“The novel is about an off-the-grid metal artist who welds sculptures out of the discards of this often-disregarded region. It is also a novel about stepmothers and daughters, and about cultural estrangement, the painful divides between where I live now, in New York, and where I return often to visit my family in rural Pennsylvania.”
“My poems often try to render the ordinary strange, and the strange ordinary.”
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“My playlist for Confidence reflects the boom-and-bust instability of all-consuming limerence: when it’s good you’re unassailable, and when it’s bad you’re either in major trouble or about to be.”
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“Five Conversations About Peter Sellers is an essay in conversation – five narrators carrying on five threads, all related to Peter Sellers and how his outsize ego derailed production of the 1960s James Bond spoof, Casino Royale.”
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“In moments you will laugh at the absurdity of their world, and in other moments the darkness will feel all too familiar…”
“…with a few exceptions, these aren’t tracks that I was actively listening to as I wrote Meltwater. It’s more like ‘here’s another way to access the tonal and emotional arc of the book,’ which is about fear, the future, eco-collapse, parenthood & children, death, dystopia, self-destruction, guilt & responsibility, hopelessness & (maybe) redemption.”
“Along with a dog named Lola, I wrote Monstrilio listening to music. There were songs that took me to the places I needed to be: Upstate New York, Mexico City, Brooklyn and Berlin. Others dug into feelings shouting to be explored: loneliness, chaotic giddiness, carefree monstrousness. Others jerked me away, whisked against some horror I’d just written, spitting me out at the other end, harrowed but satisfyingly alive.”