LISTEN to my 2017 conversation with poet and essayist Lissa Kiernan on her award-winning book of braided essays, Glass Needles & Goose Quills – Elementary Lessons in Atomic Properties, Nuclear Families and Radical Poetics. Kiernan’s first full-length volume of poetry, Two Faint Lines in the Violet (Negative Capability Press, 2014), was a Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award finalist, as well as a finalist for the Julie Suk Award for Best Poetry Book by an Independent Press. Kiernan founded and directs the Poetry Barn, a literary center based in New York’s Catskill Park.
“Lissa Kiernan’s Glass Needles & Goose Quills is a brilliant book of bearing witness – from the death of a beloved father, to the environmental catastrophe of our times, and to the relation of body and landscape. Endlessly formally inventive, Kiernan juxtaposes nuclear plant industry reports, newspaper accounts, and texts on poetics with her own poems and prose. Fearless and unflinching, this hybrid collection is both documentary and deeply personal. This book demands our attention.” – Nicole Cooley, author of Breach.
Yours in Radio, Sharon