Monday, June 29, 2026
Touch the Donkey at a Zine Fair in Sherbrooke QC + at Jarvis Square Books, Chicago
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
TtD supplement #301 : seven questions for Hannah Brooks-Motl
Her sequence “A chooser” appears in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “A chooser.”
A: An extended lyric that meditates on the choosingness that is involved in any making. This not that. Those things here. The poem tries to take the non-neutral activity of selection—the condition of being “a chooser”—seriously but also lightly. Which words are large? How large? Those words, really? Quotidian events witnessed on walks through degraded natural vital northeastern US New England locations: why this now here? Aesthetic, actual, political, metaphysical stuff like that. I wrote it during a period when most of my poems were “about” the earthy transcendence and transaction that is poetry and making poems from, in, and across sites of the everyday and the more-special-than.
Q: What prompted this particular shift?
A: You know, I think actually “A chooser” is a poem just before a shift? It’s got some similar architecture to my book Ultraviolet of the Genuine and was in fact written after I’d finished that manuscript. So it is kind of a tail-end poem. Bottom of full exhale. Natural pause of a particular thought or style of thinking that had sustained a particular moment, an ars poetica moment, in which constellating the fallen modes, disgraced objects, sullen affects became my primary objective as it seemed to me this was what poetry was good for, a kind of recuperation. In this way the big words might be read as jokey and desperate—a joke about how desperate are the poem’s efforts?
Q: Where are you currently, then? Mid-shift, or further along? What is that process looking like?
A: I am currently more interested in the left margin than I’ve been in a while. Doing word by word writing as opposed to phrasal movements that want space, choreography. I get up very early to write, that’s still the same, but now the work seems (to me) harder, it wants to move faster, get clipped at strange angles, it feels more obdurate—almost punishing. One way to describe this might be “a fury.”
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?
A: Amelia Rosselli, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Anna Mendelssohn; I’ve been reading around in outsider psychology from the 1960s—R.D. Laing mostly. He might be there too.
Q: Why outsider psychology? And how do you see it, if at all, affecting the poems?
A: The psychology is for another project (prose) but of course it jumps the prose/poetry barrier. Laing is often mislabeled an “anti-psychologist,” accused, for example, of saying schizophrenia was caused by family of origin. While he was deeply suspicious of medical diagnoses that concerned only behavior and then-emerging-now-prevailing pharmacopsychiatry, he bitterly proclaimed until the end that he had not endorsed that view. However, the social, cultural, phenomenological models of minds, particularly those in extremity, that he did propose are deeply affecting, in part because he wrote so wildly and so well. I recommend “Bird of Paradise” from The Politics of Experience. For me, poetry tracks mind’s movements and for the last few months existential psychology has offered new rhythms, vocabularies to do that.
Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks over the past decade-plus, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: I hope it’s getting stranger and, within that strangeness, more accurate.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Reading is always energizing for me, so I’d say the writers I’ve already listed as important to what’s going on now. I return to Lorine Niedecker, Iris Murdoch, Wong May, Emerson, Montaigne, Marguerite Young, Ernst Bloch, and the work and example of my friends—Dan Bevacqua, Emily Hunt, Sara Nicholson, Scout Turkel, Kai Ihns, Peter Gizzi, Hai-Dang Phan, Ben Estes, Alan Felsenthal, Stacy Jo Scott, Jae Choi, Joanie Cappetta, Patrick Morrissey, Mark Leidner, Anya Klepikov among many others!
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
TtD supplement #300 : six questions for MA│DE
Their poems “ROBIN HOOD MORALITY TEST,” “PRESIDENTIAL FITNESS TEST,” “ROMBERG’S TEST,” “SCHAMROTH WINDOW TEST,” “FAULT INJECTION” and “HAFELE & KEATING EXPERIMENT” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Robin Hood Morality Test,” “Presidential Fitness Test,” “Romberg’s Test,” “Schamroth Window Test,” “Fault Injection” and “Hafele & Keating Experiment.”
A: The genealogy of these poems goes all the way back to our earliest days of collaboration and our debut chapbook, Test Centre (ZED Press, 2019; reviewed by you back in the day!), which was when we first started writing and publishing poems about various types of ‘tests’ — psychological, mechanical, physiological and so on. Years later, the Test Centre poems became relevant again as we were putting together our third poetry collection, Detourism (forthcoming in 2028 with Palimpsest Press).
