One Question: Short Conversations with Poets

The form is simple, and singular: one poet, one question, one very short essay. Over and over. Lounging at the intersection of conversation and poetry, of essay and dialogue, this book gathers together a small selection of very brief interviews with some of the world’s finest living poets. For years, Jesse Nathan has been publishing these popular interviews—each one presented with one of his deliciously short, vivid, sharp-edged introductory essays—online at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Taken together, that body of work represents an essential glimpse—a core sample—of contemporary poetry, catching the trends and contours of the terrain, but also making visible the ways that the poets of our time are confronting the deepest issues of our time. Now a little sample of that core sample, a taste of it, appears here in print for the first time. The poets—including Diane Seuss, Arthur Sze, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jorie Graham, Frank Bidart, Raúl Zurita, Robert Hass, Cathy Park Hong, Ross Gay, Safiya Sinclair, Fady Joudah, and so many others—take the candor of these exchanges in all kinds of directions, from sex to artistic form to the politics and crises of our time.

Jesse Nathan is the author of Eggtooth, a debut collection of poems that won the New Writers Award, the Housatonic Book Prize, and the Kansas Book Award, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His writing appears in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Threepenny Review, and the New Republic, among others. Nathan teaches literature at UC Berkeley. He was raised in northern California and rural Kansas, and lives now in Oakland.