In episode #18 of Phoned-In, poet Ish Klein reads from Moving Day.

Ish Klein is both a filmmaker and a poet, so it’s no wonder that her second book of poems, Moving Day, seems to be infused with the light and movement of cinema (“Marquee me, the card/ entitled, MOVING DAY,” “I hear your voice beyond the screen.”) The poems in Klein’s latest collection contain a rare mixture of language. In this energetic, topic-hopping collection, Klein is somehow able to blend the formality of literary voices past (from “Be Here Hamlet”: “A puzzle how humans react to the loss of the life of a king,/ these royal feelings die,/ the awe in a way: a depth can die”) with a smattering of colloquialisms from every day life (In “Fairy Tales from the Web,” Klein speaks about the phenomena of online dating, “This is the magic of the machine./ The meeting and love trial and,/ if it works, the love made.”). Moving Day is chock full of exclamation points, which punctuate Klein’s poems (and the collection at large) with a sense of urgency.

Hannah Jansen You seem to have a fascination with discomfort. Moving Day is full of “hard, black-biled” language and “instants uneasy as amputees.” It’s haunting, ghost-filled, and gritty. Why do you think you return to that sense of unease throughout the collection?

Ish Klein I am often very uncomfortable because I still deal with my past in which senseless things have happened to me, and I have made many mistakes and have had misjudgments that bother me. A couple of things I deal with every day are anxiety and paranoia. Anyway I write from my state, but the state is getting better, I think.

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