“Survival Takes a Wild Imagination” Shows How the Labor of Liberation Makes Us Better
How do we write and think about survival, about freedom, and about our revolutionary potential while living in a burning world? How can we begin to examine the interpersonal tragedies we’re forced to live through as parts of larger systems of atrocity that not only impact our lives but the lives of every living creature around us? How do we do that work despite (and in spite of) the fact that there are so many powerful people working against us to prevent us from doing it? Perhaps most importantly, how do we continue on with our humanity intact? How do we stay as whole as possible?
Through her newest collection of poetry, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, multidisciplinary artist Fariha Róisín explores her experiences as a queer, Muslim, Bangladeshi woman trying to heal from a childhood of abuse and the pain of generational trauma while also providing responses to these questions and posing some new ones for us to consider as we try to move through our corners of the world.
The personal is political.
Because of the way people have bastardized that phrase, it feels almost silly to point out how closely linked our personal lives are with the world(s) outside of them, but it doesn’t make that reality any less true. The personal is political, whether we acknowledge that or not, whether we want it to be this way or not, no matter how hard we try to disconnect ourselves from what is happening and what has happened before we were even alive. Sometimes, it feels as if people are becoming more acutely aware of this, but then the modern world constructs new horrors or resurrects old ones to remind us that we still desperately need to have these conversations. We not only need to answer these crucial questions for ourselves so that we can find the strength to move forward but we also need to answer them to ensure our collective endurance and eventual liberation.
Most poetry collections at this length generally move through one or two themes but Róisín’s focuses on a variety of different aspects of her life, her identity, and her faith — her relationships with her unloving mother and her “hero” father, her relationship to her body, her relationship to desire, the importance of joy and pleasure, her belief in our ability to liberate ourselves from oppression, our connections to the natural world, among others. Although the collection is split into three sections (to hint at the ideas that connect all of the poems in that section), Róisín weaves all of the ideas, feelings, and memories she’s excavating and interrogating through one another to prove how no one experience is truly untouched by another.
In the first section, “The beginning, the body, the wound,” Róisín jumps right into the more intimate violences of her life, describes the difficulties and triumphs of healing from mental, emotional, and physical contusions thrust on her not by her own choices but by the inherited traumas of her mother and other family members, and pushes back against the systemic conditions that created those traumas. The poem “For Every Girl Who Has Had Her Throat Slit Open” directly addresses patriarchal constructions of violence and the ways men wield their power over women, each other, and the Earth. Róisín writes,
Here’s the thing, though you can pounce around in your violence all the mindlessness that becomes you. Fight wars & do whatever you need to do to tell yourself you have meaning. But nothing will salve ego without grace…
As the poem continues, she points out how men covet and use power as a way to mask the grief of their inevitable mortality and the parts of their lives that make them feel shame. But like most of the poems in the collection, she doesn’t just stop at pointing towards these truths; she also presents a resolution:
If they could only just take all the moments needed to weep & say thank you, thank you, for all of this… for a moment longer than a second…& mean it.
Two of the most impactful poems of this section, “This is for Everyone Who Had to Make a Family out of Themselves” and “Amar Sonar Bangla,” confront inextricably connected aspects of Róisín’s identity: that of a survivor of childhood domestic trauma and abuse and that of a child born to Muslim Bangledeshi immigrants whose families survived genocide. Named after the national anthem of Bangladesh, the latter poem, “Amar Sonar Bangla,” is almost a prayer about the burden and requirement of overcoming the historical and inherited trauma of her family, specifically of her mother. She writes:
You can’t ever forget, you can’t ever escape. Memory. I live it for you Every day, ammu abbu, dado, dadi, chacha, chachee. ancestors guide me out of this heat, let me heal your centuries’ worth of pain.
As she continues describing the ways her mother’s uncaring and hurtful nature helped make her strong enough to carry this burden, she hits on the radical possibility inherent in the struggle to liberate ourselves from the pains of the past:
I’m no longer mad that this was my karma, someone has to break this centuries-old grief. It’s a privilege to do it for you, it’s a privilege to do it for my people.
With this, she reminds us survival and liberation aren’t just about the destruction of the systems of oppression that threaten and dismantle our lives. We also have to eliminate those systems within ourselves.
The former poem, “This is for Everyone Who Had to Make a Family out of Themselves,” is about figuring out how to love and be loved despite years of living without the kind of love all young people deserve. It’s about trying to become a person who can give love and accept love freely, even among the ruinous nature of our society. Róisín writes:
I want a love that knows that to love a wild thing is to let it be free, & love me anyway. I want to be a person who chooses light, holy over seduction. God over money. Listen to me, I want to be a person who sings freedom & believes it.
Upon every rereading of this poem, that final line — “Listen to me, / I want to be a person / who sings freedom & believes / it.” — always feels so fitting as a summary of Róisín’s intentions with this entire collection.
The second section of the collection, “Liberation, pleasure, joy,” is the shortest section in both page count and in the length of the poems grouped there. While it may be a little jarring for some to go from reading poems about grief, trauma, and the general pain of being a person with multiple historically marginalized identities to reading poems about sex and the desire for human connection, these poems very much belong in the same collection. Actually, the fact that they exist together here elucidates how Róisín views all the different aspects of desire that the collection is addressing as springing from a similar place, from inside of us where all of our life experiences, beliefs about our positions in the world, and our relationality to others live and coalesce to create who we are.
All of the poems in this section will hit you in the gut one way or another, but the standout is really “A Pandemic Lamentation,” which sounds exactly like what it is: a kind of ode to the grief of the pandemic and a celebration of the lessons some of us (hopefully, many of us) learned from it. Through this poem, she examines the difficulty of isolation and of bearing witness to what feels like unending death. Then, she reminds us of this truth:
This tiny eternity made us
collapse capitalism into a blip.
Humans so greedy, they think
their lives that they lead for no one
will count for something,
when all that’s ever mattered
was how well you loved, & what you
left behind of it.
The third and final section of the collection, “Finding Earth, God,” is the most poignant and critical section of the collection, especially for the current moment we’re living in, especially for those of us bearing witness to genocide and finding ways to speak out against it. This is the section where she really gets into the logistics of survival — not just our individual survival through our personal tragedies but our survival as people who dare to imagine and believe in the possibility of a better world and who have committed ourselves to doing the work that will help get us there. What is especially surprising and moving about this section of the collection is how Róisín unites all the themes, ideas, griefs, and hopes she’s been investigating and dissecting throughout the other two sections together to bring her vision of moving forward to life.
It feels impossible to choose just a few poems from this section, as they are all equally stunning in their construction, delivering their messages in ways that are both extremely memorable and feel easily accessible to readers of any experience. But there are a few I will come back to over and over again.
The section starts with so much beauty and power with a 10 stanza prose poem where Róisín speaks directly to and about her younger self called “An Ode to Baby Fa.” She writes, “So I celebrate the small grand act of making something big out of a life that coulda turned’a tragedy. No one’s sympathy will ever be a salve for the permanent feeling of loss. Whose words will help overcome generations of trauma? You can do it, Fa, you can remember yourself?” Once again, she calls herself forward to show us the promise and possibility that lies in the labor of healing and of working to free ourselves of the binds of the past.
The section continues with poems that both continue the work she’s been doing in the rest of the collection and speak directly to us, as if she is trying to point out to us that while her experiences are her own, they are connected to the tapestry of human experience that she encounters through other people and through the work she does as a writer and an activist. In “Fear, I Give You Back,” she insists we must let go of the fear of the unknown in order to truly achieve the changes we want to see in our world:
Fear, a word by any other name, would sound as primordial & yet human evolution relies on its collapse. To fear or not fear? That is the question—whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer from it, the capitalistic design that arrows outrageous fortune, & to take & take, for a hypothetical scarcity, to steal, to pillage, to bear arms to seas, to lands, to fear the unknown, than to accept the devices of our own inhumanity.
In one of the shortest and most extraordinary poems of the collection, “What Is a Border?”, Róisín constructs a kind of declaration of independence for herself and for everyone with lineages and inherited violences that are similar to hers. To some degree, it also works as a declaration for anyone who is forced to live on the margins and doesn’t fit into the dominant, ruling class’s definition of how people should be. Here, she proclaims, “I am borderless / You see, / I am not small. / I am not made out of limitations. / I am free.” It’s so simple, and yet it is so gut wrenching and formidable in that simplicity.
The poem “How to Hone Your Intuition,” a short prose poem that uses allusions from the Tarot to urge us to remember the only way forward is to “Burn it all down & start again,” and the final poem in the collection, “An Incantation,” a two part poem that brings everything Róisín has been discussing in the collection to an incredibly compelling conclusion, are perfect end caps to a collection that challenges our ideas of what survival looks like and pushes us to recognize how our individual survival is intimately linked to the continued existence of the people around us, to the creatures we encounter, and to the Earth itself. In “An Incantation,” Róisín writes, “Survival is not for the weak, sometimes / you gotta kick so hard you break your leg — / see, survival is learning how to kick the door down / with a broken, rickety leg.”
This line feels like a perfect encapsulation of everything Róisín is trying to remind us of and teach us through this collection. Each section builds on the previous one to a tapestry of feeling that brings us through the diversity of experiences, possibilities, and hopes that are often a part of existing in a world as disastrous, demoralizing, and dehumanizing as ours. Through the exploration of her own specific tragedies and joys, Róisín is able to help us imagine a way out of the harmful processes and systems that make our lives feel impossible to live a lot of the time. As she points out in that line from “An Incantation,” our collective survival and liberation is dependent upon our ability to recognize and accept the toll the work of liberation will take on our bodies, our minds, and our spirits.
Róisín points out over and over again that getting ourselves out of the mess the people who came before us made was never going to be easy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t possess the ability to do it. And it doesn’t mean we should stop trying. In fact, as Róisín points out at the end of “An Incantation,” the labor of liberation can actually make each of us better, one by one: “I love myself for committing to this / healing, for embracing it, for allowing / it to cleanse me. For not resisting anymore.”
Survival Takes a Wild Imagination by Fariha Róisín is out now.
Close Out National Poetry Month by Preordering Queer Poetry Books
I’m asked all the time how people can support queer and trans authors, especially in this potent moment of increased targeted book banning, and two of the easiest things you can do is: request upcoming LGBTQ books from your public library and, if you have the money, preorder them. Preordering books is immensely helpful for writers! So, to close out this year’s National Poetry Month, I thought it would be fun to look to the future of queer poetry. Here are some upcoming queer poetry books you can preorder right now! Also, if you want to stay on top of your preorders for poetry collections and chapbooks put out by queer poets of color, keep Shade Literary Arts’ continuously updated preview list bookmarked!
Spellbook for the Sabbath Queen by Elisheva Fox (May 2023)
Billed as “part psalter, part Sapphic verse,” this upcoming book out from Belle Point Press weaves in Jewish mysticism and vivid place writing on the Gulf Coast and East Texas.
Mare’s Nest by Holly Mitchell (May 2023)
This one’s for the horse gays! It’s about Kentucky, queer adolescence in the early aughts, and yes HORSES!
I Am the Most Dangerous Thing by Candace Williams (May 2023)
This is the author’s debut full-length poetry book. According to the publisher: “Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn’t just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself.” I am very intrigued!
apocrifa by Amber Flame (May 2023)
This book with a gorgeous cover is “a nongendered love story told in verse.” It’s the follow-up to Amber Flame’s full-length debut, Ordinary Cruelty.
Forever Is Now by Mariama J. Lockington (May 2023)
Technically, this one is a YA novel-in-verse, but I thought it would be fun to include! It centers a Black queer teen who has chronic anxiety, and that cover? Gorgeous.
I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes (June 2023)
Tin House stays putting out some of the best poetry collections in the game! I’m looking forward to this one from a poet whose work I’ve loved. The publisher describes the book thusly: “Across four sections, poems navigate the terrain of queer, normative, and ambiguous intimacies with a frank intelligence.”
Shrines by Sagaree Jain (June 2023)
Former Autostraddle contributor Sagaree Jain has a new book of poems coming out with Game Over Books, and it sounds great! From the publisher: “SHRINES is half queer coming of age tale, half a mad dash to ecstasy, all pulsing with effervescent joy.” Plus, it was blurbed by K-Ming Chang, and that’s always gonna be a yes for me.
Because You Were Mine by Brionne Janae (July 2023)
Brionne Janae’s lines made it into Dani Janae’s list of 25 lines of poetry she thinks about every day, which published earlier this National Poetry Month, and rightfully so. The upcoming book is about queer love, family, trauma, and community.
Alt-Nature by Saretta Morgan (February 2024)
Listen, I know this doesn’t come out until 2024, but it’s never too early to preorder a book! A hack I’ve used in the past if I know there’s a possibility I’ll move before the pub date but still want to get an early preorder in is to have it sent to a friend’s place or my place of work when I used to work in an office. This upcoming collection is being put out by Coffee House Press and promises: “Sense-expanding poems that bring into relief the histories, landscapes, social ecologies, and Black queer femme experience of the southwestern United States, finding language to speak to the violences that accompany environmental degradation, settler-colonialism, globalized/ing militarism, and forms of incarceration.”
“Rose Quartz” Review: Poems for the Wounds We Carry
I’ll admit, I was attracted to the title. Shades of pink have followed me through my life, showing up in names, flowers, organs, sex. In the summer sunlight, pink is innocent, warm, nurturing, even sensual. In its evening shadows, pink is the reflection of fleeting mortality. Sasha Taqwsəblu Lapointe’s new poetry collection Rose Quartz grapples with the deep wounds inside of us all through evershifting rose-colored glasses.
Split into four chapters — Black Obsidian/Ace of Wands, Opal/Eight of Swords, Rose Quartz/The Lovers, and Moonstone/The High Priestess — Lapointe mixes spells, potions, and witchcaft in a delicate balance of Brothers-Grimm-like fairytales, only to reveal the short distance between fear and death. The beginning of the collection drops us into Lapointe’s reality: an Indegenous woman living in the Pacific Northwest, proclaiming and explaining the world in which her relatives are so inherently linked to the mud and clay around her; “the red paint / is for healing.”
Quite quickly, the reader must grapple with the color red: “she is checking to see / if she is still intact / are the guts here the liver the stomach / the heart.” Eventually, we are left with the emptiness of life without shades of rose: “Half Indian / an older woman laughs / I must take after / a white father / because I can / pass.” We are also left with a world without red: “This beast will go on living / Each beat of its heart tells me, / It will survive and I will not.” What we expect to be whimsical reveals the doomed truth about the reality of 2023. Tales of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Hasel and Grettel, all used to sugarcoat colonialism, racism, microaggressions, systems of labor, exchange, and enforcement working against us. The speaker is acutely aware that she cannot separate the mysticism of nature from the inhumanity of humankind.
Deep in the beating heart of this world in which she is trapped, we hear stories of her lovers. Despite the title’s names, the rose quartz that follows her is anything but a fairytale. This spectrum of lively colors stalks her. The care of her lover is saturated in fear; “but at night they came / thorns around my chest / and I forgot how to breathe / my husband sleeping next to me / could not reach me / through the bramble.” These verses, from her poem “Rose Quartz,” speaks to the fear of exposing broken wounds. Painted beneath glistening gemstones and hues of pink, the speaker’s journey through healing climaxes when she gives birth “to a rosebud / still unmoving / deep deep red.” At the core of this tragedy, “my skin / was leaving / my body / organs hardening.” Love and all its baggage is exposure, and exposure is excruciatingly unforgiving in the body and in life.
Like conversations with her grandmother or rituals with the Earth, she searches for some kind of healing from the sharp scars of rose quartz, only to be left with the shadows of a rose-colored life. In her final section of the collection, The High Priestess, she invites us into the wisdom of solitude: “I sat alone in a diamond.” Within this space, the speaker begins to find resolve as she reflects on her own identities in a few verses that will continue to stick with me for awhile: “I am tired of writing / about old things / like grandmothers” only to be followed pages later by “because I will never / be done writing / about old things.” The tormented speaker we learn to empathize with finally sees her life in rose, as told by her grandmother “keep this / with you / it is part / of your story / sometimes / to remember / a wound / is the way / of healing.” We need the reds and the pinks of life, in all of its blood, gore, and vitality.
By the final poem in the collection, I was soothing the truthful stings of my own healing wounds. I placed the book down with a healthy dose of reality, but a fantastical curiosity about how this process works its magic. Rose Quartz is far from the rosy, lovey-dovey, romantic verses and prose I expected, but exceeded my expectations nonetheless.
8 Poets With New Queer Books To Check Out This National Poetry Month
I need you to know that whenever I share a post about poetry, at least two hours of tears have gone into it because! There’s so much great poetry! My life has been irrevocably changed for the better and the important and the necessary by just one glance a poet has made at me five years ago! I am absolutely feral over poetry, and it overwhelms me so much that I often leave it, just so I can have some semblance of control over myself and the way this special interest beats in me like my heart’s big brother. If I’ve given you one recommendation, I’ve held back from giving 15. And even then, I will (with your permission) text you all the ones I forgot because I could not make my brain work fast enough to open the catalogues of my heart while we were catching up at Starbucks.
Anyways, here’s eight poets with new books that you should be on the lookout for this month! (And check like, every small press possible as there are so many deals to be had this month (like Button Poetry, Game Over Books, Ghost City Press, Haymarket Books, and YesYes Books). Imagine, more poetry books both in your home and on your hard drive! A dream come true that certainly will not take over your life in any way shape or form. *wink* *blink*)
1. Negative Money by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (they/them) is a writer with experience in poetry, prose, and essays. They are a Cave Canem Fellow, Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellow, and is Associate Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Art & Design at Northeastern University.