Detourism amalgamates six collaborative experiments undertaken during the first six years of our work as MA|DE (2018–2024). The six experiments/sections function like individual chapbooks within the layout of the full collection, and each takes the reader on a journey through a new zone of collaborative poetic potential. We like to conceptualize Detourism as the poetic equivalent of a compilation of ‘B-Sides and Rarities’ — the kind of thing a band releases once they’re a few full-length records into their career.
When we were putting together the “Test Centre” section of Detourism, it was the only one based on an actual publicly released chapbook, and we didn’t want it to be merely a retread of that early release — so we opted to virtually double our original content, writing a large number of new poems about new tests, including the six that appear in touch the donkey. We often wonder if these more recent test poems, written after several years of collaboration as MA|DE, read any differently than the original test poems written during our earliest days of collaboration together. That might be a fun problem for a keen reader to parse!
Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: We shift gears a lot in our work — most projects tend to be self-contained, with their own well-defined sets of constraints and collaborative approaches. That’s true, of course, for these test poems, but also true for two other full-length poetry projects we’ve been working on lately. One of these explores a highly constrained form of our own devising and incorporates graphic elements; the other is more intertextual, looser in some ways, very focused on how words interact and are positioned on the page.
In all cases, what we are trying to maintain throughout our poetry is a distinct ‘voice’ for MA|DE. Regardless of which of us writes a given line or section, it must all conjure what we refer to as our ‘third mind.’ We don’t ever want a reader to be able to look through a text and identify which parts were written by ‘Mark’ and which by ‘Jade.’ Developing MA|DE’s voice, and writing into it, is a process we are continually refining.
Q: I’m always curious how collaborators see their own individual works shifting. Is there a way to return to either of your own work habits or approaches unchanged? What influence do either of you see in your own work from these collaborative projects?
To answer this, we’ll step out of our collective position for a moment, and respond individually…
Laliberte: For me, MA|DE has increasingly become a primary artistic concern. So, when I’m conceiving of something new and testing out that idea on the page, I always have to make a decision about whether to introduce it into MA|DE’s ecosystem — based mostly on whether it has a generous amount of space for Jade to slide into and co-occupy. If there is, a process of becoming can begin together …
If not, I’ll decide that it’s better to cast that idea into the pond of my own solo practice. At this point, MA|DE’s projects tend to be intensive, rigorously conceptualized, painstakingly framed and then fully explored. Therefore, when working alone, I’ve noticed that I’ve become most attentive to the pleasures of short-form writings — investing my time exploring more minimal poetic gestures, and developing a form of bastard/mongrel haiku in particular. Very precise minimalism and wordplay seems well-suited to a single voice.
Wallace: Writing collaboratively forces me to pay more attention to my own artistic patterns and proclivities, so I can avoid replicating those idiosyncrasies when writing in ‘third mind’ mode for MA|DE. This self-awareness exercise is also helpful for honing my individual voice; it allows me to identify and emphasize the tendencies in my work that seem meaningful, while avoiding various pitfalls (creative ruts, unambitious shortcuts and the like). Collaborative writing also gives me the opportunity to attempt projects that I simply couldn’t do alone because I don’t have all of the skill sets and ideas that Mark brings to the table. Participating in such necessarily collaborative projects sometimes allows me to expand my own individual capacities and other times makes clear my ongoing limitations. I also have to say that having a dedicated collaborative practice like MA|DE does inevitably makes it a little harder to preserve time for my solo work.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting as your combined, collaborative selves? Are you looking at any other collaborations or collaborators for influence?
A: The most direct influence on MA|DE’s collaborative approach is undoubtedly the artist collective FASTWÜRMS, self-described as “the trademark of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, a they/them joint authorship and poly-disciplinary artist.” FASTWÜRMS was actually Mark’s MFA supervisor at the University of Guelph back in the early 2000s, where he completed a degree in Studio Art. At that time, the idea of a long-term collaborative partnership with its own framework and defined existence, separate from its individual creators, really began to intrigue him — and certainly the way Kim and Dai had intertwined life & art had a lot to do with that. They really do exist in the Canadian arts scene, and at the University of Guelph, as their own kind of collective ‘entity’; they are two people but share one ‘Associate Professor’ designation at the school of fine arts, for example, which is a really interesting victory within the institution.
