An Interview with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey is the author of four collections of poetry: Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021); Boom Box (Sundress Publications, 2019); Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize; and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress Publications, 2015).

He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016).

He is the co-author, with W. Todd Kaneko, of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2018. The pair also wrote the poetry chapbook Slash/Slash, published in 2021. Slash/Slash was the winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in Alabama. Previously, he taught at Grand Valley State University, and currently, Huey is a Professor of English at Bowling Green State University.

As of today, Auburn’s football team has yet to win a game against an SEC opponent and is 2nd to last in the SEC West. What is your opinion on the current state of the team and their future under coach Freeze?

You’re inviting me to write you an essay about how the hyper-Christian culture of college football is super toxic, especially in the South, especially in Alabama; how Hugh Freeze reminds me of the group of men who came to my house after I went to church at the First Baptist of Trussville with a junior-high friend, and their idea of outreach was to lecture my mother about how irresponsible it was that she didn’t seem to mind that her children were going to hell; how being a professor who cares about universities as sites of, you know, education means that being a serious fan of top-level Division I football is probably one of my most hypocritical traits; or maybe about how I suspect Freeze hired an offensive coordinator and gave him play-calling duties specifically so he could fire him at the end of this always-certain-to-be-a-struggle year and take over play-calling himself; or how nothing from Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side has aged all that well except for the part where Freeze comes across as stubborn and pious, self-righteous and self-interested — but anyway, Auburn has won a couple games in a row since you sent me this question, they should be bowl eligible in two weeks, and recruiting has turned around to keep their blue-chip index numbers acceptable after a few miserable seasons under a coach we don’t talk about anymore, so yeah, things are moving in the right direction.

Sorry for that, I couldn’t resist. On to poetry: Often times, your poems play a sort of balancing act with humor and devastating heartbreak. What role do you see humor inhabiting within your statements about some of the darkest truths of modern life? 

Part of the job of poetry, I believe, is embodying contradiction. Poems reach for language that means more than one thing; words and phrases that evoke seemingly opposing concepts at once. So heartbreak and humor, yes. Not as opposite as we might think. Both essential in our humanity. This question makes me happy, because I want my poems to engage with humor, right, to be funny, or kind of funny, or almost funny, even as they’re also serious, but you never know how that’s going to land. Our senses of humor are so personal, so idiosyncratic; you put the poems out there and hope for the best. Of course, there’s also a long tradition of using humor as a way into the heavy stuff. Many of my favorite comics aren’t exactly telling jokes; they’re exploring really serious stories and subjects and getting laughs along the way. Tig Notaro, for example. One of the most amazing pieces of art I know is this live stand-up act she did right after finding out she had breast cancer, and she’s processing the diagnosis in almost real time with the audience, and she’s also funny, and it’s uncomfortable and terrible and great and amazing all at once. Not that my poems are anywhere near that level. But that’s what I’m chasing. 

In Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy your poems mention the films E.T., Porky’s, Risky Business, Terminator, and reference others. What role has cinema played in the development of your voice as a poet?

Movies have been a huge part of my life. My parents divorced when I was kid, and my brother and I would spend weekends at our dad’s, and pretty much every weekend we went to the movies. Then I was like the exact right age for the video store explosion to be this, like, miracle — it’s hard to explain now, in terms that make sense in the streaming era, how crazy cool it was to be able to walk into a store in some strip mall and have this incredible array of movies available to you. Before we had kids, my wife and I went to the movies two or three times a week. As poets, as writers, as storytellers, we’re always casting about for models, for ways of perceiving, for the possibilities of narrative, and movies have always been a path toward possibility. Poets grab onto the language around them, the language they breathe in, and movies are tied up that language for me. Not just for me. For anyone growing up in the past fifty or sixty years. I mean, that’s also true of music, or TV, or any pop culture, really. Like, you read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or Natalie Diaz, you watch Top Gun, you listen to R.E.M. or Guns ‘N Roses or Public Enemy, you watch Game of Thrones or Andor, it all gets into your brain and rearranges you and shapes what you’re capable of making. 

Can you talk a bit about the background and the inspiration behind the poem, “Self-Portrait as an Aging Clown Going for an Evening Run on the Summer Solstice?”

