Q&A With Poet and JHU Prof Dora Malech

Like the poems in JHU professor and Hopkins Review editor Dora Malech’s previous four collections, those in Trying x Trying find joy through a playful use of language and gravitas through a direct and keenly observed rendering of our world. Her images and references range from Diebenkorn to Denny’s, from Robert Lowell to the parking lots at GBMC. The collection bursts with details drawn from day-to-day life, from art, from poets of the past.

Malech offers us a glimpse of an artist who is constantly observing, recording, and making connections – both at the level of ideas and experiences, as well as at the more fundamental level of language itself. In “All the Stops,” the speaker rolls through a stop sign, then meditates on the idea of stopping: “All those years // wishing I were sur