Vermont poet Michael Metivier speaks with Vermont novelist Makenna Goodman about her debut, The Shame (Milkweed, 2020). With humor and vivacity, the book charts the internal struggles of its narrator, Alma.

Good Friday

Smoke alarm, you rouse me
to the dark, my thoughts
like crowds outside my door.

It’s possible one could go their entire lives and experience a single death, only their own. The aftermath of unpredictable tragedy, there would be nothing to observe, nothing to predicate one’s visions and versions of death.

Along the street I watched
them burn plastics.
Farms, often as not,
stretching back throats
to the mountain.

Tropicália is a book that doesn’t pull its punches or steer away from the absurd, pulling in readers from the first line, “She devoured tiny Americans that came out of vending machines.”

Rain won’t fall, won’t fall and won’t.
When I learned the word virga

I learned how full a cloud could be,
Every word worth an extended visit,

Visit meaning to both comfort and afflict.

and every year I still yearn to write them—the leaves,
signature picture of beauty
inevitable
and stock as a sunset.

Dialogues with Rising Tides testifies to how we are inextricably intertwined in a web of ecological disaster, intergenerational trauma, and a persistent murmuring chorus of our own underlying fears and anxieties.

These delicate buds
of early Spring —

Late one evening in early summer, Frank and I sat in gathering dampness and dark, having just doused the fire where we had cooked dinner. We were on the western side of our meadow, near the oaks, looking into the swale where night collected first.

No dream nor waking spirit prevents / my tendency to wander / my tendency to run with pride / my vanity

In Amblyopia, Ananda Lima interrogates the imprecision of sight, the movement from one language to another, the blurred space in between.