POETRY, and
Tin House; she has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award, the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Betty Gabehart Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award. She is currently a faculty member in the MFA program at New England College. Today she takes a moment to talk with us about her new book, which challenges existing notions about the love poem, for “but what are poems for if not to express extremity? If not to both rage about and celebrate obsessions?”
Rosebud Ben-Oni: I
really felt what you had to say about love in your opening poem “Agape Feast,” especially the last lines: “Its mercy is electric, it is storied, it is rank./ Its mercy is a tablet dissolved in a glass,/more invisible the more you drink.” Can you tell us how this breathtaking poem (which is a gift to read aloud!) sets the stage, so to say, for the rest of the poems in