Of course, musicians take this approach all the time when they start a band and name themselves. This naming invokes a persona — cynically, it could be viewed as branding, but it’s also a way to aim collective energy at a shared, continually developing creative mythology. And if it’s done right, it expands in service of the work and takes on a life of its own. This kind of shared, creative positionality seems to be a bit less common in other art forms. There are examples of writers who have done it — Michael Field, the pseudonym under which Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper wrote poetry and plays together for many years, being one example — though this seems to be the exception rather than the norm. More commonly, what we see when writers collaborate is that they tend to do it in a way that tries to preserve their individual voices within the work. This includes retaining their individual names, brought together with an ampersand, which to us seems like a very informal bit of punctuation. One-off or shorter term collaborations are certainly pleasurable endeavours. While this is a completely valid way of working, we chose a more foundational, familial, esoteric path with MA|DE.
Q: With a handful of published chapbooks, a full-length collection and a further forthcoming, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your collaborations have progressed? Where do you see this particular project heading?
In our early poetic projects we were working to establish MA|DE’s voice, and testing out different approaches to collaborative composition, refining our tone through various poetic projects. As we continue to write together, our focus is shifting toward testing the limits of that voice, and looking for new ways to use it. Most recently, we are seeing if we are capable of writing something akin to a mainstream genre novel, which seems about as far in the opposite direction as we could get from experimental poetry. Genre fiction, of course, requires skill sets related to plotting, character development, et al., and while we may have some of those skills individually, we are still figuring out how they work in practice when we have to create something wholistic at such a large scale. A mainstream fiction voice is rather different than a poetic voice: it requires clarity, concreteness and other things we are happy to do away with much of the time in poetry. We also think a lot about what it might mean to be innovative and surprising within the context of mainstream/genre fiction, which tends to be somewhat more rule and arc oriented than our usual milieu.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
Oh rob, this is a very interesting question. We sense that other writers do this often, but in a way this approach is very foreign to how we work, either as MA|DE or individually. Both of us are voracious readers (and Mark, in particular, is a huge collector of printed matter), but we rarely read a book twice, even if we continue to ponder certain texts for years afterward. Neither of us is really sure why returning to beloved texts doesn’t happen more … there just seems to be so many new things to discover in the eternal present. To put it another way: there are many authors we admire, but they don’t necessarily animate our current work at any given time. For us, each project we work on tends to have its own set of demands and inspirations. We like to create reading/research lists as we begin to conceptualize a project, which we add to as we proceed. The greatest source of energy in our artistic practice is surprise. Finding new writers and works that speak to us and whatever issues we are in dialogue with is very helpful; coming across a text coincidentally that dovetails perfectly with a current project is very invigorating. The combination of preparation and chance is a heady artistic alchemy.
If our reading audience is interested in knowing more about who / what we’re reading, there are a few easy places they can access where we reveal what literary energies are lighting us up in the moment: MA|DE recently started a monthly newsletter on Substack — in it, we almost always mention new books we’ve bought or read in a given period, we really geek out on our love of literature there. Also, both of us individually log what we’re reading on Goodreads pretty religiously; those accounts can be accessed here and here!
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
TtD supplement #299 : seven questions for Joel Chace
Four poems from “against which” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “against which.”
A: “against which” is the title of the third and final sequence of poems in a full-length collection, Bone Chapel, set to be published by Charles Alexander’s Chax Press later this calendar year. In this series, there are sixty poems total, and eight that begin with the exact words “Against which.” The remaining fifty-two poems all start with words that make approximate rhymes with “Against which”: “A guest which,” “Egress glitch,” “Unclenched fist,” and so on. As I recall, the words “against which” somehow popped into my head, possibly in a dream, though they may have been triggered by “Against which, advance the war,” from Macbeth, a play that I must have taught a hundred times over the course of my career. I honestly don’t remember how the notion of developing an entire sequence occurred to me.
Q: How does this work compare to some of the other writing you’ve been doing lately?
A: The collections that have preceded Bone Chapel – fata morgana, Unlikely Books, and Underrated Provinces, MadHat – represent, among other things, a greater focus on spirit as it manifests itself in nature, including human nature, and in an ongoing conversation among thinkers and writers across centuries. In addition, in Underrated Provinces I began using strict counting as a structural method, especially in the first sequence of that book, where the first poem employs single-line stanzas, the second poems employs two-line stanzas, onto the ten-line stanzas in the tenth piece. In Bone Chapel, all the poems in the second section employ five-word lines (as well as five-line stanzas), and the pieces in the third and final section employ six-word lines.
Q: What brought this interest in working, as you call it, “counting as a structural method”? What do you feel working such structures allows or provides in your work?
A: I started using this procedure as I developed the sequence entitled “toe” [Var(2x): Joel Chace, toe], which will be the second section in my upcoming book, Bone Chapel. Five toes led me to five-line stanzas. Then I thought, “Why not five-word lines?” I enjoyed what happened with that series, so I continued using the method in two sequences that followed.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?