Read: “Two Poems” in The Account
Follow: On Instagram
2. Freedom House: Poems by K.B. Brookins
K.B. Brookins (they/them) is a Black, queer, and trans writer. A National Endowment of the Arts Fellow, they won the 2022 Academy of American Poets Climate Action prize for their poem “Good Grief” (linked below). Their memoir, Pretty, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.
Read: “Good Grief” in poets.org
Follow: On Twitter and Instagram
3. Explodingly Yours by Chen Chen
Though Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency came out last September (which you should also read), I need you to grab Explodingly Yours for the simple fact that this has to have one of the gayest covers I’ve ever witnessed and we should share in that joyous celebration together.
Chen Chen edits the lickety split, an online poetry project hosted through Twitter (each poem is the length of one tweet).
Read: “I’m not a religious person but” in Poetry Foundation
Follow: On Twitter and Instagram
4. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
Franny Choi is a Ruth/Lilly Stenberg Fellow and someone who’s reading/class/any virtual presence I always sign up for. I just finished reading this book yesterday. The Libby app (please tell me if you’re in the United States that you love yourself and you have this) tells me I spent 27 minutes reading this book cover to cover, but I know it’s tak(en)(ing) me at least 13 lifetimes. I will not shut up about this book I need everyone to carry this book into battle, into softness, into hope with them, right now and forever amen.
Read: “How to Let Go of the World” in PEN
Follow: On Twitter
5. A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE Golden
Golden (they/them) is a Pink Door Fellow, an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellow, and have a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University. A curator and community organizer, they are a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Transgender Poetry for their book, A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE, and have won awards for their photography series documenting Black trans people across the United States, titled, On Learning How To Live.
Read: “Two Poems” in Apogee
Follow: On Instagram
6. Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan
Charif Shanahan (he/him) is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, a Lambda Literary Finalist in Gay Poetry, and the aforementioned Trace Evidence: Poems. I started reading this book about a week ago when I was nearly blackout drunk, triggered, and quite honestly not super present. There were few things I felt I could use to ground myself and I hadn’t read a poetry book in a long while. But while I was scrolling through Libby to distract myself, I was shocked that this one was available already. I started reading, and I know in no small part, this book helped me make it to the other side of whatever terrible I’d landed myself in.
Read: “If I Am Alive To”
Follow: On Twitter and Instagram
7.CRUEL/CRUEL by Dior J. Stephens
Dior J. Stephens (he/they) is Managing Poetry Editor for Foglifter and a Cave Canem and Lambda Literary Arts Fellow. I just need y’all to know that I came across him recently when they came across my “write on” timeline on Twitter and I am BEYOND EXCITED to get my hands on CRUEL/CRUEL (LIKE COME ON, TITLE!).
Read: “Two Poems” in Peach Mag
Follow: On Twitter
8. Dream of the Divided Field: Poems by Yanyi
Yanyi (he/him) is an Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poet House fellow, winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Former poetry editor of Foundry, he holds an MFA in Poetry from New York State University. He teaches creative writing.
Read: “Landscape With A Hundred Turns” in poets.org
Follow: On Instagram
Though these aren’t within the last year, I think it’s important to also note Troubling The Line edited by Trace Peterson and TC Colbert, who, when I was having one of the toughest times figuring out my gender identity — see, a glance! — and which has been a source of strength for these pandemic years and We Want It All: An Anthology of Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel and both from Nightboat Books.)
You don’t have to stop at this list! Luther Hughes (buy A Shiver in the Leaves ) is a black queer poet and organizer who, every year, makes a list of forthcoming poetry books from queer poets of color. Be sure to donate to Shade Literary Arts so they can keep doing this amazing work!
25 Lines of Poetry I Think About Once a Day
feature image photo by jakkapan21 via Getty Images
I spend most of my free time thinking about poetry. Whether it’s because I’ve just written my own poem or just read someone else’s, there is so much to mull over when it comes to form. What I love the most in a poem is its ability to surprise me, to turn a phrase, to flip the script, to say something that I didn’t see coming. In the way that if you guess the twist in a horror movie ruins the movie for you, the same can ruin a poem for me.
I read a lot of poetry, so there are probably hundreds of lines I could recall that strike me in one way or another. It’s National Poetry Month, so I become a poetry hound, sniffing out new books and revisiting old ones, finding solace, rage, love, and beauty in some of the words crafted by writers I truly admire.
These aren’t necessarily my top 25 lines, these are just the ones I could recall today. I hope they do something for you as they have brought me immense pleasure (and sometimes an understanding of pain) that I hadn’t experienced until I read these lines.
1. “as we both know,/if you worship/one god, you only need/One enemy—”
from Witchgrass by Louise Glück
I think about this line (I’m counting this as one line, sue me) so so much. Even the opening lines: “something comes into the world unwelcome, calling disorder, disorder” kind of haunt me. Any poet will tell you the first line has to have grip, and this poem doesn’t disappoint.
The thing about this specific line is that I’m not entirely sure what the exact meaning is. It makes sense, but my mind is grasping at something deeper that it cannot access when I read it. Maybe that’s why the line sticks with me, it resists a neat and definable meaning.
2. “I wash the silk and silt of her from my hands—/now who I come to, I come clean to, I come good to.”
from Grief Work by Natalie Diaz
“Grief Work” is one of my favorite Natalie Diaz poems, and I have written about these lines before. I think about coming to someone clean and good, and it takes my breath away because I have come to many people at my worst for many years. I like to think I am good now, but there is so much growth left in me.
3. “i’m hurt that you would ever think/ i don’t glisten to you i’m always glistening”
from You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm by Paige Lewis
This poem knocked me down when I first read it, especially this line. See my point about surprising the reader? You think the obvious word is coming and then it doesn’t. So stunning.
4. “I wished for a place big enough for grief/& all I got was more grief, plus People magazine.”
from How I Became Sagacious by Chen Chen
What I love about Chen Chen’s work but especially in this collection, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities, is the surprise and humor in it. It’s funny that People magazine shows up out of nowhere, it’s funny that when you want a way out of grief there is only more grief. Funny in a resigned sigh kind of way, not funny hahaha.
5. “I wake up & it breaks my heart”
from Meditations in an Emergency from Cameron Awkward-Rich
Truly incredible how this poem manages to break me open and put me back together in the same breath. I love this poem, and this is the opening line, making it a poem I come back to when I wake up and my heart is broken, which is often.
6. “Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle,/Fishes in the Sea./If You Want a Left Wife,/Please Choose Me.”
from Left-Wife Goose by Sharon Olds
Stag’s Leap is full of fucking bangers, but I think about this line the most. The lines “had a sow twin, had a reap twin/had a husband, could not keep him” are also so fucking gut punchy like jesus Sharon! I’ve never been divorced, but I feel like Left Wife when I read this poem.
7. “Show me one beast/ that loves itself as relentlessly/as even the most miserable man./ I’ll wait.”
from There Is No Such Thing As An Accident of the Spirit by Kaveh Akbar
If Kaveh Akbar has 1000 fans, I am one of them. If Kaveh Akbar has 0 fans, I am dead. This whole book (Pilgrim Bell, 2021) is a treasure but boyyyy this poem is so lovely. These lines are one I wish I would have written.
8. “She bites into a pear and every pearl/in the world releases its oyster”
from Frequently Asked Questions #4 by Camille T. Dungy
The power and imagery here is just beyond. BEYOND!
9. “I loved you before I was born/it doesn’t make sense, I know”
from I Loved You Before I Was Born by Li-Young Lee
Is there anything to be said here? Like oh my god. Okay, I will say this line reminds me of a lyric from one of my favorite songs, “Slow Show” by The National.
“You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you”
This is art! There is poetry in everything! What a world!
10. “And in the aftermath the brother simply—flourished. The trees simply—bloomed.”
from Untitled by Diana Khoi Nyugen (Ghost of, 2018)
I’m listing the collection this poem appears in because the poem doesn’t have a title. And wow, this poem. If it’s possible to spoil the premise of a book of poems, I won’t do that here, but when you read this book, when you get to these lines, it’s going to hurt.
11. “You loved and were loved/said the bee to the lily/before it buzzed off.”
from A New Dawn by Mary Ruefle
This poem appears in Dunce, and if you can, you should get this book. I love this poem so much, and these lines that state a simple truth for many of us, as played out by a bee and a lily. Poets, man.
12. “What if I want to go devil instead?”
from Late Summer After a Panic Attack by Ada Limón
Whomst among us has not wanted to devil from time to time? I, a Scorpio, can certainly relate.
13. “when it is too late to pray the end of the flood/we pray instead to survive it.”
from Child’s Pose by Brionne Janae
Janae’s recognize Janae’s and so I like this poem a lot on that front, but this line? Woo. Wipe the sweat off your brow kind of pressure. It really made me ache in a new way when I first read it.
14. “Christ bore what suffering he could and died/a young man, but you waited years to learn/how to heal.”
from Pity by Camille T. Dungy
Please come get me off this floor.
15. “whatever/returns from oblivion returns/to find a voice”
from The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
This line has come to me at some of the worst times in my life and spurred me forward. That’s the power of Glück.
16. “Tonight I think/no poetry/will serve”
from Tonight No Poetry Will Serve by Adrienne Rich
Is it cheating to choose the titular line? I don’t know, but I think about this line a lot when I’m in love and down bad and longing for someone. Because even at its best moments sometimes even poetry isn’t enough.
17. “I am less of myself and more of the sun”
from Flash by Hazel Hall
I think this was once Poem-a-day at poets dot org and one day I had a really big rough time at therapy so stopped to get an almond butter brownie at the cafe/bookstore next door, and a book of poems by Hazel Hall nearly lept off the shelf at me. Sometimes the world gives you just what you need.
18. “Be a dream, a mezzanine/sesame seeds at the bottom of the package,”
from Presence by Nikola Madzirov
Because, why not be sesame seeds? Life can be that simple if we let it.
19. “I will bear him wherever I am taken/and no one will kill him and he will not die.”
from Self-Portrait as a Door by Donika Kelly
Has the end of a poem ever made you burst into tears, because this one did it for me. This whole book is achy and devastating but this? This is another level.
20. “for the full lips swelled, a dark/fruit bloomed under my/fingers”
from When I Touched Her by Toi Derricotte
I’m sure there are a few dykes reading this so I know y’all know, but the way this poem takes me back to the first time should be studied. It so effortlessly and beautifully captures the feeling of being with someone new.
21. “Goodest grief is an orchard you know. But you have not been killed/Once. Angel, put that on everything. Self. Country. Stone. Bride.”
from Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country by Angel Nafis
Something about “goodest grief.” Something about poems about grieving. Something about the ghazal. The title of this poem also just speaks to me and fills me up and makes me feel like not being my own country anymore.
22. “I want to buy you/a cobalt velvet couch/all your haters’ teeth/strung up like pearls”
from Want Could Kill Me by Xan Forest Phillips
As the owner of a green velvet couch and a Scorpio (not to rehash this point), but this speaks to me. I wanna wear my hater’s teeth something serious.
23. “I’m/the Vice President of panic and the President is/missing”
from On the train, a man snatches my book by Paige Lewis
There are so many things to panic about at any given moment living in America, and this line so expertly captures that feeling that many of us have succumbed to.
24. “In the age of loss there is/the dream of loss/in which, of course, I/am alive at the center—”
from About the Bees by Justin Phillip Reed
All I can think of when I read this poem is swarm, something alive at the center, maybe not for long at the center of a swarm. It’s so vivid and makes my skin crawl and I shove my shoulders up to my ears imagining it, but in like a cool way.
25. “For hunger is to give/the body what it knows/it cannot keep.”
from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Poets have so much to say about hunger, but I like this best.
What are your favorite lines from poems this National Poetry Month?
“Judas Goat” by Gabrielle Bates Made Me Start Writing Again
I consider myself an avid poetry reader and writer, but over the past few months, my voracious reading has dimmed to a trickle. I would write maybe a poem a month and wasn’t reading new books at all. That all changed when I got the email about Judas Goat, the forthcoming debut collection of poetry from Gabrielle Bates.
On top of being a dynamic poet, Bates hosts The Poet Salon, a poetry podcast with Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat. The podcast hosts sit down with other poets and discuss the guest’s work over their favorite cocktail. I became familiar with Bates because of this podcast, and when her book was announced on Twitter, I was immediately intrigued by the title and the cover. It’s bad poetic practice to let a pretty cover sway you, but perhaps I’m not all that interested in being good.
Bates’ debut collection is the haunt embodied. I know it might sound cliche to talk about poetry as haunting, but the images she conjures arrest you in their wildness and their brutality. In one poem, the speaker recounts an incident with a goat:
“WHEN HER SECOND
HORN, THE ONLY HORN
SHE HAS LEFT,
goes up through the white and copper-topped
tunnel of my eye and enters the basket of bone,
we are no chimera the ancients ever dreamed.
At once too mundane and too fearsome.
At once too separate and too dependent.”
The image, the horn through the eye, is jarring and elastic. It stretches around your brain and becomes the only thing you can see, a fixation. Judas Goat is full of these images, of this language that makes you want to look away while pulling you closer. The collection explores love and intimacy between partners, between parent and child, and between a woman and herself.
All the while, even as the speaker of the poem moves, we feel still grounded and tied to the South that Bates grew up in.
Once I started Judas Goat, it was nearly impossible to put down. But I found myself writing down lines and words of my own, spurned by the richness in the text I was reading. Every poet will tell you that in order to write poems, you have to read poems, but I hadn’t felt compelled to write in a long time. This collection shook something loose in me.
In “Saint of Ongoingness,” the speaker muses
“The question dawns in me late in December:
Don’t I deserve joy? Rhetorical.”
I think this question really permeates throughout the second half of the book. The question of joy when you’ve lived through a messy life, one probably fraught with trauma, the shared trauma of not just being a woman in the world but a woman in relation to the world. When you come out from the other side of that, joy is a word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite reach.
The question of joy stays with me because, after loss of any kind, we find ourselves scrapping toward it. Clawing as if through mud but also like a spoon ringing in an empty bowl. There is joy to be found, surely, but of course there are also imposters.
In “Rosification” the speaker states:
“We lie to each other all the time. What else can we do?”
And it makes me think of how we lie on our quest for joy, stating with assurance that the next thing, the next publication, the next job, the next love, will bring us joy, but these things are, again, imposters.
In opposition, the lie in “Rosification” is the truth that resonates throughout the other poems. The speaker tells us of a lost mother who has been found again, a marriage that couldn’t find itself, the joy and pain of friendships. It’s a blisteringly honest collection.
The poem is the one place you can lie or, put more delicately, exaggerate, stretch the truth. But these poems cut to the bone, and as a result, spur emotional reactions. Bates’ poems meet at the intersection of the human and the animal world. I have always thought the animal world is incapable of lying. Yes, some birds practice mimicry. Some bugs pretend to be snakes, but in that quest for survival there is a truth that remains untouched.
The goats and snakes and rabbits that appear in these poems ground you as the reader in the speaker’s reality, making her world more real and more true. You can’t always trust a poet to tell the truth, but you can trust a snake to bite.
Bates writes with such precision it’s almost ghastly. I love the way we move through the collection. Most books of poetry aren’t linear, we don’t move from darkness to epiphany, and I think good poems really resist that urge to tie everything up into a neat bow. The urgency with which she writes, the way she compels us to see the world of her making, is stunning.
Through all of the book’s themes, Bates finds a way to reach the reader with sharp and salient language.
“Conversations with Mary” ends with the lines
“How did it feel
Cold blood on the cock of God
Whose blood
My blood”
Such a damning and startling image but one that, again, pulls you in and beckons you to ask questions, to feel something other than complacency.
I hope that a second collection is in the works for Bates, though I know that expecting the next book out of a poet can be selfish and tedious. For now, I’m stuck on the poems in Judas Goat, returning to them when I need a splash of cold water to the face. These poems wake you up only to make you tremble with their frankness.
Chance and Error Are Friends to Sadie Dupuis’ Writing Process
When asked about my (deep, profound) fan love of Sadie Dupuis, it can be hard to know where to begin. From her musical projects Speedy Ortiz and sad13, to her sly and sparkling poetry, Sadie Dupuis is one of the most invigorating and original creators working today, so I joke that she’s one of those people who is simply too good at too many things. Leave some genius for the rest of us, Sadie!
But my dumb little joke belies the deep care and generosity at the heart of Dupuis’ oeuvre. Her latest collection of poems, Cry Perfume (out now from Black Ocean), is a powerful collision of recollection and reaction. It ranges from the ways that technology has reshaped the music industry, to the backstage realities of performing life, to the grief and galvanization that comes from losing loved ones to overdoses, to the ways that our memories can open doors into our futures if we are brave and gentle enough to make positive change. What’s the opposite of a sophomore slump? On the heels of her glittering first collection Mouthguard, Cry Perfume is a triumph.
For this conversation, lightning struck twice: I caught up with Sadie while she was on the road book-touring with her friend Michael DeForge (whose beautiful book Birds of Maine is out now from Drawn & Quarterly), chatting about poetry and perfume. Little did I know that, flying homeward a few days later, I’d be in Cleveland in time to attend her last tour stop and continue IRL our conversation about Veronica Mars, harm reduction, and comedic artistry!
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Yash: The collection is collected into five sections, each named for a compound phrase containing the name of a color (“Blue Hour”, “Red Arsenic” etc.). How did you arrive at this structure, and how would you trace the collection’s trajectory from each color-section to the next?
