#The tinderbox santa monica Patch
I feel immensely grateful that I live in a place where I can have a small patch of yard, a little room to stretch, to roam, and that I can loop my neighborhood on foot without too much fear of crowds. So, lately, I’ve been honing that practice. Well, because I’ve long been prone to catastrophizing, and to taking in too much news, over the years I’ve had to teach myself to try to find something miraculous in the narrower sightlines of daily life. MB: I’m delighted to join you, Kasey, and I hope you are taking care in this startling and scary time. What is bringing you joy these days, or pleasure, or comfort-what is helping you? I’m thinking of both poetry-related things (reading or writing practices, particular books or poems) and non-poetry-related ones, though I know there’s not always a meaningful distinction between the two. It feels important, first, to acknowledge where we are, in a large sense: in the midst of a pandemic, with stay-at-home orders in place in both your state (Illinois) and mine (Pennsylvania). KJ: Monica, thank you for being open to having this conversation with me. She and I emailed back and forth between April and early August of this year, from her home in Galesburg, IL to mine in Philadelphia.
I was thrilled when Monica agreed to this interview. From there, I moved on, joyfully, to her books: No Shape Bends the River So Long (a collaboration with poet Beth Marzoni), winner of the 2013 New Measure Poetry Prize Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live, winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Poetry Open and Elsewhere, That Small, published by Free Verse Editions at Parlor Press in early 2020.
Kasey Jueds: I first found and fell in love with Monica Berlin’s writing via a group of poems that appeared in the Salvage/Selvage issue of Quarterly West.
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