An interview with the Virginia Poet Laureate on poetry as witness, colonial history’s hauntings, and her longstanding poem-a-day practice

Perhaps it is now the other way around, / and I have become an almost-perfect lover, / caring little that the Gods love poets less.

“The ecology and economy of the region is under threat. This Transpacific Literary Project folio, Monsoon Notebook is for these essential, vanishing, and unruly waters.”

One of the challenges in this novel was to figure out a way in which time can be manipulated the way it’s so interestingly manipulated in film.

It’s not the bullet that makes you bolt, / but the very words /
emerging from the muzzle’s restraint / the classroom in disguise

Diwali is celebrated in various ways by South Asian peoples. The Sikh celebration adds politics to the mix.

Queens temples break from Western architecture and remake old buildings into new spaces for divine encounters

“He could’ve walked into Harlem and everybody knew ‘im. He could walk into Spanish Harlem, everybody knew him. The gangsters knew him and respected him because he stood up to them…”

…incoming donations were piled up two and three boxes deep on the sidewalk.

“The typhoon really hit me hard,” she said. “I live in New York, but I’m still Filipino.”

We set up a table with hot cider to stave off the chill, and little by little, over the course of three hours, 20 participants came by to strut their stuff…

In conversation with solitude.

Sisters Deanna Fei and Jessica Fei capture the many faces of Flushing: a home, a place of transit, a new territory.

After the family saw this photo, ‘they couldn’t sleep.’

A photo essay.