Gabrielle Calvocoressi at The Rumpus provides a wonderful, wide-ranging interview with GenPop Books author Michael Klein:
MK: “When I think of hopefulness, I immediately think of intimacy. Hope and intimacy are close in meaning to me. One of the missions of the book was to talk about ways in which we’re intimate and ways in which we’re afraid of intimacy, which I think is pretty much the way I experience the world. And everything in the world it seems to me is a manifestation of that. That, and you’re either in living or in dying. Living isn’t only about being in the world, it’s about making something happen to the world.”
Also at The Rumpus, Sean Singer pens a mixed review/psychoanalysis of then, we were still living, invoking Papa Freud, oddly enough, in a discussion of post-9-11 poetry. And while Singer appears eager to distance himself from the motley American “we” to whom Michael’s book is addressed, Singer concedes then, we were still living is a “thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way. . . . a masterful book full of melancholy’s dark colors . . . politically engaged, sensitive, and topical.”
