This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with poet Jory Mickelson about All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing), a collection that circles our contemporary world in crisis: pandemics, environmental collapse, war, and unfettered consumption. These big themes are placed in the big landscape of the West, its histories and its legacies.
Poet Corrie Williamson says this about All This Divide: “Jory Mickelson deftly and powerfully probes one of the great American myths through breathtaking poem after breathtaking poem. Mickelson’s daring reckoning with the idea of The West (its plundered opening, its brutal hunger and astonishing beauty) is balanced by their deep empathy and eye for complexity, pleasure, and detail. The history of loss / sets up a people to either forget / or hold on forever, Mickelson writes, and these poems are both prayer and commentary on the horror and holiness of that history and its modern echoes. This is a necessary work of unsorrowing and unforgetting that is utterly gorgeous to read, alive with music, buoyed by skillful research and rendering, and ultimately brimming with mercy, hope, and light. I am awed by these poems.”
This conversation has been edited for time.
NOTE! Jory will be reading with poets Marc Beaudin and Roger Hart in Helena, in partnership with Montana Book Company and Mt. Ascension Brewing, for a “Flight of Writers” on October 9, 2024. Tickets are available here.
NEW! “The Cover Story” is a new online and podcast segment from The Write Question in which Lauren asks her guests about the stories and the processes behind their book covers, debuting during TWQ’s eighteenth season. Learn about the cover of All This Divide soon!
About Jory:
Jory Mickelson is the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (End of the Line Press, 2025), All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2024) and Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press, 2019), winner of the High Plains Book Award in Poetry. They have received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Dear Butte, the Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and most recently the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. They live and write amid the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo (W. W. Norton & Company)
Jory Mickelson recommends:
The Cloud Path by Melissa Kwasny (Milkweed Editions)
River, Amen by Michael Garrigan (Wayfarer Books)
The River Where You Forgot My Name by Corrie Williamson (Southern Illinois University Press)
Lake Superior by Lorine Niedecker (Wave Books)
Lauren Korn recommends:
All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing) and Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press) by Jory Mickelson
Incarnadine by Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press)
The River Where You Forgot My Name by Corrie Williamson (Southern Illinois University Press); also, looking forward to Your Mother's Bear Gun (River River Books, forthcoming 2025)
The Cloud Path by Melissa Kwasny (Milkweed Editions)
Doomstead Days and Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare (Nightboat Books)
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer, editor, and sound engineer. This episode is supported by Montana Book Co., located in downtown Helena, Montana, since 1978, offering new books for all ages, vinyl records, and community activism. For delivery in Helena and shipping online, visit mtbookco.com.
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The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
