An Interview with Christina Hennemann

Christina Hennemann is a poet and writer. Her latest poetry book “Leafing” is a winner of the Cerasus Poetry Chapbook competition. Her pamphlet “Witch/Womb” was funded with an Agility Award from Arts Council Ireland. She received the Doyle Award and the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, as well as a Mayo Artist Bursary. Her work appears in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Anthropocene, Southword, York Literary Review, Meetinghouse, Kelp Journal, and elsewhere.

You can read Biohacking in the July 2025 issue.

Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?

The first lines of this poem came to me as I woke up one morning, drowsy and still half-caught in a dream. I let my subconscious guide me as I took the first notes. Later, I ran with that idea of how technology controls our lives and what happens to our autonomy in a society full of demands and pressures on the individual.

Is there a collection of poetry that never leaves your (perhaps metaphorical) nightstand?

I love Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets because it shows so phenomenally what you can do with form and how you can bend and innovate it. I also come back often to Jane Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours for the poems’ precision and clarity.

How do you revise your work?

I try to be ruthless. I keep all my drafts, so I can always return to a previous one if the revision doesn’t feel right. But often, the way into and out of a poem are not necessary for the reader. So, I try to find the core of the poem and refine the images for precision and originality.

Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?

I often draw inspiration from visual art and love visiting galleries and exhibitions. Although the poems sometimes move far away from the initial inspiration and don’t always end up being ekphrastic in a stricter sense, visual art opens my mind to new perspectives and lets the words flow.

How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?

I write in the morning, before I reply to emails and take care of other work commitments. I find that my mind is still fresh and I’m more creative than later in the day. When life gets busy, I make an effort to at least record any interesting observations, a flash of an idea, an image, and come back to it when I have more time.

In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?

The big question for me is how I can stay true to the poem. Poetry can do so much by playing with form, b(l)ending genres, and surprising both the poet and the reader. Anything can turn into a poem. I hope I will never find an answer for that mystery of how a poem comes into the world. It’s the process of exploring that question that keeps the work fresh and rewarding.

July 16, 2025 0

ROBIN BLACKBURN MCBRIDE

April 4, 2025 0

ZOE DICKINSON

fledgeling

day by dry day
lack makes things lighter

I walk the bluff
desiccated
as the cat’s-ear seeds
that leap in swarms
into the sea

under my feet
the bluff evolves
from landmass
into a curving wing

day by day
plants shed water, growing
hollow as bird bones

tasseled grass ripens to feathers:
seed spikelets turn to barbs
and barbules, hooked to catch wind

poised on Pacific precipice
a mutant bird of grass and stone
unfolds its wings
and waits for a gust
to take flight

April 4, 2025 0

An Interview with Ray Greenblatt

Ray Greenblatt is an editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and teaches a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple University-OLLI. His latest book of poetry is From an Old Hotel on the Irish Coast (Parnilis Media, 2023).

You can read Sunday Snow in the January 2025 issue.

Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem?

My wife and I were walking for the Sunday newspaper as we usually do in our little town. It had snowed and was one of those gentle snows—almost mystical. Footprints told us a story of where people had been and were going.

Is there a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone for you?

I have always been most affected by Robert Frost’s blank verse poems—Death of the Hired Man, The Witch of Coos, Out Out!—in which he is not restricted by rhyme and seems to speak to us directly in beautiful rhythms.

If you didn’t write poetry…

I began writing stories in prose, all the way back to fourth grade when I won the class’s story-writing contest. After college, I began to take a short story workshop with a well-known author. She would say on the first reading how wonderfully descriptive my story was. On the second reading she suddenly demanded all sorts of technicalities, like how the character got from here to there. I found them irrelevant. I wanted to cut to the chase and lyric poetry allowed me to do that.

What are you working on now?

I’m preparing an MS entitled Time Found in which are included recent poems along with flash fiction that I’ve been newly developing.

How do you make space for poetry in your routine?

Now that I’m retired, it’s much easier to listen to the Muse’s call and respond immediately, instead of having to wait until work is over and often losing the spark. I find that when my wife and I travel, an unusual environment usually churns my poetic juices. I come home with a poem sequence that attempts to depict that foreign place from a traveler’s point of view.

