Joanna Furhman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2024). Fuhrman’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2023, The Pushcart Prize anthology, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and The Slowdown podcast. New poems and poetry videos are forthcoming in Fou, Nu Review, Posit, The Texas Review and Terrain. She first published with Hanging Loose Press as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.
Hanging Loose Press: What are this past year’s accomplishments that you are most proud of?
Joanna Furhman: Curbstone Books/Northwestern University just published my seventh book of poetry, Data Mind. It’s the first time I have written a collection that one could read as a book-length poem, so I feel excited about it. All the poems in it are darkly comic, surreal, feminist prose poems about digital life as a non-digital native.
HLP: Congrats on the new book. The dark comic streak is a very appealing quality of the book. So have you learned any tips on how to navigate your fate as an analog citizen? Please share!
JF: Maybe accept being lost and stop trying to navigate. As a devotee to the possibilities of chance, that’s usually my advice.
HLP: Any particularly difficult experiences/challenges for you this year? and how did you work through them?
JF: I’ve had a series of injuries this year, but I have been going to physical therapy and I am healing.
HLP: Sorry to hear about your injuries. Was there anything other than PT that is helping you heal?
JF: I think the chiropractor helped. If you need a good one in Brooklyn, write me.
HLP: What are three books you’ve read recently that have made an impression on you?
JF: Kelly Link is my favorite fiction writer, so I was excited to read her first novel, The Book of Love. I have also been thinking a lot about and rereading multiple times Kazuko Shiraishi’s My Floating Mother City. It’s a collection of selected poems translated into English from the Japanese. I had heard of her but hadn’t read her until a student started writing about her, so then I ordered the book. I also recently read my former student and friend Lauren Russell’s brilliant third book, A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close.
HLP: My Floating Mother City. The title is fantastic. What else about it appealed so much that you ordered the book?
JF: I liked the sense of humor and the mercurial feeling of the leaps, the movement from the every day to the surreal. She also uses the line in a similar way to Hanging Loose favorite Maureen Owen.
HLP: Are you able to explain your tendency to the surreal? How will you feel if these new poems end up being more rationalist, in a manner of speaking?
JF: I would not say they are more rational. There’s lots of imagery directly from my dreams, but they are more pared down. The leaping is a little slower, more magical realist and less dense surrealism.
HLP: Any upcoming projects?
JF: I have written a lot of poems since I finished Data Mind, but they don’t feel like a book yet. Part of the issue is that a lot of the poems are about my mother’s death, so the style is less surreal than what I usually write. I am trying to figure out how to make the different types of poems speak to each other. Or just waiting for things to start to congeal.
I am also looking forward to editing books for Hanging Loose by Starr Davis and Miguel Coronado, and planning a book tour for Data Mind in 2025. I have a sabbatical from my teaching job at Rutgers in the Spring and want to use it to travel to places and read from my new book. If you are reading this and have ideas of where I should read, let me know.
