A Road Trip with Failure: A Conversation with Sasha West

February 6, 2014, by

sasha_westOn Friday, February 7, Sasha West and Jason Schneiderman will read their poetry at the Menil Collection as part of the Public Poetry series. West will be reading from her collection Failure and I Bury the Body and Schneiderman from his collection Striking Surface.

Sasha has a close relationship with Inprint. She was a winner of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize and was a long time Inprint Writers Workshop instructor. She is an alumnus of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she also served as the editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and later went on to become Gulf Coast’s Board President. In 2012, West’s poetry collection, Failure and I Bury the Body, was selected by D. Nurske as a winner of the National Poetry Series and published by Harper Perennial.

Her poems have appeared in Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, and others. Sasha was kind enough to answer some questions about her poetry and creative process—a big thanks to Sasha for taking the time to talk to us.

BETH: In an interview, you likened linked short stories to “recognizing someone dear to you in the airport of a faraway city.” Could you explain a little about how you linked the narrator, Failure, and the Corpse together in Failure and I Bury the Body? Continue reading