Grad Research: Julie Kantor publishes chapbook, LAND

Exciting news: Ph.D. student Julie Kantor has published a new chapbook of poetry, LAND, with Dikembe Press, and will be reading and signing copies of the book at Farewell Books on Friday, May 15 at 7:00pm.We asked Julie about her process and the themes of the chapbook:

I wrote the first two poems of LAND in a BART from San Francisco's airport to the Mission. Reviewing the photographs of the bird's eye view captured on my phone from the flight from New York, the lines that carved mountains served purpose other than to demarcate peaks & their inclines; these were the mappings of my veins, of my (then) partners', those living at the heels to follow in—the way earth comes toward & falls away in the cragged valleys is the way we become, or unbecome, together in what is lost, in what is yet to come into existence. There is more than we can see or feel.The "we" of LAND, the story of their travels, seek a way to continue through means that are in excess of the actual, of and beyond it. LAND infolds within it many worlds--no one is dominate over another; the distinguishing qualities that tell us when we don't belong somewhere we inhabit, atmospheres that tell stories, leaving us uncomfortable aren't present; there are no caution signs. “We” roam to find a place that can hold, sustain them, but every thing is tenuous. Attempting to understand the world one way doesn't work out, because living in the world only one way is untenable.

Julie's poetry has also been published in Boston Review, A Public Space, Maggy, and Foothill. Her work is being translated into Ukrainian for a new modern American poetry anthology, and she is a poetry reader and writes microreviews for Boston Review. LAND, published by Dikembe Press, is her first chapbook.