion for ourselves.

Boulder County Poet Erin Robertson carries this love for nature and compassion forward. She is the founder of BoCo Wild Writers where she teaches outdoor nature writing classes.  Her work can be found at http://www.erinrobertson.org

WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA

BY ERIN ROBERTSON

AVAILABLE THROUGH RAW EARTH INK

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com