Abby Minor and I met in grad school at Penn State, and we have been poetry companions ever since. For more than a decade, we have exchanged poems by mail every month, offering each other feedback, guidance, and support as we composed book and chapbook manuscripts. Our letters cross the United States from Tucson, Arizona, to Aaronsburg, Pennsylvania; they travel from city to village, Sonoran Desert to Appalachian ridges and valleys. Although I see drafts of Abby’s poems and manuscripts as she first writes them, a moment of revelation occurs when I encounter her published work, transformed into its final form. Following the recent publication of her chapbook Infinity Ballot by Bateau Press, I asked Abby to let me interview her as a way of asking the big questions one doesn’t ask in regular life together.
Through a masterful blend of conversational voice and adroit figurative language, Infinity Ballot delves into rural community life under the present stresses of our American political reality. Abby’s poems engage with the political landscape of rural central Pennsylvania and the absurdity, frustration, and tenderness that animate small communities considered to be cultural and political backwaters. From her home in a village of six hundred, Abby writes and teaches poetry and art classes in low-income nursing homes and youth centers, runs a rural reading series, works on a farm, and occasionally teaches poetry workshops at Bucknell University. She has authored three previous chapbooks and a full-length collection, As I Said: A Dissent (Ricochet Editions, 2022). She founded and served as executive director of Ridgelines Language Arts, a nonprofit providing community arts programs for marginalized folks in the region. Infinity Ballot emerges from that daily work of living out community.
Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted by email in May and June 2026.
Julie Swarstad Johnson: I intensely admire your ability to interweave different registers in your poems: gravity to levity, slapstick to mystic. And you often achieve this shift very quickly. One instance of this I love is when you write in “Whatever Is Likely an Entrance,” “best as in / like what-so-ever u personally feel / may dwell on your holy hill.” You capture the comedy of real life, the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the absurd. Do you have a sense of how you arrived at that skill, or how you’ve cultivated it?
Abby Minor: Maybe it’s that I come from Yiddish-speaking self-described nutcases on my mom’s side, for whom any grief or injustice can be salved or countered with a joke! But of course Jews are also stereotypically melancholy, and I inherited that strain, as well. My family cannot get through a Passover seder without cracking up, so I grew up with the sounds of prayer and the sounds of laughter comingling. I’m more into the prayer parts of life than my (very secular) family, but I take the laughter as a special kind of gift.
I also think the American mode is sort of mystical slapstick—I’ve been reading American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke. This was published in 1931, but it feels so fresh: she looks at several centuries-worth of almanacs and other popular material, and proposes that the quintessential American character is a bombastic, comedic mythmaking, tall-tale-telling orator…to what effect? Many of these early American stories are fueled by nonsense. This orator doesn’t necessarily have ethics. He just tells these wild, triumphant tall tales to capture the attention of his audience. (Does this sound familiar?!) I certainly hope that I diverge from that character when it comes to ethics, but I’m drawn to this mythic-nonsense-comedic mode, and I learn from artists who work in that mode and ride it towards beauty and justice: Sun Ra, Joanne Kyger, Robert Ashley, Frank Stanford. People who blend everyday speech with mystical speech. To arrive somewhere strange and true.
[A] long time ago I realized, and more or less accepted, that I would commune with most of my poet teachers and comrades via their work, not in person. And my work is how I talk to them.
Johnson: Joanne Kyger shows up in Infinity Ballot, as do other writers and artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, the Bloomsbury Group, Emily Dickinson, Ntozake Shange. How do these artistic lineages—of women you know only through their work—shape these poems?
Minor: Well, it does get lonely out here sometimes, and I think about what it would be like to live in a place where you have your lineage there, around you—like everyone gathering at Robert Duncan’s house to share new poems and drink wine, that does sound pretty heavenly. I’m not sure if that kind of thing happens much anywhere now, in cities or in the country—though I’ve seen glimpses of it visiting you in Tucson!—so a long time ago I realized, and more or less accepted, that I would commune with most of my poet teachers and comrades via their work, not in person. And my work is how I talk to them. It’s like, oh, I saw that move you made! I love it. Here’s my version. Maybe in heaven we will all get to read our poems to the foremothers who inspired them.
Johnson: I love that idea of speaking back to the writers we admire through what we create, like musicians trading phrases in jazz. In “American Quartet,” you specifically riff on the title of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. How have choreopoems and other modes of performance shaped your work?
