Happy Poetry Month, readers! We've got some incredible new poetry collections coming out during this annual celebration of verse. Read on to learn more about the poets behind our three new collections: Ultra Blue author Graeme Bezanson, Pitiful author Brandi Bird, and The Wren author A.F. Moritz.

Can you each share, in your own words, what your poems are thinking through, or what your books are about?

Graeme Bezanson: The poems in Ultra Blue are thinking about different narratives of boyhood and growing up, about the stories we patch together and tell each other about masculinity and what it might mean to be a man. Also, they are thinking about wolves and push-ups and pocketknives and ghosts.

Brandi Bird: Pitiful is a labour of rage and love and obsession. In these poems, I’m twisting the relationships we form with our bodies. We are sexual, we are hungry and we all have at least a little propensity towards voyeurism. I wrote this book because it’s necessary. We all need to look more closely at our disgust, shame, and desire when we examine bodies. Our own bodies and other people’s bodies. I wrote Pitiful to critique the restraint, inaction, and self-victimization I’ve seen in this genre of literature. I’m asking the reader who, if anyone, is ever rescued from themselves?

A.F. Moritz: One of the chief elements of my poetic vision is that beauty is the absolute, beauty is the unique true all. Poetry does many things but at the base of all of them is its power to concretize this absolute, to bring it into the reality of time that we live. This is the chief power and activity of the poet.

For this reason, poetry has to write the ugly poem. If the true horrors of this situation are left out, then what’s being called beauty in the poem is not beauty but prettiness—beauty from which truth has been excluded. Which quickly becomes a hard-to-redeem ugliness. The poem has to be both beautiful and ugly: not beauty including ugliness, not ugliness aspiring to beauty, but beautiful-and-ugly heard as one word and one meaning and one thing. So, the pure absolute, Beauty, which may seem to be beyond our knowledge, is revealed to us, brought to us and introduced to us, by poetry. 

All of your collections vary quite a bit in style. Brandi, the poems in Pitiful move around the page quite a bit and are different from The All + Flesh in their raw self-interrogation/diary form and tone. Graeme, Ultra Blue reads like one long continuous poem, an epic. And A.F., The Wren is a collection of exclusively short poems, which is new for you. Could you each share a bit about your relationship to form for these particular collections? 

Brandi Bird: The line breaks/white space in Pitiful are often staccato or cacophonous in their formation. When they become rigid and controlled, it is purposeful and sometimes happens within the same poem. I use white space as a weapon against the speaker of these poems or towards the audience and/or myself (the author). I end Pitiful with a villanelle, an inherently obsessive form, and a gesture towards the idea of mimicry and suffering. I’m not ignorant towards the contagion of disordered eating or it’s perpetuation through media that depicts it.

Graeme Bezanson: Ultra Blue was always going to be one long thing—I often start and abandon long things, but this one lived a little longer. I like books that you can read in one sitting, and I think Ultra Blue is like that. In the writing, I was thinking of three acts with two little intermissions. The three denser parts are built out of my notes on reading all kinds of different texts about boyhood; the two sparser sections are kind of “divinations” using the changing positions of Elon Musk’s satellites to help build poetry out of words and phrases from an interview between Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. It was a relief to be able to alternate between these two modes.

A.F. Moritz: I’ve written short poems from the start but they have mainly been mixed in with longer ones, anywhere from two-thirds of a page to two, three, four pages. In April 2019 I decided to write a succession of very short poems to do what is usually called “capturing moments” and “capturing thoughts.” The group would develop by the poems suggesting each other, growing out of each other, and as a result resembling each other: mirroring, echoing, but more accurately, branching from each other—so each one is a branch and is like a branch is like other branches.

Could you each share about your influences and/or inspirations for these collections, or whose work these collections are in conversation with? 

A.F. Moritz:  I think what really pulled the reins and tugged me around to this direction was my love of Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the period 1915 to 1936, Jiménez wrote a great number of mainly very small poems, grouping them into books that were collections of poems but also were unified works of many constantly diverging and merging parts. I have just published a translation of Jiménez’s great 1918 book Eternidades (Eternities)—it came out simultaneously with The Wren. 

