“I know the light and the shadows are definitionless without each other”
––Carl Phillips
Some of us take a moment to look back on the year.
Caroline Hagood/Translation Editor
- favorite book/poet/writer that taught me something: Editing Rebecca Suzuki’s When My Mother Is Most Beautiful was a transformative experience for me. The way that Suzuki plays with hybridity as a means of exploring art, love, language, and culture is just amazing.
- favorite moment: My favorite moments would have to be blurbing Jiwon Choi’s amazing poetry book, A Temporary Dwelling (forthcoming in 2024 from Spuyten Duyvil), and reading an ARC of Joanna Fuhrman’s brilliant Data Mind (forthcoming in 2024 from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press). Choi’s thought-provoking A Temporary Dwelling asks how we might reimagine gender, genre, and geopolitics, while Fuhrman’s Data Mind is just the kind of darkly funny, brilliant, and hypnagogic book we need about the Internet right now—as chatbots take over our lives.
- most challenging thing worked through: I think many would agree that it has been a tough year sociopolitically. My biggest challenge was figuring out how to keep showing up for my students and how to keep showing up for my writing as things grew darker. The answer, as usual, was reading. I made a practice of reading a poem each morning before doing anything else, and it did actually help. I really love The Slowdown poetry podcast/newsletter because Major Jackson’s poem choices are spot-on.
- projects: I put the finishing touches on my speculative memoir, Goblin Mode (forthcoming in 2025 from Santa Fe Writers Project). In Goblin Mode, the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn. In this supercharged three-day stretch, she navigates a city full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on subways, makes an ominous visit to a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, Puerto Rico at Christmastime, mothers two spirited children in an apartment that’s probably haunted, and lives in a world that may or may not be about to shut down. This state of goblin mode that she inhabits is metaphorical, said to have taken root since Covid and all the other sociopolitical unrest. But it’s also very real, in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely.
Mark Pawlak/Editor
Two books that have given me not comfort but rather a deeper understanding of our present world on fire: “Tracing Homelands” by my friend and former university colleague Linda Dittmar is an intimate account that uncovers inconvenient truths about an embattled Israeli-Palestinian history that is often buried in silence. Linda grew up in Israel and fought in the 1967 war. Her eloquently personal voice charts a reluctant eyewitness’ journey to uncover the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 war, while weaving flashbacks to the author’s Israeli youth and Zionist upbringing. A braided narrative told with empathy and unflinching honesty, it reflects on the Palestinian and Jewish lives entwined in this searing history.
The other: “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened:A bouquet for Victoria Amelina.”
Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist based in Kyiv. She won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works. Since 2022 Amelina had been collaborating with Ukrainian teams to document Russian war crimes and advocate for accountability for the international crimes committed by the Russian Federation and its troops. She was tragically killed in a senseless airstrike while eating with colleagues at a restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Amelina’s two essays in this collection, included with the many tributes and remembrances by colleagues gave me historical perspective on the tragedy ongoing in Ukraine.
Favorite event: hands down the celebration of UNVEILING, the collaboration of poems and paintings by Bob Hershon and his daughter, our HL art editor, Lizzie at the Jefferson Market Library in Manhattan in November. It was the first full gathering, post covid, of the Hanging Loose family of authors and friends.
Most challenging but ultimately rewarding was the invitation on short notice to be on the faculty of the summer Kettle Pond Writers Conference in the Adirondacks. Preparing a workshop and a reading of my poems were no-brainers, but I was also asked to give a lecture. What among many topics to choose from and bring fresh insights to without coming off as pedantic? I landed on a talk about Denise Levertov’s ideas about the poetic line, which she articulated in several essays. I found the perfect Levertov poem to give the audience as an exercise, which successfully conveyed her important ideas and Levertov’s exquisite craft.
I’m happy to report that the lengthy essay and memoir about my deceased friend and fellow poet Etheridge Knight that I started more than two decades ago shorty after his death and have tinkered with ever since is about to appear in the literary annual Spoke #10.