Minor: I used to say I didn’t like poetry readings. I liked to read poetry on paper, in a book, by myself. And I still do love to do that. But in recent years I’ve also been drawn to poets who perform their work in some way—Shange, Anne Waldman, Edwin Torres, Raúl Zurita. Zurita not only writes epic poems of Chile but has done things like bulldoze a poem into the sands of the Atacama Desert, in honor of the disappeared. I think about—the audacity? the faith?—it takes to do something like that. To really believe “The poet’s job is to unsay Fate,” in Alice Notley’s words. Artists like these have blown the lid off, giving me permission to think about what poetry is, what it can do, what it can be. That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to rent a bulldozer, but when you’re thinking of things in those terms, making the choice to arrange things differently on the page, or sing part of it, or put a drawing in, doesn’t seem like such a big deal. That feeling of—am I allowed to do that? Yes, you’re allowed to do that.
Johnson: Infinity Ballot demonstrates that audacity and faith, and it also reflects your thinking on art and what art does in the world. You show us that art is vital for understanding the world, whether or not the people around us recognize this. As in “American Quartet,” where you and your neighbor Warren both need “a blues // for digging wells” even if “he once said art comes / second to survival.” Elsewhere, in “Whatever Is Likely an Entrance,” you write, “I dwell on the holy hill of wanting to do that / for us,” which in its context I understand as wanting to write something that will be legible and meaningful to the people around you. How has art helped you bridge the distances within your community, especially with people who don’t see art as important?
Minor: Art is the only thing I’ve been able to fully commit myself to—to really develop a practice and believe in it, believe that it’s worth doing. I am like an art nun, or an art socialist. Not “art” as in big museums and prizes, but as in singing your little song. Or your big song, your uncontainable song. Collecting scraps, making things. People like making things. It’s in our nature. And I like making things with people, that’s my favorite way to interact. Art is the zone or the mode in which I feel like I can communicate most clearly and freely with people. At parties I usually wind up under the table with the kids and the crayons.
I do find that art is a vehicle through which I can connect with people I otherwise would never encounter—teaching poetry in low-income nursing homes, making assemblages at the youth center. Art has been the passport that gets me into those spaces. At the same time, art is also the destination. I like something I heard the philosopher Federico Campagna say: “The material is in service to the immaterial,” not the other way around. Meaning, we don’t write poems to help the movement for justice move forward; we engage in the movements for justice so that all beings may have the space and time and safety to make art!
Another thing that occurs to me is, art is like a method of smuggling. Smuggling the political into the mystical, smuggling the mystical into the political. For many years I was involved in activism to reduce the stigma surrounding abortion. I learned from activists in that community: holding a rally? Make sure there’s a craft project. Holding a craft night? Make sure you’re also fundraising for your local abortion clinic. I never want to feel like I’m engaging in mysticism devoid of politics, and I never want to feel like I’m engaging in politics devoid of mysticism. “Art” seems for me to be the best word to describe the zone where these things co-occur.
Johnson: Joy and pleasure feel like they belong in that zone of co-occurrence as well, and I experience those feelings in the gorgeous sounds of your poems—rhyme, slant rhyme, sudden bursts of repeated rhythm, words morphing into other words sound by sound. Do those things tend to find their way into a poem intentionally, unintentionally, or a bit of both?
Minor: Oh, man, I don’t know…I think what usually happens is unintentional, and then it becomes intentional. Something arrives by surprise, and then I go back and emphasize it. I use the dictionary a lot, I look up words that are near other words, sometimes I look for a word that starts with these two or three letters, and so on. I make lists of words.
Johnson: That sounds like an exercise in the pleasure of language! I am also always in awe of your titles, and Infinity Ballot has some of my favorites: “Hotfoot to the Oil of Love,” “Digging My Cosmos with a Teaspoon,” “Tenderly Diary.” How do you write such great titles? Do you have a sense of where they come from?
Minor: Titles! I love titles. I don’t really know where they come from, but usually from outside the poem. It’s so nice when a title and a work of art find each other and are happy together. But often with bigger projects, like a cycle or a book, I have a working title that changes so many times, I confuse myself. Like right now, I’m working on the newest draft of something called “The Dress Eaters,” but it used to be “Salvage,” but now “Salvage” is something else…it’s crazy. I have way too many binders of drafts.
Sometimes I’ll have a phrase written on a scrap of paper, or a line I cut from a poem, and then it turns out to be the title for something else. Lately I keep an envelope of lines and scraps cut from poems (literally snipped out, with scissors!), and I dip into those when I’m looking for a title. A long time ago I had a student to whom I suggested pulling a line from her poem to be the title—she looked at me and was like, “I think it’s unsophisticated when the title occurs in the poem.” Oh, damn, okay! I think of that.
I grew up with a Jewish mom and hillbilly dad in the foothills of the Allegheny Front. I’m white, my sister is black, on our mom’s side our cousins are Barbadian-Jewish city women, and on our dad’s side our cousins grew up driving dirt bikes. That all seemed pretty normal to me when I was a kid.
Johnson: Infinity Ballot itself is a title I love for the way it holds a sense of timelessness and the mundane. And it suits the book perfectly. It’s a book about a very specific time and place: a village in central Pennsylvania in the late 2010s/early 2020s where preppers and hippies and the “dude in cut-off everything” and kids joyriding on a tractor are living side by side, sharing their homegrown garlic and trying to compromise over a light in the park. But Infinity Ballot is also about a particular moment in American life: the momentous elections of these Trump years, extractive capitalism as seen in Amazon deliveries and Dollar General stores, the struggle to understand the people we live alongside. You show us how those larger narratives play out in the specifics of your time and place. How do you keep that balance as you write? Is it something you try to cultivate, or is it more accurately a reflection of your own life?
Minor: As an Appalachian person, I’m interested in how it can be to commit your life and energy to a particular place. As a Jewish person, I’m interested in diaspora and radical internationalism. There’s part of me that really wants to be “from here,” and there’s part of me that knows none of us are “from here.” Certainly in a historical sense, white Americans don’t have a ton of ground to stand on (no pun intended) when it comes to indigeneity, but also in a deep time sense, like, we are all just passing through.
I mention this because so much of the Trump rhetoric plays on insider/outsider dynamics—who’s from here, who isn’t? However, way before Donald so-so showed up in his current unholy manifestation, I was asking myself questions about identity and belonging in the context of rural America. Like when does it make sense to generalize, and when is it such that only particulars can tell the story?
I grew up with a Jewish mom and hillbilly dad in the foothills of the Allegheny Front. I’m white, my sister is black, on our mom’s side our cousins are Barbadian-Jewish city women, and on our dad’s side our cousins grew up driving dirt bikes. That all seemed pretty normal to me when I was a kid. And maybe it is normal—lots of Americans have mixed families, but it’s not a constellation that I’ve found it easy to make generalizations about. You know, like, the kind of Passover where the bone on the seder plate is a deer leg bone your sister found in the woods? The kind of dad who chews tobacco and has a PhD in particle physics? Are those common reference points?
Part of me believes that a situation can only really be explained via its particulars—and a Trump slogan, or a Dollar General, is like the antithesis of any particular reality. It’s like a steamroller. At the same time, I have a cultural analyst in me who wants to explain the steamrolling. In college I wrote a 30-page paper about the movie Talladega Nights. Ultimately, it wasn’t too long after that that I got into poetry—I could not sustain my scholarly interest in Will Ferrell for that long!—but I still do read a lot of scholarly work about American history and culture, and those analyses of overarching energies and narratives do inform my poems.
Johnson: “Solar Eclipse,” one of the longer poems in the chapbook, brings those themes to a pinnacle. You weave together the unstoppable construction of a Dollar General with a 1767 Warrant (a deed) for the land that became your present-day township. You write, “all I want // is for the villagers not to feel flattered / by the crushing,” meaning, you want your rural community to understand that they’re being devalued, that their home place has always been for sale. At what point in the process of writing this poem did you incorporate the 1767 Warrant?
Minor: A lot of times I wind up doing research because I get to a point in working on a poem where I just don’t know what else to say—there’s a blankness, and that blankness is not “writer’s block,” it’s actually my lack of knowledge. Research gives me information and imagery, but it also quite literally gives me words I would not have otherwise used. Writing “Solar Eclipse,” I was thinking about land sales, and how there was a moment—not so far in the past—when this land was first sold without having been bought. The Warrant to Haines was not exactly that moment, but it was close. How a copy of the Warrant arrived on my desk is thanks to my friend Philip Ruth, who is a brilliant researcher of hyper-local history and paperwork. I had no idea how to find that on my own.
Johnson: You also pull imagery and language from various religious traditions throughout these poems. You reference Psalms, The Sacred Harp shape-note hymnal, your mom texting about celebrating Jewish holidays, the “other people singing about Jesus” who really are “singing about Jesus,” even a song about George Fox you sang as a kid in Quaker School. You dip in and out of these sources, playing with meaning. How have these different traditions shaped your writing? How does poetry open up your understanding of these texts?
Minor: It’s odd, I’m like a religious person without a religion. I like the peacefulness that seems to be at the true heart of all religions—and at the true heart of poetry. Not that these texts are always preaching peace, but that to engage with them is a fundamentally peaceful act. It keeps you off the streets. If you’re reading it and you’re wondering what something means, you are suspending conviction. I’m interested in conviction, I have convictions, but conviction is also scary. The way that poetic language functions, no matter what a poem or a verse or a psalm are saying, it kind of eludes conviction. The meaning is not straightforward. Yet religious texts clearly inspire all sorts of convictions, some of which are beneficent and some of which are injurious. Like most people on the planet, I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of religious energies both beneficent and injurious. I think I keep religion close for both of these reasons.
