Jessy Randall and Daniel M. Shapiro are American poets and longtime collaborators whose shared writing culminated in Interruptions: Collaborative Poems, published by Pecan Grove Press in 2011. Their collaboration grew from a friendship that began in childhood and developed through formal experiments, shared prompts, comic premises, and poems written so closely together that individual authorship often disappears inside the finished work.
Their joint practice belongs among contemporary poets who treat collaboration as a compositional method. Constraint, interruption, pop culture, humor, ordinary speech, and emotional surprise all become ways of making a shared poetic voice.
Interruptions: Collaborative Poems
Interruptions collects poems Randall and Shapiro began writing together around 2002. Early collaborations often used invented rules: alphabetical structures, assigned premises, and other constraints designed to keep either poet from controlling the whole poem. Over time, those rules became looser as the two writers developed a more intuitive shared process.
The result is a book built from exchange. Images, jokes, memories, surreal turns, and emotional shifts move between two minds while preserving the pace of a single poem. The method places the book within a broad tradition of experimental poetry where procedure and collaboration shape the form itself.
Jessy Randall
Jessy Randall is a poet, writer, and librarian whose books include A Day in Boyland, Injecting Dreams into Cows, Suicide Hotline Hold Music, How to Tell If You Are Human, Mathematics for Ladies, and The Path of Most Resistance. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, McSweeney’s, Nature, Scientific American, Asimov’s, and other journals.
Randall frequently works with visual and diagrammatic forms, comics, nursery-rhyme structures, science, libraries, everyday feeling, and feminist history. Her recent books on women in science combine poetry with research and illustration, extending her interest in the meeting point between literary form and systems of knowledge.
She is Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College, where her work with rare books and literary archives adds another dimension to a career already shaped by poetry, publishing, teaching, and the history of the book.
Daniel M. Shapiro
Daniel M. Shapiro is a poet and special education teacher whose books and chapbooks include How the Potato Chip Was Invented, Heavy Metal Fairy Tales, The Orange Menace, and (This Is Not A) Mixtape for the End of the World.
His writing often draws on music, popular culture, humor, loneliness, memory, and the strange emotional charge of familiar objects. Prose poems and compact narrative forms allow cultural references to move quickly into personal reflection, absurdity, or grief.
Friendship and collaboration
Randall and Shapiro have described their collaboration as a process in which both writers participate in every poem. Their long friendship gives the work an unusual level of trust: a line can be altered, redirected, interrupted, or made stranger without the need to defend individual ownership.
That shared method makes Interruptions useful for thinking about what happens when poetry becomes genuinely social. Voice emerges through exchange, and surprise comes from allowing another writer to change the direction of thought.
Further reading
Browse the poets directory for additional writers and literary traditions.