Caroline Crew's Blog

Spoiler: I adored this collection:

Wendy Xu’s Ottoline Prize-winning second collection, Phrasis, deeply disturbs the foundation of sensory experience. The book’s title, taken from Ancient Greek, translates to “manner of expression.” In interrogating both how we perceive and the systems into which we organize perception, the deftly wrought poems of Phrasis challenge the reader’s consumption and creation of “meaning.” There is a central tension between visual perception and language’s system of meaning that dominates Phrasis: “My source text was unresponsive and so varying / methods, slashed it pink instead.”

Read the rest of this review at 32 Poems, here.

I am so so thrilled to have an essay in the Charcoal issue of Fairy Tale Review !

New Essay on Jesus and Foreskins up at DIAGRAM

Read here!: http://thediagram.com/17_5/crew.html

Two new poems about balloons, rape culture, horses, and airports up at Gulf Coast. Read them here. 

All kinds of thrilled to have three poems up at Powder Keg, in the company of amazing poets like Amy Lawless and Lauren Hunter. You can get at the whole issue here!

I have a new essay out in Sycamore Review. I'm so thrilled to have my essay about falling in love with MMA, masculinity, crying and the labor of violence in here! 

Thrilled to have a short nonfiction piece (or a very long sentence) up Quarterly West, which you can read here!

I have a piece of short fiction exploring Cornish folklore up at the wondrous Cosmonauts Avenue! They very kindly shortlisted this piece for their Fiction Prize. Read here!

Molly is a witch exceedingly dear to my heart and I'm so chuffed I got to talk to her about saints, witches and being a feminist poet over at Brooklyn Magazine. You can read it here! And here a lil bit about the space between nonfiction and poetry:

You also write a fair amount of nonfiction—you recently had an essay in Conjunctions. How did you come to write in this mode? What about nonfiction interesting about it to you?
I came to nonfiction through poems. It was a natural move—so many of my favorite essays seem so close to poems. And so many of my favorite nonfiction writers are poets. For me it really came out of researching poems. I wrote a little chapbook about poems based on saints’ lives calledCAROLINE WHO WILL YOU PRAY TO NOW THAT YOU ARE DEAD and I’m kind of a nuts researcher. While I was working on that book, I’d make a lot of notes to myself. I’d write in the margins about Catherine of Sienna, “she did what?” Those little asides to myself in my research notes were essays. That’s how I first started getting into nonfiction.

I love poetry and I love political poetry, and I think it has a huge capacity to say important things. But so does nonfiction. There are things I need to grapple with in sentences. I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction and poetry are pretty arbitrary, but having the label of nonfiction for myself keeps me somewhat accountable. It gives me a different level of transparency. It prods me to think a lot more deeply. It’s not necessarily about honesty. I also really enjoy the collage element of nonfiction and being able to include other people’s ideas in a much more elegant way than I can achieve in poetry. That’s really appealing to me, to create a bigger space in which to put Kathy Acker and cage fighting together.

I'm really thrilled to have a poem in Spoke Too Soon: A Journal of the Longer! You can read / listen to my understanding of flag day and hummingbirds and hating bird poems here.