It will never stop being surreal to me that I grew up to be someone with a white-collar job living in a Midwestern suburb, a dad who likes puns and grills burgers and mows the lawn and coaches my kids’ second-grade soccer teams and periodically gets serious about running and losing weight. The very thought is absurd. Yet here I am, somehow. 

Your work with titles always astounds me. My current favorite might be “The Existence of Han Solo Explains the Universe,” featured in your collection, Boom Box. When do you know a title is just right for an Amorak Huey poem? 

Well, thanks. Man, I do love titles. Often in my writing process, the title comes before the poem. Ironically, this one didn’t, not in its final form. The poem was originally published in a now-defunct online journal under the title “Han Solo Explains the Universe,” but what I meant was that, like, the fact of Han Solo explained things, not that it’s a persona poem in Han’s voice or whatever, and so luckily I got another shot when the poem made the cut for the manuscript. How do I know when a title is just right? Definitely more an art than a science — sort of like how you can’t know as a 100 percent objective fact when a poem is finished, but the more poems you read and the more poems you write, you develop an instinct and a trust in that sense. I like titles that give the reader a starting place, a jumping-off point from which the poem can meander in all sorts of surprising directions. I like titles that are funnier than the poem. I like titles that make ridiculous promises. I like titles that offer a jolt of surprise from the very beginning of the reading process. I like titles that invite, that lure, that open a door. And I like the fact that there are lots of different kinds of work titles can do and that you can always find some new rhetorical strategy. Every poem offers a new opportunity.  

How did your time as a reporter and an editor influence your evolution as a poet?

I wrote a lot of headlines in my time as an editor, which I think definitely plays into my appreciation for a good title. Maybe my best headline ever, one I actually won an award for, was on a story about a high school student who got suspended for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt to school on the day some Coca-Cola bigwig was coming to make a donation to the school. The headline was “Student calls Pepsi shirt a joke / but suspension the real thing.” Beyond headline writing, spending more than a decade in newspapers helped me hone my writing to the necessary — gave me practice saying complicated things in clear, concise language. I covered county government and a county-run hospital for a while in Elizabethtown, Ky., and so I’d have write these straightforward stories about sometimes-complicated meetings or legal topics. And of course these stories mattered, right? They mattered to the community, to the people affected by the county’s actions and decisions. Writing for a newspaper, you always had a very clear sense of audience and purpose. There was never anything abstract about the reason you were writing. I like to think I try to bring that same sense to my poems, even though poems do different work in the world than news articles — or maybe they do similar work in a different way. 

I too am a huge fan of Jason Isbell’s music. I was pleasantly surprised when Isbell showed up alongside Leonard DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon. Like Isbell, have you ever considered pursuing some cross-art-form work in acting, or any other field? 

What’s the old saying about a face for radio, a voice for the newspaper? Teaching is as close as I’ll ever get to being on stage, I think. I can’t sing, I can’t even clap in rhythm, and I can barely draw a stick figure. Pretty sure words are where it’s at for me. Unless Scorsese has a bit part for me in a biopic about T.S. Eliot or something, which I’d happily take on. Call me, Marty! 

What have you enjoyed most about starting River River Books?

Starting this press with Han VanderHart has been an incredibly rewarding experience. We’ve ushered two amazing books into the world already — An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp, Bullet Points by Jennifer A Sutherland — with the next two to follow in January. It’s been so much work, but good work, and a pleasure to do it alongside someone who values poetry and community as I do. We’ve learned a lot about the tedious parts and the costs — always, the costs! — of being a small press. We knew it would be hard, and in some ways it’s been harder than we expected, but it’s also an honor to support these books, these poets as best as we can. 

What new projects do you have in the works?

My collaborator Todd Kaneko and I just finished going through the final proofs for the second edition of our textbook and anthology; that’ll be out in early 2024 from Bloomsbury. I have a manuscript I’m circulating. It’s called Mouth. I have a chapbook manuscript I’ve sent to a few places. I have this idea that my next book after Mouth might be new and collected prose poems, and with that in mind, I challenged my friend Chris Haven that both of us should write 15 new prose poems this month, so I’m working on that. I’m also very slowly writing a ttrpg set in a near-future, kind of cyberpunk, climate-change-ravaged, technology-dominated version of Michigan — which as I type that out, doesn’t sound as far from reality as I’d want it to. That one’s mostly just to give me a sandbox to play with worldbuilding for a while. I have no idea what, if anything, will become of the project. As you can see, I’m one of those people who tends to have too many projects in progress. I haven’t even told you about all of them. 

