ON CONSTELLATION ROUTE

KAVEH AKBAR This book is built around the epistolary form, these letters from you to friends, futures, cockroaches, your radiator, William Shatner. And then there are also these letters to you, many of them actually poems to you, written by friends. I’ve never seen a “single-author” poetry collection include several whole poems written by other people to the poet, which seems wild, to land upon a whole new poetry-book-thing in 2022. Can you talk about how those poems in the book came about?

MATTHEW OLZMANN I think there are a lot of interesting collaborations happening in poetry. In the case of this specific book, it sort of emerged as a natural extension of the collection’s epistolary motif. In addition to the more outward-facing letters where the speaker is addressing various aspects of the world he lives in, I had written some persona poems—letters to that speaker, written from the perspective of a flying saucer or the Roman Empire—and it seemed like a fun idea to invite a few people to write some letters of their own. I was hoping it would create a type of communal feeling. Without trying to dive too