Episode 228: Crafting a Page-Turning Poetry Collection — Interview with Kallie Falandays

by Gabriela Pereira
published in Podcast

Hey there word nerds!

Today I am pleased to have Kallie Falandays on the show!

Kallie is a poet and the founder of Tell Tell Poetry, a poetry resource site and editing company that helps poets get published.

Her own poetry has appeared in numerous places such as Black Warrior Review and The Journal. She is also the author of the poetry collection Dovetail Down the House available now from Burnside Review Books.

Listen in as Kallie and I chat about crafting a poetry collection that will keep readers flipping pages, and the specific of the poetry publishing process.

In this episode Kallie and I discuss:

  • Using titleless poems to immerse your readers in the heart of your collection.
  • How to combine three different poetic formats in one book.
  • Why there is no right or wrong way to read poetry.
  • Characters and narrative arcs in poems.
  • The specific details of publishing in the poetry world.

Plus, Kallie’s #1 tip for writers.

About Kallie Falandays

Kallie Falandays runs Tell Tell Poetry, a poetry resource site and poetry editing company. She is the author of the poetry collection Dovetail Down the House (available now from Burnside Review Books), and you can also read her work in Black Warrior Review, The Journal, CutBank, Booth, and elsewhere.

To connect with Kallie check out her company’s website at www.telltellpoetry.com.

Dovetail Down the House

An amazing and poignant collection of poetry from poet Kallie Falandays. Look at what other authors are saying about Dovetail Down the House:

“I like the arrogant flick of love in these words. Tactile, muscled, and angry with desire, these poems reach for you. If you’re alone at the end of this book it’s because you dove from love’s edge and you have chosen your loneliness.”

—Emily Kendal Frey

 

“Techno-savvy though she is, Kallie Falandays loves paper (references to it frame Dovetail Down the House) but often it’s not poems on paper that remind me of her so much, but artwork: the fantastical, perspective-reorienting work of, say, Escher and Chagall. And from that intriguingly parallel universe, Falandays casts her eye back on our own, investigating the highs and lows of fever-heat passion so intensely, she could blister the wall paint off an Escher house and set Chagall’s winged goats and upside-down cows to dancing their hooves off. Watch out! ‘The wind./Coming to eat you.’”

—Albert Goldbarth

“This book tells me that letters on a page are the ghostly dust of one’s own body, ‘the opposite side of [one’s] skin.’ On these pages, an ocean bleeds its rain. On these pages, ‘we wolf the burn.’ When we flip one particular page’s table over, we can naughtily and hauntingly and sadly rub its legs. Dovetail Down the House is an essay on grief (in poems) and a haunted-house-opera (even though the book inquires about ‘the opposite of opera’) and a making of a lovely-as-lips body out of text, a zombie lover/a window in the mouth. Kallie Falandays writes, ‘Your face was dripping in my head all morning’ and I think that this is the most perfect articulation of grief and sadness and weight. And like Falandays, I deeply feel ‘the sadness of not being able to be nothing’ even as I revel in material reality: doorknobs and vampire movies and bedsheets and how ‘everyone everywhere is twirling their hair.’”

—Olivia Cronk

 

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

 

Link to Episode 228

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