For my last question, I’m going to steal a question from you. If you were going to read a poem, the same poem, every day for a year, which poem would it be?

For sure it’s “Song,” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The heart dies of this sweetness.

***

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review

Winter Wheat Writing Festival Is Back to BGSU!

We’re thrilled to announce that Mid-American Review’s twenty-third Winter Wheat Writing Festival is back to BGSU from November 9th to November 11th. This year’s festival boasts an exciting lineup of over 45 in-person and online workshops covering fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and more. The full workshop schedule can be found here.

We’re honored to introduce our distinguished keynote speaker, Faylita Hicks, renowned for their critically acclaimed poetry collection, HoodWitch. Additionally, we’re excited to feature one of BGSU’s faculty members, Sharona Muir, the author of the story collection Animal Truth and the novel Invisible Beasts.

Winter Wheat is also featuring not one, but two exciting open mic nights on Friday and Saturday evenings. Friday’s open mic will take place at Howard’s Club in Downtown Bowling Green, and will be followed by a music performance by Zack Fletcher + The Toro Quartet, By the Willow, Chloe and the Strings. The event is co-hosted by Pella Felton and Bea Fields (THEYDAR). Our second open mic night will take place in Prout Chapel at the BGSU campus. Attendees are encouraged to attend both events and to share their own work with the audience! 

More information on our website. 

Winter Wheat is open to the public and free of charge. To register, visit our website: www.bgsu.edu/winterwheat.

To individuals with disabilities, please indicate if you need special services, assistance or appropriate modifications to fully participate in this event by contacting Accessibility Services at access@bgsu.edu or 419-372-8495. Please notify us prior to the event.

––Mays Kuhail, Winter Wheat Coordinator

Featured Writer: Benjamin Percy

On Thursday, October 5, Benjamin Percy visits Bowling Green State University as the 2023 guest for the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds Series. He will read from his work at the Donnell Theatre of the Wolfe Center, 7:30 pm.

https://events.bgsu.edu/event/creative_minds_residency_benjamin_percy_keynote_address

Benjamin Percy is known for world-building, but in some ways that term is misleading. He does build worlds, but most commonly it’s our world advanced past a circumstance—sometimes horrific, sometimes nebulous—that has irrevocably shifted its mores, practices, and structures. The speculation inherent requires not so much building as re-building, blending the familiar with the jarringly different. At the same time, that speculation reveals often unpleasant truths about who we are as humans, and how we treat those who stray from our tight definition of human.

Red Moon provides an early example, one that turned out to be uncomfortably prescient. The story sparks from a prion virus that causes lycanthropy. Some with the virus take medication and try to live as invisibly as possible to protect themselves and their families. Others, reacting to anti-lycan laws and violence, are building a war. The general populace of uninfected citizens does not come off well, treating the infected with hostility regardless of circumstance. That we have now, a decade later, seen some of this same level of disgust and suspicion toward the ill through a pandemic is not at all reassuring, but it does underscore the insight of Ben Percy’s writing.

The Comet Cycle shows similar perception. In The Ninth Metal, a meteor fall—less a shower than a hailstorm—has embedded a new metal into the earth of a northern Minnesota town. The discovery offers a new energy source, but produces in its wake a dysfunctional boomtown, delivering, as one character puts it, “a millionaire a day.” That “omnimetal” also produces a new narcotic, potential weapons, and a ferocious land rights battle pushes the dread to the forefront. We—humanity—will not handle it well. The Unfamiliar Garden moves to Seattle, and sets its protagonists against changes in climate, a dangerous fungus, and murder. The Sky Vault heads north to Fairbanks, Alaska, and blends the current questions with an ominous WWII secret. Each novel in the cycle thus builds a new world out in time and place from the central event, the comet’s debris, while allowing its characters to make choices in response to those changes, to each other, and to an ever-morphing concept of “familiar.”

Following Benjamin Percy’s oeuvre could be likened to a choose-your-own-adventure, a trait very much in keeping with his writing itself. He has published three short story collections, and his short stories have appeared widely in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Orion. He has also now published seven novels; his first novel, The Wilding, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2010, and his second, Red Moon, came in 2013 from Grand Central. His current project in longform fiction, the Comet Cycle, closed with The Sky Vault, published this month by William Morrow.

