Dilruba Ahmed was recently interviewed for the Four Way Review. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

FWR: In an interview with the New England Review, you stated that, “I’m interested in the ways that—particularly during difficult times—a seemingly small act can contribute to a greater purpose. And how those acts, even when they occur in relative isolation, can bind people together toward a common goal.” While I know this is a reflection on your first book, Dhaka Dust, I think this speaks to your writing in Bring Now the Angels, as well. Illness frames much of the text, as you reflect on “SickDad” and how cancer impacted your family with an eye towards the minute detail. 

In the poem “Local Newspaper, Floating Photographer, Father’s Day Edition”, you describe images of vitality: “Describe your father. / Midnight scrambled eggs each New Year’s Eve. The insistence: ‘say yes to cake’ … Describe your father / Why do children keep growing, in their small and ignorant bliss?” Each of these small moments construct a man and a life, and by sharing these moments of specificity with your reader, you have brought us into this man’s life more effectively than broad strokes. In this movement from the broad (father; illness) to the keyhole (“pizza purchased for men searching dumpsters in Columbus”), did you find it easier to write about small moments? How did you find the lens with which to view these grander, binding moments?

Dilruba Ahmed: My new book, Bring Now the Angels: Poems, is an extended meditation on loss, both personal and public. In the personal realm, the poems mourn the many losses associated with chronic disease and terminal illness in the Western world. During a 3-year battle with multiple myeloma, my father lost his health, his mobility, and his typical daily activities. Some changes were sudden and dramatic; other losses accrued slowly. 

The ripples kept growing. We experienced a loss of confidence in Western medicine, which both saved my father and destroyed him, and for me, in faith. The disappearance of our bearings and touchstones transformed the world into a place suddenly strange and unfamiliar. 

The situation was painfully personal, but everything happened within a larger context. We witnessed firsthand the cost of being ill in America: the associated expenses, maltreatment, discriminatory practices, and reckless over-use of painkillers. Not to mention access issues to dialysis centers and the related questions about quality of treatment and quality of life. In each health care facility, for every deeply caring and attentive health care professional, there were physicians who were out of touch with their patients and the mission to heal. My family members and I experienced the corruption and carelessness of our country’s healthcare system even as a few shining stars gave my father the best possible medical attention he could have requested. 

While small moments often sparked poems like this one, in my revisions I’ve tried to consider their larger contexts so I’m not just “zooming in” but also “panning out.” I’m making an effort to examine the layers surrounding personal moments by asking, “What are the social, cultural, and historical contexts relevant to this poem? Who has been represented here, and who has been erased?” Claudia Rankine has called for white writers to examine how the racist history of our country has shaped mainstream thinking about both whites and people of color—and our representations of both. From the intersections of my identity, there’s still work to do as well.

These questions have led to deeper revisions, as with the title poem of my new book, “Bring Now the Angels,” which began as a measured acceptance of a terminal diagnosis and the adjustments accompanying physical and cognitive losses. In subsequent revisions, I situated personal loss in more universal ways, focusing less on the diagnosis and more on the indictment of a society that permits the vulnerable to suffer under dismal conditions, with poor medical treatment and exorbitant costs. I revised from a first-person narrator to an oracular, choral voice that bears witness to maltreatment, misuse of addictive painkillers, and debt.

Read the rest of this interview here: http://fourwayreview.com/interview-with-dilruba-ahmed/

“A Heartbreaking Lesson of Politics,” by Sharon Gelman, was recently featured in Scoundrel Time. Read an excerpt below:

A Heartbreaking Lesson of Politics
“I first parted ways with my parents politically during a presidential primary race. I was eight.

The Republican candidate was Richard Milhous Nixon. My parents were staunch, active, pragmatic Democrats, and they were backing Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primary. Once he withdrew from the race, they supported Hubert Humphrey.

But I fell in love with Eugene McCarthy. He was the anti-war candidate who spoke about peace like a poet, because, in fact, he was a senator as well as a poet. His campaign bumper stickers were shaped like flowers: white daisies with his name in white in the flower’s blue center, to be precise. I put a McCarthy flower sticker on the paisley cover of my three-ring binder and proudly carried it to school, talking him up to anyone and everyone who would listen. I loved him and believed in him with my whole tender young heart…”

Read the rest of this piece here: https://scoundreltime.com/a-heartbreaking-lesson-of-politics/

Faculty member Robin Romm‘s essay “Hi, Dad. It’s Me. Please Buy Lots of Soup” was recently featured on Wired. Read an excerpt below:

“Hi, Dad. It’s Me. Please Buy Lots of Soup.”

“MY FATHER IS 74. He lives alone in Eugene, Oregon, about 90 miles from the first novel outbreak in the Portland area. In 2016, he was in a catastrophic bicycling accident that left him with steel-plated ribs and reduced lung function. I still think of him as a stubborn and athletic ox of a guy. He was a cardiologist and mountaineer, a skier, hiker, and general adrenaline junky. His father was a histrionic type, eternally crouched against imagined (and experienced) tragedy. My father defined himself in the face of this. He is never histrionic. If he panics, he does it silently, then makes a joke. He wouldn’t be the one looking over his shoulder to see what pursued him. He’d be the one looking forward, toward what beckoned. Once, when I asked him why he’d chosen the heart as his specialty, he told me he liked the feeling of being on the edge. The edge is a vivid and exciting place to be, so long as you always stay on it, and don’t fall off.

I called him and asked how he was. He told me he’d been keeping busy. He’d gone to his class on the poetry of the Vietnam war, two fundraising parties, and a basketball game.

“I guess you’re not worried about the coronavirus,” I said.

“Well,” he said, taken off guard. His dog has cancer, and he’d thought I was calling for another update on his status. “We don’t have it here,” he said. “Why should I be worried?”

Read the rest of this essay here: https://www.wired.com/story/hi-dad-its-me-please-buy-lots-of-soup/

“Direct Address,” a poem by Kimberly Kruge, was recently featured by The Poetry Society of America. Read an excerpt below:

Direct Address

Here is everywhere I’ve ever been and everywhere I’ve never been at once.
The one beside me is everyone I’ve ever known and everyone I’ve never, too.
The howl from the next apartment is every howl across history and it is also not that.
It is no secret we create reality. The storm settling over the city where I am now is
the storm settling over my past haunts, is the storm at a particular longitude and latitude
on the plane of my thoughts; it is a death wish…

Find the rest of this poem, and read a brief reflection by Kimberly, here: https://poetrysociety.org/features/in-their-own-words/kimberly-kruge-on-direct-address