rob mclennan : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Em Dial

  

 

 

 

Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, the Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. 

Em Dial reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

rob mclennan: I’d first caught a glimpse of your work through the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towardsthe Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025). How did you get involved in that project?

Em Dial: It’s such an honor to be included in this anthology that’s full of writers I admire. I received the call for submissions through a mailing list for Asian diasporic writers, and the project seemed so fitting for some poems I had been working on at the time that were about the legacy of Quadroon Balls in the Antebellum American South. As someone who is entering the world of archival and documentary poetics, I really admire Naima Yael Tokunow’s editorial vision for this collection. 

rm: How does this particular piece fit with the other work you’ve been doing, such as the poems in In the Key of Decay? Structurally, the poem feels quite different from the work in that collection.

ED: The pieces in Permanent Record feel like clicking the magnification on a microscope up by a lens. Where In the Key of Decay is grasping at these big ideas of race, science, and gender and trying to spread them out on the page for examination, my more recent work is more constrained, trying to take a very specific idea and draw out the boundaries around it to better understand it.

rm: Part of what struck about the poems in your debut was the range of formal exploration throughout the collection. Was there a concern at any point about how to make the collection cohere through such variety? And what prompted you to attempt so many directions?

ED: Part of the range is due to the fact that this collection is a compilation of years of work. Over those years I grew more confident as a writer and willing to stray from traditional forms. I think the other reason for the diversity in forms is my intention to make this work one of attempting, of trying, of failing to find an answer. If I were to plod along in couplets for 80 pages, I think I would have felt too direct in my approach to poetic inquiry. In arranging the final manuscript, I did have some anxiety about the formal incoherence, but ultimately it felt like it built towards the intention of the collection and became one of my favorite things about the book. 

rm: I wouldn’t say an incoherence, but certainly an exploration that opens the possibilities of the coherence of In the Key of Decay. Has your sense of the poem, or the manuscript, shifted since the assemblage of this debut collection? Are you still exploring multiple directions through form?

ED: My sense of both has been constantly bouncing around since starting my MFA program last fall. In In the Key of Decay, I thought of both the poem and the manuscript as a whole as an opportunity for charting and sense-making. I think recently I’ve been learning about and utilizing the poem as more of an agent of chaos, of both making and unmaking. What this means for me formally is still to be determined, but I’ve been taking more interest in received forms and the opportunity of letting form come to you rather than seeking it out.

rm: Did you have any difficulty translating more performative elements of your work for the sake of working a printed book? There are moments within the collection I can feel and even hear the performance come through. Were you concerned about how a piece that might work well in performance might sit on the page?

ED: That was a huge concern for some of the pieces in the collection that I had initially written for slam stages. But rethinking how to communicate some of the same energy visually was one of my favorite aspects of developing the book. It felt like working on a sudoku or some other kind of puzzle, trying to fit pieces into their proper spot in relation to one another. I think much of my more recent work has tended toward quiet and reservation, so it was a fun challenge to revisit older work and think about how to preserve their louder integrity. 

rm: I’m fascinated in how your work articulates the complications and collisions of culture, borders, family and history, from external forces to the internal. How easy or difficult was it for you to open these conversations, some of which fall into the deeply personal, through the form of poetry?

ED: It has felt like poetry is the only way. I think I have felt and witnessed these collisions at global and personal scales for all of my adult life, and became deeply obsessed and troubled by them. Poetry became the only lens that allowed me to zoom from the large to the small and back, and similarly from the individual to the universal. I can be quite reserved in day to day life, but strangely, I seldom feel hesitant to implicate the details of my own life in the context of the issues I discuss. It feels like the only way.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His latest title is Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller (2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : Pause the Document, by Mónica de la Torre

Pause the Document, Mónica de la Torre
Nightboat Books, 2025

 

 

 

The latest from New York-based poet and editor Mónica de la Torre, and the first I’ve seen, is Pause the Document (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a collection that follows a host of her other full-length and chapbook titles including Talk Shows (Denver CO: Switchback Books, 2007), Public Domain (Washington DC: Roof Books, 2008), The Happy End/All Welcome (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020). Set in a trio of untitled sections, Pause the Document offers a collection of lyrics that spark and sparkle, documenting an archive of tangibles and intangibles, from dreams to theorums to the void, all concrete, and clear; composed as gestures or monologues that might appear equally comfortable on the page, stage, or at the podium. “I was wrong in thinking just / malignancies could be extirpated.” she writes, mid-way through “AHİ VIENE EL LOBO,” Fatalism will only take us so far; / as it turns out, they’re still viable / in a territory larger than previously / calculated.” There is such an underlay of confidence and authority to these poems that would lean well into performance. “Funny, I wasn’t thinking of communicating in a language other than this one,” she writes, to open “RETURN TO PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY,” “but here I am. Feeling formally restless and leaving tracks.” The poems are exploratory, declarative, engaged and curious; shifting prose blocks to line breaks, a variation on rhythms, propulsion, offering exploratory statements on human language and being.

de la Torre both writes the clutter and through it, attempting clarification through the noise, and a habitat of habitation perpetually overrun by our own excesses. “What empty chatter must they overhear,” she writes, to begin the poem “LONDON PLANE TREE,” “in the polluted habitats for which they’re naturals.” If future alien civilizations might seek to understand how we lived, or at least tried to, one might hope they could find their way to these poems. There is such lovely ease in her lyrics, such as the poem “NOT AGAINST THE RULES,” that opens:

It hailed golf balls
back in June.

