Episode 25: Alicia Wright - “The Ecstatic State of Making the Point”

Join us as we talk to literary hero and former camp counselor Alicia Wright, editor of the magazine Annulet and Annulet Editions, and author of the just-released poetry collection You’re Called by the Same Sound, out on Third Hand Books. Annulet is a vital site for new poetry, poetics, and criticism that’s structured to be inclusive, public-facing, and non-hierarchical. In this conversation we discuss the book review as a public utility, nourishing and supporting the wildness of the mind, the value of rigor and how to cultivate it outside institutional structures, valuing your time and work, telling the difference between work and fun. Alicia illuminates the editorial ethos that informs Annulet, reflects on the quiet and independent work of editing, and on forms of dialogue and particularity. Also we try to figure out which sports metaphors could actually help us. Thanks as well to the intrepid contributing editors of Annulet.

Works/writers/situations mentioned include The Explicator (dad of “the annulet”), Denver Quarterly, the Language poets, Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville, Mahmoud Darwish, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, the rise of AI, and how reviews should resist being data. Check out Annulet’s Critical Circle Workshop here and the Linkages Lectures here.