The
Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. Today’s poet is torrin a. greathouse, author of the debut collection
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), the winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. They have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. They are the author of two chapbooks,
Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods, 2017) and
boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018). Here, greathouse discusses accessing “the register of self-mythologization”, writing from the “triangulated position of identity,” and the desire to “force readers especially cis abled readers to collapse the space between our bodies for the distance of a sonnet.”
Lannie Stabile
(she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook,
Strange Furniture, is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at
Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.
INTRODUCTION
Poetry is always teaching me something. When I became an editor with
Barren Magazine, I quickly realized reading someone else’s art vastly improved my own. Submitters introduced me to forms I never knew existed and made me want to try my own hand at it. Like pantoums. I didn’t know what the hell a pantoum was until I read one in the slush pile.