Interview

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin

is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

In my work, I use manufacturing to reflect on human-machine dynamics, sexuality and gender queerness. I think about how the workforces’ relationship to their machinery lacks heartfelt conscious reflection. Personality and machinery are often separate. I challenge this, making work that shows how humanity, personal identity and machinery can be a reflection of one another. Human sexuality and machine movements are similar in their dynamics and relationships. In my latest body of work, I use my lathe to produce phallic objects that explore gender queer motifs relating to the machinery I work with and my own sexual expression. My work sifts through old places in our culture.Factories that have seen many years and parts made.

After attending Pratt Institute for sculpture, I received my Machinist Certificate from Housatonic College in Bridgeport CT. My interest in machine work is the catalyst for how I understand the world. Time was always an interest that I would express in mechanical terms. Eventually I began making clocks out of aluminum discs. Then I was in the group exhibition, Horology at Jack Hanley Gallery in 2019. My studio is in Brooklyn, NY, where I have a machine shop to produce my work. Crossdressing is something I have been getting into lately. Exploring femininity has been very expansive for my work. I am more in touch with who I am, which is inspiring me to make work that I’ve never made before.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.

Her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She has received awards from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Anderson Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Poets House, Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman and lives in Brooklyn.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015).

His work has garnered a Guggenheim, a Lannan, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.