A: Yes, I do. Just one. Louis Zukovsky, in various sections of his A.
Q: Explain.
A: About halfway through his tour de force A, Zukovsky started to use lines based solely on word count, primarily five-word lines and even two-word lines in one section.
Q: With a handful of published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: Right now, in this country, it’s extremely hard for me – for most people, I believe – not to feel tremendous concern, if not despair. I’m being drawn to address political, social, and cultural crises, but to do so while continuing to maintain a wrestling with spiritual crisis.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: There are many. To name just some poets: Oppen, Zukovsky, John Taggart, Norman Fischer, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Touch the Donkey : forty-ninth issue,
The forty-ninth issue is now available, with new poems by Joel Chace, Andrew Brenza, Jake Kennedy, Hannah Brooks-Motl, Salem Paige, MA│DE and Sara Gilmore.
Eight dollars (includes shipping). We're the original odd couple!
Thursday, April 9, 2026
TtD supplement #298 : six questions for Sunnylyn Thibodeaux
Her poems “Signs of Life,” “Mailbox Full,” “I am Without” and “Rent Control” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Signs of Life,” “Mailbox Full,” “I am Without” and “Rent Control.”
A: Those poems are each their own in such a way, but also stepping back and looking at them I realize I can actually split them into two categories.
“Rent Control” and “Signs of Life” were written with the setting of San Francisco. “Rent Control” being a sort of list poem history of the building that we've lived in since 2006.
“Signs of Life” was an intake of my walk home through the Mission District. By that moment in May walking home from SF International High School where I had been working I knew I was leaving the city for New Orleans. I was taking everything in, the beauty, the desperation, the humanity, the culture. That intersection is always bustling. It’s a busy transit corner with 3 bus lines that traverse the city and the BART underground. There are lots of commuters and drug deals, panhandlers and street vendors. That poem is basically a word photograph capturing things that are gorgeous and personable and things that are less than ideal.
“I am Without” and “Mailbox Full” are both poems wrestling with grief. When my mother passed I think the world fell into a haze of bodily movement without being present or aware and I recall sitting on the sofa and just staring at the rug, recognizing that it really needed to be vacuumed, but I was numb and so so sad and seeing all the little bits of everything just made the hurt of missing my mom more real and I just sat sedated in grief. I don't even know how a poem came out in that period of my life. Recollection is spotty.
“Mailbox Full” was a voicemail I seriously wanted to leave for my dear friend Duncan McNaughton when I called him just as he returned home from the hospital and his mailbox was full.
Q: How does these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: Well first of all the grief, while still present, is not as crippling. Observation has always been a part of my writing and I can’t imagine that specifically going away so I think that I could end up continuously writing like any of those poems. Those list poems happen periodically as well as the prose block poems. I have never been one to set out with a project in poetry to where I could say, “This is my plan or this is the style I intend to achieve.” The poem wants what the poem wants, and I can’t always answer for how it comes out.
Q: You mention the word “setting” when describing these poems. Is setting an important factor in the way you approach a poem?
A: Yes and no. Setting is the now, the actual moment of orchestration. It is the presence of itself that allows for the writing to come. Setting, in this sense, is not what we think of in that formal regard as we approach the learning of literature. But also with that said, a place, as in “Signs of Life,” can be everything to the poem. It is more a being present that is important. And being present can also mean being present in memory. It may all find its place in the poem. Not sure if this makes sense. Poetry is almost like a meditation. It’s not where you physically are, but how you open yourself to receive.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What writers or works sit at the back of your head as you write?
A: To be honest, I attempt nothing. What happens happens.
I will say, hands down, Philip Whalen. Also, Nathaniel Mackey’s lyric is a tune I sometimes find myself humming.
Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading? And with that, given you’ve a selected poems forthcoming, has the experience of seeing that process through shifted or expanded your perspective on what you’ve been attempting?
A: I think it’s interesting when you recognize that you’ve settled into yourself, though one should never get comfortable. I recognize my tendency to observe. I also recognize my tendency to interweave reflection. Isn’t that what poetry is? Like that age old advice of “write what you know,” but what we know has to come through a sense of grounding, observation, an intuition. It is not about actually using your head in this matter.
Putting together a selected, I can see that I’ve been writing about some form of nature all of my adult life and the moon is a pretty frequent character. I’m not sure that’s ever gonna change. It’s interesting that you reference what I’ve “been attempting.” I don’t actually attempt anything outside of observing. It’s what I think I work hardest at. We have to sit still to do this and Lord knows this world does not encourage stillness.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: For song and rhythm, Nathaniel Mackey. For interpersonal connection and reflection, Lou Welch. For grounding in the real life world spin, Philip Whalen. For a pragmatic view of concise awareness, Lorine Niedecker. To learn, Duncan McNaughton.
