X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS

THE LAST INTERVIEW: Blake Middleton vs. The New Guy at XRAY

July 13, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

Blake Middleton is an actual person. A Floridian. An American. The co-worker of your bartender friend who you immediately like better than your bartender friend after just a few conversations. And a poet. The kind of poet who just wants everybody to feel less fucked. Writing concise, concrete lines that once piled together form a sort-of meditation, a smirking mantra of “Fuck You” in the face of an absurd world. What follows is a conversation/battle of wits between he and I, revolving around his new book “An Actual Person in a Concrete Historical Situation”—out now from CLASH Books. Part…

Crow Jonah Norlander

TROY JAMES WEAVER DOES A LITTLE CHATTING WITH GRAHAM IRVIN

May 18, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

Troy James Weaver is the author of Wichita Stories, Visions, Marigold, Temporal, and Selected Stories. His work often centers around young and vulnerable characters from rural areas struggling to fit into the world. He writes with an unparalleled rawness in quick, powerful bursts. A Troy James Weaver novel is quick and slim, but will change the way you think about writing and people both. In a blurb for Temporal, Scott McClanahan wrote, “[Troy] is our Witold Gombrowicz.” For Marigold, Michael Bible wrote, “[he] is the poet-laureate of Midwestern absurdity with a heart a mile wide.” Dennis Cooper wrote, as a blurb for Selected Stories, Troy’s collection out with…

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DYLAN KRIEGER in conversation with VI KHI NAO

April 20, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

VI KHI NAO: Your bios over the years read like a poem: “Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio, a poet, a performer, a repository of high hopes from hell, a pile of false eyelashes growing algae in South Louisiana, an automatic meaning generator writing the apocalypse in real time, a divining rod of ungodly proportions.” Where and when in your life are you not a poet? DYLAN KRIEGER: Over the course of my life, poetry has slowly permeated more and more of my speech, my encounters, my rituals. There are fewer and fewer places where I am not a poet,…

Crow Jonah Norlander

A REVIEW OF JOSHUA DALTON’S I HATE YOU, PLEASE READ ME by Selena Cotte

April 13, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

Joshua Dalton’s debut collection I Hate You, Please Read Me (House of Vlad Press, Feb 2021) can also be read as a novel in fragments: It uses tweets, direct messages, flash-length stories, and a much-anticipated closing screenplay to communicate a pitiful, media-saturated existence. While never explicit, it seems clear that the stories and interactions all exist in dare-we-say anti-hero Marshall Crawford’s world in varying degrees of intimacy, to paint a character portrait of self-pity, self-awareness, and self-abuse. Even stories about other characters appear as representations of his own self-image, merely presented from an angle, using TV tropes and dripping with…

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ENTITLED TO FEEL SOMETHING DARK: AN INTERVIEW WITH SHY WATSON by Brad Casey

March 9, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

The first time I met poet and writer Shy Watson was after a reading in Brooklyn I’d organized in the summer of 2019. I’d heard of Shy for years, admiring what seemed to me to be a prolific amount of published work; within three years she had published dozens of poems, reviews, interviews, four chapbooks and a poetry collection. She was somehow involved in all the independent presses and magazines I admired: Metatron, Wonder, Bottlecap Press, Ghost City Press, Peach Mag, and Hobart as well as running and editing her own press: Blush Lit. And her work was deserving of…

Crow Jonah Norlander

INTERVIEW WITH SIMON HAN with Taylor Hickney

November 17, 2020 · Interviews & Reviews

Simon Han, an Asian-American writer whose critically acclaimed debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, comes out on November 17th, took the time to speak to me about growing up as an immigrant in Plano—a suburb of Dallas, Texas—the racism of the American Dream, his craft decisions, and more. *** Taylor Hickney: To me this novel is about loneliness, families, the immigrant experience in America and the racism that goes along with it, the facades of the suburbs, and more. Where did the kernel of this story come from? How long did it take you to nurture it until it became what…

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“FIND THE PATTERNS”: A Review of Chloe N. Clark’s Collective Gravities by James McAdams

July 28, 2020 · Interviews & Reviews

To lift one particularly apposite description of a character in “Like the Desert Dark,” Chloe N. Clark “likes thinking about ‘ifs.’” Collective Gravities, her third collection (The Science of Unvanishing Objects, Finishing Line Press; Your Strange Fortune, Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), posits a world replete with paranormality. Like a symphony, these stories repeatedly touch upon the same subjects, explored, revealed, and experienced from a diverse variety of narrative perspectives. We can represent the frequency and range of this symphonic collection numerically. Subjects (admittedly subjective): # Stories these subjects occur in: astronauts/paranormal investigation…

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INTERVIEW WITH JAMES McADAMS by Jo Varnish

May 25, 2020 · Interviews & Reviews

James McAdams’s Ambushing the Void is released this month by Frayed Edge Press. I caught up with him for a chat about his book, his writing process, and his inspirations. JV: Ambushing the Void is a collection of stories drawn together by themes such as relationships, loss, and nostalgia, and told through truly memorable characters. Professor Pankova and Teo are two of many that will stay with me. Did you draw from real life counterparts for these and other characters? JM: It’s pretty easy for me to look at a person, or read/hear about a person on a podcast or Tweet,…

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PETS: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Jordan Castro (Review by Matthew Boyarsky)

April 14, 2020 · Interviews & Reviews

Pets: An AnthologyEdited by Jordan CastroReview by Matt Boyarsky I’ve been bitten by a dog exactly once. The dog’s name was Nelly. She jumped on me in what I thought to be a gesture of playfulness before she tore into my forearm. Nelly’s owner screamed. How could someone so good at making her happy do something horrible? “Do you need help?” she asked. I told her I was okay, that the dog was just doing her job. A dumb thing to say. The owner seemed the type of person to have her animals up to date on their shots, and…

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INTERVIEW WITH JEFF JACKSON: “HOW DO YOU MAKE ART THAT HAS STAKES WHEN PEOPLE AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION?” with Chris Gugino

December 17, 2019 · Interviews & Reviews

jeff jackson is a writer/playwright/artist/musician. he lives in charlotte, NC, and sings, writes, and performs with the group julian calendar. in october of last year, he released his second novel, destroy all monsters, which is a beautifully twisted novel with two sides, like a record (literally, you finish reading the first side and then flip the book over and read it from the back cover, returning to the middle of the book). destroy all monsters concerns an epidemic of musicians being murdered during their performances. there’s no tangible link between the victims, their killers, or the method in which said…

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