Notebook got nicked,
got soaked.

What month is it.

She speaks
of grief so gracefully
you hold on to her words
lest you miss
its gnawing at you too.

There’s a curious temporality to these poems, one that attempts to utilize the progress of time as a grounding element; her narrator attempting to locate or ground herself, perhaps, as the poem “DECEMBER,” for example, begins: “Who can say where we’re going. To be sure / I’d split my attention so now looking / back. I couldn’t tell.” Or the poem “FIT TO PRINT,” that begins: “Late in November appears a variant of concern. The news gets torn up.” Through all the searching for certainty, it might not yet be found. Through all the chaos, all the swirling movement, where does the centre hold, one might ask. As the poem “NOT AGAINST THE RULES” closes: “I am writing in the dark / and that is what the noise is about.”

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of nearly forty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), his Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil) is out any day now and available for pre-order. As well, his poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary), a follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), appears this fall. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : Death Styles, by Joyelle McSweeney

Death Styles, Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2024

 

 

 

Composed as a study of and around grief and time, South Bend, Indiana poet Joyelle McSweeney’s latest poetry title is Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024), a poem-cycle that furthers her confrontation of and articulation around the loss of her daughter, a process she began through her prior double collection, Toxicon and Arachne (2020). In the piece “On Death Styles: A Précis,” over at Annulet, writing on what was still a work-in-progress, she writes: “My work-in-progress Death Styles investigates the essential contradiction between trauma, which compels us to repeat the past, and survival, which compels us to move forward. These poems ask: what is bearable. How does the present tense bear the past, how does it birth the future—and how might we survive that birth.” A bit further on, also: “The title Death Styles makes homage to an unfinished trilogy by Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, which struggles with the problem of survival in the aftermath of traumatic historical events (Bachmann herself did not survive).”

Echoing a form of the daily cycle, almost as concentric circles, her form seems closer to Bernadette Mayer, say, than Robert Creeley’s “day book,” as McSweeney allows the prompts and confusions, contusions and repetitions of daily movement inform where each new day, each new poem, might move. “To circle is also a style.” she writes, early on in the collection. The layerings of grief are punctuated by and through the repetitions, the incredible openness and indirect directness of her lyric, how she doesn’t shy away from grief, while simultaneously attending to the requirements of her day, including notes around her mother, her partner and her other children. “Darling,” she writes, as part of “8.25.20,” “I’m sorry you didn’t survive / reverse aubade / every time the sun rises / I want to crumple up / this whole heliocentric universe / still the helicopter rises from its crumpled cup / outside the hospital down the hill / and I race out toting your foster brother to wave at it / Good bye good bye / come back this time [.]” Or, further on:

You’re the grieving mother and you’re helping the detective. You run a finger down the column of inked figures. All the guilt is there. Tiny beetles are working away at the glue. After the baby dies you are all struck with lice. Your daughter asks you, Why do I have lice? You answer, Dunno, why anything, why did the baby die, as you comb away the lice. There’s always more of them. you run a fever down the seam of the book and split it with your fingernail and tear the page away. To hide your theft you expectorate.

You let it off your chest.

“Repetition, I have come to understand,” she writes, to open her afterword, “is the shape trauma makes of time.” As one might imagine, there’s an emotional rawness to her lyric, confronting the loss head-on, through a daily attention. The bulk of the collection exists as the title section, writing daily, dated poems from August 2020 through to May 2021, with a short coda within the sequence, “CONCLUSIVE DEATH STYLE :,” as well as a further coda-section, the poem-sequence “AGONY IN THE GARDEN.” “smashed up on a windscreen,” she writes, as part of “8.21.20,” a poem subtitled “A LIE DETECTOR FOR MATTHEW RHYS,” “bent like a stovepipe / thrown down a drainpipe / a banged-up memory-storage device / each time we hit a pothole, my chassis / convulses, the detective / so dry at the joint / he clanks [.]” In an absolutely stunning and striking collection, McSweeney examines the intersections and interweavings of grief and time, examining them together and separately, noting how they connect and impact upon each other, each moment tied directly to the next. “Will you / retract the dewclaw / rewrap each silhouette / for maximum / frivolity and shrewdness / and land / like a cat on the lawn,” she writes, as part of “9.1.20,” “sure as a lawn dart, a spear and a bee bee / which all have the same life purpose:  to make a bee-line / to point to the eye / to punctuate / improve it [.]” As her forward continues:

After we lost our daughter, I wanted time to not just stop, but to repeat. Even if I couldn’t have a different ending, I wanted to have those thirteen days with her again. I was caught in a problem impossible to solve. How could I reconcile grief’s desire to look backwards with survival’s command to move forward in time, towards a future where I didn’t much want to go?

