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Natalya Sukhonos was born in Odesa, Ukraine and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. She holds degrees in Comparative Literature, a Yale BA and a Harvard PhD, and she has taught at Harvard, Stanford, UC Davis, and Zayed Universities. Her first poetry collection, A Stranger Home, was published in 2020 by Moon Pie Press. In this conversation, H. L. Hix speaks with her about her most recent collection, Sunlight Trapped in Stone (Green Writers Press, 2026).
Gray’s poems are inspired by singers and poets as well as actors and filmmakers. “Testament” is addressed to Brandon Flowers, the lead singer for The Killers, also playing on time and sex and staying relevant as time moves on. A couple of poems are inspired by the legendary bluegrass Carter family, and another by Johnny Cash (“The Cave”: ‘Ends make fiction of our means. Johnny said it: he wasn’t lying.’). “Watermelons” is another poem for a late poet/musician, Michael Donaghy.
In clean, unaffected and polished prose, Cooley invites us into her world, and many of her essays follow a braided structure that pull together threads on people, animals, age and aging, accidents, and flukes and family, as well as other moments worthy of reflection. But Cooley doesn’t limit herself to braided threads. Two of her essays deploy a flash-like form in ideas and well-researched facts that seem unrelated and dot the page – until they kaleidoscopically connect.
It is not uncommon for writers who write about a war they served in to be typecast, much like an actor relegated to one role. Smart Fish Don’t Bite, Ehrhart’s new book, challenges the assumption that he just a “Vietnam writer.” By any measure, the poems in Smart Fish … bridge the intimate and the global, they are thoughtful, honest (a precious commodity in our time), and consistently memorable. They will reward every reader’ attentions.
Niki reinvents herself, makes decisions that work for her. She turns down a role in a Bresson film. She befriends, and later beds, Jean Tinguely, a fellow artist who turns out to be a boon companion for life. Harry’s extra-marital adventures foment another suicidal crisis for Niki, who finally divests herself of the unholy mess by picking up and moving out, this time on her own, to Paris. This is the germinal event – she blossoms as an artist, and finds her voice: “I shoot at the painting,” she exults, “it cries, it bleeds, it dies.”
Wild Inside is a thoughtful, gentle call to parents to be present with their children from their earliest years, to make “meaning of our childhoods and our parenting journey” through the “most ordinary moments” of tactile, intimate engagement with the natural world. This is because what people do, what they are occupied with, wires their brains. Through tactile, visual, and auditory experience, we learn to make predictions, make connections, and bring our observations into context.
If it seems that the 19th century never ended it’s because the deepest questions it raised either haven’t been answered, or have been answered in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In Beast—The Lost Chronicles Stubbs shows that he understands this, and doesn’t shy away from allowing his sequence to provoke the metaphysical discomfort it reflects and challenges.
Spiraling, as metaphor and embodiment, the isolation of the spiral, is the collection’s center. On the invented face of “The Other” who lived and died and is resurrected, as Paz wrote, are “the wrinkles of that face./His wrinkles have no face”; for Clariond’s invented face, with the same fervor of a body negating its own being, “the river in which we see ourselves tells a lie: the light/of the word will forever remain a force of absence:/a radiance flowing past the edge of sight.” The book, full of edgeless radiance, more a body than the body.
Shirley Clarke: Thinking Through Movement explores many of Clarke’s films in depth, showing the ways in which she uses situation, context, space, time, real vs scripted life, and a networked and collaborative approach to working that focuses on the filming process itself as the main point of creativity rather than a pre-conceived plan. The result is a powerful way of looking at dance and filmmaking that can be applied to any kind of artistic endeavour.
Gaythwaite’s sheer wittiness is a delight, even without the gripping moral dilemmas that propel the stories forward and the vivid, often morally questionable but nevertheless endearing characters who bring the plots alive. The reader turns the pages to see how their situations are resolved – or not resolved.