This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Robin Gow: One of the lines in the first poem really resonated with my own experience with gender and then understanding the complexities of gender for speakers in the book. You write, “I think I knew I was a boy / when the boy […]
Robin Gow
ROBIN GOW is a trans poet and young adult author from rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press 2019). Their first young adult novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions, is forthcoming in 2022 with FSG Books for Young Readers. Gow’s poetry has recently been published in POETRY, New Delta Review, and Washington Square Review.
Articulating the Inarticulable: An Interview with Kayleb Rae Candrilli on their latest collection WATER I WON’T TOUCH
Collaborative Gender(s): A Review of Ava Hofmann’s MY MY SUMMER OF TOTAL FFAILURE
by Robin Gow
I’m making myself write this review because all my attempts to explain Ava Hofmann’s work to friends fail and I end up just saying, “You have to read it. You just have to read it.” Her latest chapbook, MY MY SUMMER OF TOTAL FFAILURE published this year in 2021 by The Offending Adam, is no […]
Holy Dispatches: A Review of Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations by Kopano Maroga
by Robin Gow
Rightly dedicated to “Judas,” Kopano Maroga’s first collection imagines Jesus’s “lost years” as full of queer erotic bliss and newly vibrant prayers. In doing so, Maroga also weaves the voice of a more personal present-day speaker whose black queer self-celebration is a radical ritual. The title poem, “jesus thesis,” begins, “jesus was a […]
What’s Foretold, What’s Witheld: An Interview with Donika Kelly on The Renunciations
by Robin Gow
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (fivehundred places) and the full-length collections The Renunciations (Graywolf 2021) and Bestiary (Graywolf). Bestiary is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also long-listed for the National Book Award and […]
Welcome Hauntings: A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s God of Nothingness
by Robin Gow
In God of Nothingness, Mark Wunderlich’s poems conjure reluctant ghosts and waltz with rusted memories. Embracing regret, grief, and death, this collection makes mourning and melancholy tangible, intimate moments through earthy lyric. By sharing his vibrant hauntings, the speaker delivers brief afterlives to loved ones, landscapes, and saints, all the while asking, “Who witnesses our […]
Apocalypse Singing: A Review of Claire Wahmanholm’s Wilder for Pandemic Times
by Robin Gow
In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come. The collection’s striking red moon cover drew me in with its strangeness. There’s something ominous […]
Re-defining Drag Transformation: An Interview with Maxi Glamour
by Robin Gow
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity Robin Gow: It’s so nice to get to chat with you! I’m really grateful for this opportunity to delve into your work. I guess I want to start by asking where your drag name “Maxi Glamour” came from? Maxi Glamour: I created it when I […]
Juno Was Always a Trans Movie
by Robin Gow
I watched Juno with my partner two winters ago, on her laptop in the living room of my first grad school apartment. This wasn’t the first time I had seen it, but it was the first time I’d watched it since I had come out publicly as a transgender. My partner, also trans, and I […]