Brandi Bird: I have a whole “Mood Board” on my website but I think my biggest influence for Pitiful was the entire genre of The White Woman Memoir. I was a very big devotee to those women growing up. I’m also influenced by the internet, the old one, the one that I used as a girl and doesn’t exist anymore. On the internet I found other girls who wanted what I (thought I) wanted which was to appear effortless, detached, and anonymous in my actual obsessive interests and desperation for approval. 

Graeme Bezanson: In terms of contemporary poetry, I guess I was thinking a lot about Susan Howe, Lisa Robertson, CAConrad, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, people who I think of as building poems out of bits and pieces, using weird little machines of their own construction. In terms of being in conversation with other books, Ultra Blue is full of references to older texts about boyhood, masculinity, and “becoming a man,” which are in turn full of references to each other—I think it’s interesting how texts get re-purposed and re-purpose each other under the dominant western (capitalist, patriarchal) model. The work that Ultra Blue is “in conversation with” includes Rousseau's Emile, or On Education, the Boy Scout's Handbook, Kipling poems and stories, talks given by Robert Bly at his 1980s “Mythopoetic Men’s Movement” meetings, Greek myths, and Tintin comics.

Graeme—what is the significance of horses in Ultra Blue?

I wrote Ultra Blue while living in a very horse-centric corner of France. Our nearest village was home to the National Stud and a sprawling hippodrome. Horses grazed in the fields all around us and trotted about town in all seasons. Many of my neighbours and friends were connected to the horse industry, either as jockeys or trainers or administrators at the Stud. My kids’ drawings were all on the back of feed inventories and breeding price lists because that was the scrap paper at school. The village chapel had horses painted on every wall. Which is to say there were a lot of horses in the atmosphere! And horses play such an important role in our stories about manhood and masculinity. For a long time they were instruments of violence and war. Alexander comes of age via the taming of Bucephalus. In a passage about the horses in Wagner’s operas, Adorno says that horses know more about heroes than heroes do themselves.

Brandi—is Pitiful actually pitiful? What is the relationship of this title to you and/or this book?

I named this book Pitiful because it’s funny. The title came to me after I saw a professor of mine, Sheryda Warrener, on a bus while I was juggling a million ludicrously capacious bags and trying to finish homework for creative non-fiction class on my laptop (which was also precariously balanced on my knees). She said “Brandi, you love to suffer.” Now that’s funny! And I do! That’s Pitiful. That’s what it’s all about!

A.F.—this is your 23rd collection of poetry. How does The Wren fit in with your larger body of work? How does it partner with your 2018 collection, The Sparrow?

There are many ways it fits in! For instance, Jiménez. In my last book, Great Silent Ballad from 2024, his poems are quoted, used as an epigraph, discussed in the notes, etc. The poem that I see as the keynote of Great Silent Ballad is entitled “On a Thought by Juan Ramón Jiménez,” and it begins with three of his lines. If you were to read that poem, you would find that its thought and the mystery it shows and confronts is very similar to my statement above about what one of the principal ideas in The Wren is.

There are a lot of links between The Wren and The Sparrow! In The Wren, the wren hops out shyly from its covert for just a second, then disappears back inside, so that you might doubt you really saw it. In The Sparrow, the sparrow keeps returning, being glimpsed, being shy and perhaps threatened, just as in The Wren. 

My favourite sparrow among the many—I think there are seven—that appear in The Sparrow is in a poem (from Night Street Repairs, 2004) called “Love Song”, in which “a sparrow came down / in the crowd’s midst and ran across a table / to seize a crumb from under / idle, malevolent hands.” Well, there is a crumb that looks forward to the poem “Crumbs” in The Wren. It’s a poem that gives an image of the good in the tiny—in other words, it includes the possible goodness of tiny poems, where threatened fugitives like the wren and the sparrow can flourish, perhaps.

The Wren is also meant to hark back to a key poem for me that appears in The Sparrow, a poem called “Wren House” (from Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1999). I long to quote the entire last stanza of “Wren House” to make the connection to The Wren clear, but I’ll just stick to the last three-and-half lines: “a wren is a mighty being, but to sing / my wants is perhaps beyond even him. Whatever can / be destroyed is going to be destroyed. Patience, patience. / Hate what needs to be hated. All’s finished, all’s completed.”