Slushies, get ready for some trailblazing poems in the form of mathematical proofs, theorems, and other types of mathematical reasoning that level their gaze at heartbreak. One poem even embeds a second poem as a footnote. Alex reminds us all of the hermit crab essay/poem format, prompting Sam to recall Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , in which the end of a powerful love is likened to the experience of shedding yet still living with an abandoned skin or shell. Come along for a ride with some poetic work...
Feb 12, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast If your story had a sound, Slushies. What would it be? A rush, a zuzz, a sizzle? David Landon’s “Bach, Onomatopoeia, and the Wreck” triggers a discussion of stories and sounds, and poems that resist narrative closure. Shane Chergosky’s “Headwind” takes us down a different path. Erasures, Slushies. Ammi right? Listen to us puzzle over the way erasures “make it new” and simultaneously obliterate and conjure the from which they’re made. Special note: Jason reads the erasure twice. First as a robot,...
Jan 30, 2023•48 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast How much meaning do you need, Slushies? When language lingers, when images form a spiral, a murmuration, might a poem’s mood hold meaning close to its heart and simultaneously at bay? And, also, how do you pronounce ‘ichor’? All this and more in a rollicking conversation about poet Nick Visconti’s new work, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” And speaking of things, listen for Samantha on Anne Carson’s zen koan dollop of insight from Red Doc> : “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous th...
Dec 13, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast We have a special treat, Slushies!! In today's episode, you’ll get a duet from Nancy T and Rachael Philipps. Starting with the accents of Long Island , T’s poem makes Alex think of Nassau and Suffolk County while Marion recalls Billy Joel's music. The language also leaves the crew thinking about Tracey J Smith’s, “ Solstice .” The tables turn when the crew reads, Philipp’s “After you left us,” going from jargon about the sounds of the world to the description of human remains. With cremation on ...
Sep 22, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s okay to be somber, Slushies! Don't let the poetic gestures confuse you as the rhythm and pacing contribute to a starburst of flash fiction by Maria McLeod. The obligation to help the writer leaves the crew thinking, as Kathy recalls Dubus’s “ A Fathers Story ” and Marion thinking of “ The Defeated ” on Netflix. “The Eternal Fall Backwards” will have you captured in the stream of the writer's thoughts and deeply invested in remaining there. What piece of media did you recall while reading “T...
Aug 26, 2022•44 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast Join us as we consider a pack of poems by Pier Wright, and the complexities of pacing, prosody , and narrative poems with strange and powerful images: memory, tenderness, a “magnificent young moose,” & the magic of being caught in the act. Kathleen “Gratitude” Volk Miller, champion explicator and advocate for gratitude and neuroplasticity , analyzes the “small pointy hats of hope” as lovers entwine. Jason “Gorgeous Vectors” Schneiderman loves sticky collisions. Gabby and Alex and the crew ponder...
Aug 08, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Slushies, what are some ways a writer may gain your trust? Kathy lifts a brow at poems including questions. Marion looks side ways at pop-cultural references. (Check out this favorite of ours from issues past.) But these poems may make them think otherwise. In “Diving For Pearls” the imagery pulls us into the world of Bedouin and sea-faring cultural economy. Or how “Tidying up with Marie Kondo ” may trivialize the idea of the context of curiosity. Speaking of sparking your joy— or not— what was ...
Jul 18, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you pronounce “ San Gorgonio ,” Slushies? How do you say “ Schuylkill ?” We talk regional accents, local knowledge, and artistic craft-- from the risks of the pathetic fallacy to the unknowability of metaphor, the art of ambiguity, and, of course, the golden shovel . Join us for an episode devoted to poems by Marko Capoferri where we discuss poetic craft, resonant symbols, and the peculiar power of telephone poles. What can’t you pronounce where you live? Links to things we discuss that y...
Jun 07, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello Slushies. Do you see the string? Past the blooming peonies and fungus gnats? Follow us into the labyrinth of our minds as we discuss the work of Eric Stiefel . You may need to brush up on your Greek mythology and Italian literature as a guide. A discussion about various versions of ourselves turns into discussion of an app that animates photographs of faces and National Mason Jar Day (November 30th). And, maybe, the only way out of the labyrinth of the mind is to open your mouth only to fo...
May 20, 2022•46 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast Slushies, are you ready to take a deep dive into some fiction? Listen to “Benefitting Positions,” at the link below, or read it here . Would you ever hire a professional hugger, or would you want to be one? Listen in as the group discusses the concept of professional snuggling and what the drive is behind good fiction. In this time of social distancing, the topic of touch has become more pignant than ever, and very much so in Jac Smith's piece. Maybe you’ll be a different kind of touched when yo...
