“A Paper Hive Earns No Quarter,” “Confessio Inimicus,” and “In Service” by Adam Houle appeared in Issue 28 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
Both “A Paper Hive Earns No Quarter” and “Confessio Inimicus” were two that lasted, that I worked through during my last year or so in Texas. I had quite a few buggy poems going that dealt with guilt, defiance, obligation, and these two were among the strongest. They both appeared in AGNI and then made the cut for Stray. “In Service” grew from a project where a local hospital system and Ed Madden, Columbia’s Poet Laurate, were hoping to make small placards with various poems on them. I don’t know what happened to that, but I wrote a series of poems, a few curtal sonnets, a few small lyrics, about illness, about health, about mirrors and staring oneself down.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
“In Service” gave and gives me still some trouble. I think the laughter of the night nurses is right—it’s accurate, sure, but more importantly it feels like a needed exhale for the poem, a movement of scope—people are laughing still, no matter what. What’s about to happen is absolute hell for the guy at the glass, but it’s also just Tuesday or pay day or whatever. I think a lot of us are asking ourselves, how can I grieve and go to the movies? So it’s emotionally difficult for me—how to feel about how we feel. Technically, I’m not in love with something in the last three lines—I fuss with them in my head a lot.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency (2015); Karen Skolfield’s Battle Dress: Poems (2019); and I want to throw a chapbook in here too, which I’m rereading right now, Casey Thayer’s Love for the Gun (2021). That’s three, but forgive me.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be?
Michigan poet and essayist Thomas Lynch. I stumbled across his book of essays The Undertaking at a used bookstore in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and it was the right book at the right time. And that led me to his poetry, which I also like. To buy him a coffee and thank him would mean a lot to me. That said, there are a lot of writers I owe a cup of coffee and more.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I have a book length poem that I started in fits and starts and that’s scattered across a couple notebooks and going poorly and slowly, so if you want to tell me stop that, I’d definitely listen. And I try to get a few notes down each day, and some of those notes are growing into poems around notions of home and the myths we tell ourselves about landscapes—both psychic and physical.
Our thanks to Adam for taking the time to answer a few questions and share his work. Read Houle’s poems “A Paper Hive Earns No Quarter,” “Confessio Inimicus,” and “In Service” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-adam-houle.
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Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press 2017), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in South Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of English at Francis Marion University.