Sadie: The poems in my last book, Mouthguard, received a lot of feedback as they were in progress — through workshops, gauging reactions at live readings, through friends and my editors at Gramma. It was valuable to consider many other readers while still writing, but I wanted to try something new on my next collection. So I wrote Cry Perfume in more of a vacuum, typically busting out a poem a day on different stretches of touring between 2016-2020. As lockdown began, I realized I had a ton of poems that had barely been through an editing process. I was able to identify certain themes I’d returned to — grief, music work, the encroachment of tech, harm reduction — and revise with those ideas in mind. And literal isolation did lend itself to editing in solo mode!
Oh absolutely, I can imagine.
When I finally shared the in-progress manuscript with some friends, I got essential feedback from Dorothea Lasky, who basically told me — I’m paraphrasing — that I’d frontloaded too many quippy poems and then had too many long bummer poems feeding into one another. She suggested I write down every theme I observed in each poem and try to section according to those themes. My apartment was a mess of papers scribbled over incoherently, but I settled on “death, sound, mirrors, euphoria, and night.” Which aren’t very fun section titles! With the collection named Cry Perfume, finding perfumes that correlated to those themes seemed a more fitting route. A couple perfume head friends pointed me toward fragrance blogs, which I perused for a few weeks. I flagged (and in some cases slightly modified or mistranslated) names of perfumes that evoked the section’s major theme. A lot of perfumes happen to mention colors, and I liked the way both scents and colors summon emotion well. (Plus I am usually always wearing a ton of loud colors at once, and I liked that my book could, too.)
Oh my gosh, perfume names! L’heur Bleu! What a perfect connection. We see so many books that draw on visual art, and smell feels like an often underutilized sensory mine. What are some other ways that fragrance (as symbol, as image, whatever) informed this collection?
Yeah. I have a funny relationship to smell in that I had broken my nose a couple times as a kid, and my septum was so severely deviated that my nasal pathways were almost entirely occluded until I had surgery a few years ago. I had no sense of smell until around 2018. When I started, I had been able to smell things as a kid and I could smell things very faintly, but on tour, if everybody else was like, “Oh God, it smells awful in here,” I would have no idea what they were talking about (which is a blessing in many ways).
I think for many people, smell is really tied up in memory. People will recall a cream that their grandmother used and that will evoke a flood of memories. For a book that is so much about grieving and memory, I liked being able to evoke this other sense that is so often strongly correlated to memory and the past. Even though scent is not the sense that I’m relying on most of the time (I’m very sight oriented or sound oriented), I like being able to weave it in this way with perfume titles, which are so dramatic and evocative, and in this case, colorful.
Yeah, especially for a sense that is so far removed from language. I think with sound, we have speech and with sight we have texts, but with smell there is so much less connection to language. I thought that was a really, really cool leap.
After those thematic ways I’d oriented the book, I was like, “I can think of a better way to talk about night, to talk about mirrors, to talk about loss.” Perfumes just often have quite dark or sad sounding names, because they are playing off a spectrum of feelings and memories. It was perfect to be able to go through these blogs and mine them for names that felt right.
In “Fuck No To All That” you begin with this couplet: “I’m not adventurous in my work today./ I’m not diving into the skin of horrors.” Elsewhere, you say “I can’t write memoir, I’m scared/ the men in my life will see themselves.” I loved these moments! For such an emotionally rigorous and reflective collection, this is an interesting deviation from confession. How do you transform biographical material into this collection to “transcend time and place”?
My artistic impulses tend toward misusing the creative process like therapy — and with much of this book centered around grief, oops I did it again! Having to explain my projects after they’re released can be retraumatizing, but I just don’t learn my lesson since writing is tightly woven into how I make sense of my world. Writing more broadly about the communities of which I’m part, it’s impossible to erase empathy and care from my work (or anger and derision) if those feelings are tied into the events I’m recalling. But the experience of losing friends to overdose — a preventable death that U.S. drug policy exacerbates — isn’t unique to me. And the experience of an arts worker lamenting exploitation in their industry, especially when tech is involved, isn’t unique to me or to music. So my presumption is that those personal feelings do transcend my personal history.
The “I can’t write memoir” poem you mention came out of my work teaching writing. On maybe three different occasions I had students imply to me they felt they could not broach a topic or genre because men in their lives would take that writing personally, which would put these students’ wellbeing at risk. I guess I wrote that one from a place of mourning. However many years ago, writing songs and poems helped me understand I was in an abusive relationship, and helped me to leave it. It infuriated me on these students’ behalves that they could not even feel safe working through their feelings privately in writing.
That’s heartbreaking. When your craft has offered you doors out of tragedy and harm, it’s devastating to see those doors shut on others like your students. Are there other moments or ways that your teaching has informed this collection?
When I was teaching full time, I think it was really informative for me as a writer. I would always have my students share with me and with one another things that they were excited about. We would do a lot of “here’s a Tumblr I love, we’re going to look at it as a class for ten minutes.” I think I like to pull from so many corners of media and entertainment. My students were really inspiring to me, in that you’re never more excited about checking out the things around you than you are when you’re 18. In that way, they were incredibly wonderful to work with and work alongside.
Especially with poetry workshops, I find that a lot of students (especially in that last-high-school-early-college age group I’m describing) only have experienced poetry as it was taught to them in high school. I didn’t have a particularly wonderful experience with poetry in high school. I thought I probably hated poetry based on the way it was taught, which was to analyze every single line in one specific way. “There’s one meaning you’re meant to derive from it. Write an essay on that for a score.”
It’s funny, on this tour with Michael, I’ve had a couple people come up to me telling me that they’d never bought a poetry book before this reading because they only had that one kind of experience with it. Stepping away from that very formal approach to literary criticism or analysis has made me a lot more excited about writing and reading. I like to read things! I’m not a Jungian, but I like to read things and let them watch over me and see what sticks out! I’m not doing a close analysis of every single line, but then I can revisit and find new things the next time.
It’s not a passive activity, but this kind of reading feels more like pure enjoyment of an art form in the way that I would watch TV or walk through a gallery. It’s been really fun to work with students who are coming to poetry by way of excitement and enjoyment for the first time after the very formal only-looking-at-a-certain-kind-of-canon structure. I feel like that is always really rejuvenating for me as a reader, just seeing students get excited about writing and trying out new forms and not feeling like they’re beholden to analysis.
That’s so true — I think a lot about the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”. So often, we’re taught a mode of reading in school that isn’t always a resonant or realistic way to engage with art.
Yeah, but some people don’t realize that. Some of the people coming up to me are probably closer to my age. I’m 34, and they just never went back to poetry because the school system didn’t inspire them to. I think it’s always very exciting to witness people experiencing poetry in that way for the first time, whether they’re young or have had a couple decades away from reading poetry.
Yeah, that’s really beautiful. And getting to return poetry to people after it has been so thoroughly rung out by conventional education is really, really rewarding. That sounds like a really beautiful process.
I’ve had a couple people who are like, “Who are you reading?” And I’ll get to write to them, in my dedication, like, “Check out Morgan Parker!”
Several readers have commented on your playfulness with language; it brought to mind Patricia Lockwood’s idea of being struck by “pun lightning” at the moment that some play on words occurs to you. What kinds of words and slippages of meaning strike you with lightning?
Chance and error are friends to my process, whether that’s in recording music or in writing poems. If I hit a “wrong” note while composing, that often becomes my favorite moment in the song. I used a hodgepodge of writing methods for Cry Perfume, since I was traveling, and if any of them produce a glitch in my intention, I go with it. My handwriting is atrocious and if something I scrawled is ambiguously readable, I’ll opt for the weirder word choice when I’m transcribing. If I did some voice-to-text to write a poem, I won’t fix the misinterpretation. And my fingernails are very long for guitar-playing purposes, which makes chaos out of typing on the phone — autocorrect is a really good co-writer! Since the editing process was so far removed from the initial writing, I can’t remember what’s “mistake” and what’s intentional, which makes it fun for me as an editor, working to make new meaning when the first draft was in many cases a few years ago.
“A glitch in my intention”! I love that idea, that’s such an interesting way of introducing chance into such thoughtful work. (And I love the idea of autocorrect as cowriter!)
As far as the stuff that happens on purpose on purpose… I feel pretty governed by my ear for “music” within poetry and am always chasing that high of syllabic rhythm and words that feel nice to say out loud. That’s annoyingly vague, but it’s more intuitive for me than an explicit set of rules — more akin to noise music or making abstract visuals than it is, like, pop songwriting.
My turn for some pun lightning, because couldn’t “noise music” just be another name for poetry? I would not immediately have connected noise as a genre or a practice to poetry until you mentioned it! Are you a ‘poetry is meant to be read out loud’ kind of writer? Do you read your poems out loud to yourself? Obviously, you’re reading them out loud now on tour, but I’m so curious about how sound filters in for you and how you see sound working in poetry.
Yeah, I do read them out loud to myself, but it’s a different voice, you know what I mean? I’m mumbling through them to myself to make sure I didn’t fuck something up or that it won’t be really annoying for me to read it out loud in two years. For the last book, I had read all those poems out loud a million times because I was doing readings all the time, and I had been able to edit them from that; on the other hand, this book’s editing process was so entirely in the pandemic that I really hadn’t read these poems out loud. That performance aspect just wasn’t available to me during that time, and I had this bleak feeling like, “Well, I’ll never tour again.” It’s been really fun learning them in this new way by reading them aloud on this tour every night. And I’ve been trying to read totally different poems each time, which has been fun.
But overall, I do feel like the sonic component, even if it’s just represented in my head, is a big part of it for me. That’s not dissimilar from how I work on music. I often get into trouble in the arranging process because I’ll put so many layers in there that would be impossible to replicate live or I’ll put production moves in that can’t happen live because I’m really a headphones-listening-to-records-at-home-first person. It’s not dissimilar for poetry. The number one thing I’m thinking about is the experience of sitting at home with a book and then the book tour is the fun chance to try things out in a different way.
Around the time that I was first doing readings, I was starting to go to more high-concept noise shows where people are crawling around on the ground wearing masks or putting contact mics on a drill. I feel like in my ideal world, there should be more crossover between those audiences with the poetry world, because I feel like poets are doing similar things. I feel like I know a lot of poets who are very interested in that sort of high concept noise performance stuff, but it can be a really tricky thing getting musicians of any genre out to poetry readings. It kind of cracks me up — like, “you guys can sit through an hour of people pitch shifting and delaying their screaming sounds and you can’t hear 10 minutes of a poem!”
I also would love to see poetry readings given the production and special effects of musical performance. Like, where are my poetry arena shows with all the big lights and pyrotechnics?
I do always think that I want to bring props into my readings. I had this idea on the last book. I was like, “I’m going to do a tea party every single night. I’m going to bring a little table and I’m going to have a frilly tablecloth. I’m going to get a teapot just for this and I’m going to pour little cups of tea as I read.” It doesn’t happen, but in my mind I sort of have the idea of what I would like to happen during the reading. I did bring a bingo ball on tour this time, because I thought I could pick poems out to read that way, but I wound up relying on other methods of randomness, a lot of polling my friends who are at the readings for numbers. Michael was rolling dice for me to pick some poems at some point.
Now that I’ve kind of read through all the poems, I’m relying on that a little bit less and can kind of tailor what I’m doing to what I feel is the mood of the city, if that makes sense. I’m like, “All right, I know what I have to do here.” I have been having the audience pick a number one to five at the end of every reading and I’ll go to one of the sections based on what they say and read a couple things from the top of it, which has been fun. I like letting people feel like they have… I’m not huge on participatory elements in music performance, but I feel like just saying, “Give me a number,” lets people feel like they have some agency in the reading in a way that is low stakes for me, as the person who has to read the stuff.
Which is such a fascinating way of reintroducing chance — a lot like how you mention using autocorrect as a co-writer!
Yeah. I feel like that can make things really feel fun for me where they might otherwise feel… It can add a levity to reading, especially a book that at points can be kind of heavy.
Yeah, that levity you mention is actually such a perfect segue to my next question. There’s this magnificent stanza where you conjure “this imaginary/ feminist pro-harm/ reduction sex/ worker advocate cop/ in this small/ town crime procedural”. You’re clearly having fun with the enjambment on this one! How do you combine humor with deeply-and-sincerely-held principles (around social justice, harm reduction, and community organizing, etc) in your poems?
I’ve always used humor as a coping mechanism and deflection tool, in my personal life and in my written work. I can’t easily access an earnest tone of voice without feeling wrong, even when I wholly believe the things I’m describing or defending. But when dealing with and working around some of those topics you named — the ones I can’t stop writing about as they occupy so much of my thinking — I would find it crucial either way to latch onto moments of fun and funniness so I don’t burn out. Plus it’s gratifying, reading poems about topics that might otherwise feel heavy, to get a few laughs from and with an audience. And a lot of my favorite poets are experts at striking that balance between funny and devastating. David Berman is one I’m always citing.
I can absolutely relate to earnestness feeling difficult to access. I find humor helps me look at painful or profound things a bit more in-the-eye without getting frozen in some Medusa effect! It’s ironic, too, when so much issues-based or “activist” poetry is, if anything, overearnest. What do you think writers have to learn from humor?
We did a reading in Pittsburgh at a comedy club — it was sponsored by a great bookstore called The White Whale and they did it at this comedy club called Bottle Rocket. The audience was incredible! So often with poetry, people are afraid to laugh or they think that it has to be this high-minded thing. The comedy club audience was laughing at the parts that were funny, and sometimes the parts that are funny are woven with the parts that are the most fucked up in terms of the processing grief and processing what the fuck is happening in this world. I found that reading wonderful!
Dorothea Lasky is someone who was really inspiring to me when I was figuring out what I’d like to do in poetry. She’s just so funny, even when she’s describing something that’s just awful. I think that’s how she’s able to find her way in. CAConrad is also like that, but the person I’m about to cite is Mark Leidner, who I met when I was living in Western Mass. He would go to open mic standup nights and just read his poems there and they were… He would always be the best person at the comedy night! It was a really awesome way to get to hearjust a difference in audience perception, because they’re not looking at how it’s formatted on a page. They don’t even know he’s reading a poem. For them, it’s a conceptual joke performance and who’s to say poetry can’t be that, too? I think seeing how his poems could work in that setting really inspired me to inject some of that into my work and not always be going for the highfalutin Sylvia Plath worship.
“Who are you? That’s my favorite question/ When it’s said in awe/ When I’ve escaped or when I’m caught” has really stuck with me. It builds on an earlier phrase, where you say “The more you perform / the quieter you become” and it feels like such a twist on Winnicott’s saying that “it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” How does your poet-self escape from or catch your musical self? How do these two creative/performing identities coexist or inform each other?
The same concerns and influences impact both my songwriting and poetry, but I tend not to be working on albums and books simultaneously, which helps me feel like I’m not re-treading the same exact stuff (unlike the TV show Nashville, which I’m currently re-treading). When I wrote Mouthguard I was weirdly self-conscious about being perceived as a “musician” poet, rather than a poet poet, and shied away from writing about music — even though music supplied so much of my joy, friendship, work life, thoughts, and world. For Cry Perfume, a lot of the poems were about live music as an industry and written while working full time in it, so music performance’s conventions and settings were inescapable. And, in moments of fatigue about music work, I would feel overcome by joy at reconnecting with music as a listener, and didn’t fear writing about that pleasure in a way I might’ve on the last book.
My PDF of the collection is highlighted to hell — but what is your favorite line from the collection? Which lines have stuck with you since writing it?
As I’m on tour, I’m still getting acquainted with which lines feel best out loud vs. which ones looked the most exciting to me while proofing. Generally the lines I’m most proud of wind up titles, and I like ones that frame the poem in a surprising way, evoke a world on their own, or offer a clear view in. And I guess I like to use this space to refer to other works as well. A couple favorites from this book: “Fuck No to All That,” “Yes Tears Left to Cry,” “Weird Touch I Spat As She Spidered,” “Bowling a 666,” and the poem which opens the collection, “Fake Blood on a Fake Fur Coat.”
“Yes Tears Left to Cry” was such a good one! I really loved those cheeky little homage riffs. When you use allusion and reference like this and you leave a door in the poem open to external works, does it change the way you relate to the media you consume?
I think I’m so used to doing it. I wouldn’t say it lessens my fandom or interest in art to be figuring out ways to refer to it. I think I’ve always liked media that is referential like that. I love when I see a movie, and I know I’m immediately going home to look up every single Easter egg I might have missed. So, similarly, I think I’ve always really enjoyed putting my own Easter eggs in poetry or songwriting, especially referring to my friends’ projects. If I hear a huge pop song and think there’s an opportunity to play with the title, that’s very fun for me. I probably heard No Tears Left to Cry more than any other song the year it came out, so it would be hard to not refer to it in a book.
Oh absolutely, I loved that magpie sensibility. Song titles or certain lyrics absolutely do become really specific touchstones for me, in the same way that people talk about smells. You hear certain parts of a song and immediately it’s like, “Oh, that’s October 2018.” It’s a really special way of engaging with and enjoying art, and that enjoyment is another thing this collection captures so well. Your line “I don’t review art/ When I like it I like it/ embarrassingly,” is such a lovely manifesto in favor of that vehemence of artistic enjoyment. What are some books/music/television/movies that you’ve “liked embarrassingly” lately? What do you recommend we read or listen to or watch after finishing Cry Perfume?
It’s dorky to shout out my tourmate and friend Michael DeForge but whatever—his work always blows me away and his newest book Birds of Maine does too. If you like talking birds, socialist utopias, and the ideologic possibilities of the early internet as represented by fungal networks, this is a graphic novel you should grab. Beyond the nepotism, some fiction favorites I’ve read this year are Monarch by Candace Wuehle, Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min, and Darryl by Jackie Ess. On the poetry front, I’ve especially loved collections by Alison Lubar, Arisa White and Rachelle Toarmino. And the essays in Raquel Gutiérrez’s Brown Neon blew me away.
