Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

Dec 17 2024 138 ep. 45 mins 12

Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Podcast artwork

Painted Bride Quarterly’s democratic editorial policy means that we give all of our submissions a lot of time, attention, and care. It also means we take a while to answer authors who submit. This podcast lifts the veil on our editorial process by bringing you directly to the editorial table with rotating editors from our Philadelphia, New York, and Abu Dhabi offices, as well as special guest PBQ alumni and other guests. Listen in to the discussions that make PBQ. Join us as we curate contemporary writing with rigor and respect.

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Episode 134: Tidbits & Trolls

Dec 17 2024 49 mins

Episode 134: Tidbits & Trolls Join us for a conversation about new poems by Kelly Egan and a discussion about line breaks, image systems, and the surprise turns poems make. Keep your eyes and ears open, Slushies, the landscape is full of lore. Egan has us pondering possibilities. Once upon a time folks believed in Selkies, shapeshifting seals who make folks fall in love wi

Episode 133: Delicious Disorientation

Dec 04 2024 46 mins

Episode 133: Delicious Disorientation Three poems by Christopher Brean Murray cleverly dropped us all into a wonderful sense of disorientation that we relished navigating. Our discussion touched on time travel, dreamscapes, masterful language and wordplay, and we explored the importance of trusting the speaker in poetry that leans into surrealism. Samantha pointed us to other te

Episode 132: Trust & Fear

Nov 20 2024 32 mins

Episode 132: Trust & Fear Talking about fiction is our JAWN slushies. Join us as we discuss Terry Dubow's "The Q," a short story that sounds like it wants to be a crime novel: a murderer gets out of jail and asks to stay with his pen pal. The surprise is that the piece is also a gentle story of male friendship and compassion. We're drawn to the story's ability to showcase the

Episode 83: Goodnight, Mary Magdalene (REISSUE)

Oct 02 2024 41 mins

Goodnight, Mary Magdalene first aired in June 2020 and features three poems by Vasiliki Katsarou, a poet and publisher. In 2023, Vasiliki published a short collection of poetry Three Sea Stones with Solitude Hill Press and a second collection, The Second Home, with Finishing Line Press. It’s a great time to revisit Vasiliki’s work. Dear Slushies, join the PBQ crew (which includ

Episode 62: Six Degrees of Separation (REISSUE)

Sep 04 2024 29 mins

While we’re on a brief recording hiatus, we have a re-issue of an episode from 2019, when our team took a rare look at a non-fiction piece by author Andrew Bertaina. It’s great timing to take a fresh look at this episode, as earlier this year Bertaina published a collection of essays called “The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place”. Enjoy the episode and check out Bertaina�

Episode 131: Catching Waves

Jul 30 2024 42 mins

Slushies, waves abound in this lively discussion of a poem by Martha Silano and two more by Jane Hilberry. The way stream of consciousness can crest and fall, sound waves, the missed and caught waves in real life (including runs of luck or the lack of it), not to mention the different ways in which we experience poetry– the gang rides wave after wave. We regularly find that our p

Episode 130: Anthropomorphic Imagination

Jul 16 2024 54 mins

The natural world and human nature provide a variety of jumping off points for three poems that contrast the ego and experience of each poem’s speaker with other perspectives, both observed and imagined. The discussion touches on the use of a strong opening conceit, lineation that cannily reflects breathwork, and leaning into specificity as strong poetic moves. Let’s not forget

Episode 129: Chew on This

Jul 02 2024 48 mins

What's your love language, Slushies? Is it touch, or talk? Recipes or arithmetic? Join us for this episode devoted to poems by Jin Cordaro, whose work strikes an incantatory tone, draws us in, and gets us chewing on the riddles of the human predicament. How do our bodies know things before our minds do? How do other people's shopping lists make us ache for connection? We focus on t

Episode 128: Put Your Pants Back On!

Jun 18 2024 39 mins

We just had to start this episode with a reassurance that everyone was dressed, which you’ll understand as soon as you read or listen to “Pneuma”, the poem by BJ Soloy that kicks everything off. The bonkers energy of a country and a world overflowing with bad news and tragedy is juxtaposed with some very real tenderness and self reflection in two astounding pieces by Soloy. T

Episode 127: Ecstatic Collapse

Jun 04 2024 41 mins

Our first order of business was debating lifestyle choices in NY vs. Philly, after which we dug into two wonderfully different poems by Glenn Shaheen. “Imago” plunged us into an elegaic interrogation of modern life, identity, and poetics framed by both the real world and open world gaming. With Glenn’s poem as our guide we roamed wide, touching on gaming terminology, Bey’s