Aiden Arata reviews Flood Letters at the Pank Blog:

Gottshall understands both the appeal and the repulsion of giving up; each piece bristles with the quiet kinetics of keeping each in check. Starvation, cold, and the dead world strip away everything the narrator has, yet her weak grip on civilization seems more hopeful than pitiful. This is the magic ofFlood Letters: the speaker holds on. We see a soul one step beyond capitulation, the need to exist as a creator, the hope of futile correspondence. The reader is compelled to reply.

Joan Larkin, whose chapbook Legs Tipped with Small Claws is forthcoming from Argos this spring, chats with Tony Leuzzi about poetry, sexuality, and their writing processes. The conversation is part of a series at Huffington Post called Voice to Voice, which “feature[s] intimate interviews between novelists, poets, playwrights, and writers as they discuss everything from the state of LGBT literature to sex and sexuality between the pages to the joys and challenges of writing about LGBT issues, themes, and lives.”

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David Varno takes a close look at If I Were Born in Prague and The Other Music at Words without Borders:

With both of these chapbooks, it is thrilling to look at the original lines and then back to the translation, a practice that can be exhausting with a longer book, usually leading non-academics to give up and rely solely on the translation (assuming the original is even available). Here in Argos’s chapbooks, the new or revised lines rise up from the surface of the page in a new dimension, allowing us to trace the translators’ work as writers. Having one of these books in hand, mentally charting its landscape, makes it hard to doubt the argument for old-fashioned reading. The book can and should be an object of art in its own right. As with all of the projects from Argos so far, some of which are hand- stamped or sewn, much care was put into their production.

An interview with Argos Books’ editors E.C. Belli, Iris Cushing, and Elizabeth Clark Wessel is up at Coldfront.