Going Micro: An Interview with Anthony Frame of Glass Poetry
“With small presses, I definitely feel like we’re all in this together and my experience has been that we are a community rather than a group of competitors.”
“With small presses, I definitely feel like we’re all in this together and my experience has been that we are a community rather than a group of competitors.”
“It can be lonely to work from a liminal space, but I think it allows me to go deeper, to uncover the unnameable, the wild. Even though it can be uncomfortable, I’m most comfortable working there.”
“Experimental literary fiction appeals to a smaller subset of readers than more traditional commercial fiction, and being a small, agile, independent press means we can publish a wider range of books without taking a big financial risk each time.”
“Families of victims are allowed to grieve openly and freely if they choose, because their loved one was exactly that: an innocent victim. Families of shooters don’t have the choice to grieve openly, because they not only must carry the burden of grief, but also blame.”
“People didn’t want Haitians teaching liberation to the rest of the world. All of those blockades from first-world countries left Haiti without infrastructure, without tools, without hospitals and schools. Here’s your freedom, but you’re on your own. Learning about that history was how I was introduced to the Negritude Poets.”
“One thing I did while writing this book was to try to imagine what it would mean if this world—with all its horrors, sufferings, reasons to turn away—were Paradise. That’s not a logical thought or a purely “positive” one. Among other places, it took me to Blake, in whose work affirmation and annihilation often mix.”
The practice of learning new languages is a humbling exercise. The act transports you back to your toddler self, vulnerable to mistakes; at once you are morphed into a Socratic state of awareness that you have so much more to learn.
“I love the act of repetition. Maybe it feels like a meditation of sorts, but I’m also interested in simplifying a technique down to a single mark or color, so as to allow space for the viewer to interpret the feeling, or to let a concept emerge if that’s what is intended.”
“To that effect, I think what compels me to write stories is the simple act of getting them out of my head. In an effort to become better people, we’re always trying to make sense of our past or some trauma that we suffered through, and for many, we use art and creativity to do this.”
In Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017), Carmen Maria Machado explores the bodies, demons, and desires of twenty-first century women.