Interview with PS Conway: “Poetry is precision. It’s quiet, distilled, and often emotionally surgical.”

PS Conway is a poet, satirist, and self-proclaimed practitioner of “literary comedic nihilism,” known for pairing sharp language with darker emotional undercurrents. After years of silence, he reemerged during the Covid lockdown with Life Sucks, Laugh Here, a weekly satire blog that struck a nerve—and a funny bone.

Since then, he’s published over 50 poems, released a critically acclaimed debut poetry collection (Echoes Lost in Stars), and is now gearing up to publish Life Sucks: Memories and Introspections During the Great Covid Lockdown, a riotous essay collection born from pandemic absurdity. In this conversation, Conway reflects on humor as survival, the difference between bleeding on the page and throwing punches, and how satire became the unexpected home for all the things he couldn’t say in a poem.

PS, you went from decades of not writing to releasing a poetry collection and now a sharp, satirical essay collection. What was it about the pandemic that brought the words back? 

I think the pandemic stripped life down to its bones. No noise. No excuses. Just you and whatever you had been avoiding for the last few decades. For me, that was writing. I had gone silent for years, convinced I had nothing worth saying. But the lockdown made the silence unbearable. It was a hole neither whiskey nor therapy could continue to fill. So in 2020, I started posting weekly satirical essays on my site Life Sucks, Laugh Here, and the audience grew fast. People were desperate for release: from fear, from boredom, from the sheer absurdity of it all. Turns out, my voice still worked. It just needed a global catastrophe to clear its throat.

You’ve said that humor became a kind of lifeline during lockdown. What made you decide to lean into satire for Life Sucks instead of sticking with poetry? 

Poetry is where I wrestle with the big, existential stuff: grief, memory, longing. But during lockdown, that kind of introspection felt like staring into a mirror and daring it to crack. I needed a sharper tool. Satire let me laugh at the chaos instead of drowning in it. Life Sucks was born from that instinct to survive by mocking the absurd. I did not choose satire so much as satire chose me. The world was too bizarre to play it straight. If poetry is where I bleed quietly, humor is where I throw a punch and hope it lands somewhere near the truth.

Your essays cover everything from existential dread to aging and Nietzsche with syphilis—was there a particular essay that cracked the whole collection open for you? 

Yes, the essay that really cracked the collection open was What Doesn’t Kill You Gives You Colitis. It was the first time I fully stepped into the “PS Conway” voice and let it – like Jesus – take the wheel. That piece was my first true hit, the one readers really responded to. Up until then, everything had been funny in a nostalgic, observational way. But this was where I arrived at Literary Comedic Nihilism. You get a crash course in Nietzsche and his syphilis, then dive headfirst into my own deranged history with ulcerative colitis. How do they possibly connect? That’s the beauty of reading the book. It’s ribald, hysterical, and sets the tone for everything that follows.

You’ve been nominated for two Pushcarts and earned praise for your poetry. How different was your writing process when working on Life Sucks? Did your poetry instincts sneak into your humor writing? 

The writing process for Life Sucks was wildly different. Poetry is precision. It’s quiet, distilled, and often emotionally surgical. Life Sucks felt more like drunk fencing. That said, my poetry instincts definitely snuck in. It had to be good writing, first and foremost. I still cared about rhythm, pacing, and the way a sentence landed. I wanted the essays to be as musical as they were funny. Even the punchlines had to have their own euphony. So while the tone (radically) shifted, the discipline stayed. I might have swapped metaphors for childish poop jokes, but the muscle memory of poetry still did the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

There’s a really honest thread running through your humor—it’s funny, but also strangely comforting. Do you think writing satire lets you say things you maybe couldn’t in a poem? 

Yes, satire lets me smuggle in the hard truths under the guise of a joke. In poetry, I tend to whisper – sometimes susurrate. In satire, I can shout from the cheap seats while wearing a clown nose. That absurdity creates space to say things that might otherwise feel too raw or self-indulgent. I can talk about shame, mortality, anger, even love, but with a wink. Humor makes it safe to admit what hurts. If a poem is a wound dressed in silk, satire is the same wound with its pants around its ankles, asking if this rash looks infected.

You mention “Manopause,” aging, and societal expectations in a really fresh way. What made you want to explore those topics through comedy instead of memoir or personal essay? 

Honestly, I didn’t want to write a sad little memoir about getting older. And who would care? I wanted to write something that made people laugh so hard they accidentally learned something. Comedy gave me room to be brutally honest without getting preachy or pathetic. Aging is absurd. The body starts falling apart, your patience evaporates, and suddenly you’re sweating through your jeans in a rental car on a cold winter morning. Manopause let me vent all of that, but through a lens of satire, not self-pity. Besides, no one wants to read a serious essay on midlife without at least one reference to Severus Snape’s supercilious attitude.

Your journey’s been anything but linear—25 years of quiet, then poetry, now satire. How do you think that long creative pause shaped the way you approach writing now?  

Let me gently fix the timeline. It wasn’t exactly 25 years of silence followed by poetry. When the pandemic hit, I started with comedy, writing the weekly comedy blog (Life Sucks, Laugh Here) to help myself and others stay sane. Then my CEO decided the essays were a little too spicy for corporate America, and I was encouraged to take the site down. So I turned to poetry, which felt safer for a while. Eventually, I found my way back to satire for the book. That creative pause gave me perspective. Now I skip the pretense and just say what matters. Preferably with a punchline.

You clearly love playing with language, whether it’s lyrical or laced with dark humor. Do you find your writing routine changes depending on what genre you’re working in?

Absolutely. Poetry asks for quiet. I need space to listen – to my Muses, to rhythm, to memory, to that one perfect word I’ll delete anyway. But comedy? Comedy craves chaos. It wants caffeine, petty rage, and a browser history that could trigger an FBI wellness check. My writing routine shifts with the mood. Sometimes I’m scribbling in a notebook like a tortured monk. Other times, I’m pounding keys in the dark while yelling at my dog about socialism. But whatever the genre, the goal stays the same. Say something true. Say it well. And if possible, make someone laugh so hard they worry they pulled something.