An Interview with Rivka Clifton, 2026 Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest Winner
To celebrate the publication of Rivka Clifton’s A Feast of Small Proportions, winner of the 2026 Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest, we interviewed Rivka for our readers of The Juice to learn more about her project, influences, and process.
Photo of Rivka Clifton
Fork Apple Press is honored to publish Rivka Clifton’s A Feast of Small Proportions as the winner of The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest (2026).
ISBN 979-8-9925064-6-4
What was your generative process like for A Feast of Small Proportions? Was there a catalyst or inciting incident? Were there certain poems that came first, and led to the creation of other poems?
I wrote all these poems as a part of my dissertation. The project I had in mind for that was to spend a long time rotating objects in my brain until they became entirely unique to themselves. The poems serve as models for that type of thought, which is great and doable in grad school.
Then I left academia and found my time relishing art was much less than before. A Feast of Small Proportions was an attempt to distill that experience into a shorter blast.
Wrong Feast by Rivka Clifton.
Baobab Press, 2026.
The poems in your chapbook expertly navigate the balance between narrative and image. I’m thinking of poems like "The Suspended Body," which combines colloquial tone with surreal embodiment, or "Tiny Tykes," with its contrast of places marking beginnings and endings of life. How do you think about this balance, and where does this take purchase for you?
I like this question! I think “image” here is synonymous with “lyric,” particularly how Ellen Bryant Voigt describes it in The Flexible Lyric: an intensifying decoupling of the moment from its temporal context, allowing its many, and often contradicting, impulses to exist together. Tony Hoagland puts it a different way in “Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy: Image, Diction, and Rhetoric” when he describes the image as being the quickest, but most uncontrolled way of conveying poetic information.
Muzzle by Rivka Clifton.
Jackleg Press, 2025.
I intentionally approached these poems with a skew towards the lyric. The lyric, the image, had always been central to my writing—I was kind of shocked when a friend described my first book, Muzzle, as very lyric. But with these poems, I knew I wanted that intensified atemporal effect the lyric can give a bit of writing. So I tried to eschew narrative for the lyric whenever possible.
But I also think I just might be bad at telling stories. Leon, a love of mine, always tells me I don't tell stories in a followable way. He’s right, too. I think I focus on the highlights, decontextualizing them from their lead up and consequences because the highlights themselves are dazzling. So maybe the balance is because I’m a failed storyteller.
Who are your poetic influences? What writers do you see yourself in conversation with?
For this book, Brigit Pegeen Kelly is the fountain from which these poems flow, especially her last collection The Orchard. There’s some Charles Simic too—his more surreal poems, sure, but more than those, his ideas. His essay “Negative Capability and Its Children” influenced my approach to poetry.
Timothy Donnelly (The Problem of the Many) and Kathryn Nuernberger (The End of Pink) are in there. Carl Phillips’s earlier work too.
Beyond aesthetics, I also see myself in conversation with queer poets. The three blurbers for the book (Ally Ang, Claude Canese Jarboe, and Temperance Aghamohammadi) showcase how wide the aesthetic range of the queer world is. Evelyn Berry and Brody Parrish Craig too. I love how we don’t need to be explicit about our identities, though a lot of us can be, to embody queerness in every phrase.
The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly.
Boa Editions, 2004.
The End of Pink by Kathryn Nuernberger.
Boa Editions, 2016.
The Problem of the Many by Timothy Donnelly.
Wave Books, 2019.
The Flexible Lyric by Ellen Bryant Voigt.
University of Georgia Press, 1999.
In this contemporary moment where the very acknowledgment of identity and diversity has been politicized, how do you see your work's engagement in conversation with intersectional identities as in resistance to or in defiance of particular events or policies of today?
The poems are meant to do what Simic asks in “Negative Capability and Its Children”: to think without recourse to abstraction, categorical imperatives, and logic. For me, this was a practice in understanding people and things as unique and individual instead of as representative of large categories.
