“Flyby,” “Sleeping Girl,” and “Ode to the Giant Ground Sloth” by Audrey Hall appeared in Issue 47 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
These three poems ended up as an unintentional triptych on the passage of time:
“Flyby” was inspired by the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft launched in October 2024 to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Scientists expect to find some form of life there, due to the moon’s bodies of waters, but the spacecraft won’t reach Europa until April 2030. I thought this impending discovery made for a fascinating comparison with the Greenland shark, which lives for hundreds of years at the bottom of the ocean and can gestate for over a decade. The universe’s best secrets have always been protected by time.
“The Sleeping Girl” was inspired by Dod Procter’s 1927 painting, which I encountered in the National Gallery of Ireland. I’m particularly excited about this poem’s publication, because the ekphrastic is a poem I’ve long admired and wished to publish.
“Ode to the Ground Sloth” was inspired by the display in the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science’s atrium. I practically grew up in this museum, thanks to my mother and my grandmother who worked there. The memory of being trapped in time on sleepaway camp with this fossil, waiting for morning to break, still figures in my dreams.
What was the most difficult part of writing these pieces?
Ironically the two sonnets arrived much more simply and organically than the free verse “Flyby,” which I restructured and pared down for months. When I started writing “Flyby,” the Europa Clipper mission hadn’t even begun, and was actually postponed, making it seem as though the poem might never be relevant! Luckily, she did in fact make it into space and redeem the poem.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. It recontextualizes Plath and her writing in the wake of her recently discovered letters which accuse Ted Hughes of intimate partner violence and assault.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Natasha Trethewey, fellow Mississippi native and author of Thrall, one of the first books of poetry I read! I would also love to pick Danielle DeTiberus’s brain on her process writing “The Artist Signs Her Masterpiece, Immodestly.” You can tell I’m fascinated by the ekphrastic!
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I am putting together a manuscript! Tentatively revolving around nature and global warming, existential anxiety, art, my relationship with the concept of love, and alligators.
Our thanks to Audrey for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Flyby,” “Sleeping Girl,” and “Ode to the Giant Ground Sloth” here.
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Audrey Hall is a poet, literature scholar, and megafauna enthusiast from Mississippi. Her poems are published and forthcoming in the minnesota review, Raleigh Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, and others. Her work has been anthologized in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama and was nominated for Best of the Net Awards in 2022 and 2025.