Jeanne-Marie Jackson (SideGig #4)

Podcast

In SideGig #4 Paul and Kevin play backup for Jeanne-Marie Jackson, a scholar and critic of African and world literatures based at Johns Hopkins University, who sings Whitney Houston’s 1988 hit “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.” After making music together, the three discuss Jeanne-Marie’s might-have-been alternate life as a pop music phenom, the intersections between academic and musical undertakings, fabled New Haven karaoke bars, and popular music in Russia and Africa. 

All can be here

Review

On Joel Chace’s ‘Underrated Provinces’

From left: the cover of ‘Underrated Provinces,’ Joel Chace.
From left: the cover of ‘Underrated Provinces,’ Joel Chace.

The link between form and content is, of course, rarely clear cut — despite Robert Creeley’s (and then Charles Olson’s) influential assertion that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” — but just because total mimesis isn’t attainable doesn’t mean that a certain charge can’t be derived from forms that echo their subject matter. […] These thoughts are prompted by Joel Chace’s new collection Underrated Provinces.

Gina Myers

Podcast

PennSound Podcast #84

From the cover of Gina Myers’ ‘Works & Days.’

In this episode, Christy Davids talks with Gina Myers about her recent release Works & Days, published in 2025 by Radiator Press. Gina and Christy talk about how the book travels through spaces of seriality, duration, and instance — and the way work shapes and warps our sense of what’s possible.

Questions of origination

Review

On Jean Day’s ‘Apicality’

From left to right: Jean Day, the cover of ‘Apicality.’

Place the tip of your tongue in different positions, and you might find yourself pronouncing your Ss like SH. For most of us, that means something about how we speak to and understand each other. For phoneticians, this introduces questions of articulation and apicality. For poet Jean Day however, the term Apicality lends her latest book of poems its name. And while the term Apicality suggests questions about the formation of speech and language, the term also has applicability across many fields. 

Poetry in the democracy machine

Review

Teetering in a liminal space between a long poem and a consortium of compact lyrical statements, Executive Orders makes use of a kind of ludic legalese intended as a counterpoint to the unilateralism of Donald Trump’s heavy-handed use of executive power. By the same stroke, it broaches broader questions about how the social fabric of our lives relates to the impersonal ubiquity of technology today. By opposing poetry’s negative capability — its capacity to flow against factual uniformities — to the crushing realities of executive legislation, the book maintains a subdued sense of communitarianism. 

The controlled chaos that is clowning

Interview

A conversation between Henry Goldkamp and Mayookh Barua

The cover of Henry Goldkamp’s ‘JOY BUZZER.’

In the early performances that eventually became a part of JOY BUZZER, you (or me) never know what’s going to happen next. There was no real order to it, in the lineage of the kind of controlled chaos that is clowning. […] And that wackiness that creates a lack of foresight also makes fertile grounds for laughter because laughter is always in some way or another rooted in some sort of incongruity.

In Memory of Radio (PennSound Rewind #8)

Podcast

Black Authors on the Air 1967–2018

In this program we celebrate Black voices on the airwaves, from a 1967 radio-play staging of Samuel R. Delaney’s The Star-Pit  to Douglas Kearney’s 2018 appearance on Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening. The stations represented here include college and community broadcasters, flagship stations for the venerable Pacifica Radio network, modern internet radio, and even the BBC. Other authors featured include Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claudia Rankine, Tyehimba Jess, Erica Hunt, and Tracie Morris.

A call to take up thread

Review

A review of ‘Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress’ by Victoria Guerrero-Peirano

From left to right: the cover of ‘Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress,’ Victoria Guerrero-Peirano.
From left to right: the cover of ‘Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress,’ Victoria Guerrero-Peirano.

The axiomatics of Victoria Guerrero-Peirano’s first poem in this beautifully crafted, hand-sewn collection instigate a pretty radical shift away from cordoning off textile workers as banner casualties in late capitalism. Or of textile work as polite women’s work. “I leave words” begins the first poem.