Episode 18: Felicia Zamora
Interstitial Archaeology
Big episode today! My guest is Felicia Zamora, and we’re talking about her new book, Interstitial Archaeology, which was the Editor’s selection from the Wisconsin Poetry Series. (A big hello to my former employer, UW Press!) Like the title says, it’s a book that digs down into undiscovered spaces; but it’s also one that pushes out, makes those spaces have a place in the surface world. There’s such a breadth of artistic craft in this book, and it’s incredibly smart and funny at times—any book that quotes from The Simpsons is going to have a special place in my heart.
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Along with Interstitial Archaeology, Zamora is the author of eight books of poetry including the forthcoming Murmuration Archives, a part of the Akrílica Series with Noemi Press, as well as Quotient; I Always Carry My Bones; Body of Render; Instrument of Gaps; & in Open, Marvel; and Of Form & Gather. Her work has won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, the C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and she served as the 2017 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO. Currently, she is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati, and a poetry editor for Colorado Review.
Pick up a copy of Interstitial Archaeology here.
Read more about Zamora here.
Some notes:
Felicia Zamora referred to the poet Donika Kelly and her great book The Renunciations. Give it a read!
I mentioned the book Line Study of a Motel Clerk by Allison Pitinii Davis. Davis is a terrific poet and is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
Zamora also talked about the zuihitsu form. If you’re new to that one, find out more about it here.
Coming Up: A special double episode! Matt Donovan and Jenny George discuss their chapbook We Are Not Where We Are, an erasure of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Coming down the line our episodes featuring Eric Pankey, and David Baker discussing the work of Stanley Plumly with the publication of his collected poems.
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and he now works as a freelance writer and editor.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon