Ange Mlinko has published six collections of poetry, including Starred Wire, published by Coffee House Press in 2005 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; Shoulder Season with Coffee House Press in 2010, which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2010, and a finalist for a PEN Center USA award. Marvelous Things Overheard was selected as one of the best books of the year in the New Yorker and the Boston Globe in 2013. In his review of Ange’s last collection, Venice, in the New York Times, Troy Jollimore noted that her poems are ‘wild, energetic, alive, wantonly catholic in their allusiveness, often downright chatty.’ Ange has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Formerly the poetry editor of The Nation, she is now the poetry editor of the literary journal, Subtropics, which is based at the University of Florida where Ange is a professor of English. Ange has just published two books almost simultaneously: Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, a work of lyrical criticism which came out from Oxford University Press at the end of 2024, and her seventh collection of poetry, Foxglovewise, which was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the US and by Faber in the UK. Foxglovewise is Ange’s first - but much overdue - UK publication. As its name suggests, Foxglovewise is a book much concerned with the relationship between place and who and what lives there, flora and fauna - whether it is an encounter with a culinary garden in a Scottish cemetery or the otherworldliness of Florida. It is a book that conjures up very particular spaces, even if the poet herself doesn’t feel located in one place. As in Ange’s other writing, the poems can be read microcosmically - focussed on the specific but also speaking broadly and acutely to issues that affect the world at large - what it’s like to find yourself off the map, being subject to ‘history’s forces’, what being a gardener or being in tune with the land, or, as she puts it, ‘negotiating earth’s curve’, can tell us about the stories we use to make sense of ourselves. Like Ange’s other work, too, the writing is crafted not just with an ear to the possibilities in language but also with a degree of levity that - in spite of moments where the poet ‘mark[s] the edge of the abyss’ - also allows the reader or listener in through humour to the kind of big ideas we should all be confronting, rather than keeping them out. In this conversation Ange talks to Niall Munro about a number of these topics, and Ange reads two poems from the collection, ‘Foxglovewise’ and ‘Voluptuous Provision’. She also offers insights into some of the differences she sees between US and UK poetry and the role of the poet. If you have any thoughts on the episode, feel free to get in touch: you can reach us on social media (@brookespoetry) or e-mail us at poetrycentre@brookes.ac.uk