Apr 28, 2022•37 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast We’re thrilled to consider new poems and flash fiction by Dr. Emily Kingery on this episode. Subtle and specific and utterly compelling, these poems make us ponder and pause and praise. We’re global as ever, Slushies: from Lititz, PA, to the KGB Bar, Gabby is somewhere in Powelton, it’s last year’s Ramadan (Ramadan Kareem!), Samantha hasn’t gotten married yet, and Kingery’s got us thinking about the trouble we got into in high school basements. Time warps and shapes shift! Listen in & enjoy. Thi...
Feb 21, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Slushies, do you know your shades and types of blue? Do you know how to say blue in Russian? When we talk of St. Petersburg, are we talking about Russia? Or Florida? When we discuss Max Lasky’s poems we discuss what we call things and how we write things and what to call the things we write. (Discuss what ‘lyric’ means amongst yourselves.) “Come Here” takes the table to a scene in Maryland, once home to Jason and his long “O,” and is heavy in Hikmet. After reading “Prothalamion Poured from a Cop...
Dec 13, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Slushies! We’re excited to release this episode featuring three poems by Hillary Adler: "Did You Google that or Shake a Magic 8 Ball?"; "We Must Be Animals"; and "Letter to Erika from a Bench on Christopher St." Recorded in the spring of 2020, our crew is well locked down but looking up, delighted to be reading poems together from afar. We’re down with “dirty words,” Slushies, and the ontology of the self, despite Marion’s broken thumb. It’s animality and the annoyingness of humans in “We Must B...
Nov 22, 2021•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Featuring Sarah St. Vincent & Karolina Zapal How many times can we reference the 90’s before you actually start believing that we can time travel? Are hairspray bangs enough (specifically Kirsten Dunst’s lack of them in On Becoming a God in Central Florida )? As the editorial table moves through space-time in our usual fashion, starting off in 1991, Sarah St. Vincent gives us a feeling of the WWE moments of intimacy which make, as Jason says with some Hulk Hogan gusto, YOUR BODY SING WITH PAIN! ...
Oct 22, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast In anticipation of the Collingswood Book Festival , we thought it might be nice to have some of our senior editors and a couple of festival participants sit down for a proper chat about poetry and community, the anonymity of sending work out into the void and the anonymity of masks, and of course, bears and bathrobes. Enjoy and let us know what you think! Has the pandemic made writing more universal or melted our minds so terribly that our relationship to literature has changed? Will readings st...
Sep 28, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is about allusions, Slushies. How do poems gain dimension by relying on references? Where is that ekphrastic sweet spot? Listen in as we focus on the poems of July Westhale. Under the influence of her work, we talk glass flowers , ghost towns, road trips, and snow. Here are links to a few of the references and allusion we make on the show, inspired by Westhale’s way of seeing the world: This is America ; “ My Mother is a Fish” ; Teresa Leo’s Junkie ; and ee cumminings [i carry your ...
Jun 30, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daydream Believer Listen in as pop culture, nostalgia, and formal craft converge in a discussion of poems by Jeff Royce. As of this recording “we are not the epicenter,” but it feels as if we have all the time in the world as the pandemic spirals on just outside the sound of our voices. Royce has us remembering The Monkeys and Lava Lamps, recalling Larkin’s famous insight that “They F&^% you up, your mum and dad,” and imagining angel trumpets and panthers (both Rilke’s famous panther poem and Te...
Jun 09, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is all about craft and connections: literary craft and professional connections. In the notoriously small world of poetry and creative writing, should editors recuse themselves from making editorial decisions? Things get wonderfully complicated when you know a poet— be it from grad school, from a workshop, from a conference. Or from dressing up in potentially crass Halloween costumes. (Listen for further confirmation that Jason and Kathy are soul mates via their 90s -era matching Pr...
May 25, 2021•53 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast POEMS BY KAILEY TEDESCO THREE POEMS ACCEPTED April 28, 2020 Bloomwards & Eggsome What’s your background, Slushies? Sounds like a loaded question, right? But it’s really a reference to your choice of green-screen background Zoomery. This episode opens with a larking conversation about our current delight in Zoom’s capacity to allow us to upload virtual backgrounds for our physical spaces. (The discussion of poems starts at 8:01 if you want to skip the banter). Kathleen’s surrounded by tulips (whi...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Courtesy of www.FridaKahlo.org Frida Khalo’s 1946 oil painting The Wounded Deer Dear Slushies, on this episode we focus on the heart of literary editing and pose the age-old question: “What do you like when you like what you like?” We also break our own rules on this episode of The Slush Pile. Instead of flipping our thumbs at the end of each poem we’re scheduled to consider, we decide to discuss a group of poems by Shari Caplan as a suite. She submitted three poems about the female gaze, and we...