Do you belong to a writers’ group?

I can proudly say that forty years ago this year (it’s hard to believe) three other poets and I began a monthly poetry critique group. Over the years we’ve gained and lost poets from varied backgrounds: Haitian, Russian, Polish, Greek, Persian, etc. We share a meal before we critique. We number around twelve, feel like family, and are still going strong although the joints creak!

February 18, 2025 0

An Interview with Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s collection of lyric essays, Micrographia (2023) won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and was recently shortlisted for the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving, a collection of poetry (2021) and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir (2017). A new collection of poetry, Stock, is forthcoming with Coach House Press in 2025. Jennifer is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.

You can read Bath Time in the Northern Hemisphere and Sorting Shapes in the October 2024 issue.

If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?

The easy answer is by writing in other genres, which I do—primarily creative nonfiction! But if I didn’t write at all I think I would have to find some other form of artistic expression, such as painting. The fulfillment that I get from poetry is in making something to share beyond myself, taking my own self-absorptions and turning them outward to ask, “who else recognizes this?”

How do you revise your work?

It’s a multi-stage process that requires a lot of time—not necessarily in the number of hours but in the passage of weeks or months (or sometimes years) on the calendar. Some pieces just need time to germinate…or percolate…or fester.

Most poems include at least one line or image that I think of as the “good enough” line. These are the lines that I’m not quite happy with but that I ignore for a while, hoping they will go away, like a scratch in the paint or a sliver in the floorboard. Eventually, I reach the stage of revision where I finally face the “good enough” lines and revise those, too.

I’ve also been known to continue revising a piece after it’s been published. My second book, Deriving, included several pieces that had already appeared in magazines but got another overhaul for the book. I like thinking of a poem as a living thing that can grow and change over time, rather than a static artifact.

As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?

I find it’s so easy to get sucked into the external markers of success—publications, awards, reviews. Yet when I really think about what I want to achieve with my work, it’s to create moments of intimate recognition and connection with an individual reader. This is what I look for as a reader, too. There’s nothing better than hearing someone tell me that they were moved by something I wrote.

What are you working on now?

I am just starting to think about promotion for my new book of poetry coming out in 2025 with Coach House, Stock. It’s a response to stock photography, exploring how those image databases represent women through four tropes—the idealized mother, the businesswoman, the sex object, and an anthropomorphized Earth. I’m also writing new poems whenever inspiration strikes. And I’m working on something completely new for me—a middle grade novel.

How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?

I am lucky to have one day a week that I can devote to my writing. This is made possible by a well-paying job that accommodates that schedule and a partner who also has a well-paying job. I know that that is an extraordinary privilege and I think it’s so important to be transparent about that. But I also find that the initial spark of a poem doesn’t ever appear on those days. That happens in between driving kids to piano and scrubbing the toilet or while lying in bed trying to sleep. I’ve learned that it’s critical to jot those ideas or lines down in that moment, or I’ll never remember them. It also only ever happens when I am in an open mindset. I make space for poetry by trying to see my world through a poetic lens and being conscious about my attention.

Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?

I belong to a wonderful writer’s group with three other women I profoundly admire—Lisa Martin, Rayanne Haines, and Jannie Edwards. We are all mothers at different stages and we also have all lost our own mothers, and the ways that those two things intertwine through our work has made our group extremely close. We provide each other with feedback and advice as well as boost each other’s work—and often have conversations about writing and life late into the night. They all provided feedback on the two poems in this issue. Edmonton also has a vibrant poetry community and I get so much inspiration and feedback from many other friends in this city. I am also the co-chair of the Parenting Poets Community Committee for the League of Canadian Poets. This small group has a lively online community on the Slack platform. It includes both emerging and established poets who identify as parents. We share opportunities, discuss issues and challenges related to writing while parenting, and celebrate each other’s successes. We also have a channel devoted to sharing our rejections, and sharing those in community really helps with the sting! Any parenting poet in Canada is welcome and can reach out to me for information.

November 20, 2024 0