There have also been times when I’ve wondered, why am I engaging with these traditions at all? Because I’m also very interested in artists who create their own cosmologies, like Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series, in which she leads all of humanity, over the course of six-hundred-plus pages, towards her own dark and lovely version of the Big Bang. I believe she really did that. But for now I have no plans to start my own religion! The George Fox song will probably always be in my head. Somewhere Simone Weil describes herself as “standing in the threshold of the church.” I feel that way.
Infinity Ballot is now available from Bateau Press: Click here.
Abby Minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. Granddaughter of Appalachian tinkerers and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, she teaches poetry and art classes in low-income nursing homes and youth centers. Her first book, As I Said: A Dissent (Ricochet Editions, 2022), is a collection of long documentary poems concerning abortion and reproductive politics in U.S. history.
About the Contributor
Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (Unicorn Press, 2019) and The Night Season, forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in 2027. She co-edited the anthology Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020). She has served as Poet in Residence at Lowell Observatory and at Gettysburg National Military Park, which led to the chapbook Orchard Light (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). In March 2024, she was a crew member for Imagination 1, a simulated lunar mission with an all-artist crew. She lives in Tucson and works as an archivist and librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”
Three Poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn
“Children in these circumstances are deprived of love at a formative stage and learn to immediately behave like adults without the benefit of the learning path of childhood.” Read three poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn, our second biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Conkers.”
A Conversation with John deSouza
“Language is a powerful tool and can do great harm both to ourselves and to those most close to us when used cruelly or selfishly.” Poet John deSouza discusses his chapbook, This Rough Magic, his creative process, and the influence of John Ashbery in this interview with editor Danielle McMahon.
Chapbook Poem: from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys
“…what interested me was the idea of a character who didn’t do what he was capable of, not because of external circumstances, but because of either a lack of will or a seemingly perverse one.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for May 2026, from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Love does not exist by Maria Giesbrecht
“This poem was inspired by a dream… I had this strange feeling when I woke up that it meant something more and started writing a poem to see if anything would reveal itself to me.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for May 2026, “Love does not exist” from A Little Feral by Maria Giesbrecht, along with a few words from the poet.
“After a loss in my family, I discovered one grieves for both the living who hide their pain and for the dead who sleep in silence.” Read two poems by Patricia Wallace, our third biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fox.”
May ’26: New Staff, New Calls, New(ish) Name
Editor Aiden Hunt provides information about changes to PCR’s name, format, and staff in this editor’s note, which also contains links to our Spring calls for submissions.
“I kept thinking about how easily adults learn to stop seeing what’s right in front of them, especially when they’re somewhere between one country and another, neither arriving nor leaving.” Read four poems by Nivara Lune, our fourth biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Notes Toward an Elsewhere.”
The Lines of Landscape: on The Catastrophes by Marie Scarles
“Scarles’ choice of title points away from place, and toward the book’s deeper and more powerful offering: a changed way of seeing, one of the hallmarks of any successful poetics.” Read the full chapbook review by contributing editor, D.W. Baker.
“Every time I plucked a few of the little orange sun sugars to take inside, their garden smell lingered on my fingers. It was almost enough to just sit with that scent…” Read three poems by Kait Quinn, our fifth biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Tomato.”
Chapbook Poem: Superbloom by Joyce Schmid
“That June, flowers bloomed everywhere in Northern California—as if to honor her, to celebrate her life. This poem is an attempt to accept the fact that she is really gone.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for June 2026, from Superbloom by Joyce Schmid, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Well by Robin Becker
“Allowing flickering sentiments and images to play against one another, I replicated one form of consciousness. A surprising aspect of the poem: the sudden appearance of figures of government.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for June 2026, “The Well” from Midsummer Count by Robin Becker, along with a few words from the poet.
“Like a lot of my poems, this one reaches toward something impossibly out of grasp. But … maybe that’s the power of a poem, to momentarily touch something out of our reach.” Read three poems by Scott Weaver, our sixth and final biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Annotating The Inferno.”
A Conversation with Abby Minor
“[A] long time ago I realized, and more or less accepted, that I would commune with most of my poet teachers and comrades via their work, not in person. And my work is how I talk to them.” Poet Abby Minor discusses her chapbook, Infinity Ballot, her Jewish-Appalachian heritage, and her convictions in this interview with new contributor, Julie Swarstad Johnson.