A leading American poet and a multiple Pushcart nominee (with awards from Midwest Poetry Review, Peninsula Pulse, Poetswest, Womanspace, and others), Midwest writer Christine Swanberg just had her ninth poetry collection, Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, and Other Incantations, published. A college and high school teacher, she is a featured national reader and workshop leader; her work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and journals. Your collection of 75 poems is grouped into five parts, each preceded with a color or b/w photo. How long did it take to complete? Was it more challenging than your previous collection, The Alleluia Tree? It has been five years since my last collection. I experimented with sonnets and shaping free verse. Part of my process is placing the poems in journals before publishing them as a collection because I want them to have wide a readership; it makes the collection more professional and more publishable. The collection morphed into a cohesive manuscript when working with David Gecic, of Puddin’head Press. David believes in incorporating his favorite poems into books he publishes. Eventually, we could see certain poems that lent themselves to themes in the collection. I try to group poems in a way that leads the continue...