On another path, Percy is writing for comics at DC, Marvel, AWA, and Dynamite, with his best known projects including Green Arrow, Ghost Rider, X-Force, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and Wolverine. For the latter, he also wrote two podcast series, The Long Night and The Lost Trail. Continuing into further media, Percy is writing screenplays and adapting stories for TV, both his own (The Ninth Metal, Summering) and others’ (Urban Cowboy).

And, as a generous and varied craftsman, it only makes sense that that Ben Percy would offer what he knows to the public, this time in the form of Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf, 2016), a collection used widely in the classroom, including at BGSU. 

In all of his work, Benjamin Percy has much to teach us about writing, about building stories, but also about the myriad ways in which we cope with disaster, with change, and with each other.

—Abigail Cloud, Editor-in-Chief

Featured Writer: Sara Moore Wagner

Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.  

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has also authored two chapbooks: Tumbling After released in March of 2022 and Hooked Through published by Five Oaks Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in several publications such as Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Western Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review. Wagner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times as well as Best of the Net and Best New Poets awards.     

Wagner’s poems explore relationships between mother and child, father and son, and other family ties in Appalachia. Several poems address the opiate crisis that heavily ravaged Appalachia and the entire country. Poems such as “Girlhood Landscape” explore the impermanence of beauty through a young girl waning optimism, stating: “because I want to remember blooming. // Because I think I could just bloom.” These poems also depict moments of trauma associated with miscarriages. Her work incorporates fairy tales and folklore, with several poems devoted to sharpshooter Annie Oakley, myths of Tantalus and Thetis, and Biblical figures in works like “Self Portrait as Judas.” 

In her work entitled “Invasive Species,” published by the Normal School in December 2020, Wagner talks about a nest created in a dated wreath. The relationship of mother/daughter and mother bird/hatchlings seems to blur. Both mothers are “separated […] by a door” from their young. The poem closes with: 

We’re all just waiting to crack open  
or be emptied out, to be forced  
from our homes or windows,  
to destroy what we love  
because we need it,  
because we think  
we’re safe.   

There is a sense here of the complicated necessity of letting our loved ones live their own lives, continuing to love them from a distance. This necessary and natural trajectory of love and how it operates exists in these final lines. Perhaps the complexities of love lead to hurt when love is needed most. The shared habitat of the nest on the house’s door creates all these avenues of focus. 

Poem excerpts appear courtesy of Normal School and Saramoorewagner.com. Biographical info also from saramoorewagner.com. 

–Michael J Morris, MAR

Featured Writer: Dustin Pearson

On Thursday, February 16th, Dustin Pearson will read his poetry as part of the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. The reading will take place at 7:30 at Prout Chapel at BGSU.

Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millennial Roost, and A Family Is a House. Dustin also has work which appears in The Nation, The Boiler, Blackbird, Bennington Review, Poetry Daily, The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, among other publications. Dustin is an Assistant Professor teaching creative writing at the University of Toledo.

Pearson’s work explores themes of love, loss, abuse, trauma, and hope. His work is both raw and honest, and while woeful at times, still carries grace and hope in its folds. Pearson views his writing as a way to artfully call on his lived experiences and observations, zooming in on them in the process. In an interview with Florida State University’s English Department, Pearson iterates, “I like to think of the writing as holding a magnifying glass to different aspects of that experience. The aesthetic presentation of the resulting writing is determined by how much I prioritize my internalized perception of what I’ve experienced or a more assimilated or recognizable one, which I think people most often call reality.” Indeed, there is a malleability to truth, experience, and the expression of them; in his poem “Souls Side by Side” Pearson writes to that end:

“He creeps

around us

pining

like he hadn’t died

when he first left.

Father, why

are you dying?

We killed you.

You should be dead.”

(from theboilerjournal dot com)

With the pain in Pearson’s writing, however, love and tenderness comes hand-in-hand. In “A Difference,” a brother’s broken arm is bandaged. In “Fossil Fuel,” hope is within reach: “The loss is overwhelming, but ahead of you, there are tracks. You want to fall but think not again, and you think: no matter the man the tracks belong to, you must find him.”

—Mays Kuhail, MAR

(Poem excerpts courtesy of The Boiler and The Account Magazine, biographical information from dustinkpearson dot com)