This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Colin Pope, whose poetry collection Losers is out today from the University of Wisconsin Press. “I never actually thought of myself / as a dishwasher,” Pope writes in “On the Various Disciplines of Losers,” one of the early poems in the collection. Losers is an exploration of what it looks like to push back against the labels imposed by society while struggling to make ends meet. Pope’s specific, personal, and lyrical verses paint life in working-class America with unsentimental care. “It’s about work. Opportunity. Hurling everything / into a single moment of hope and then, / when it’s passed, losing that very same everything along with all time after and before,” Pope writes. “The bag empty. / Tables cleared. Flowers at night wrung with dew. / And telling yourself in the shower this is what / patience looks like. This is how waiting feels.” Publishers Weekly praises the collection for “explor[ing] working-class and postindustrial rural America in poems that tackle class, geography, and social constructs.” And Natasha Tretheway adds that “Losers reminds us that it is our suffering, our ability to feel keenly, that gives meaning to our time here.” Colin Pope is the author of Prayer Book for the New Heretic (NYQ Books, 2023) and Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral (Tolsun Books, 2019). He has received two prizes from the Academy of American Poets, is the assistant director of creative writing at Northwestern University, and is on the advisory boards of the literary journals RHINO and TriQuarterly. Originally from the Adirondacks, he currently lives in Chicago.
Colin Pope, author of Losers.
1. How long did it take you to write Losers?
It started taking shape in early 2023. I’d say the whole process took about two years, though it’s nonlinear, of course. It occurred to me that, somehow, I hadn’t written seriously about my childhood or my background in previous collections, so when the decision was made to actually turn the lens on myself the work came in rushes. The draft I submitted to the University of Wisconsin Press was completed in mid-2025.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Staying inside it. There are a lot of uncomfortable situations and memories in this one that had to be returned to repeatedly. You know, you grow up kind of poor in America, you’re likely to be around some fucked-up stuff, for better or worse. And then, on top of that, making sure I’m portraying the people and the places accurately and with the grace I’d want to give myself. The push and pull between tough memories told truthfully, essentially. That was the hardest part.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have a cluttered home office in the downstairs part of my Chicago apartment. Something about the clutter itself helps my brain, sort of like riding the edge of my attention span along all these pieces of my history and daily life. As far as when and how often, I like to tell people that when I’m in good spiritual shape, I set the timer on my desk for twenty minutes and then look at a blank page. If something comes out, great. If not, better luck tomorrow. The truth, though, is that I’m rarely in good spiritual shape. I tend to pick away at ideas for poems, make notes, and write an actual draft when I find the mental bandwidth and calm. After a while of this, I see the threads of my subconscious obsessions and the writing gains momentum and speed, and then I pursue the project doggedly until a draft of a book emerges.
4. What are you reading right now?
C. Russell Price’s new book, Bisquick: An American Seance (Northwestern University Press, 2026), is fantastic and inventive in all the ways poetry needs right now. Dorsey Craft’s excellent A Brief History of Accidental Inventions (TRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2026). I’m rereading Anthony Madrid’s I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, 2012), which is maybe one of the most underrated books of poetry of the century so far. J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), another deeply undervalued recent collection. Lisa Lewis’s Present and Future Storm (Word Works, 2026) just came out and is such deft and fun work. Natalie Shapero is sort of undeniably great. Then let’s see…there’s a bunch of standbys on my desk next to my laptop: Sharon Olds, Frank Stanford, James Wright, Zbigniew Herbert, Natasha Trethewey, Diane Seuss. I will randomly pick up and flip through any or multiple of these on any given day. I’ve got a stack of about forty books on the desk, all of which I’m technically reading at the same time.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
You know, I’m always surprised that more people don’t read Cyrus Cassells, whose work is so wonderfully beautiful and whose rate of output is so unbelievable he’s something of a poetry miracle. He’s the one who introduced me to Thomas James, who is another ridiculously undervalued and under-read poet. Perhaps the greatest lyric poet of the Plath tradition.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I recommend writers, or anyone aspiring to be a “serious” writer, do anything within legal limits to pursue their craft. And even some things outside of legal limits, provided they don’t hurt anyone. For me, this question boils down to whether you believe in two things: that everyone deserves a chance to pursue writing and that the apprenticeship model that other arts have used for centuries can work for creative writing. For me, [the answer is] yes to both, with a “duh, of course” attitude. I was the first person in my family to go to a four-year college. And then the first in the history of the extended family to get a doctorate. These things came as a direct result of pursuing writing seriously, which I wouldn’t have been able to do without the patronage of an MFA to get me through. That you can get paid to go to school to write is an incredible, incredible thing, particularly for first-generation students and those of us from backgrounds without much academic or financial privilege. The MFA program provides these paid apprenticeships that allow so many diverse voices to gain the resources that were once reserved only for the wealthy or academically advantaged.
7. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
This took months to figure out! At first I believed that the poem order could operate purely chronologically, with a section focused on childhood, a section focused on teen [and] college years, and then a section focused on present(ish)-day adulthood. This was a good idea but completely impractical (and ultimately dull and predictable). The logic of the book is the logic of my mind’s attempt at creating narrative from disparate occurrences and emotions across time periods. So the final organization lived between these two impulses, with early poems that point to later sections and later poems that call back to the mind that conceived the earlier [ones]. I wanted to make sure to establish place and people at the beginning, too, which is why the collection starts with “Spitting Off the Overpass in December,” which is based on a true occurrence, of course.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Losers, what would you say?
Be patient. I rushed into publishing my first few books because, having grown up blue collar, I thought I’d need to have books out in order to get a job teaching somewhere. And don’t get me wrong, I love my first two books, but there are things I would change with both of them, if not in the writing itself then in the publication process. Of course, I say this looking back now; at the time, I did end up getting term contract academic jobs, and who knows if publishing those first books helped or not.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Losers?
[Laughs.] This feels like a loaded question for this project! Again, I didn’t grow up well-off, so I had a lot of jobs that directly informed this collection. I counted them all up once and I’ve had around fifty jobs, not counting one-off gigs like cleaning out old barns or shoveling snow for people. During my PhD I worked at a flower company where I delivered flowers. For those who don’t know, delivering flowers is an insane job. In the same trip you can go from dropping a bouquet at the ER for a guy who’s comatose from a car wreck [to] visiting a beauty parlor to give an apology arrangement to somebody’s girlfriend, then to the funeral home, where you have to literally navigate around the dead. What other job is like this? Such jobs inevitably inform writing, at least the narrative conceits. Also, I grew up washing dishes, delivering newspapers on my bike, painting houses, doing landscaping, working catering jobs, [and more]. All of these, and the people I met at all of them, directly informed the work in this book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Be kind toward your writing and ruthless toward your editing. The production of work should feel like a pleasure, even if you’re wading through difficult things or working in a formally intricate mode. Then, after you have a draft of anything, admit to yourself that you’re not a perfect human, you are in fact deeply flawed, and what will separate the average piece of writing from the good piece of writing are the micro-decisions that occur during editing. Be the ruthless, annoying, exacting, paranoiac of your most neurotic nightmares in the editing. But [in] the writing, be a kid chasing a firefly.
