in conversation

In Conversation: Allison Adair & Eileen Cleary

“Fall in love with someone else’s work,” Meg Kearney told us. “It’s the best way to stave off the jealousy and that insidious belief that we do not belong.”

And how can we not fall in love with other people’s work when poets like Eileen Cleary and Allison Adair make the falling so easy? How can we not fall in love with Eileen’s clear and haunting images, her mastery of form? How can we not fall in love with Allison’s ability to find beauty in the dark, in her lush language?

I could go on and on, cite poems from these two poets that have kept me up and night and poems that have soothed me on difficult days. I could tell you how much I admire how they move in the world, how they champion other poets, how they continually put good work into the world and notice the same of others.

But mostly, I want you to take the time to listen to this conversation, because it is like being at the table with two generous and brilliant people. If you haven’t already, you will fall in love with their work.

Allison Adair’s debut collection, The Clearing, was selected by Henri Cole as winner of Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and named a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” book. It is coming out in paperback on June 9th. Allison’s work has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and first place in the Fineline Competition from Mid-American Review. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison teaches at Boston College and Grub Street.

Eileen Cleary is the author of Child ward of the Commonwealth’(Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize and 2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021). In addition, she co-edited the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus, the featured text at the 2021 Michigan State University Filmetry Festival. Her poem “The Way We Fled” was recently anthologized in Tree Lines: 21st CenturyAmerican Poetry (Grayson Books, 2022.)

In Conversation with Three Poets

On Saturday April 23, we hosted three wonderful poets with new books: José Angel Araguz, Quintin Collins, and Daniel B. Summerhill.

These three poets: José Angel Araguz, Quintin Collins, and Daniel B. Summerhill, know each other in ways that go deeper than simply reading at the same event. Quintin and Daniel workshopped together in the Solstice MFA Program, now at Lasell University. After graduation, they trusted each other with their works in progress, emailing work back and forth, one on the East Coast, one on the West. And José serves on the faculty of the Solstice program, where Quintin is now the assistant director.

But that’s just the easy stuff. The not so easy stuff is how these three poets witness the world we move in, how they speak past the inherent, institutionalized barriers they continue to face as creatives, as scholars, as partners, as fathers, as Black and Latinx men.

This is a reading, yes. But it’s also community, and proof that when one poet falls in love with and champions the work of another, poetry turns from solo connection to conversation, to recognition, to witness.

Check out the recording of the event below:

In Conversation: M. Soledad Caballero

To kick off National Poetry Month this year, the poet M. Soledad Caballero joined us to read from and talk about her new book, I Was A Bell, winner of the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize. It was a joy to talk with Soledad because she is warm and generous and diligent in her craft.

I first met Soledad in 2006. We had both signed up to take Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Master Class in Poetry at Grub Street. We spent 10 weeks together sharing and learning from each other. We were poets who trusted each other deeply, which was such a pleasure to experience.

At the end of the class, I solicited poems from everyone to make a chapbook in which we asked Morgan to write the introduction. As I was getting ready for this event, I tracked down the chapbook and re-read the introduction, where Morgan writes: “the steady intelligent voice of Soledad’s image-rich work…” This is a great description of Soledad’s work, though it has matured much since we last workshopped.

In her new book, Soledad visits spaces no one can access anymore, reaching into her past to evoke the horror of Pinochet’s Chile and the upheaval of immigrating to the U.S. Threaded with poems about cancer, she deftly parallels these two journeys both of which violence/harm initiates. What I take away from this book is that always where there is heartache, there is love.

Even though it was sixteen years ago, that workshop bonded me with poets I am still connected to, in that we still champion each other’s successes. I was so thrilled to have Soledad at the Notebooks Collective to discuss her new book and all things writing.

The Event

About M. Soledad Caballero

Soledad is Professor of English and co-chair of the WGSS Program at Allegheny College. She is a Macondo and a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, was winner of the 2019 Joy Harjo poetry contest by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, the Crab Orchard Review, and other venues. Her collection, I Was a Bell, won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, Red Hen Press 2021. She is an avid tv watcher and a terrible birder. Visit her website.

You can purchase I WAS A BELL at our bookshop.org store for The Notebooks Collective.