Zachariah Wells is the author of three collections of poetry (Unsettled, Track & Trace, and Sum), as well as a children’s book Anything But Hank, with Rachel Lebowitz), and a collection of critical essays . He is also the editor of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets and The Essential Kenneth Leslie. His poems have been translated into Bosnian and Spanish and adapted into operatic songs by composer Erik Ross. He lives with his family in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

We talk, heartily, here about Career Limiting Moves (Biblioasis, 2013), about my perverse pleasure in reading criticism, Zach’s threadbare bathrobe, Paul Muldoon’s critical style, Zach’s negative review of Jan Zwicky’s negative review of negative reviewing, the impossibility of suppressing subjectivity, the anvil of the agon, Zach’s snide attack on Andre Alexis. About Michael Lista and Scott Griffin, going easy on friends, Michael Harris’s poem ‘Concentrate,’ Margaret Atwood’s Survival, Peter van Toorn, the importance of cutting to the core poems, King Lear, John Clare, the slim, stellar oeuvre of Elizabeth Bishop, and Lisa Robertson’s take on Wordsworth’s The Prelude