I think that’s what political art should aim for: precise thought, individualized understanding. That helps dismantle larger systems that exist to concentrate access to power as every prejudice is a limitation on who power’s manifestations can benefit.
I’m also trans. I wrote these poems prior to coming out to myself (despite knowing in my core my actual gender). I think it’s very important for trans writers (maybe any marginalized writer) to write about things not explicitly about our marginalization. This is difficult because it’s a secret struggle we must always wrestle with, so it will inevitably end up in our words.
Fork Apple Press curates work that engages with themes and symbols of desire, consumption, spirituality, gender, environment, cultivation, and wildness. What are some of the symbols you bring to the table in this chapbook? What drew you to those motifs or images?
I’m not too sure about symbols with their unilateral meaning making, the authority they place in the hands of the author. I much prefer co-authoring meaning with my readers, with letting images take on their own lives. Once I put these meditations on the page, they’re my readers’ to do something magical with them. To go back to Hoagland’s description of the image, the image delivers information beyond what the writer can control or even consider.
I do have moments of hunting and cooking, fish, flowers, etc. For me, these moments conflate desire and consumption into one thing. But I don’t want to dwell too much on that here.
What did your generation and revision processes look like in the development of this work? Did you encounter any roadblocks or moments of inspiration?
I wrote most of these poems for part of my dissertation. So I was reading a ton of poetry, craft and theory (I still do, but during my PhD, I felt my brain blossoming in ways I hadn’t conceived of until then). I worked with my committee and classmates to edit them. I felt, halfway through my dissertation year, that I was losing a part of my voice to the various orchestrated edits I had to do to graduate.
But my dissertation chair told me he heard the same voice in these poems as he did in my application materials, but that the volume had been turned up. After defending and while revising on my own, I always came back to this: what choices can I make to amplify what is on the page?
I’m a big fan of noisy music: harsh noise, black metal, sludge, hyperpop, ambient droning, etc., etc., so I sort of love when that amplification creates distortion—for these poems that might be in their likeness to our realities, the pacing of their events, or any number of things. I think in developing A Feast of Small Proportions I learned how to embrace those distortions.
What advice do you have for poets building their own chapbooks right now?
Watch videos of how snakes move. Their coiling sleeves of muscle. Chapbooks should move in a similar way—effortlessly and with precision.
Chapbooks are a form that feels like magic. Lightning strikes and you get to caress its mane for a moment before everything is gone.
Tell us about your forthcoming full length collection, Wrong Feast, from Baobab Press, out September 2026. Congratulations! How do these two works bridge together or deviate from one another?
Thanks!
I originally conceptualized the two works as having a condensed/expanded relationship, but I think that might be a little simplistic. I mean it’s certainly a part of it.
I feel like both are concerned with thinking beyond abstraction. But I feel A Feast of Small Proportions stays longer in the wonderment of unknowing or the earliest stages of coming to know. Wrong Feast feels more confident in its knowing.
In terms of allegory or implication, A Feast of Small Proportions might be a selection of closeted poems, where their joy comes from the ineffable aspects of self and other. I was writing these, after all, while deeply closeted as a masc-attracted trans woman.
Working with Baobab Press’s editors helped bring the self knowledge I gained in transition to the page. I’m very grateful for them and their caring hands and keen eyes. But also I sort of like having a DL trade manuscript.
If there is a word or line from your chapbook that you hope dwells within readers long after they’ve read this chapbook, what is it?
“Being dead was appealing in popular culture.”
So much of America worships any and all forms of death: genocide, climate collapse, generative AI, racism, queerphobia, colonialism . . . I could go on. As poets and poetry readers, we are already showing opposition to popular culture. We should make that opposition complete.
Rivka Clifton is the author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) and Wrong Feast (Baobab Press) as well as the chapbooks: Action (Split/Lip Press), MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. Rivka lives in Seattle.