Project for 2024: I’m working on a long sequence of short Brechtian poems (working title “After Goya”) that emerged from my notebook jottings about the Ukraine war this year. It has occurred to me that one thread running through my many poetry collections over the years are poems about the wars of the 20th and now 21st Centuries. I plan to collect them together with the new Ukraine war poems into a collection of “disasters of war.”
Nina Lee Hook/Social Media Editor
My 2023 has been full of life transitions, lots of work and studying, and spending time figuring out where I see myself in the coming years. I had the amazing opportunity to live in London and Santa Monica before settling back in New York, where I decided would be my long-term home. I worked multiple jobs, took undergraduate and graduate classes, and presented my thesis – all of which were obstacles, yet taught me so much! As always, the one thing that grounded me was reading… as I dove into popular literary fiction from Donna Tartt and Hanya Yanagihara, poetry from Charles North, and lots of fantasy! I am so excited to continue learning about the Publishing industry and exploring my creative ideas in the coming new year.
Joanna Fuhrman/Editor
I am working on poems for what will— hopefully one day— be my 8th book of poetry; it’s tentatively titled The Last Phone Booth in the World. You can read some of them in the new Hanging Loose and Best American Poetry 2023, and in recent or forthcoming issues of Arts Fuse, Guesthouse, The Laurel Review, The South Dakota Review, and Swimm. You may have heard me refer to the manuscript as the “dead mother book,” but it’s also about clouds, childhood, telephone booths and language. Also, I am starting to set up readings for my forthcoming book of prose poems about the internet Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, October 2024).
Jiwon Choi/Editor
I have been writing my way into the world, a life saving act, for the past many years now, but these recent months have put into a particularly sharp focus how much we need poetry in our lives. Writing to push ourselves out of the darkness is how we help others find the light. A lot of my writing this year has drawn upon my childhood growing up in my uptown Manhattan neighborhood, much of it traumatic and unfortunate, a regular condition of the poor and immigrant class. But I am finally understanding that these experiences are foundational for my work as they offer an origin story that inspires me to craft a deeper understanding of the immigrant experience beyond pain and suffering. I work to find insight and expand my perspective as an artist. As a human being. Also, I was grateful to be included in some great readings and happy to be able to organize some in support of wonderful poets and artists. I hope to do more next year.
I finished my third book of poems, A Temporary Dwelling, which will be published in 2024 by Spuyten Duyvil. Thanks to Joan Larkin and Caroline Hagood for their generous support in the process. I have started on book four and count myself lucky to be able to say so.
Poets and Writers that have left an impression on me this year:
- Carl Phillips: My Trade is Mystery
- Joan Larkin: My Body
- Jack Agüeros: Lord is This a Psalm?
- Caroline Hagood: Ghosts of America
- Grace M.Cho: Haunting the Korean Diaspora
- Philip Levine: My Lost Poets
- Louise Bogan: Selected Letters 1920-1970
- Anne Carson: Glass, Irony & God
And I have found the light listening to so many tremendous jazz artists, notably Ahmad Jamal, Sam Rivers, Don Shirley, and John Coltrane.
Dick Lourie/Editor
I look back with satisfaction on the editing I’ve done this year. With support from all my colleagues and a lot of help from Thomas Moody, our ace associate editor, we got our two issues out (113 and 114) as planned. One of the problems it’s good to have: too much great material to fit. We had to “triage” work from one issue to the next.
I also edited Maria Dylan Himmelman’s Sundry Abductions, winner of our inaugural Founders’ Award for a poet’s first book. I welcomed the opportunity to work with such a talented author, and I’m proud of how the book turned out.
And I’m looking back—as I look ahead—at my own writing. I made some progress in 2023 with more time spent on it—always a challenge for me—and I want to keep that going, as I continue forward on my current project, a book-length poem about radio.
And one big thing: gratitude for the way my editorial colleagues have worked so collaboratively all this year. We’re at a point where our staff of editors comprises, literally, two generations. We old hands have some to teach, and much to learn, as we carry on this HL project together. We’ve done it this year, and I’m confident that we’ll keep doing it. 
