Silence, like its close friend death, is unavoidable, and it comes and goes as it pleases. It quietly haunts the borders of meaning, lurking in the subtle folds of symbolism, waiting for the words to fade, allowing itself to sink back into the comforting realm of perplexity and incomprehension in pages that feel “crowded” with blank space. Silence in these poems reveals more than it conceals, and in its death-like quality, it envisages the catastrophe of the linguistic trauma of bodies that migrate to survive amidst war and seek a utopia, always on the verge of oblivion.

Cherokee is not spoken objectively, nor are semantic elements something of an isolating, demarcating machine. The language is concerned with the nature of phenomena, causal agents, and subsequent effects. Syntactic axioms are constantly moving, true for a moment, and forever shifting as time marches on. 

The Collection of poetry, to me, has always been a snippet of, or window into, identity; but in recent years this seems to have become a truly inescapable facet of the current condition and direction of the Collection.

In honor of the publication of Alex Baskin’s I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets, winner of Fork Apple Press’ The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest, we interviewed Alex for our readers of The Juice to learn more about his project, influences, and craft.

We envision The Juice as a place to feature the thoughts of writers and readers, both including and beyond the staff of Fork Apple Press. We see these posts as being more interactive than other publishing mediums, and to that end where we encourage our readership to write to us and each other in the comments, and continue the conversation begun in the blog post.