This bar I’m typing in right now (Providence’s The Hot Club!) is playing “Powerful Love” by Chuck & Mac which always makes me cry! I’m trying really hard not to do that on top of my laptop. In the car with Michael we’ve been listening to Guerilla Toss, Illuminati Hotties, Queen Bee, Garcia Peoples, and 311 came on the radio today to much delight.
My TV taste is bad and that’s fine for me (less fine for my partner who’s forced to watch along). The closer something feels to Riverdale, the more I’m suckered in. Search Party and Barry fall more into the “other people also like this show” category of my fandom, but I love them both. Paranoia Agent and Veronica Mars are the all time faves. And I’m really glad for the return of Los Espookys.
Oh gosh, I love this — I’m also a Riverdale and Veronica Mars kid, so I deeply relate!
On the movies front, all five Screams are top of the pops and cutesy meta horror is the corner I won’t get out of. Unfriended, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and Uncle Peckerhead are a few other semi-recent ones in my personal canon. Lately I’ve been on an “underappreciated John Carpenter movies” streak and Christine is my current fave. Michael and I got to screen Josie & the Pussycats in New York last weekend, one of our mutual greatest hits. Last night, I was up until 4:00am watching a movie called Nerve, which had Emma Roberts and Machine Gun Kelly in it.
Those four in the morning movie experiences are always very intense for me. Even if the movie is terrible, I’m like, “This is the most profound experience I’ve ever had.” How was it?
I think that I would have to say that it’s good! It’s a fun, high-stakes game of social media daring.
Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis is out now.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for a Big Life Change
Feature image photo by mikroman6 via Getty Images
If you’ve been reading my work recently or following me on social media, you know I’m about to embark on a big life change: a move. I have never lived anywhere that wasn’t in Pennsylvania. This state is my home, but I’m ready to move on from it.
This move has come with a host of emotions: I’m excited, I’m anxious, and I’m scared. Scared that things won’t go as planned, anxious that I might not like my new city, and excited to start a new life for myself. I’m in flux, but being very mindful about how a big change could easily untether me. I’m working at staying grounded, and a part of that is turning toward poetry.
These books aren’t specifically about big life changes themselves, but they do ask big questions about grief, humanity, and more. They ground me not because these poets have answers to said questions, but because they dare to ask them.
Soft Science by Franny Choi
I have only ever wanted to bite
down hard on whatever was offered
to my hothouse mouth.
I was first introduced to Choi’s work when she co-hosted the VS podcast with Danez Smith. I hadn’t read any of her chapbooks, but when Soft Science came out, it was next to impossible to get my hands on it. It was always sold out wherever I looked for it. When I finally did get it, I was struck by the world within the book, the world Choi questions and interrogates.
One of the big questions asked in this book is about what separates the human from the machine, in this modern world, where do we draw that line? It makes me think about how we work, the current state of the “content machine,” and how we make everything in our lives fodder for online consumption. Or we are forced to.
These poems are rife with Turing tests and examinations of what makes us human. One of the things that the book offers as an answer is itself. I walk away from it with a thought that humans were given the gift of making art. A machine can formulate art as well, but it doesn’t have the understanding of what it is doing the way we do.
There is also the question of what the poem can do, especially within the poem “You’re So Paranoid.” Many people will offer the poet’s job is to witness the atrocities of the world and make art despite, but this poem makes me think: is witness enough? In the poem, the police offers give up their humanity to move with machine precision and brutality. They are ostensibly humans but humans acting at the will of an oppressive state, robbing them of what makes us recognizable to each other.
The speaker in the poem muses:
The cop speaks and I call a plum into his mouth it doesn’t shut him up.
Poetry, as beautiful and stirring as it is, has its limits. I chose this book of poems because everything changes, but how we respond to that change can make us more ourselves, more human.
Ghost of by Diana Khoi Nguyen
If you are unafraid, beware.
This book deals heavily with the death of the author’s brother by suicide, so I want to tell you this before you go into it. Grief can feel insurmountable. Maybe it is insurmountable. The death of a brother is vastly different from moving across states, so why did I choose this book?
I chose it because of my fear and my grief. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with either. I’m in therapy, I’ve acquired all the tools I need to make this move successful, so why am I still grieving?
In the above-referenced poem, “Grief Logic,” the speaker tries to work out just that, the logic of grief. It is a stunning poem, a heartbreaking one. I think of it often and reading it again for this has come with that same swell of emotion. I have five brothers, two of which I still speak to. To lose one of them would wreck me. In this poem, the speaker states
If this doesn’t end the world, the world will end after it.
and I can’t help but think how poignant and true that is of grief. The times in my life where I have lost someone or some version of myself, it felt like I would never survive it. These poems survive though, they endure the grief of the author, they carry that grief along with her. Poetry, even when you aren’t the one that has written it, can carry your grief.
Grief is the most human emotion. A big change can come with that grief, and it is important to know this and let it come. To not fight it even if you are scared or worried. It cannot be rushed or hurried along, so it is best to let it take its course.
In “An Empty House Is a Debt,” the speaker writes something I will leave you with:
A human terrifies.
A human is someone who becomes terrified, and having become terrified,
craves an end to her feat.
This craving carves a cave.
I Was A Bell by M. Soledad Caballero
How long since my body
carried joy?
I have to confess that Caballero was one of my college professors, which is in part why I love this book. I also love it because it deals with a similar change. Caballero writes of coming to the US, her journey out of a country changed by a coup, and even her present-day cancer diagnosis.
What I learned from this book is the enduring spirit of the heart. The heart that can be wracked by grief and fear of the unknown, can still recover, can still beat. In the poem “Pacific Dreams,” Caballero writes of missing the Pacific Ocean, a place where her body was once suspended in the cool water, the smell of seafoam in the air.
The opening line is quoted above, and I ask myself the same question often. A part of why I am moving is because I am moving toward joy, which I have rarely ever experienced in my life. The body is so fragile, robbing it of joy can have lasting effects. I’m trying to prevent that from happening.
Reading as the speaker talks of becoming accustomed to the strange land of the United States, I feel empathy for the small girl in those poems. I’m moving as an adult and I’m terrified, it must have been so hard to lose a home for a girl so small.
The poems that deal with cancer and the havoc it wreaks on the body are so complex and divine.
too much life. That is
what the doctor says. Many routes of muscles, blood
to dance with, invade. So many ways to make mountains
of death.
These lines appear in “What You Are Doing Is Living,” a poem that confronts the terror of death and tests and the body. It’s a beautiful collection that makes me want to confront change instead of shying away from it.
Hull by Xan Phillips
have you ever heard
of intimate space
compounding with want
This collection is daring, it burns in your hands as you read it. The titular poem contains the lines:
It is for the
dead’s inability to do so
that I rattle the coins in my
chest. In every exhale there
is audacity
These poems have audacity, and that is something I want to mirror in my own life. To have the audacity to want change, to strive for it. I like to think of it as my ancestral duty. These poems guide me toward that thinking.
Many of them chronicle the realities of violence enacted on Black people throughout history, from slavery to modern-day lynchings. These poems take on the voices of the deceased or are in conversation with them. It’s a challenging read because of its history, and its emotionality.
In “I Never Used To Write About Birds,” the speaker says
this is the closes I’ll get to grabbing
our unjust god by the pearls
strung across his throat so I can ask
why he sat back in luster
all these millennia
watching my people die
and all I can think of is the audacity it takes to write those lines. Phillips is a strong poet, and an obviously audacious one. I hope you find this in their work too.
Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück
I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer;
Anytime anyone dares to ask me who my favorite poet is, I mention Glück. Her work is not only beautiful, it is honest, the purest form of truth, for me.
Winter Recipes from the Collective is her most recent book, and while reading it, I was struck by it’s quietude. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes sense when talking about poetry, but the book is really a study in patience, in observation, in looking.
In “Autumn” the speaker writes
The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.
To change is to be committed to action, no matter how scary it is. I spent many years contemplating this move and feeling stuck in this city, but now I’ve put in the action necessary to make it a reality.
I list Glück as a favorite poet because her voice is so clear and wanting. It is begging to get at the meat of what is in its sights. Whether that thing is relationships or the natural world, she approaches it along with you. You the reader and the speaker hand-in-hand, getting to know what is being discovered together.
What impressed me about this collection is that Glück is such a celebrated poet that there is no one left for her to impress. She’s writing with a new eye, in my opinion. Writing with that honesty I love so much. I consider her collected poems to be my favorite book, and it shows: The collection is well worn with brown edges and a softness that comes from opening a book again and again.
There is so much beauty in discovery, and I find that in this collection. I have complete confidence that you will, too.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for a Summer Picnic
Feature image photo by ivan-96 via Getty Images
I don’t know where you are reading this from, but for me, this summer has been hellishly hot. Almost too hot to enjoy the splendors outside, the hostas in my front yard, my neighbor’s fig tree, the bumblebees dug deep into flowers. I hope you have or have planned some time outside on a cooler day, preferably for one of my favorite activities: a summer picnic.
Some of my favorite memories involve a picnic at a local park at one of the shelters on the grounds. Playing music and singing along, taking a date to a special spot, riding my bike through the designated bike paths, then settling down for a light snack and an ice cold drink.
What makes these summer picnics even better is literature. Whether that entails talking about all the new books you are reading or bringing a book to read to yourself or a date, something about reading a book in the sun with birds chirping, surrounded by greenery, is heaven.
Here are five books that I think are perfect for your summer picnic reading. Whether you’re new to poetry or a fanatic, these books will be a way into deeper reflection and conversation with yourself or your date.
Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar
There is room in the language for being
without language.
This book of poems was highly anticipated by many, including myself. After reading Akbar’s first collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, I was stuck in this place of wanting more. I gifted another copy of the book to a friend and talked about it with other poets. I read it more than once. I listened to him on podcasts talking about his work, which is what I do when I know there is so much more I can learn and understand about poetry and poets.
What is so great about this collection is that it is so personal, and that makes it awe-inspiring for me. The language does that thing that good poetry does, it surprises me. I don’t see the next line coming as I go along, it is beautiful and languid. But there is also loss and struggle in this collection. One of the things that first drew me to Akbar’s poetry was knowing that he was a sober person, like me. I wanted to read poets reflecting on sobriety to prove to myself that I could be a sober poet, that the magic wasn’t in the drink.
In “There Is No Such Thing As An Accident Of The Spirit,” Akbar writes
Show me one beast
that loves itself as relentlessly
as even the most miserable man.
and in those lines, there is truth, yes, but also vulnerability and an understanding of what makes us human. I think about myself when I come to this line, which is kind of the point of it. To love oneself “relentlessly” even at your worst moment, to have an elevated sense of self. I don’t find judgment in this though, only observation.
I come to this book when I want to learn something, when I want to be challenged and swayed in the same note.
Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich
I used to fear my body
was a well anyone could toss
their wishes into
Pulling from the above lines, I think this collection says a lot about who has claim to the body, with the speaker working that out through the poems. Poets are always musing about the body, but this collection is different, as it explores being a person that is both Black and trans.
As I’m sure many of the people reading this understand, historically, those that are Black, trans, and queer have had untold violences enacted on their bodies and their psyches, which I think this book delves into as well. What is the psychological toll of watching another Black person murdered by police, another Black trans woman murdered by an angry man; what do we do with ourselves when we learn of these violences?
There is a poem in this collection that very often gets quoted or passed around on the internet, and for good reason. I think it contains the answer to the questions I’ve just asked. “Meditations in an Emergency” chronicles the way the speaker moves through a day in a perpetual state of heartbreak. The poem ends with the lines:
“Like you, I was raised in the/institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand/on my stupid heart.”
I read these lines but especially the entire poem as a mediation on how it is easy to despair, but it is vital to dream and make a better world. To have faith that things can be better, despite what we know of the world.
Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy
I have loved every cell of her body from the time I could count them
until now
What first drew me to Dungy’s work was her reflections on the natural world. The way she listed and described flowers, greenery, animals, mountains, all seemed so careful and attentive, and soon I sought out more of her work. What I love about Trophic Cascade is how much it contains. From meditations on motherhood, sex, the dwindling natural world, to racial violence, so much intersects in these poems.
The poem “Nullipara” begins:
I have learned love rests on the odd assortments of petals.
pick buttercup, pick sweet pea:
You love me. You love me.
and these reflections on love, whether they be between lovers or between mother and daughter, are also rich with the language of the green world. In Dungy’s poetry, I find that we can find ourselves in nature, that we are not so different from the flowers and the beasts, though we find ourselves to be far superior.
This comparison is evident in the titular poem, where the speaker muses on how becoming a mother changed everything about her world just as the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone changed everything about that ecosystem.
The more we can learn and cherish about the world around us, the better we will understand ourselves.
New and Selected Poems: Volume Two by Mary Oliver
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine
If you are going to read one poet in a park, let it be Mary Oliver. Her poetry is widely quoted for a reason. This book is the most “loved” that I own, meaning it is dog-eared, coffee-stained, and post-it noted. Years ago, I found myself trying to connect with the world and turned to Oliver’s poetry as a way to get out of myself and my incessant worrying.
What I think makes Oliver so quotable is she states things that we want to connect so plainly. Where we are struggling to make sense of the world around us, she has a grasp on it and has decided to share that knowledge with us.
In “This World” she writes:
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too
and it makes me think that everything has a song, we just don’t know the language in which they sing, the tone and melody cannot be heard with the naked human ear. This wonder is so pertinent in Oliver’s poetry, making her one of the most celebrated of our time.
frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
To return from paradise I guess they call that
resurrection.
This collection is one of the most talked about and celebrated books of 2021, and for good reason. Seuss takes us into the past, into girlhood and its struggles, with these mesmerizing sonnets that play with the form.
These poems are untitled and untraditional. They are playful yet unflinching in their honesty. When reading this book, I first struggled with some of the poems that lacked punctuation, but once I got a reading groove going, it became so easy to get lost in the world of each poem.
The poems in this collection that got to me the most were those documenting the often brutal life on a farm. In one poem, the speaker tells of a sow giving birth:
“Mama/suffer to rid herself of each fancy body. Pigs have more hair than you’d/ think. Ice-white, and long white lashes.”
This almost angelic description of the mother pig is contrasted with the deaths of two of her children, one of them crushed by her in the night.
The poems are just so honest, about the speaker’s life and her relationship to the literature she is creating. The language isn’t trying to hide behind itself or shield the reader from horrors. It just is, and that kind of writing is something that I’m drawn toward.
If you want to impress your date with your poetry knowledge, I definitely recommend reading this book.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Pride Month
feature art: Autostraddle // photo: CSA Images via Getty Images
I love Pride month, it’s a time where I feel the most alive, and most able to bask in the glow of lesbians and queer women that I love. Just as I have discussed in regard to music, there are so many talented LGBTQ poets who are gaining recognition in the world now. I feel so blessed to be able to read their work and even talk with them about their work. In a field that was once dominated by the cis straight white male voice, LGBTQ poets and poets of color are finally starting to get their due.
These books I have chosen for In Verse this month are by LGBTQ writers and cover many topics that sometimes do and do not have to do with being queer. Whether they choose to write about queerness or not, these collections are still invaluable reads during Pride month.
Head Off & Split by Nikki Finney
If I touch her there everything about me will be true
This book, a National Book Award winner, is stunning. I truly felt knocked back when reading these poems, especially the ones dealing with the atrocities of the Bush administration. The poems are alive, and moving, like a body of water. They chart the humanity of people who lost their lives during storms, they refuse to look away and so force you to look as well.
Poems like “The Aereole” bring the reader into a more intimate space. The body becomes centered and focused, and desire comes with it.
In “The Clitoris,” the speaker says
In water
desire can rise,
honor sea levels,
ignore land-locked
cartographers.
In water
desire refuses retreat.
and it ties together the embodied and the wild. coming back to water means calling on the storm waters that took so many lives, ruined homes, shifted landscapes for many people and families. What can we make of the desires of the water, does water want to destroy, does it want to have the power to cradle a life in its hands? I think of all this while reading this collection. I don’t come out with any answers, but poetry does not have to provide that for me.
Finney is a fabulous poet who’s work I myself need to delve deeper into. Head Off & Split is a great place to start for newcomers.
Space Struck by Paige Lewis
Lately, I’ve been feeling betrayed by names
The first poem I ever read by Paige Lewis was “You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm,” a beautiful and celestial poem, and I immediately was in love with their work. What I loved about the poem was that the “you” felt like it was me, and so I was pulled into this strange world, listening to the commands and seeing everything as it was revealed to me.
The poem begins:
“Sit on the park bench and chew this mint leaf.
Right now, way above your head, two men
floating in a rocket ship are ignoring their
delicate experiments, their buttons flashing
red.”
I think starting the poem with a command is what makes me like it so much, it immediately situates you in the world of the poem. It orders you to pay attention. The rest of the poems also grab your attention, but for different reasons. One thing I found in the poems is a refreshing humor I don’t often find in the books I choose to read. Like, one of my favorite lines in a poem:
“I’m the vice president of panic, and the president is missing.”
While there is humor in the poems, there is also a sense of doom, of feeling small and untethered. But also a fear of taking up too much space in a world with disappearing habitats and endangered species. There is so much contained within their words that I find myself in, that resonate so deeply with being a human that also cares deeply about the world around them.
Lewis is a very compassionate poet, you can feel it in the work and in the language. It’s a great collection to read this Pride month for that reason.
Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
Walk to the store & back without disappearing
This book deals with the sometimes unpretty reality of being a queer person in public, but especially a Black queer person, and all the histories tied up in those identities. The poem “The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Learns the Rules” includes the lines:
“Winner takes
shape.
