Interview with Sarah Kravitz

 

 

Here’s an interview with Sarah Kravitz, who gave Bop Dead City “Type Anatomy.”

 

She’s on the right.

Describe your work in 25 words or less.

There are poems that feel tangible. Those poems are not mine. My poems shatter into abstraction when they hit the concrete.

 

Tell me about your poem “Type Anatomy.”

I have teased letters all my life—in “Type Anatomy,” I wanted to expose text, to caress the aesthetics of font, to undress Helvetica and explore the sensuality of typographic representation.

 

What or who inspires you to write?

Fleeting expressions on my students’ faces. A cringe. A silence. Family legends. All the dark crevices of the mind.

 

What authors have influenced you as a writer?

Pablo Neruda. Allen Ginsberg. Thomas Pynchon. Joyce Carol Oates. Sylvia Plath. Aldous Huxley. Philip K. Dick. Haruki Murakami. Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez. Raymond Carver. Margaret Atwood. Sandra Cisneros. Virginia Woolf. Jonathan Safran Froer.

 

Do you have a blog/website?

http://holonymy.wordpress.com/

 

Where can we read you next?

My piece “Punishing a Fig Tree” was recently published in Stone Highway Review. http://www.stonehighway.com/uploads/8/0/0/8/8008182/shr_sept_13_pdf_large.pdf

 

What are you working on right now?

I have abandoned two consecutive novels on page 280. I hope to return to these neglected works, particularly 00:11 Universal, a work of speculative fiction that describes a man who is a prisoner of introspection. However, my current focus is on academic publications.

 

Any advice for other writers?

Persistence. Patience. Perspective. Seek the profound within the personal.