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ADAM DEUTSCH by J. D. I S I P
It’s hard to believe Every Transmission is a debut collection! There’s a carefulness, almost meticulousness to these poems. Your lines and images are packed and precise. Before we jump into the book, tell us a little about building this collection – how long you’ve been working on it, choices you had to make, how it came together. Thanks for the kind words! It’s a “debut” in that it’s the first time a press accepted a full-length manuscript, but Every Transmission is really more of an “editors’ choice” collection. I’d had four manuscripts before this one (titled Manual, They Should All Be Odes, Reactivate the Dust, Room Temperature, respectively) that I’d been shopping around from about 2008 to 2019. A friend once told me, when I was really cranking on the first one, to leave it behind and focus on new work; one of my mentors had said the same thing to me in grad school, so I’d work on a manuscript for a few years, then move into a new body of work after a while when it didn’t get scooped up. In 2019, just to goof around, I decided to take all the poems across those 4 that had been published, and put them in one file, then whittled that down from around 125 pages to 70ish. I think I sent it out once, then worked on that for another year or two. I could see the book in there, but with so many “old” poems with more recent stuff, I went through this process of reflection, and started to see elements that needed to be worked out — “fixed” feels like the wrong word, but there are ways I used to write something, and I knew I could do it better. Maybe that’s the “meticulousness” you mention. Maybe “modifications” or “fine tuning” is more like it. I tend to think about things in mechanical ways — parts interacting, and that view is what was guiding me (with encouragement from friends who are amazing writers). Eric Muhr at Fernwood Press picked it up in early 2022, and it went through more refinement from there. He’s an editor of kindness and awareness whose good sense shines in various spots in the book.
I enjoy the fun you have with vocabulary in this collection, your willingness to make up words (which made me think of Whitman) like “undecent,” “Luciferic,” and… “tagins”? “Tagins” is a transliteration of a Hebrew word. When I think about word-creation, I’m usually thinking about Milton (and he’s in at least one other poem in the book). Milton blew my damn mind in grad school.
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