Thomas March

I recently spoke with the writer Yrsa Daley-Ward, about her first book, bone, a bold and expansive collection of poems that confront trauma, longing, self-empowerment, and survival with clarity, soundness, and remarkable wit. bone was first published by Daley-Ward herself, a poet-actress-model-songwriter, but soon enough caught the attention of Penguin, which has now issued the collection in the U.S. In the conversation that follows, we discuss the genesis and evolution of the book, Daley-Ward’s approach to composition, and the many challenges of the writing life. Bone is such an expansive book in both breadth and depth—in the time it covers […]

Wayne Koestenbaum’s latest, The Pink Trance Notebooks, is a difficult book to review—but in a very good way. In fact, it would be difficult, in the space of a traditional review, to do justice to a single of its poems, or “trance notebooks,” each its own luxuriant collection or collage of pithy observations, speculations, reports, notations, aphorisms, and epiphanies. The collection is apparently the result of a year-long hiatus from journal writing in favor of this more immediate, unfiltered transcription of a mind at work in and on itself. But beyond the circumstances of their composition, there is a particular […]