Loser,
salt!”
and the words are both historical and biblical. There is an admission and recognition that the speaker can never be the “winner” because of history. Because when you’re Black and queer in the world, any stranger can be a death sentence.
So much of life for Black queer people is being asked to choose, which this poem deals with. In some queer spaces there is anti-blackness, and in some Black spaces there is homophobia and transphobia. To hold all of these identities in one body is to be, in a way, always choosing. Unless of course you find the blissful company of other Black queer and trans people.
Alabi’s work is sharp and precise. The poems do what I love in poems: They surprise me. Sometimes there are words I couldn’t imagine that appear next. Just as I’m getting comfortable an in the rhythm of the poem there is a turn. I like that kind of poetry, it leaps off the page, it kind of shakes you by the shoulders.
I’ve been looking forward to this collection of poems since reading Alabi’s work in an anthology of Black poets. It certainly did not disappoint. I recommend this work if you are Black and trans but most importantly, if you are not. There is so much power in reading stories that do not mirror our own. That’s where you can find your humanity.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
I lost it all with my eyes/ wide open
Ocean Vuong will be known as one of the most celebrated writers of our time, and for good reason. Vuong’s work is delicate and seeing, it really reaches into the core of what sticks with us and makes us feel.
Many people might have had their first introduction to his work through prose, specifically On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and that makes sense to me. But I deeply encourage you as a reader to also read Vuong’s poetry.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds, as I read it, deals with generational trauma, queerness, and family. It is a deeply personal work as many poetry collections are, but the language really sets this book apart from others I’ve read.
The poem, “Eurydice” starts with the lines
“It’s more like the sound
a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer
to the rib’s hollowed
hum.”
It is a devastating beginning. It does what good poetry does and imagines a new language for you. It says something plain but in a way that expands the definition. Vuong does this a lot in this book, and I really love that in this work and envy that skill.
Vuong has a great quote about how queerness saved his life that gets passed around almost every pride, and I can’t help but think of it when I read this book, and when I read his newest collection, Time is a Mother. Being your truest self is how you save your own life, the perfect message for the Pride season.
When I Grow Up I Want To Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
Our kissing would rhyme/ with cardiac arrest
I got introduced to Chen Chen’s work the same way I do many poets: they tweet something smart or cool and I follow, then buy their book. I was drawn in by the title of this collection and bought it almost immediately. Reading through it, I found humor and a biting nature that was so refreshing and welcome.
“Summer Was Forever” covers the pressures of the version of you your family wants you to be and who you are in reality. It also is a poem about young love, young queer love and desire and I find it so beautiful and sweet. Those early queer crushes are always so monumental and I think this poem gets that across so well.
In “Elegy,” the speaker muses:
“Like all scholars in any sort of heaven, I will study
the metaphysics of madness. I will find
that the littler the light, the better it tastes.
On Earth lately, I’ve been looking at everyone
like I love them, & maybe I do. Or maybe I only love
one person, & I’m beaming from it.”
Chen’s poems have that element of surprise that I talked about earlier. It is beautiful and it’s engaging. The music in the poems is so prevalent, even when the poem is wide and stretching and feels a little chaotic. I try to read poems that challenge me, and many of these poems challenged me. It’s always a good sign when you have to stop and google something when you are reading, and I did that many times with this collection.
Chen’s poetry made me feel the way Dunce made me feel, I found myself smiling at some sections and reading with a furrowed brow at others. When a book of poems makes you ride the wave of emotion that way, it has done its job.
Queer Naija Lit: Akwaeke Emezi’s Poetry Collection Makes Space for Many Selves
Hello, Hello! Welcome to my column, Queer Naija Lit, where I’ll be reviewing some of my favourite queer Nigerian books.
CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING deserves its name. Between the first and last pages, my mind became a thunderstorm of questions. What is time? What is being? What is life? What is death, to a god? Each poem presents an experience like lightning. Look: love. Here, pain. See where they connect. At the center of the thunderstorm is stillness. There, clarity is born. If you feel confused and a little unsteady then, congratulations, you’re ready to read Akwaeke Emezi.
What is time?
In colonial reality, time is a wound. Colonial time announces itself by the suppression of other times. It is the present, absent. In Emezi’s work, time is mended by stories that reach across, into, beyond, and before the bifurcation of “this” time.
It’s common to think of time as linear, but Emezi’s poems convey a story that doesn’t go from point A to B. Rather, it explores moments: freedom, peace, reckoning, and hurt can be represented through time — by which I mean experience. In Igbo culture, experience is the focus of a story and, by extension, life (what is life, if not one long story/experience?).
I grew up hearing stories from my family that didn’t hold their center in a particular time or region but in experience and shared understanding. Simultaneously, I was hearing a linear story about my country and people that only made sense if I didn’t look beyond the last few decades. I was — through spiritual and academic colonial institutions — conditioned to think of myself through a lens that denied my existence. When you have two means of storytelling next to each other — like with most binaries — we’re taught to pit them against each other. The “and” of the colonial mind is really a “versus.”
Emezi recognizes this cultural conflict in their narrative, but they step out of the narrative of oppression and into truth. Binaries can show us where things separate, but also where they connect — like a door hinge, or the two faces of a coin.
When I look at time as an experience the way Emezi writes it and compare it to linear, measured time, what becomes obvious to me is the way they are connected, and that one way of perceiving — the linear way — is deemed more real than another.
The consequences (and intent) of this are dire. Experiences and realities that can be validated through linear time thrive. Meanwhile, experiences and realities that can’t be translated into this metric are invisibilized and subjugated. Specifically, the people and environments living in non-privileged realities are subjugated.
Not in Emezi’s book. CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING exists in the reality of the spirit that wrote it. Emezi is who they are, an ogbanje and a god-child. The book is an embodiment of their reality, which is also Igbo reality.
What is being?
Colonization forced a majority of the world to think of beingness as one thing. There’s one (white) human, one (white) reality, one (white) self. This narrative is a modern descendant of Plato’s search for Ultimate Truth, which is fear and control. Colonization is an empire’s attempt to take all that is. I can’t imagine the size of the ego necessary for a person to believe they can know and be all that is, and yet, the proof is in life right now. It’s in the ways we’re still conditioned to try to define everyone else and the ways we’re prevented from defining ourselves. Like Toni Morrison says, definitions belong to the definers.
Our ability to know and define stops at us — and even that is tenuous. To reach beyond the self and attempt to define (control) all reality — and therefore the experiences of people that aren’t you — is violence.
When Emezi writes, it is from deep within themself, made possible by their acceptance of their reality. The book is filled with selves mirroring each other, asking hard questions. This mode of storytelling is grounded in our culture. Duality is an important concept in Igbo culture. Life is possible when two exist. The earth and the sky, day and night. Time and being create life and death. While colonial reality seeks to suppress difference, Igbo culture recognizes that difference itself is life.
A poetry book is brilliant fabric to weave reality with. In physical form, each end of the book serves as a container that the selves in the poem differentiate and reflect within. The difference in the book serves a different purpose from the conflict and suppression that is the current dominant narrative. Instead of suppression, Emezi writes towards connection and integration.
One poem, “Self Portrait As An Abuser” (one of many portraiture poems in the book) fractures the selves in two. One self seeks to live by taking. This self fears being alone, fears being unloved. The other self, on the other end of the page, is healed enough to tell the story as a warning. Between these stories, another narrative emerges.
I literally mean Between. When the stories are read through the space that separates them, a third narrative emerges. The hurting self tries to tell the spirit inside it to live. It doesn’t end there. I count at least ten narratives in this poem alone, and the entire book is like that, yet no two poems are the same. It’s brilliant.
This is a book to be read and re-read, like all true stories. People aren’t ever just “one” thing. We grow, change, heal, and hurt. That’s life. Stillness (which is not rest) belongs to spirit, the internal consciousness. We dip into it from time to time, but permanent stillness is death.
It’s important to place Emezi’s work in context. It makes sense that this was a book written by an ogbanje. An ogbanje is a trickster spirit, and what is colonization if not trickery. Substitute that, unname this, redraw these lands, rename these people, destroy their artifacts. Weave a web of fear over the world so we pretend all is well, as people are hurt. Trickery.
So of course, it takes an ogbanje to see where the oppressors’ tricks fail and spin old realities into new worlds.
Emezi is also the child of an alusi (deity) , Ani. The earth mother. She holds life and death, the harvest, marriage, communal laws, and spiritual practices. Ani is the ground everything is built on, and she is where we return when we leave this realm. The python that swallows everything.
That Ani sends her child as an ogbanje makes sense. The child of Ani has to be everything, a reflection of their mother. For Igbo people right now, that means they have to be part trickery. They are a reflection of the liminal space that the colonized culture — fighting for its own reality — occupies.
It matters that a god of my people showed their face and is queer. It matters the way they continue to experience violence in this embodiment. This mirrors colonial interactions with African liminality and the ways we experience the embodiment of spirit. Their stigmatization by cis-het Nigerians invested on some level in the upholding of colonial reality makes it clear what the arms of oppression are orchestrating us to kill internally. Our own spirits, our own people, our own gods.
I, and any of my people who know to look, know what we see. What we feel in Emezi’s telling. To tell a story is to survive it. To tell a story with all your faces present, as Emezi has done, is to live. As a people, if our gods are alive, so are we.
The whole story matters, it always does. So, thank you Akwaeke, for giving us everything.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
“The J Girls” Review: Sex, Fire Sauce, and Growing Up in the 90s
For fans longing for a raunchier, more complex version of Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club, may I introduce you to Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show? Okay — that’s a bit misleading. There is no formal club, no babysitting, no perfect Connecticut neighborhood, and just one standalone text — Hurt’s poetry collection. In many ways, the J Girls live the antithesis of the picturesque lives of Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, and Dawn (also shout out to Mallory, Jessi, Logan, Shannon, and Abby). Set working-class Gaudeville, Ohio, Hurt’s collection serves as the commentary and content for reality show footage “recovered from a set of three VHS tapes found at a community rummage sale” (I know it’s a lot to wrap your head around).
The recovered “reality show” footage includes six episodes flanked by opening and end credits. The J Girls are a group of high schoolers growing up in the late 90s and early 00s in the Rust Belt: “Jocelyn. Jodie. Jennifer. Jacqui. Joelle: Gaudeville girl-gods of quick fingers and full pockets.” Like The Baby-Sitters Club, the group has auxiliary members who find their way into the plot — Jacqui’s mom and an anonymous woman who Hurt describes as “nobody you can see; a safer name than me.”
If you couldn’t tell already, this book is a wild ride like much of the content in the MTV’s golden age of reality television. Just like the drama that unfolded in the best seasons of The Real World (hello New Orleans and Hawai’i!), The J Girls is action-packed with sexy escapades, relationship sagas, and defiant characters. Instead of living in a swanky house with strangers, the girls are close friends who spend the “show” reckoning with tensions between Catholic school teachings, societal expectations, and personal desires through blow jobs, prayers, and badly kept secrets.
Once you wrap your head around Hurt’s form and structure, The J Girls is quite a refreshing portrayal of Midwestern teenage girlhood — more focused on exploring the messiness of truth than pleasantries. Hurt refuses to let us hide from the realities of growing up often relegated to the shadows and closets. I’m far from vanilla, but even I found myself sheepishly reading Jacqui’s monologue, “Ode to the C Word.”
if I name it, I name myself and come
alive with dirty chatter. Self-satisfied,
my glossy lips won’t quiet now.
I could chew this cuss all night.
[Okay so note: This is maybe not the best book to read at work or on family vacation].
Individually, Hurt’s poems are poignantly raw. When strung together, they provide striking characterizations of each of the J Girls as they grapple with their sexuality, relationships, and reputations as teenagers. However, readers might find themselves easily lost amongst the twists and turns of Hurt’s poetic metaphors and word play. Her intricately crafted poems do not make for the most dynamic page-turning summer read.
Take for instance, “Viral,” one of the most memorable poems in the collection — a monologue from Jodie, a Chevy-driving Taco Bell employee. Jodie recounts the night she flashed a customer while working the drive-thru window, “in a…warm-breath cloud of / spiced beef and tube cheese.” Eighteen lines later, the boobflash incident becomes a thesis on body shaming, respectability, and reputation in this small midwestern town. Amidst the chaotic, unnecessarily dense retelling, Hurt still somehow manages to reference “Fire Sauce” (the best sauce obviously), lube, and the PTA. Perhaps, this is the magic within The J Girls — Hurt’s ability to unearth depth within the mundane in ways that make us nostalgic for our own high school days when we too wondered, whispered, and performed coming-of-age rituals in cars, bathrooms, and fields.
Paying homage to her upbringing in Youngstown, Ohio, Hurt’s sophomore collection breathes life into the memories that many readers have of their own upbringings — mall trips with friends, being in love with Bath and Body Works fragrances, and loving/hating our first cars, jobs, homes, and lovers. Despite this, the book lacks the attention to the rich racial and ethnic diversity of the Midwest that I sought as an Ohio-based Black reader. Instead, Hurt’s poems and narratives of the “Gaudeville” J Girls perpetuate a centuries-old myth of a monolithic (white) Midwest. If there is any racial diversity in the book, I missed it while trying to decode Hurt’s thick stanzas stacked full with double-meanings and mystery. It’s not that Hurt doesn’t have the range to include more depth and characters who look like me; her priorities are just — elsewhere.
Despite this oversight, The J Girls is a fascinating poetry collection meant for those of us “older” readers slowly creeping our way into middle-age and longing for a mall trip with our besties or backseat make-out sesh with our crush. For many of us, there is something so familiar about the J Girls’ journeys. We all have been or have known a Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, or Joelle — just wading through adolescence in a world where that shames girls for our curiosities, sexualities, and messiness more than not. In this familiarity, The J Girls serves as a requiem for those girls we used to be or know — the girls who found themselves between the legs of another searching for love, acceptance, vengeance, or something more than what their world would ever offer.
In Verse: Poetry Collections That Conjure Spring
Feature image by CSA Images via Getty Images
It’s spring.
There are many poets that come to mind for me when reflecting on spring, and probably some for you as well, but I want to recommend a few that you might not think of.
In these books, you won’t necessarily find flowers and natural scenes, but you will find a general feeling of rebirth, of growth, and of finding peace within the things that trouble us.
I hope you find at least one of these collections to be suitable for you, and whatever your spring may bring.
x
DJ
Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
The side effect of a passion for
waves is dream upon dream where every object is as blue as the sea.
Shira makes me think in spring. I’ve participated in her writing community, In Surreal Life, twice now, and she has crafted a space that is both bright and vivid. With her own wisdom and that of visiting poets, you are always surrounded by the sweetness and rigor of poetry.
This collection of poems is about Shira’s mental health journey, but also love, and also heartbreak, and triumph. There’s so much within the pages. There’s even a bathtub scene with Björk.
As a fellow bipolar person, I think mania can feel like spring, and getting medicated and going to therapy to help manage emotions can feel like I’m losing that manic magic. These poems, the fact that Shira wrote them and all they contain, feel like they disprove that notion. Coming out of the constant manic-depressive roller coaster and into a world where I can feel joy and sadness as wholes and not halves, that’s magic.
The poem “Side Effects II” ends with the penultimate refrain of “I make a plan for tomorrow” and isn’t that spring? To have a dream of tomorrow, to know that another day is waiting for you beyond today’s challenges. There is a life after everything, even the things we thought we couldn’t conquer. This book proves that for me.
High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain
My desires are berries because they are small and many
We are not to judge books by their covers but I love the cover of this book, it is the sun, it is marigolds and turmeric. That alone makes me think of spring.
The quote above is the first line of the first poem, and that poem ends with the lines
I am the snake and I am the silence,
an animal’s rib picked clean.
It is impossible to encounter a snake in a poem and not think of the Garden of Eden, so I do. Alicia also conjures sin, so I’m doubled with thoughts of the Garden, what it means, who was there, what they did.
The biggest word in this poem is “forgiveness” and makes me think of a God that expects mercy but who is merciless. There are many poems in this book that revisit forgiveness, like “Drive Thru,” one of my favorite poems in the book.
All your desires are sacred.
All you need is to speak them aloud.
I think to forgive is to pass toward spring. Forgiveness not in the biblical sense of absolving evils, but forgiveness in the sense of moving forward yourself, without the extra weight of resentment for wrongs done to us. I say that as someone who holds many grudges, but would like to be a more forgiving person as I have been forgiven many times in my life.
This Strange Land by Shara McCallum
If I am not an ocean
I am nothing
This collection explores motherhood. The acts of being mothered and mothering equally. I read it in college when I was going through a time of reexamination of my relationship with my own mother. It was my first time away from her, and I struggled without the weight of her gaze on me.
My relationship with motherhood is complicated and so colors my relationship with this book, when I read it I’m reminded of the trope of the oppressive mother, the one I grew up with, and it takes everything in me not to cry.
These poems stew, and in her own examination of herself as a mother, McCallum leads me to spring. I think to bring life into this world is the most profound thing, it is a miracle, and we don’t think enough of the mothers we know, especially Black mothers.
In “Dear History” McCallum writes:
so I could not tell
if silence was the sound
darkness made
fall over the earth
or if silence was within me
and I was the dark.
and those lines bring me back to childhood, wondering if I was evil because of the way people treated me. Raising a child is a tender thing, and there are so many ways to fuck up that relationship, but McCallum’s poems really rejoice in pregnancy and motherhood. The imagery she uses to describe it is sweet and bright.
I find spring in that, and also forgiveness which appears in this collection as well. Despite the heavier poems there is still so much that rises in this collection, so much that lifts you up in a world that often does the opposite.
Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
Kingdom Animalia contains many poems dealing with loss and grief, which at first glance may not bring anything like spring to mind.
I think you could argue that there is spring in grief. I don’t think grief ends in the traditional sense, there isn’t a full stop where you pass over from grieving to not grieving, but there is reprieve. In this collection, those moments of reprieve come when the speaker recognizes the connection between natural life and that of human existence.
In “Dear Minnie, Dear Ms.” Girmay writes
Trust the queen is you
Trust the mud is you,
& the soft, silver afro of the dandelion.
If you trust that you are in everything, even in the natural world, that the people you love that have gone are also in everything, that brings a certain comfort with it. I read this collection for the first time while on vacation, in the Florida sun, so maybe that’s where the idea of spring comes to mind for me. But I do believe it is also in the poems and in the language as well.
Dunce by Mary Ruefle
You loved and were loved
said the bee to the lily.
This collection wins the award for the most times I have smiled while reading a book of poetry. I wanted to end on this one because there is so much love bursting through these pages. So much exaltation and appreciation for life. These poems are funny and comforting, it’s probably one of my favorite collections I’ve read over the last five years.
Ruefle writes of ‘convulsive tenderness” in “Grandma Moses” and orders that
Real snow glitters,
so add glitter to the paint
when painting snow.
I read this book in bed overnight and went to sleep smiling, it is really that good. This book contains one of my favorite lines of a poem: “I have made cautious/inquiries, and finally learned it is/ Thursday.”
I don’t know why that line makes me feel giddy, many lines in these poems do. They just feel me up with lightness and air. They are playful and silly and sometimes there is a pain in them but the prevailing emotion is one of gratitude.
I think the speaker in this poem is thankful for Thursday, for breakfast, for the color purple, which in turn makes me grateful as a reader. this book gave me a new way of seeing and experiencing poetry. I have yet to find another collection that has made me feel like this one, but luckily for me, I can revisit these poems when I want to. And so can you.
I hope the rest of your spring is filled with poetry. I hope you find something beautiful and warm within these poems, the way I did. Happy reading friends!
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Sexual Assault Awareness Month
Feature image by CSA Images via Getty Images
Hey.
This month’s In Verse is about something very important to me, and very close to my heart. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I am a survivor of sexual assault, and while I have written about it a lot in poems and essays, I won’t go into the details here.
When I was going through therapy in the months and years after the assault, I craved poetry that would help me understand what had happened to me. I wanted someone to tell me what to do, how to behave, how to recover. No healing journey is that simple or universal. My own was messy and often fraught with retraumatization.
I did find solace in poetry though, as I do with almost everything I’ve ever been through. If you are in the months or days or years after an assault and looking for something to help you process how you feel, I hope these poets help you. Whether you’re ready to heal or just want to hear someone else’s story, these poets are experts at examining grief, loss, and recovery.
I hope you find what you need here
x
Dani
The Renunciations by Donika Kelly
What I wanted: a practice that reassured
that what was cracked could be mended
If you are a survivor of abuse, this collection might be one you pick up and put down a lot. In the early days of my healing, someone recommended I read “The Body Keeps The Score,” and because of the intensity of the stories in that book, it took me over a year to read. I read The Renunciations in about a day and a half. I was stunned but also very hungry for these poems. They spoke to things that had never been uttered in me, even silently.
The above quote comes from a poem near the end of the book: “A dead thing that, in dying, feeds the living.” For me, the quote speaks to how after surviving an assault all you want is to know that one day you’ll be okay, that the feeling that you are ruined will subside. That you’ll eventually come back to yourself.
My favorite poem in the collection comes last: “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” The lines
The home I’ve been making inside myself started
with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle,
the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog.
speak to the way that survivors often have to “clean house” in the process of healing. You have to get into the thicket of yourself, pull weeds, and get your skin snagged on thorns. It’s a bloody and taxing process, but you do come out on the other side of it.
It’s hard for me to talk about this book without crying. I didn’t make it through it without shedding a few tears. I used to think that was a show of weakness but I’ve come to let tears mean a sort of cleansing for me now. If you find yourself crying while reading this book I hope you can let the tears flow too.
Build Yourself A Boat by Camonghne Felix
am I allowed to disrespect the form.
I first listened to this as an audiobook after listening to an episode of VS with Camonghne Felix talking about this book. I fell in love instantly. I immediately bought a physical copy of the book so I could hold it in my hands and read it. Once I got a physical copy I read it again and again. I often taught it in workshops with teens who were interested in poetry. This book, and the above poem “Mirror Talk” spoke to the power of speaking, of telling the truth.
In “Contouring the Flattening” the speaker states:
but I keep my sob stories to myself. I keep my
smile white and my fists closed. I let survival be
survival.
And those words screamed at me. There is definitely a push to silence survivors when we try to talk about our stories. When we speak up, it’s for attention or money. No one wants to believe us because a world in which there are no rapists is a safe world. It allows people that deny assaults to either 1. not interrogate their own sexual experiences where they may have caused harm and 2. blame the victim and position themselves as strong enough to not be assaulted. This is especially true for Black women who are raped and abused at staggering rates and not believed or silenced when they try to speak up.
While the speaker in these poems struggles with divulging their trauma to the reader, they do allow us a glimpse into the ways they have been hurt. It is an incredibly vulnerable act, and a gracious one. To let someone else hold your pain or see their own similar pain reflected is an act of love. For the self and for the reader.
Hot with the Bad Things by Lucia LoTempio
Listen: if nothing goes to plan, imagine it as bad as possible
From what I as a reader can tell, this book is centered around two events. One is the murder of a woman by her ex-boyfriend in the speaker’s college town. The second is the speaker’s own assault. These two events or often bent or blurred together.
In one of the poems, the speaker asks:
If telling a story is the mark of victory, what does that make me? Maybe power
is like language— hard to nail down and relentless; smiling at a man who is
waving to someone behind you.
For me, this question makes me think that sometimes telling our stories isn’t this big, triumphant thing. Sometimes it is a sore, a painful thing still. I know the first time I wrote about being raped and it got published, it felt like I had let the world in on this incredibly traumatic thing, and for what reason? I knew I had to get it out of me, but why?
This book is just bursting with great language, To write a poem is to manipulate language into something else, usually pretty, even if the subject is ugly. What I like about these poems is that the beauty isn’t what is compelling you to read the poems. It’s the story, the parallel drawn between two women and their lives, not dissimilar.
Reading these poems helped me feel permission for my anger. I felt like I was allowed to have the rage I felt in my body. I was scared of rage, I thought it meant doing harm. Poetry chiefly gives both the speaker and the reader permission to feel in whatever way they see fit. If it is hard to decipher or doesn’t make sense right off.
If you do get your hands on this book, allow it to give you permission as well.
Wound From the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse
Forgive me. I cannot find the poem in all of this
Many of these poems deal with the violence forced on trans and disabled people. The stories range from street harassment to sexual assault. These poems are sound, strong, not heavy. I often feel that describing poems as heavy makes them sound like a burden to the reader, which they are not.
In one of the earlier poems in the book “Phlebotomy as Told by the Blood,” we get this rich imagery and language:
Maybe I too am read for all the slaughter carried within me, bastard child of water, lake swelled with rotting fish.
Red is obviously a color very much associated with anger, so for me, this line in particular reads as being colored with rage at the trauma the speaker has been made to endure. There are other poems in the book that reflect this reading to me. Like I said earlier, feeling rage and anger can be scary, but the speaker in these poems seems to carry it well.
These poems also deal with familial abuse, which is a subject that is very tender for me. I crave reading poems like these because they help me to see that I’m not the only person that has been hurt or abused by a parent. It is of course very common, but people don’t talk about it publicly out of fear of “shaming” the parent or parents who did the abusing. There is an impulse to protect the family that I understand all too well.
These poems are sharp and unflinching, they carry a history of abuse that often is not talked about, especially for trans and disabled people. When you live in a body that is not considered the norm, so much of outside people’s fears and insecurities are projected onto you, and often violently. Trans people should not be made to carry this violence delicately, and that’s what I like about these poems, they refuse that notion.
My Heart But Not My Heart by Stephanie Cawley
the end of grief is [ ]. This is my question.
This book isn’t about abuse like the others. It instead deals with the grief around losing a parent. The reason I chose it is because of how it talks about and examines grief. It is very similar to the way I felt about my assault, a kind of loss in its own right.
In the book, the speaker writes:
IIs this what I feel like. Is this my central image, that of an absence flanked
by two feather appendages, two useless mechanisms for flying kept
groundward by the loss of a heart, the musculature of the abdomen, the
shiny beak and eyes.
This meditation comes after the speaker finds the wings of a bird with no body between them. I was struck specifically by “the loss of a heart” because for me, being assaulted was very much about a betrayal. It was always by someone I trusted to not hurt me. I tried to deny what happened to me but the loss still lingered. I had been robbed as something that I couldn’t name or feel or touch any longer.
The image of the wings lingers for me as a reader. To be robbed of flight by forces unknown speaks to the experience of abuse. You are always mourning the self you could have been had you not known the brunt of someone else’s sorrow and rage.
That’s why grief is so poignant, it doesn’t just let you go. It can subside or feel assuaged at some points but it never lets you go. I think this book perfectly illustrates this relationship.
I really like how this book handles grief, and I hope you can connect to it as well.
A Conversation With Jhani Randhawa About Their Poetry Collection “Time Regime”
– from “Scriation II: Recrystallize” in Time Regime
Randhawa is a queer* Kenyan-Punjabi/Anglo-American maker across mediums living in unceded Kumeyaay territory in southern California. In a continent-spanning, cosmos-wide phone conversation, we plumbed loss, time, and other queer elementals.
This interview has been condensed for clarity and concision.
– Time Regime
I considered canceling our phone chat, but then I decided to pick up Time Regime yet again. I had been moved by Randhawa’s language before, but this time, post-Emir, was different. I was softened, pricked, entered. Accompanied. I was once again reminded of what the best poetry does for me–it gives my grief another throat.
J F K Randhawa: Beautiful question. I think this work is infused with years of grieving and grief — and grief that preceded me, grief that I inherited. Certain poems are more thematically interested in tangling with grief. Others are perhaps not directly involved in that tangling but nevertheless are caught and bound in the living world — I grieve the living world every day. Even when not in a space of grieving, still the drum beat of loss. The drums of loss: I just conceal them and echo them and that loss is ecological.
A lot of this work was written in New York, when I was living there for a time. There was a loss I was writing and sinking into — a confluence of losses and transitions. So the performative act of sounding out — which is a way I think about poetry and about this writing — that is the voice of grief. And the drumbeat of grieving, I think it moves through this language. At the time I was living in New York, I was thinking a lot about policed spaces, policed bodies, human and non human. I was also thinking about the loss of certain friendships when I came out as queer and came into my sensuality and sexuality a little bit more in a particular friend group that I think had certain other gendered expectations of my body. The loss of friendship when you experience opening your world to vaster ideas of relations.
In that time, I just remember this one specific day right after Trump was elected in the city. And I don’t even know what militarized force it was. But all of a sudden central downtown — there’s just like four blocks that were cordoned off by a bunch of people with military grade automatic rifles and the cop cars were suddenly tanks. And there’s this intense sense, it’s like a pit of despair. That was the time when I really started to learn more about the voice of grief and to tap into it more.
drought-and-displacement-dry, lurid with hotel horses (p. 64)
While the idea of town sinks deep in our bladders (p. 9)
The water towers
bruise what’s left of sky– (p. 24)
Alone with an antique affair of solid rain. (p. 89)
bulldozer with paradise face. (p.61)
the surface of the earth was raked, curdled by
orchard (p. 87)
The landscape is mausoleum. What do you do with this? (p. 87)
I must confess that I tend to avoid ecopoetics. I blame my breakable heart, the memory of a lover who said, I can’t take how depressed you get about these things. (After I had laid in bed for three days mourning a slaughtered sequoia.) But somehow Time Regime allows me to look the apocalypse in the eye, its one pitiless eye. As we joke and memeify the prospect of WWIII, the future glows. Is that hope or atomic radiance? Either way, Randhawa holds my hand as we traverse what’s left of this unbearable landscape. The act of naming the workaday horrors is amulet, almost alchemy: “the land the narrative as dead as email.” (p. 87) Or, “There were poems concerning wars waged in the cloud cover.” (p. 81) Or, “Lover, I am listening, hoping that in your gulfs I will swarm, a blossomed algae.” (p. 31) Do we queer what we cannot save?
Still, consolations infest the text: “There are ancestors strewn about, to seek in the wreck.” (p. 88) Very well then. Let us sift through the ash for the bone shards of our ancestors, teeth.
J F K R: The way I’ve described this work in the past is as a dream. Some parts of it are dream logs. Our dreams are spaces of visitation, of thresholds. The bell hooks figure in your Dream, Almah, feels like a guide, offering an antidote and a mantra to dispel with illusions secreted by a grief left unwitnessed — for me, for so many, bell hooks’s work has been so oriented to envisioning, seeking and more futuristically practicing with the material of the present unobstructed relation; I feel she does this by metabolizing histories and traditions of love and harm and witness and methodologies of listening, learning, communicating. Dreams bear a likeness to bell hooks’ work — dreams are a practice space, they are a metabolizing space, a space where the subterranean, this beautiful word you used, breathes into us, giving us the secrets of the present, and the present across time. If we, humans, particularly people in more technocratic or “post-industrial” urban/sub-urban environments, forget, or feel obstructed from the ecological shape of our lives, we shut out a vital tenderness, an integral spirit of communion (with our own bodies, our kin and communities, the materials that envelop, nourish, deplete us).
That dreams are not already gathered about you watching?
ALR: Why Time Regime?
J F K R: For me, time is fluid, interpermeating, positional, interdependent, layered over itself; time erodes, it erodes itself, bends, spirals, erupts. Time has afterlives and carries future ancestors in its currents. It is uncertain. It is neither linear, nor does it progress only forward and backward. In stillness, too, I am learning and unlearning time. When I observe time, filtered through experiences of global powers, hegemonies, and capitalist/colonial regimes and ideologies, I wonder about all the edifices built around time, that seek to police, regiment, structure, and bureaucratize it.
ALR: So a quote from Time Regime that I found impish and intriguing: “Sometimes I am deliberately working to remain unreachable.” And I wanted to know if you wanted to say more about how you see the relationship between legibility and the end of the world? Or not, because that might be revealing your hand? (laughter)
J F K R: (more laughter) You are seeing through to the hand. Which is marvelous, really marvelous. Legibility and the end of the world…I think about the article “the” in this idea about the world.
ALR: Oh, yes! Oof, I’m getting chills.
J F K R: There’s so much to unpack right there alone. Who constructed the world? Which world are we talking about? Whose world, and how?
ALR: (snaps enthusiastically)
J F K R: So thinking about the end of the world — we think that for humans. I think so many of us are caught up in a really anthropocentric and self-forward way of inhabiting the world where instead of belonging to sadness, belonging to time, or death…Death belongs to our bodies…there’s just so much that we cannot see or perceive. The life world of a worm on our sidewalk in the morning after a monsoon is so entangled in our existence and so far from what we experience and what we know on a daily level.
Legibility is such a potent and powerful dictation of experience. I think that legibility is full of signifiers of the known world — and there’s the article “the” again, and there’s the word “world” again. The constraints of what we have constructed to know and be known, and how, are limited and there are millions if not billions of other universes possible, even in this one moment on this planet, beyond our bodies. I’m gonna make myself cry because I’m envisioning this beautiful, incredible eel that lived in the coral reef outside of Tokyo in the 80s. And I saw this video of this eel in Tokyo in the 80s, and I think about the ancestries of that eel. For thousands, millions of years and how it has changed and how I will likely never know it, the bonds of those creatures to the sea, to the coral, to the salt — like the salinity in the water, all of these elements made by just looking at this eel on this video are illegible to me. I think about the amount of radiation and mercury that just continues to amass in the seas in the Pacific. I think about what worlds have already ended. Whose worlds. And how.
J F K R: Yeah.
ALR: I just wanted to say that it resonated with me. I’m touching my femme beard now.
J F K R: I’m stroking my little mustache right now.
(We laugh together hirsutely.)
J F K R: I’m excited to speak into this a little bit more because there’s so much about the obvious policing of gender fluidities that also rubs up against the construction of a tame body and maintained body, a body under regime–the bodies that are “women” and the bodies that are “men,” the bodies that are human or not human.
My background is Sikh and Punjabi, but my ancestral land is also Kenya where my father was born. There’s such an interesting relationship in the Indian Ocean circuit…
My relationship to hair as a kind of ancestral practice is and has belonged to the maintenance of a male-gendered body, or masculine body, I suppose. Just sitting with this impression is that how little I know and have gleaned from even conversations with my Sikh community and my elders around the complications of these hair practices. Besides just gender alone…and gender as an construction was happening in direct relationship to the bodies of white women in colonial India in the 1700s at the time and so there’s all these tangles. They’re so opaque to me that I’m not sure how to answer this question except in personal anecdotes and that also feels really particular — like this kind of diasporic question that I have, especially about Sikh American identity and Kenyan Sikh Punjabi American identity at the same time. It feels really bound up in “men’s hair” and my inhabiting that space, just scratching at it, is maybe a kind of queer thing.
ALR: Your poems remind me of these words from Wallace Stevens:
“The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.”
Feel free to disagree, converge, diverge — I just wanted to offer that these lines came to mind while reading your work.
__________________________________________________________________________
After some arguments with and “a long metabolizing of this phrase,” here’s the final landing place:
J F K R: A poem must recognize and inhabit itself, and have the capacity for an otherwise.
