Roundtable with Brink Editors: On the Brink of Renewal

Re:View by Hannah Bonner

Fall 2025

RE:VIEW

A few weeks before the release of our tenth issue, On the Brink of Renewal, I sat down with Brink’s Poetry Editor Cory Hutchinson-Reuss and Creative Nonfiction Editor Josh Thermidor to discuss how they approached this issue as readers, writers, and editors. Cory and Josh are two of my favorite people to talk about writing and books with, so it was no surprise to me how thoughtful they were in thinking through the theme conceptually. The care they bestow on our contributors, and their pieces, is moving to witness. 

Hannah Bonner: What immediately popped into your minds when you heard that the theme of our tenth issue was On the Brink of Renewal?

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss: My immediate response was not a practical one regarding poem curation—it was more of an emotional response. The idea of “renewal” tapped into a longing for that state—or for relief. I know that renewal isn’t necessarily positive (there could be the renewal of something that’s painful), but my immediate response was some internal sigh.  

And then I started thinking more about form, what kinds of poems might enact some experience of renewal. 

Josh Thermidor: Cory, what I really appreciate about what you said is that renewal isn’t always synonymous with relief. There are reasons why we write and why we do what we do as citizens of literature, and I think my initial response to “renewal” was actually one of acute sadness. Because, in a similar way to you Cory, I’ve been feeling like I need that so desperately. 

There was a moment over the summer when I was working on a project, and I had a moment where I was like, Oh, this thing I’ve been engaging with my whole life, I’m encountering it again in a new way. And my orientation to that thing, which is fraught, has been renewed, and I’m grateful to be propelled by that, but I’m also so distraught by the fact that that’s not going anywhere. 

Once I started to look at the work that people had been submitting for the issue, I was taken by the way people approached that theme. I imagine after you’ve worked on several issues [of Brink] that there are pieces you want to just put in your pocket and take with you—and there are a couple of those in this issue that I was like, I need this one. 

Cory: I think what you’re saying, too, is, what am I going to encounter in these pieces that get submitted? When I looked at the poems submitted for this issue, I noticed a lot of repetition. What is repetition without end? Or repetition that breaks into something slightly new? 

Around that time [editors] also found out that our eleventh issue would be On the Brink of Obsession. So I also encountered pieces that would work well for the Obsession issue because of that repetition of phrase, line, sound, or image. That was fascinating to me—what are the differences between renewal and obsession? How curious that both of these themes often involve repetition and return, cyclical movements. 

Hannah: What were you thinking in terms of curation for nonfiction in On the Brink of Renewal, Josh?

Josh: I really wanted to be surprised, so I honestly didn’t know. But at any given time I know what’s in my orbit, so I knew what was around and who was writing what. I had just read a galley of Aidan Ryan’s I Am Here You Are Not I Love You (University of Iowa Press, 2025). That title really, really turned over in my head. I was thinking of Anne Carson’s essay “Letters, Letters,” where she talks about how the letter, the epistolary form, is so interesting because the recipient of the letter often stands oblique to the action of the letter. In the classical sense, the letter is never being delivered to the person it entreaties, it ends up in someone else’s hands and someone else reads it, and then you end up in this situation where “nothing has happened”—but Aidan’s title is this kind of truncated, syntactical representation of what Carson is speaking about. “I am here you are not” and so I am writing to you. The lack of someone’s presence doesn’t compel someone to just mull about, the lack of presence renews one to reach out. 

To go back to what Cory was saying, what’s the partition between repetition and renewal or obsession? It’s interesting because the last line of Aidan’s piece [in On the Brink of Renewal] is something about his grandfather’s ring, but he goes from talking about the ring to the cyclical nature of talking about the ring. So it’s funny that his essay is in On the Brink of Renewal, but that he also ends that essay with an obsession. 

