... and you, my friend, should be listening. Justin Bigos interviews Rose McLarney in the American Literary Review, in what is becoming a series that that takes the Paris Review "Art of" model and hybridizes it with book reviewing, banter, and badassery. (In case you missed it, Justin interviewed Laurie Saurborn Young here.) I want to clasp the coattails of this pair and ride them high in the sky. Or at least to another night on the Warren Wilson porches during the MFA residencies. With the rocking chairs, of course. And the booze.
Rose's first collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, will be published by Four Way Books in 2012. She was awarded Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Orion, and New England Review, among others. Justin is on his way to a Ph.D in creative writing at the University of North Texas. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Collagist, The Minnesota Review, Crazyhorse, and other publications.
In their conversation, look for Justin to bring up the goats, and to talk about why the phrase "emotional complexity in book reviews bugs him. Look for the advice of Rose's grandmother on social situations, and why it applies to poems. Read bravely.
Three Wishes
By Rose McLarney
To have two long-legged dogs
named Thither and Yon,
loyal to me. A man
who hears when I say, Let me alone,
and lifts me over fences and creeks
of the moss that lines paths
through the woods, if it
invites me onward, or
to lay down where I already am.
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