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
TtD supplement #297 : seven questions for Laressa Dickey
Her poem “Heart bulge” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “Heart bulge.”
A: “Heart bulge” is a piece that originated in residency while I was working on an ongoing project called Mammillary bodies. I hope someday it will become a book of lyric essays. I have been working on it, on and off, for about 8 years and it's still going. The Heart Bulge piece was written during an artist residency at Saari Residence in Finland in 2022. I was working in the dance studio with an text called The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy by Eric Blechschmidt, the phenomenological embryologist. And I was reading and devising movement scores from this speculative embryological text which describes the morphological forces at work in the embryo’s development, forces which lay down the spatial map of us as humans and mammals. I was really interested in those forces as a creative problem and as a way of thinking about the creative process. That something dynamic and increasingly differentiated is forming our particular shape. It’s happening before DNA activation. Something else is at work in us, when we are taking shape. That seemed thrilling!
So “Heart Bulge” was a piece of text taken from that book. It is a moment in the embryological development of the heart before fits itself into place between the lungs—well, this is a creative way of saying it—because as Fanny Howe taught us, language literally fails to deal with actions that occur simultaneously—but before it becomes the advanced vascular system of compartments, it is a bulge in a main vertical vessel. But I took it as a score for a dance process, which led me into writing, eventually.
Heart Bulge as a phrase became a lens through which to think about how our bodies and selves are also shaped by family, by landscapes we grow up and evolve in, by the social body that we grow up inside of. And the simultaneity and complexity of all that happening at once, but also in different temporalities.
Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: Heart Bulge is different from other things I’m doing now, some of which are boring, like grant applications. What creative writing I'm doing is more collaborative. Together with a collective called WITHING, we’ve made 6 online episodes for Radio Worm in Rotterdam. The episodes are experimental language sessions, let’s say, derived from common scores we work on together, apart. It’s a collective, more programmatic approach to writing—poetic at times, but not necessarily calling attention to itself as such. Nobody in the group has a hold on what we are making—what it is or will be; it’s slippery and yet, we are making it together. I find myself writing things I don’t recognize as me and I love that.
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2835793/3980073
Q: Is this shifting the ways in which you approach your own work, when you return to it?
A: It’s making me see my own idiosyncrasies through reflecting on the idiosyncrasies of others. I suppose this is really just a reading process, a reading as a writer process. I think moving between the collective and my own work also brings up the question for me about the use of the writer, the use of the singular voice, what it is, how it exists, what it does, thinking of it as material and materiality. And maybe it clarifies the basic conundrum: how do I want to say this? How can I say this?
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?
A: I have things I reach for, or reach back to, in terms of syntactic logic, classics like My Life by Hejinian, or the feel of a dance, Dogs of Devotion, made by Jeanine Durning. Maybe the tone of voice, that odd tallness, in Samuel Beckett in The End.
Q: With a handful of published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: Oh man. I feel like I’m finally getting a handle on the sentence and the paragraph, the units of meaning they organize and what they can do. I have developed more tolerance to use “I” in work, in a way I hadn’t, and I am more willing to move into prose, that is, the prose poem, or the hybrid, etc., when the work demands that. I hope to write a novel someday, but I suppose it will be a weird thing.
Q: What do you feel the prose poem allows in your work that might not be possible, otherwise?
A: For me, the prose poem allows a different kind of control of the movement of a text. In it, I can feel access to rhythms, stops and starts, reversals, the impulse toward and subversion of story. It allows my improvisatory thinking to form and holds it in form. Play play play! Probably someone has written this before, but the economy of the prose poem interests me. It’s often sparing, reticent, and yet it can roam across the page. It pretends and promises but ultimately does what it wants. I relate to this as a kind of freedom, a space to grow into and form, rather than being formed by. Though I suppose both are happening simultaneously. Thought is growing and forming lines and sentences, and thought is also being formed by the page and by the limits of the technology and by the limits of me as a person, thinker, writer.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I often return to Etel Adnan’s Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) or her work, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, and I do that because of the presence of/in the voice. I read Tove Jansson’s Summer Book every summer and never fail to feel amazed by those stories. About every 5 years, I go back to Gary Young’s No Other Life. I recently read Helen Garner’s diaries and already know that I’ll be back.
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