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- Painted Bride Quarterly Podcast, Salvation South Interview+Poems, Of Poetry Podcast, Moist Poetry's Summer Riot Open Call
Painted Bride Quarterly Podcast, Salvation South Interview+Poems, Of Poetry Podcast, Moist Poetry's Summer Riot Open Call
Han VanderHart
April 18, 2025
Hi dear ones. I know we’re all kind of swarmed by pollen, by pests of all kind, by end of the semester…I wanted to share some cool features before my brain uncollects for the semester and lapses into North Carolina Summer Mode+With Children:
Andy Fogle interviewed me for Salvation South, and did such an amazing job with this longform interview—we talk Southern denialism, the limit of guilt and shame, the call and response of literature, anger versus the truest emotion, and more.
Salvation South also ran six new poems of mine, including four new Ars Poeticas (yes, I’ve been writing a lot of these for an Ars | Ours project), and two new love poems.
Everything begins in childhood.
The song starts there, the poem.
It was a spring morning when I was born.
It was May. My mother’s hair was long.
The animals and earth were waking up,
preparing for a summer riot.
And! There’s a new episode of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast Slush Pile, featuring three of my poems, and the editors’ live process of discussing the poems and selecting them for publication. It is a VERY generous discussion, and left me feeling rather abashed and seen and like my cup had been filled all the way up to the very brim, so if you ever receive a request to be featured on the Slush Pile, I hope you say yes without trepidation (and considerably less anxiety than I did, ha). It was really beautiful to hear my poems read by others, and talked through. Such care and generosity, and I learned a lot about my own work in the process. So many thank yous to Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, and Lillie Volpe.
Editors discuss poems “Ars Poetica with a Broken Bucket,” “I Am Cultivating My Field of No’s,” and “Partial Listing of My Jealousies”
Also! A New episode of Of Poetry this week (Episode 70!) with the wonderful Danika Stegeman, and this episode is gorgeous, and heals my heart in several ways, formally and informally. Listen to Episode 70: Of Relentlessness, Gendered Maximalism, and Harryette Mullen and the Mirrored Cinquain, here.
I’m really excited for the Of Poetry episodes in the editing hopper right now—an abundance of community riches, y’all. America is unwell, but poetry is thriving and community care lives. Peep the forthcoming guests below!
LASTLY! My online journal Moist Poetry Journal is open to submissions on a SUMMER RIOT theme (if you catch the self-serving reference to my May birthday from the above ars poetica excerpt, congrats you clever reader, you <3). Look, some of these subs are getting a 24-hour response, but you only heard that here, I am NOT posting that online, I will not anger the poetry gods or Three Penny Review that way. But do send us something lovely, fiery, mad, loving, explosive, tender, sweet:
And don’t forget that River River Books opens May 1 to full-length poetry manuscripts.
Validation is community work. Love to you all.
Han