When I interview fire, by Carolyn Supinka

Poetry, prose poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

When I interview fire engages the world in questions that probe identity, intimacy, and loss. In this hybrid poetry chapbook, environments are all-encompassing, and the speaker asks questions of both the human and non-human entities that inhabit them.

A fire that consumed a neighbor’s home is invited to dinner. A mountain mysteriously stands in the corner of the speaker’s apartment. Two eagles are trapped by their locked claws mid- flight, a city park swarms with tear gas and swifts, a coastline is covered by smoke during the 2020 wildfires. Myth and surreal narratives are present throughout these poems, threatening to spill absurdity –and clarity—into the chaos of daily life.

“I guess it’s about what keeps coming back,” opens "Circles", a poem midway through this chapbook, which ends with a memory of dust devils whirling across a highway. This circular momentum of return is a movement embodied through the chapbook, which is rooted in a seasonal awareness and attention to the cycles, big and small, that mark life on this earth.

Carolyn Supinka is a writer and visual artist from western Pennsylvania. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Stray Gods (Finishing Line Press), and Inside Voice (Ghost City Press). She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she creates poems, comics, and prints, and works as an arts administrator. She is the co-editor of Conjunction, a zine micropress.