To endure this contradiction, and to study my own endurance, I wrote Death Styles. I set myself three rules. First, I had to write daily. Second, I had to accept any inspiration presented to me as an artifact of the present tense, however incidental, embarrassing or fleeting (these are identified as the subtitles for the poems). Third, I had to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me. I had to tolerate the poem for the time it took to get it down.

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is an Ottawa writer. On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is now available. You should pick up a copy.

 

Tiff Dressen : Process Note #34

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Tiff Dressen are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

Many, many years ago in a San Francisco so far away, I was an aspiring poet standing in the checkout line at what we lovingly called the Freakway, the Safeway on Market and Church in SF. The person checking out my groceries looked at my name (my given name) on the receipt  “Tiffaney Dawn” and proclaimed, “Hey, your name means ‘manifestation of God at dawn’”. What a gift from a stranger. I’d never really thought about my name before (except that my mother must have had someone else in mind when she named me) and later learned that Tiffany comes from a tradition in the Greek Orthodox faith, of giving the name, Theophania (Θεοφάνια) to girls born on the Feast of Epiphany, January 6th. And, like so many Christian traditions, Theophaneia is rooted in pre-Christian life. In ancient Greece, Theophania was also a spring festival at Delphi, honoring the return of Apollo from his winter residence in Hyperborea, the apogee of which was a display of an image of gods to worshippers, tucked away in a sanctuary. Sound tantalizing?

I return, however, to January 6th, Twelfth Night, the beginning of Mardi Gras season, Three Kings’ Day, when the Magi finally arrive to see the baby Jesus–the great reveal. I’ve since adopted January 6th as my personal, informal Feast Day. And, for several years now, I’ve been honoring that day by writing a poem. There’s a growing collection of these “Feast of Epiphany” poems. Here is one that began simply, at the window, then pulled me across the sky:

Poem for Epiphany #3
          (for Colleen Lookingbill)

 

Ruby crowned

kinglets dash

and flit near

our window

I watch the fiber

optic angel

of death  (yes, that’s

what you called it)

lowered to the

sidewalk men

in their buckets

above yawp

stare at the

sky message from

a friend appears “I will

always miss her,

though now she feels

far away (in

another part

of the galaxy)”

I want to write

a poem for the

songbird fever

dream set in

tiger pose poem

for “the neutral eye

of heaven” for the

sun at 200 kilometers

per second poem

for the solar system

orbiting the milky

way every 230

million earth years

pulling this poem

along with it

singing the black bar

below the wingbar

bringing myrrh to

mortality scented

olive-green carried

in the claws.

Or, more recently, this poem dedicated to the spirit of the poet Ted Berrigan and his sonnets:

  dear ted, good morning, it’s
  4:30am Feast of Epiphany
  season of lint and wet
  lemons I woke to feed most
  insatiable of felines though
  she still sleeps I have been
  trained to anticipate phantom
  hunger season of spectral
  scratching when she eats she
  purrs loudly my small
  Neptune dark passage
  chaperone in the wind
  the camellia brushes against
  the house pink blooms startle.

All this to say, I write for, with and among the seasons. The calendar (and the moon) cycles serve as a guide. This is how I track time with poems (devotions) to the month in which they were written or, at least, started. I should say I am compelled to track time with poems. Here is a poem situated in Oakland during the celebration of Tết and the Lunar New Year.

Poem for February: cityscape
        (for Linda Norton)

I watch the large, intelligent birds touch down on severely pruned sycamores. They lift off again. Crepuscular sky gyrations. They are at play. This shiny black cloud of witnesses swirling around me as if to say, “ I can’t believe you’re still alive.” Neither can I. And I take on a deeper indigo expansively, explosively or maybe privately, as a buckwheat volunteer or bracken by the tracks.

                                         Fire petals
                                         pink flames in
                                         cracks of
                                         sidewalk Oakland
                                         tiger’s eyes
                                         closer in light
                                         of the moon.

You can find more poems dedicated to the months/seasons in Tiff Dressen’s most recent book of poems, Of Mineral from Nightboat Books (2022) along with an interview with Nightboat Books Fellow, Snigdha Koirala, here and another interview by poet Della Watson here. Also, do yourself a favor and check out Lorine Niedecker’s calendar poems.

Tiff Dressen's [photo credit: Kate Sims] latest book is Of Mineral (Nightboat Books, 2022). SONGS FROM THE ASTRAL BESTIARY (lyric& Press, 2014) is their first full-length collection of poetry. They enjoy spending time with their felines, chasing wildflowers, and outdoor adventuring with their partner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com