Apr 08, 2021•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast How big is an alligator heart, Slushies? Have seen the wingspan of a Sand Hill Crane (a bird once mistaken for the Jersey Devil )? And what happens when you put Mentos in your soda? Life and its peculiarities, its soaring losses and aching beauty, and its utter, utter absurdity come barreling at us in “a flood of images” in Ryan Bollenbach’s poems, 2 of which we consider on today’s episode. Bollenbach has us recalling Willem Defoe at Sgt. Elias in Oliver Stone’s Platoon and envisioning Florida’s...
Mar 29, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dramatic tension in this episode, slushies! “There are no ties in baseball,” but what are the rules for editorial meetings? What happens when the editorial board splits? Do we flip thumbs, thumb wrestle, or rely on another voice to make the choice? Marion joins us from her “transitional liminal space” in the Marlton Hotel in NYC, while Kathleen and Addison call in from Drexel University, and Jason from his Brooklyn home. We launch into three poems by Sarah Best, an assortment of vivid, imagistic...
Dec 20, 2020•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dear Slushies, have you ever heard a theremin? Visited Utah? Tried a baked Alaska? Join us for an episode dedicated to poems by Natasha Sajé, whose work explores belonging, queerness, & womanhood in a flow of humour, insight, and vivid images. In “Dear Utah,” Sajé takes us on a trip through her connection with her now-familiar state, which she “complained about for one-third of [her] life”. “Is Homosexuality Contagious?” directly addresses the reader as it contemplates homosexuality, politics, a...
Aug 31, 2020•48 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a rainy day in Philly, even rainier in NYC, and curiously blue in Abu Dhabi. We’re wondering whether you can OD on zinc, what’s happening on planet Saadiyat, and whether ghosts are real. These poems are full of curious imagery, versatile movements and occasional hot-pants and sneeze-ghosts. We loved journeying through each one, which took us, “artfully all over the place.” We learned about Caroline Knox’s poems, cellist Miroslav Rastropovich ’s work, and Culpeper’s Herbal . Thank you, James...
Aug 04, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dear Slushies, join the PBQ crew (which includes a freshly-tenured Jason Schneiderman) for a pre-pandemic recording of our discussion of 3 poems by the wonderful Vasiliki Katsarou’s work. Be sure to read the poems on the page below as you listen. They’ll require your eyes and ears-- and “a decoder ring.” The team has a grand old time explicating these artful poems. The muses are sprung and singing in us as we read and decide on this submission. Katsarou’s poems teach us to read them without proj...
Jun 21, 2020•41 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast Be warned. We love the writers who submit to PBQ, slushies. We love doing this podcast. And we love you; we love that you listen to us discuss and deliberate. In short, slushies, as Mister Rogers would say: “1-4-3.” One. Four. Three. (I. L-o-v-e. Y-o-u). (Get it?!). We do. It’s hopeless. We’re hooked. We discuss 3 poems by James Pollock in this episode. Join us for this wonderfully raucous discussion of craft and precision, technology and point of view, and big ass fans™. Addison is sleep depriv...
May 12, 2020•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Well before we found ourselves in the COVID 19 pandemic, we had the sniffles on this episode, slushies. But neither head colds nor hangovers will keep us from the great pleasure of discussing Daryl Jones’ “Not Your Ordinary Doppleganger.” The poem’s gentle humor and delightful details have us in stitches: the poem puts the “P” in poetry, the “P” in PBQ. (There is a badly delivered dad joke buried in that sentence, slushies, apologies-- trust us, the poem does it better). Listen in as: Jason reve...
Apr 22, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Coffee: a security blanket, health-hazard, and world-tilting device. Hey slushies, today we’re discussing Frank X. Christmas’ poem “Coffee, Ice Cream.” But first! Alien business people are descending on Drexel’s cafeteria (“the place… where people eat?”) and our editors are braving malfunctioning footwear and costume parties. Much mayhem at the top of this episode, Slushies, so if you’re eager to check out the poem and the critique you can skip ahead to minute [11.35]. Frank X. Christmas’ poem i...
Mar 22, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello Slushies! Today, we put the “pee” in PBQ when Jason reminds us not to over-hydrate (it’s a thing!). Marion is in the Philadelphia Studio and Samantha in Portland for the Tin House Summer Workshop, which triggers an epic donut-discussion. Must-try doughnuts: VooDoo Doughnuts in Portland, Federal Doughnuts in Philadelphia, and Dough in New York City. After daydreaming about desserts, and resisting the bullying power of nutrition Apps, we dive into three poems by Tanya Grae. These poems are i...
Feb 07, 2020•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a beautiful fall day in the neighborhood, slushies. Kathy’s in love with the equinox, Jason’s in his bathrobe, Joe has a new porn name (“Brusque 80”), and Marion is in air-conditioned climate denial. (It’s always sunny in Abu Dhabi!). We kick off briskly with three poems by Blake Campbell. “The right parts of the brain light up / for the wrong reasons” in Campbell’s “New Year” and our brains can’t stop sparking about the wonderful terribleness of a bad day. Editors spar over the poem’s pote...
Dec 17, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
