A Review-in-Dialogue of Jenny Xie’s “The Rupture Tense” and Monica Youn’s “From From”

VICTORIA CHANG: Hi Dean! I’m so excited to start talking with you about these two books. But first, it’s my job to write a little bit about our plan for the next handful of reviews. Rather than foregrounding books, we thought it might be interesting to focus on presses. There are so many fascinating presses publishing poetry today that we wanted to shine a light on some of the good work being done. Our first publisher, Graywolf, is one of the larger, more well-known independent presses. For our future reviews, we hope to review books from smaller presses such as Song Cave, Omnidawn, Press 53, Noemi, Nightboat, Milkweed, Black Lawrence, and Autumn House, as well as influential university presses. We think that by focusing on presses (rather than authors), we will be able to talk about poetry publishing—and a press’s strengths and character—in interesting ways.

Maybe that’s a place we can start. With the acknowledgment that presses are quite diverse in the poetry books that they publish, I want to ask this question anyway (and maybe we open every review about presses with this question): What adjectives come to mind when you think of Graywolf’s poetry books?

DEAN RADER: Hi, Victoria. I love our project so much! I’m excited about this new direction our column is taking. I’m a huge fan of presses. They deserve more attention than they receive. Running a press is a ton of work and often thankless. I’m glad we are orienting the spotlight on them.

Your question about Graywolf is a good one. In some ways, it is a predictable press to begin with. Its poets are well-known, well-regarded, and well-celebrated. In truth, Graywolf does not need us to write about it; they are doing just fine on their own! Jeff Shotts has done a great job recruiting and keeping amazing poets like Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, Mai Der Vang, Mary Jo Bang, Diane Seuss, Mark Wunderlich, Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, my colleague at USF D. A. Powell, and a host of others. I think of…