In a weird way, Aidan’s piece and Gabby’s piece [Gabrielle Bates] speak to each other about being in the interstitial space, in Gabby’s case the release of her book [Judas Goat] and the question of how one moves in that space from the first book to the next book. But Aidan’s also thinking about grief and writing and revision. I really loved how those two pieces came together [in this issue]. 

Hannah: It’s funny that you talk about those two essays in conversation with one another, Josh, because they almost bookend the issue. Aidan’s is the second piece in the issue and Gabby’s is the second to last. When I was doing the layout I was thinking of those two pieces as a container to hold the issue. Cory, is there any poetry in this issue that you’re really excited to be out in the world so you can talk to folks about it?

Cory: There’s so much to love, but of course I’m excited about Victoria Chang’s poems. Her poems in this issue are so visually striking because the series, “Seam,” are all column poems with red thread woven throughout the lines. Thinking about the idea of a seam, something being ripped apart, and thread being reused, repurposed, or renewed in the poems themselves, drew me in through the colors and her language. I love to talk to people about her work. 

Chang’s poems are also juxtaposed with Margaree Little’s poem “From Calanques/Inlets.” Those poems look very different visually (Chang’s are compact columns, very structured and contained, and Little’s are fragments and a little more diffuse), but both works are so evocative and beautiful. The calanques are mediterranean fjords. Thinking about that landscape and then these fragments as little coves or inlets of memory—I’m so excited to see that poem in the issue, too. 

Hannah: To close, what are you all reading right now?

Josh: I’m reading The Paris Review’s most recent issue. But I’ve also been thinking about necessary poets, so I bought Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Blood on the Fog (City Lights Publishing, 2021) months ago. I only just realized that Simone White, who I really love, blurbed the book. So I’ve been carrying Blood on the Fog, Simone White’s Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and Wanda Coleman’s Imagoes (Black Sparrow Press, 1983) with me. 

Cory: I just finished a collection of poems by Shane McCrae called New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2025) and then I bought Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Paradiso (Graywolf Press, 2025). She’s translated all of The Divine Comedy. I did just buy Taylor Byas’s Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, 2025) for the next Brink Book Club, but I’m also reading Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath (Milkweed Press, 2021) and was immediately taken in with the evocation of place and the speaker’s upbringing. I also just picked up the novel Thunderhead (Scribe, 2024) by Miranda Darling—that’s kind of a modern day Mrs. Dalloway. 

Josh: What about you Hannah?

Hannah: I just started reading Joan Didion’s Notes to John (Knopf, 2025), which is beautiful and heartwrenching. This morning I picked up Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011) to reread for a film review I’m working on. I love affect theory. But I also love this new list of books from y’all that I need to get at the library! 

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JOSHUA THERMIDOR (Brink Creative Nonfiction Editor, he/him) is a writer and photographer of the Haitian diaspora. He believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of all oppressed people. His photos have appeared in TIME, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, NBC News, and his writing has appeared in River Styx and The Seventh Wave. He is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at The Iowa Writers Workshop. He is always on the brink of dropping everything to watch deer.

CORY HUTCHINSON-REUSS (Brink Poetry Editor, she/her) is the author of Triptych (Milk & Cake Press, 2025) and a collaborative chapbook of poems in conversation with the visual art of Giselle Simón (Prompt Press Gallery Series, 2022). Her poetry and hybrid writings have appeared in LIT Magazine, antiphony journal, Cherry Tree, the Offing, and elsewhere. Originally from Arkansas, she holds a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, where she teaches in both university and community settings. On the elevator or down the aisles or in the kitchen, Cory is always on the brink of dancing.

HANNAH BONNER (Brink Editor-in-Chief, she/her) is a writer, film programmer, and educator. She was a 2023-2024 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow and the 2024-2025 CLAS Visiting Writer in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa. Currently, she serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Brink as well as the Film Editor for TriQuarterly, and her writing has been supported by the Breadloaf Environmental Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, among others. You can find her criticism in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Cleveland Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Sewanee Review. Another Woman (EastOver Press 2024) is her first book. She is always on the brink of wanting to do without language altogether and take a modern dance class.

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