__________________________________________________________________________
J F K R: I love this question! Are you familiar with Phulkari? It’s a particular textile practice from the Punjab — but from western Punjab, from Kashmir. It’s an ancestral practice of textile and weaving. They’re usually pretty big. Often these textiles are hand woven and hand embroidered, using silk and cotton threads. They’re usually like the size of a full or queen bedspread. It’s a practice that’s often taken up by…traditionally women in the Punjab. When a daughter is born, they’ll start weaving these textiles and tapestries to pass to that person when they’ve gone through a rite — whether that’s their moon approaches them or they get married or whatever may be. This shroud is also used in death. So people are often wrapped in the Phulkari that their grandmothers started weaving for them when the person who birthed them was pregnant.
I think the Phulkari is really a ghost presence in this collection. Lots of stitching and threading and—
ALR: —“guts embroidered,” I remember that from Time Regime.
J F K R: Yes, this thread is attached to a mother line. It’s umbilical. It is these guts, our gut flora pouring all over each other in a way. In terms of a visual accompaniment, I almost would want Phulkari, but I would want them to be translucent. And I would want them to be installed in a space where people could circumambulate, and their bodies — as they would pass through kind of different passages lined and crisscrossed with these many translucent, heavily embroidered hanging tapestries–that everyone’s bodies would become auras to each other.
I’m thinking that in the space, too — you were talking about grief work happening through this text — and I would want in a visual capacity for there to be space in place for people to touch and if not to touch then to sit in presence with each other. I also would want a sensation of really sharing in space with each other.
So I’m thinking about these translucent Phulkari that are hanging from the ceiling that people circumambulate and are lit with maybe a purple light. And I would love there to be a room or perhaps even close hallway where there are also cushions lined up facing each other on both sides of the hall. And I would really love to have myself if not a few other friends present to start a process or just be in sitting practice in that space. Kind of at the end of the Phulkari space that you can pass through but also sit with. So I think I’ll stop there, in that imaginal space.
NOTE: The bolded headings are excerpts from poems in Time Regime
Time Regime is available April 1 and can be ordered on Bookshop.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Impressing the One You Love
Feature image by CSA Images via Getty Images
Hey.
Welcome to the second installment of In Verse. Happy you’re here.
Sometimes we get our hearts broken, and sometimes we fall in love. Being in love is to be full of swell, all bells, and tinkles. At its best, it is enough to make you believe in the good of the world again. Poems are so good for when we fall in love, and when we are trying to impress our new lovers.
I scoured my dense poetry collection and have found five beautiful collections for those of you that are trying to impress a new beau, or trying to keep your everyday love interested.
Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass
Didn’t we shoulder
our way through the cleft in the rock of the everyday
and tear up the grass in the pasture of pleasure?
Bass is a powerhouse of a poet, I love the way she puts words to lesbian love, the thing that has been the muse for many of us. The quote above is taken from the poem “The Morning After” in which the speaker is marveling at her lover as she goes about her day the morning after they’ve been intimate with each other.
The details of the poem, the silk kimono, the lunch being packed, all these things plant you gently into the atmosphere of the poem expertly. What’s satisfying about the speaker in these poems is that she is still madly in love with the love she’s been with for years. The dedication, the appreciation, and the passion are still ever-present. Poems like “Prayer” and “Let’s” paint the picture for the reader that love can still flourish years into a relationship.
I’ve had the pleasure of taking classes with Bass, and she is rigid in her respect for the genre. One of the things I learned from her teachings is that you as the writer are not in charge of the poem. The poem moves through you, you have to set aside your ego and let it come as it sees fit. I think the same can be said for love. You aren’t in charge of the way love comes to you. Yes, you choose love as an action every day, but who your heart clings to and how fast and how long is not in your control.
I imagine you reading this collection to your lover. You both pass the book to the other after reading one poem until the entire book is read. Then you kiss. Then you let whatever comes come.
Remnants of Another Age by Nikola Madzirov
Closeness will escape our hands like a drop
from the body of a fish just caught
This book is not an obvious choice. Mostly because it is chiefly about the effects of empire and war. The poet, Madzirov, is Macedonian and writes in his native language, which you can see printed on the left side of the book.
I think works of translation are important to read. I will try to describe here why I’ve chosen this book to read to someone you love. I believe it is because there is so much tenderness in the book, even in the face of violence, the speaker still talks of falling snow, the vastness of the universe, the small, slippery fish.
In the poem which this quote comes from, “An Involuntary Conquest of Space,” the speaker notes:
When the sun and moon eclipse with a touch
they are still apart, and everything
becomes night, a false falling asleep of the leaves
the shadows, the wild animals.
This poem is a lot about a love that is fading, but there is still so much in the image of the touch. That not-touching touching, that mirage of touch. And there is peace in that. In the false night that it creates.
I imagine you reading this poem to the one you love and talking about the bigger themes in the book, discussing the metaphor, really pushing yourselves to understand the images and allowing that to draw you closer. After all, there’s nothing sexier than someone who may not be a poet but who can engage with poetry in a critical way.
These are poems you want to take care with because they do deal with war. I don’t want to sound like I’m diminishing the work in any way. I believe that even poems that aren’t love poems have a love in them and can be shared with the ones we love.
The Undressing by Li-Young Lee
I loved you before I was born
it doesn’t make sense, I know
In this book is one of Lee’s most celebrated poems, “I Loved You Before I Was Born.” This poem is one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read, so touching and surreal. It really captures the grandness of love as the rest of the book grapples with fleeting and selfish love.
The Undressing contains masterful love poems. The speaker in these poems is writing to a lover, writing to a father, writing to so many loves. In “Changing Places In The Fire,” the speaker states:
The body of the beloved
is the lover’s true homeland, she says
and whether or not this is true, whether or not it is believed, there is beauty in it. There is recognition of the power of love and the beloved. How we often run and escape into the bodies of the ones we love, for comfort and for protection.
Like many collections of poetry, The Undressing gives voice to many different topics, but its the complexity of love that rises out and sustains the reader.
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
I am tired of mounting
this hill alone
Sprinkled throughout Bestiary are these love poems that are gut-punching, as I like to refer to them. The quote comes from “Love Poem: Donika” and does see the speaker calling on a lover in the end (Love, how do I gain/ what was lost in winter?)
The first Love Poem that appears is “Love Poem: Chimera” in which the speaker imagines themselves as a beast, the lover as a beast. There is a making in the way we love that can often be destructive or uncontrollable, it can take on a life of its own.
Most of the poets on this list have struck the balance between pain and love. Writing about the things that haunt them alongside the love that keeps them alive. I think Kelly is one of the strongest voices for this in modern poets. It’s just so easy to get lost in the world of her poems. The poems in Bestiary also deal with the trauma of abuse and how that affects the way we love, how we can be cruel to who we love when we haven’t shaken out the sheets where our trauma is laid.
My favorite Love Poem in the book is “Love Poem: Minotaur’ because it addresses the love we have for ourselves, or the love we try to have for ourselves when we’ve been hurt. It’s a poem that makes me cry. So much of the writing in this book is in commune with nature, the good and the ugly. In “Minotaur” there is a gentleness to the nature, to the salt of the sea that seems to nurture the speaker. It’s really profound.
I hope you get this book and read it with your love and take so so so much time with these poems.
Post Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
At night your legs, love, are boulevards
leading me beggard and hungry to your candy house
I did a full review of this book already, so you can get deep into my thoughts there. But I want to mention it again because it is so profoundly loving and lovely.
The above quote comes from “Ode to Beloved’s Hips,” probably the gayest poem ever written. It’s dark, it’s sweet, it’s sexy. I love every beat of it. There are so many poems to the beloved in this book that make you want to fall in love, to touch someone, to be touched.
Diaz is one of my favorite poets and one of my favorite people to learn from as I read her work or attend readings she performs at our listen to interviews she is a part of. I highly recommend her VS interview with Franny Choi and Danez Smith. It made me aroused in the middle of the day and also made me write a poem at work. That’s power.
In “Waist and Sway,” the speaker muses:
Wanting her was so close to prayer—
I should not. But it was July,
and in a city where desire means, Upstairs
we can break each other open,
the single blessing I had to give was Mouth
so gave and gave I did.
I’m a little flushed just from typing that! These poems are so rich, they are truly a mouthful. They’ll make you tingle. Which is why you should read them to someone you love, so you can both feel that spark together, and then feast on each other in whatever way it makes sense to you.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Broken Hearts
Feature image by CSA Images via Getty Images
If you have followed my writing on Autostraddle, you know the one subject I feel the most comfortable writing about is poetry. I read it, I write it, I listen to it, I consume it so many ways, through so many avenues. More than that, I love listening to poets talk about what they have said and written. I don’t demand that they explain themselves to me, but I love when they do, I love when they muse and wander.
There’s nothing like being punched in the gut by a poem. That punch can be devastating, for love, for grief, for sheer exploration. There is no other mode of expression like poetry. I find myself delighted at every new collection coming out, pining after books for months on end before they release.
People come to poetry for a number of reasons, but I think one of the main reasons is the desire to not feel alone. To know that someone once waded in the same murky waters as you, to feel like less of an outlier because of your own experiences. People have been where you are before you, and fortunately for us, some of those people were poets.
This new series, In Verse, is about bringing you the collections of poetry that meet you where you are at. This first installment is for the person dealing with a broken heart.
Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips
you broke it, now wear it broken
Pale Colors in a Tall Field is a collection of poems that I listened to after following Phillips on twitter for awhile. Phillips is a prolific poet, with works that have inspired other LGBTQ poets who’s work I’ve followed for a few years. I believe this book was the first one I read from him, and its full of gems. The quote that appears above is taken from the poem “Dirt Being Dirt,” a poem that is more about the self than a lover, but it still pertains to the way we can break our own hearts.
In another poem, “Since When Shall Speak Of It No More,” Phillips writes:
“I’m/no one’s horse. I’m not what waves like a/bit of ocean down/and to either side of its brindled neck/ I’m not a thing I know.”
Again, we’re talking more about the self here, but there’s something so desperate in the line “I’m not a thing I know.” Which, for me, rings with such clarity because it speaks to the way we betray ourselves in relationship with others. I recommend this collection because so much of the poems are deeply grounded in the self, and sometimes, no matter the nature of your heartbreak, it can be good to stay in that realm and really learn about who you are, why you feel the things you feel, and what you can do with that feeling.
Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop
How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I did a report on Elizabeth Bishop in college and spent a lot of time with her poems. What struck me about her writing was her sense of place, and the way she made sure the reader also had a deep sense of place. Not only that we could see what she was seeing, but how that sight enabled us to be grounded in our own realities even more.
Most of the poems in Geography III have to do with place. Bishop was a well traveled poet, spending time in Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and Brazil, among others. The excerpt I shared above is from the poem “Crusoe in England,” a long persona poem that references Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The lines that I quote are not about the heart, but the poem itself speaks to a kind of displacement, and what is heartbreak if not displacement?
I mostly recommended this collection because it contains one of her most famous poems, “One Art.” The repetition of the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” has become famous for its poignancy. Heartbreak is as much loss as it is displacement, and to think that loss is something that can be mastered suggests a sort of control over something that makes us feel absolutely uncontrollable. The final stanza of the poem mentions a “you” that is lost, which could be a lover or a friend. Either reading carries weight, losing as a disaster and an art. When you’re heart is broken, it helps to remember other heartbreaks you have survived just as Bishop reflects on other losses in the poem. Even when we are inconsolable, we survive.
mad girl’s crush tweet by Summer Jade Leavitt
(you are washing old words
right out of me)
A lot of my love for this collection comes from the first poem in it, titled “(carol)”. The ending lines:
(You’re like my mother)(you give birth to me)
(you give birth to me) (I forget that)
(I carry your baby) (Would’t it be great
if I carried your baby)
absolutely stun me. This is a book full of longing and unrequited affection. About being a lover to someone that doesn’t know how to care for you. It’s complex and beautiful. the poems in it are awash with that longing. It’s a book that will make you reflect on all the lovers in your life, especially the ones you would have given anything for, the ones who were probably withholding but who you pined after anyway.
In heartbreak, there is a time to wallow, to wade in it. I think these poems wade in it. Not every collection of poems leads us to a point of resolution and repair. I like when there is no answer, only the truth of experience. The lines that conclude this book align the speaker with a prophet. The speaker emerges as prophetess, but even in that power, she is still able to feel pain and be hurt. There is such humanity in these poems that often gets lost in other books. There is that aforementioned desire to emerge unperturbed and “healed.” But sometimes all a poet can show you is a snapshot of the journey — that is often the most real thing of all.
Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
Had a sow twin, had a reap twin
Had a husband, could not keep him
This one is probably an obvious choice if you know poetry, are a poet, or have heard of Sharon Olds before. It’s quintessential reading if you’ve ever been divorced or had your heart broken in a major way. “Left-Wife Goose” is written like a nursery rhyme, but the repetition of “had a husband, could not keep him” is a visceral gut punch.
Stag’s Leap reads as both linear and nonlinear, charting the emotional and physical course of a divorce, starting in winter and ending in a section titled “Years Later.” The emotional life of these poems are rich, making it a famous collection that many people arrive at to be devastated. At least, that’s how I came to the book, I heard it would devastate me and after a string of failed romances I was ready to be devastated.
The final lines of “Known to Be Left” call that to mind:
“But look! I am starting to give him up!
I believe he is not coming back. Something
has died, inside me, believing that,
like the death of a crone in one twin bed
as a child is born in the other. Have faith,
old heart. What is living, anyway,
but dying.”
The final lines call on this regenerative loop, if living is dying, than dying is living, and so on and on its goes ad infinitum. But the call toward faith is one that we need when our hearts are broken. If we live in a cycle of living and dying, we have to have faith when we are dying that living is on the way.
One Above One Below by Gala Mukomolova
A year is a skeleton made of twelve bones
Many of the poets on this list are LGBTQ, which is in part why I chose them. I also chose them because LGBTQ poets have a way of thinking and writing about heart break in a way that resonates a little more. Maybe that’s because I’m a dyke and I like to think about how other people who identify similar to me have gotten through their private and public heartbreaks. These poems, the first poem in particular, jump out to me because of their voraciousness, their sexiness, their pain. Mukomolva writes
“Dear Would-be Wife, I wish for you a wound as un-healing as the one in me.”
The naming of the Would-be Wife indicates a severance here, and earlier in the poem, the speaker announces that “once I was as good as married.” once being a crucial word in the poem. The hurt enacted by this Would-be Wife has manifested as a call for vengeance.
The figure of the year is very important in these poems. In a later poem, we see:
“When your year-long lover who will not hold your hand in public calls you
too eager, erase eagerness from your heart. Put your phone away.”
The year as a milestone for a romantic relationship, the year as a skeleton of something long dead. It’s ghastly and haunting.
I chose this book of poems because it resonated with an old heartbreak I thought I had gotten over. There’s so much desire pulsating through these poems, a whole life inside them. There of course is heartbreak, but there is also the call of the body. I believe in pleasure, and so do these poems, suggesting there is something on the other side of heartbreak. Even if it’s just a fling with another hot poet.
There is a poem for everything, I firmly believe that. Sometimes, when your heart is broken all you want to feel is that brokenness, sometimes you want to push through and reach toward a different emotion. I hope you find that in these books I’ve selected.
11 Poems to Read to Your Lesbian Lover in Isolation
So you’re being a Good Citizen and engaging in social distancing. You’ve been working from home, listening to music, eating up all of your quarantine snacks, annoying your pet who has no option but to watch you march around in your most natural form. We’re all having a hard time right now, and that includes your lesbian lover, who is working from home and watching you binge Tiger King instead of looking at her. I get it, worrying about whether the strange tingle in your lungs is psychosomatic or not is probably killing the mood at home. Maybe you’re not in the space to do a little romancin’, but I have just the thing to get you in the right headspace to do so, because I, relationship expert and irresistible paramour, have the answer. The answer for me, like it almost always is, is poetry. Read your lesbian lover poetry during one of those nights when the only thing you can hear in the apartment is the soft rustle of your plants, the mewling of your cat ignoring you from the next room. Read her these poems to light a fire between the two of you, show her how much you care and how much you know about poetry beyond some dead white men (flex on that hoe!)
Here I have 11 poems of varying lengths that you can read to your lesbian lover with that expensive wood wick candle flickering on the bedside table. You can pick and chose which ones you will read or my favorite, read them all in a rush as the sexual tension mounts and then get to business. These poems are sure to bring you closer than you already are for a moment and keep you smirking at your desk when its time to work again. They are also just a great way of showing appreciation for your lesbian lover and that even at the worst of times, the love between you continues to flower.
The Floating Poem Unnumbered – Adrienne Rich
Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine—tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come—
This is one of Rich’s more popular poems, one many a poet has come to rely on in moments of deep intimacy. I myself have used this poem more than once to great results (the result is sex). It is both delicate and forward and will do a wonderful job of getting the point across that isolation has made you horny as hell and ready to bone at any moment. It is notoriously hard to write sex well but somehow poets get it, especially Rich. Maybe the secret is brevity and a lust for language equal to that of lust for the human form. Poets are unnaturally good at straddling the line between coy and blunt, in this particular fragment of the poem we have the soft image of a fiddlehead poised against the very stark image of a head between thighs. Show off by showing your babe you know who Adrienne Rich is but also read a lot of poetry in your spare time.
Want – Joan Larkin
I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’stenderness. Touch ancient as the river.I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.She’s in her city, meetingher deadline; I’m in my mill village out latewith the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinkingof the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.We’ve kissed all weekend; we wantto drive the hundred miles and try it again.
Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes – Jenny Johnson
Come strumming an unspeakable power ballad
Through a torrent of rain with cheeks flushed scarlet
Come down the rusty metal slide
Come belted kingfisher flapping
Come lavender asters wheeling
Come loose, a sapling lengthening
Come honeysuckle Come glistening
For me this poem is just brimming with delight and sexiness. I personally theorize that honeysuckle is the most poetic and sexual flower next to the orchid and I always feel delighted to see it in a poem. This collection is full of gorgeous poems and this one is especially saccharine. “In Full Velvet” highlights the queer experience from confronting violence to experiencing BDSM displays on Folsom. Read this to your lesbian lover after she’s had a hard day, run her a nice little bath after you’ve prepared a meal of the finest goods from your grocery haul. Top off the night with a hot oil massage and end with this poem. The title evokes summoning so make sure to read it like your reading incantations, slow and growing with each line.
When I Touched Her – Toi Derricotte
for the lips swelled, a dark
fruit bloomed under my
fingers. I could not
breathe with my hand there.
This poem perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to touch a woman for the first time, and when it’s good it feels like the first time every time. For the poems that can’t be linked online, I’ve linked a place to buy the full collection from, and you will want to buy this full collection. “When I Touched Her” is a tender surprise nestled in a work that deals with the complicated relationship with the “I” in poetry, as well as the ways abuse and cruelties can shape that “I”. So this, poem, its awe and appreciation, will be felt by both the reader and the listener. This is a great one to read after sex or when you’ve both had an especially hard day and need to remember one of the sweeter moments in your relationship, the first time you got to be together physically. It’s also especially good for your long-distance lover who you’ve been wanting to be closer to
Waist and Sway – Natalie Diaz
Wanting her was so close to prayer–
I should not. But it was July
and in a city where desire means, Upstairs
we can break each other open
the single blessing I had to give was Mouth–
so gave and gave I did.
Again we revisit the ancient lesbian art of wanting, for who among us is unfamiliar with the territory. Diaz’s poem is almost sinful in its delight and devotion, it aches to be broken open and explored. What better place to explore than with your lesbian lover whose name is probably Kat with a K. Read this poem over a glass of wine in comfy pajamas with a peek of lingerie beneath just in case. Or read it in the kitchen over a cup of coffee as the sun warms your faces through a charmingly bespeckled window. Poetry is the most inviting and inventive way to say the things your heart needs to say but that your mind can’t properly conceive of. It is a kind of language of its own. Where else can we be magic and vulnerable but in a poem?
Sappho Fragment
hoping for love
for when I look at you face to face
not even Hermione can compare
and it is no slight to liken you
to golden Helen.
mortal omen; and know this
from all my cares
dewy banks
awake all night.
What would this list be without a poem from the OG, the one we do it all for, Mz. Sappho. Sappho’s writing mostly exists in fragments so it’s hard to find full poems, but this fragment is one of my favorites and could be a poem on its own. Sappho was just so… gay, its incredible. You can just see her looking at this beautiful woman and comparing her to one of the most stunning women in history! Talk about game, if Sappho was a 2020 lesbian she’d totally be a fuckboi poet that beds lots of women, breaks up with them, and text them months later a poem she wrote when they were still in love. You, on the other hand, don’t have to be 2020 Sappho; you can be yourself, a sweetheart who is reading this wondering how you’re gonna make it through another few more weeks(?) months(?) of social distancing. Read this poem in the morning when you’re both still in shared or separate beds, it will certainly make her blush.
Poem for My Love – June Jordan
How do we come to be here next to each otherin the nightWhere are the stars that show us to our loveinevitable
Recreation – Audre Lorde
you create me against your thighshilly with imagesmoving through our word countriesmy bodywrites into your fleshthe poemyou make of me.
Love Poem to a Butch Women – Deborah A. Miranda
Sweetheart, this is how it is:when you emerge from the bedroomin a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed backover forearms, scented with colognefrom an amber bottle—I want to openmy heart, the brightest aching slitof my soul, receive your pearl.
Orange Grove and a View of the Pacific – Alicia Mountain
Lily in a belly shirt before
one of us took it off.
This used to be a dress,
she said, I made it.Lily’s hair falls in the way
famous people move
their bodies.
This poem is just lovely; the images and the language are incredibly romantic, the final lines hit like satin over your shoulders. Mountain is just an exceptional poet whose exploration of the written word feels so good on your tongue. Reading this poem out loud is a wonderful experience that deserves to be shared with another woman. Read this one while taking a break from work, have your lesbian lover read it back to you, talk to each other about the feeling of reading it. You both can revel in the gift that language is, that we have words to describe the way hair falls and how much we mean to one another.
Fig – Dani Janae
What my mouth means when
it opens is that I want to eat you
alive; to say “touch me”
without all the hesitance.
Yes, this is my poem, yes I did include it on this list. Why exactly? Because I’m a lesbian so this is a lesbian poem and it’s all about want and craving someone you can’t have for whatever reasons. These reasons can include being in a global pandemic and having to stay six feet away from other humans, or that she’s already in a relationship with another woman if you’re me. The main reason I included this poem is because it works. I’ve had many lesbians and queer women approach me after it’s publication to tell me they read this to their lesbian lovers and got some action out of it. If your love language is physical touch this poem is sure to get those fires burning.
9 Poems to Read in These Trying Times
I know right now everything seems to be completely overwhelming, chaotic, lost, and up in the air. You, in turn, are probably feeling helpless and disoriented, not sure what is real or how to react to what you hear every day. The news cycle alternating between doom and gloom.
Since the onset of Coronavirus, I’ve been worried. For myself and for others that don’t have the means to handle a sudden sickness well, and let’s be honest, everyone who is handling it well seems to be massively rich celebrities and billionaires who can afford to get tested at a moment’s notice. It’s hard to conceive of what we can do during these times. Spending time in isolation is lonely, heading out despite the warnings puts others at risk. We feel inclined to spend all day scrolling on our phones, but staying obsessively caught up with what’s going on is unhealthy. The only things that seems to be certain are our fear and the fact that, after this moment, things will be forever changed.
Despite all of this, there are places for solace in such uncertainty. One place that I have found comfort before and continue to find it now is in poetry, the words of others who have experienced and seen unspeakable things and come out on the other side. I read the following poems when things are getting bleak for me; they are either inspiring or just downright beautiful. I hope you can find some comfort in them, too.
The Wild Iris — Louise Glück
“At the end of my suffering
there was a door.”
begins this powerful and resonate poem. Louise Glück is a poet who’s sharp lines and introspection can teach any novice writer a thing or two about craft. This poem is a persona poem, written from the voice of the named flower, but through excellent metaphor, Glück is able to make its message applicable to any living being. She is one of my favorite poets because she’s able to relay the harshness of reality in such measured and stunning lines, in a language that is both blunt but flowering. The poem goes on to add that:
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
Things come to an end so new beginnings can arise, our suffering is not fruitless. Not just suffering, but the things that challenge us, whether that be a global pandemic or personal troubles. Glück is one of my favorite poets because of the way she questions or sheds light on some of the more complicated facets of our humanity. The iris’ chief message is that we can come back from being decimated, and will often return to a much brighter future.
Try to Praise the Mutilated World — Adam Zagajewski
I often see this poem floating around Facebook after what some would consider a national tragedy. It is a mainstay because it is so powerful. The premise itself is simple, to praise the mutilated world means to try and find beauty in a time and place where there is loss and grief. To look at the things around you that can still bring joy and a feeling of togetherness when it feels like the world is falling apart. This poem gets chosen a lot because it revels in those small moments of joy, like a concert or tasting strawberries.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
I wouldn’t say that to despair is easy, to go out shopping and panic buy isn’t “easy” — its a natural reaction to an unprecedented situation (at least for Americans). People are scared and rightfully so. What helps, I think, is knowing there is something on the other side of fear. The hard thing is reaching for that other side without knowing exactly what we will pull toward us. Zagajewski comes from a generation of protest poets, poets that saw atrocities and decided they had not only to bear witness, but also act. It’s why people turn to poets like him when we’re shocked and at a loss for words and actions.
Diving Into the Wreck — Adrienne Rich
This may not be the first Rich poem that comes to mind for a topic like this but it’s one of my favorites. She is another poet whose activism is well known along with her creative work. In Sister Outsider, there is a great interview between Rich and Audre Lorde about their relationships to poetry that is worth a read. “Diving into the Wreck” is a poem about exploration and what we can find emerging from destruction.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
It takes the reader outside of themselves and into the world of the strange, elaborate creatures, mystery, and truth, not a myth. I come to this poem when I am feeling lust for breadth, to be encapsulated by water and sound. It is a long, deep slip into another universe and sometimes we need a little escapism.
Presence — Nikola Madzirov
One of the images from this poem that sticks with me comes in the beginning lines:
Put on the space suit of the night
and slice the apple in two
without damaging the seeds
The image of a deft hand slicing an apple without doing damage to the seeds conjures a kind of artful precision that carries throughout the poem. Madzirov is a Macedonian poet who I got the chance to meet my sophomore year of college and discuss the importance of art in times of trouble. This poem, for me, is a constant refrain and source of inspiration that I pull on when I find myself being pulled into a depression. I have also quoted this poem in a different piece for Autostraddle and it feels ever relevant as I move through my quarantined days. Especially these following lines:
Be a dream, a mezzanine,
sesame seeds at the bottom of the package,
a ‘deer’ sign by the road, an alphabet
known only to two people—
you and the one who doesn’t believe you.
These lines for me call the reader to be of surprise and splendor, no matter the circumstance they are in, whether or not they are believed. It is a poem that is surreal in its magic and reciting it to myself somehow makes me feel more grounded in the physical realm while taking my body into space. To be a dream is to become the life beyond our imagination, to be something incredible and beyond reality; to be a mezzanine is to be a part of where the art is made; to be the sesame seeds is to be that source of splendor, to not be forgotten.
Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude — Ross Gay
There are so many things that delight me about this poem, that take my breath away, that I couldn’t not put it on this list. It is as it says — a catalog of different gratitudes, some you may find strange and others you may agree with. There is no other way to describe it but as bursting with exuberance. When you read it, you can’t help but smile along with each line as a new joy is unraveled.
I am so grateful,
you could ride your bike there
or roller skate or catch the bus
there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand,
there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana,
it will make you gasp.
It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you
Who among us wouldn’t be amazed by a fig tree taller than us? The beauty in this gratitude is something that is important to hold on to through times of trouble. Even as I am frustrated by the actions of politicians and corporations, I am in awe of the creativity of my friends and family. I’m grateful for the sun and rain, for pictures of my niece, for pineapple juice and turmeric. This poem, this poem. It will make you cling to what you are grateful for as well.
The end and the Beginning — Wislawa Szymborska
Szymborska is a poet of high regard because of her ability to bring history and the mundane domestic together in the same room. That history is often brutal, fraught with war and death. A Polish poet like Zagajewski, Szymborska is no stranger to witnessing hardship. Many of her works have been translated into English, making us lucky enough to read and witness a masterful poet at work.
The poem itself deals with the heavy topic of cleaning up after a war, and while it is not the same, I can’t help but think of the doctors and nurses and healthcare workers who are at work now struggling to make sure people survive. Surely many of us have heard stories of overworked nurses running away to cry in a secluded area, or seen doctors with bruises on their faces due to hours of wearing protective gear. “The end and the Beginning” conjures those images for me.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
The poem ends with these lines because they seem so out of step with the rest of the piece. This person spoken of at the end of the poem seems to be completely ignorant of the scenes around him but is also taking a moment to appreciate the beauty around him. The poem does not make him a villain but earlier lines, “Those who knew/ what was going on here/ must make way for/ those who know little,” suggest that in the future he will learn of the events and be changed by them, as those who have been busy around him have. Whether you are one of those cleaning up or someone looking into the clouds, this poem will resonate with you, as well as the rest of Szymborska’s work.
How Can Black People Write About Flowers At a Time Like This — Hanif Abdurraqib
Questions like these are often poised in the face of tragedy. How can you laugh, smile, and go on while x injustice is happening around you? It is a hard question to answer, hard to justify dipping your toes into elegance when there is destruction. But, how can we not? There is this prevailing idea that we all must mourn and do our grief work in the same way, to be solemn and weighted in order to be respectful to the loss. Abdurraquib challenges this idea in his poem.
dear reader, with our heels digging into the good mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown & lord knows I have been called by what I look like more than I have been called by what I actually am
Black people know a thing or two about adversity, injustice, and being “called by what I look like more than I have been called by what I actually am.” In the face of brutality and fierce cruelty, we are often the first to laugh and make art. There is no better time to make art. We see how important art is in these times. Look around at how many of us are reading, watching television or movies, engaging with different facets of media in one way or another. The poet expertly argues for poems about flowers and “fashioning something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything worthwhile of their burial.”
Gacela of the Unforeseen Love — Federico Garcia Lorca
translated by W. S. Merwin
There is never a bad time to read a love poem. Many poets and readers would turn to Naruda’s Odes when thinking of the perfect love poem, but I can’t help but think of this one by Federico Garcia Lorca. It is a poem rich with desire and warmth, the kind of warmth that feeds your bones down to the marrow. The lines I come back to are: “I sought in my heart to give you/the ivory letters that say always, always, always.”
A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep
in the moonlit plaza of your forehead
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.
So why a love poem? Because love is so important at a juncture where we are isolated, left to ourselves in our home offices or our jobs lost. I know it sounds hokey and a little corny but to love one another is everything. Not just to love with our hearts but to love one another enough to fight for each other. Whether that means contributing to any of the many funds for artists and those who were left unemployed as a result of this pandemic or calling a friend who needs to hear your voice. It means supporting workers who are going on strike for better treatment and those that have to deal with the swath of new rules and regulations that have been thrust upon them as they work. Love is greater than just saying the word, and so is a love poem.
What it looks like to us and the words we use — Ada Limón
The unexpected side effect of times like these is that they make us crave connection with those we love more than ever. With the absolute need for social distancing, our want for human connection increases. Limón gets at this need for togetherness in this poem, as well as highlighting the breathtaking landscape of her natural world.
You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
Even though the speaker and their companion have some differences over the presence of God, they are still together and marveling at what lies above and around them. Whether that be the spider webs are the “unruly sky” littered with clouds that take shape in front of their eyes. To be together despite differences is a precious thing that cannot be understated. With rules around social distancing, the idea of being “together” has taken a different shape, but has reminded us of how precious companionship is.
As the next few weeks unravel in front of us, along with the uncertainty and fear come along with it, I hope these poets become a refuge for you. If not, let them be a balm and a beauty to break through the onslaught of negative news. As you go about your days consuming whatever art you enjoy the most, remember the artist and writers that make these things possible and send thanks in whatever way you can.
The Perfect Queer Poem: For Facing Our Enemies
I had been planning on ending this series with a poem by Joy Harjo when she was named the 2019 US Poet Laureate. She is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, making her the first member of a Native Nation to be honored with the title.
Here is the poem I initially had in mind. I was going to write something about how the poem anticipates the end of the world, about how queer life could mourn a dying planet while also being uniquely qualified for imagining another way to go on when we can’t go on.
But then on Friday, we faced the news of impending ICE raids, then a personal essay about the sexual assaults that punctuated one woman’s life, including one perpetrated by the president. Neither story was on the front page of the New York Times, if you still check that rag. And then there was the threat of war.
So I decided to write about this poem instead:
This Morning I Pray for My Enemies
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
I used to think that the worst thing about my enemies is that none of them deserved me. And yet I have woken up at dawn as if my heart told me: today is a new day, a new day to avenge yourself. I’m not ashamed to have survived what they did to me, but I am ashamed to have let them stay in mind without paying rent. And I’m weary of greeting the sun not with gratitude but with anger.
But it’s June, and I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the uses of anger. I’m not nonviolent, as Nina Simone once said, and I do believe that liberation is a struggle. The older I get, the clearer it becomes that anger burns you out if you spend it alone. The world doesn’t revolve around the mind’s individual agonies, but the collective struggles of the heart have a gravitational pull.
Harjo writes that it is the heart that asks who the enemy is, not the mind that obsesses over injustice and throws its telepathic daggers (or maybe that’s just my Libra stellium talking). The heart is open — I’m thinking of the Frank O’Hara poem here — and so it is the heart that can be patient and pause before asking.
The poem leaves open the question of who the enemy is, but we can speculate. “An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.” Let someone who would do you harm close enough and you begin to need them, to obsess over them, to spend more time thinking about them than they think about you. Hello, TERFs, hello SWERFs, hello white women who make bedfellows of cruel white men and who are more than happy to endure a little bit of misogyny for the spoils of white supremacy.
THOSE WHO HATE US DO NOT DESERVE US. The culture we produce for them, the language we give them, our labor as sex workers, domestic workers, our time of day—they do not deserve us. So why pray for your enemies? Have you seen this bon mot? I suppose you could read the poem as saying that you can turn an enemy into a friend by having an open heart. But I don’t find Harjo to be sentimental, nor do I think the poem recommends trying to convince someone the value of your heart when their opening offer is violence. If an enemy is worthy of engagement, then the enemy is someone we can struggle against.
I’ve written about how poems can be prayers. This poem is for waking up to more bad news with the resolve to stay in the struggle for liberation. It is comprised of short lines—recite each one in a slow prayer for keeping our enemies in our minds but not our hearts, so that we do not grow complacent to their threat, even if they offer us an inch of reprieve (as I am writing this, the ICE raids are “postponed”). Any right given can be taken away (an enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend).
If the heart keeps room for our comrades and keeps out enemies, then we can keep asking questions. We stay open, even when our minds are swayed by bitterness and despair, because our queer lives depend on knowing that we don’t have to live like this. We turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.