Featured Poets: Ellen Hinsey and Madeline Gilmore
Ellen Hinsey's life has carried her far from the corridors of literary reputation-making and deep into the heart of today's most significant struggles. She has had her ear to the ground, listening to warning signs and rumbles from afar. Reading the poems excerpted here from Anatomy of the Eclipse (Arrowsmith, Fall 2026) feels revelatory—like deciphering coded messages smuggled across enemy lines offering sustenance to those under siege. Oracular and oblique, they tease us to the limits of thought, making us feel the vastness on the other side of all we don't know about ourselves and our world. The poems quicken something in us, something prior and utterly secure, an aspect of being that remains unintimidated by the portents of darkness descending. We've been here before, too often (just read Tacitus), and Hinsey's preemptory verses have been trying to warn us. At the same time, by forcing us to slow down and let the mind linger, they brace, embrace. and fortify us. In order to extricate ourselves, we must first acknowledge where we are. If there were a way to say this more directly, the poet would have found it. Hinsey’s honesty is evident in every line.
— Askold Melnyczuk
In Madeline Gilmore’s poem “Tuscany,” the speaker recounts a rainy scene at a rented house:
Water dots / leaking roses, // the breeze / beneath the door // is blue.
It’s a pleasure to relax into the spatial quiet that this description allows. But, as in much of Madeline’s work, the spare quality of the language reveals an attention to detail and pattern, both intimate and sharply observed.
In this moment, the relationship between objects and their environment comes into focus. Paired with the still dots of water are the roses, leaking: water moves in relation to the flower. And the static object of the door may not be so static after all—it is in conversation with its surroundings. The breeze moves beneath the door, a blue breeze that has weight like the water falling off the flower.
This moment in “Tuscany” speaks to a larger consideration in Madeline’s work, the way an image, always imbued with some element of stillness by nature of its preservation in the poem, is also filled with vitality and action through the act of remembering. The more time I spend with Madeline’s work the more I notice the way her interest in the image opens onto questions of time. Her poems show us how the linear structure that separates the past, present, and future is always a fragile tether at best.
At what moment do we let a fragment of the past shape our current perception of the world? In Madeline’s poems, a school bathroom’s blue floor or a cicada’s song rearrange the speaker's understanding of herself in the present—how her body, intellect, and art have been changed by that fragment of experience.
Dreams are also a part of this negotiation, and one of the pleasures of Madeline’s work is the way that the speaker often anticipates the dreamlike quality of the moment - the knowledge that what unfolds in real time already feels like the kind of relic we reach for through the hazy texture of memory.
Take this moment in “Testaccio,” where the speaker visits the Protestant Cemetery in Rome with her sister.
To me it feels // more like a dream, / those cicadas insisting / for centuries:
through what / we cannot comprehend / we must sing.
The image already occupies a space in her mind where memory is tangled with the ephemeral present.
What to make of this collapse? As the speaker shows us, the cicada’s imperative to process through song is one answer. And we can read Madeline’s poems with this guidance, too—take the unknowable and bring its sensory detail into relief, distill the barely touchable memory into its living image.
— Alexandra Kamerling
Madeline Gilmore has a BA in English from Williams College and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Rialto, Epiphany, and other publications. She is co-editor of Volume Poetry. Originally from North Carolina, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she edits art books. Read more at https://www.madelinegilmore.com/.
Ellen Hinsey is the author of ten books of poetry, essays, dialogue and literary translation. Her volumes of poetry include The Illegal Age, The Invisible Fugue, Update on the Descent, The White Fire of Time, and Cities of Memory, which received the Yale University Series Award (1995). Her essays are collected in Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism (2017). Her book-length dialogue with Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North, explores post-war Eastern European culture and ethics under totalitarianism and was a finalist for Lithuania’s Book of the Year. Hinsey’s work has appeared numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Irish Times, Paris Review, Poetry, The Southern Review and Der Tagesspiegel, among others. A former Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and a DAAD Künstlerprogramm Fellow, she has most recently been a visiting professor at Göttingen University. She lives in Paris.
Alexandra Kamerling is a writer based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, and was a 2023-2024 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Library for the Performing Arts. Her writing has previously appeared in Volume Poetry, Works & Days, and Annulet.
Askold Melnyczuk has published five books of fiction. His first novel, What Is Told, was the first commercially published novel in English to bring to light the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. He guest edited a special issue of Irish Pages on The War in Europe, available here. His first collection of poetry, The Venus of Odesa, will be out from Mad Hat in the spring of 2025. A selection of essays and reviews, The Dangerous Tongue: Why Literature Matters More Than Ever, will be out from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2026.