For my 17th episode, I sat down with brilliant Denver-based poet Andrea Rexilius. Andrea is the author of Sister Urn (Sidebrow, Spring 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), and To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010). Her creative and critical writing is featured in the following anthologies: Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (U of Michigan P), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books), Sixty Morning Talks: Serial Interviews with Contemporary Authors (Ugly Duckling Press), and Letter Machine Book of Interviews (Letter Machine Editions). She is Core Faculty in Poetry, and Program Coordinator, for the Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.
This episode is very dear to my heart, as Andrea entered into a space of such vulnerability and openness around the life and death of her sister Andrea Erki. We explore loss and grief, the entanglements of living, and the ways in which poetry can create a language of connection where no words could do so before.
