Three Poets on Geography, Intimacy & Dislocation

Poet and translator Carlie Hoffman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska (Four Way Books) is her first book. To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map a cartography of winter on all that is physical. To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This Alaska probes all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm, and questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season. Death and dreams are its very center. But life – and all it entails and circles and loses and loves – is at its heart.

John King is the author of the literary adventure novel Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame (‎Beating Windward Press LLC), and has hosted The Drunken Odyssey: A Podcast About the Writing Life for more than nine years. His poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Palooka, as well as the anthologies 15 Views of Orlando, Other Orlandos, and Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix: An Anthology of Awkward Sexcapades.

Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. The speaker in his debut collection of poems, The Perseverance (Tin House Books), travels to Barcelona in the wake of his father’s death, where – in Gaudi’s famed Família basilica, he meditates on the idea of silence and sound, wondering whether acoustics really can bring us closer to God. This is a collection of poems examining a d/Deaf experience alongside meditations on loss, grief, education, and language, both spoken and signed. BuzzFeed noted its relaying of “experiences of being biracial and d/Deaf in sharp and beautiful poems.” All The Names Given: Poems (Tin House Books) is Antrobus’ second full-length collection of poetry. In it, he continues his investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory. It opens with poems about his surname – one that shouldn’t have survived into modernity – and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. He reckons with his ancestry and bears witness to the violent legacy wrought by colonialism. The book is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim. The art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems. Poet Camonghne Felix called the collection “a brave, tender and generous piece of music, where family is a cord forever troubled by the process of being named.”

Tiana Nobile’s writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Texas Review. A Korean American adoptee, in her debut collection Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021), Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. Exploring psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments about maternal bonding and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment. Jennifer Chang, author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark: Poems, noted that “Cleave is not only the story of a transnational adoption. Because of Tiana Nobile’s compassionate imagination and lucid discernment, Cleave becomes the story of all our lost selves, of the mothers we long for, and the languages we struggle to speak.”