Interview

On Abundance: An Interview with Robin Becker

Credit: Courtesy of Robin Becker. All Rights Reserved

 

by Liz Ahl

Robin Becker’s new book Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems (University of New Mexico Press, $21.95) adds over forty pages of new poems to well-chosen selections from her eight acclaimed collections, the most recent of which was The Black Bear Inside Me (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Spanning nearly half a century and filled with poems grounded in clear narratives that belie their formal complexity, Midsummer Count provides a fitting showcase for the great variety of themes (sexuality, Jewish identity, animals, art, and friendship among them) that recur in this writer’s work; it also demonstrates why Becker is widely considered “the foremost feminist poet of her generation.”

Other previous books by Becker include All-American Girl (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. A Liberal Arts Research Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University, Becker lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.  

LIZ AHL: In a Q&A with Deborah Kalb, you mentioned having considered organizing this New & Selected thematically rather than chronologically. What thematic structures had you considered?

ROBIN BECKER: I had read Michael Waters’s Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2001), and I loved the way he made a storytelling arc. He culled poems from each of his books by subject and theme, building from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood; he also grouped poems about love and divorce and travel, and in so doing a rich portrait of the poet-speaker emerged. I envisioned doing something like that. I also liked how Lynn Emanuel eschewed chronology in The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), juxtaposing old and new poems to create a wholly new book. In the end, I decided that I wanted my New and Selected to provide an historical record, a book-by-book “re-telling” of my journey as a poet and as a lesbian-feminist who came of age in the 1970s. 

LA: Midsummer Count includes one of my favorites of your poems, “Dyke.” It’s a great poem to teach, with its riffing on the titular word in terms of its sound and variants, how it personifies the word and also braids it with the narrator’s experience of the broader cultural history. If you imagine lesbian-feminist identity and history (both individual and societal) as manifested through your poems across the decades, what story emerges? What story of the poet Robin Becker, and what broader, shared story of us all?

RB: Liz, I’m glad you singled out “Dyke,” as it joins linguistic play and cultural specificity. The poem compresses personal and social history by moving the speaker’s emotional geography—from the scary lesbian bars of the 1970s to the freedom of Boston’s streets. It concludes by looking forward to a time of LGBTQ+ cultural acceptance and personal peace. In my early poems, lesbian relationships secure and (often) claim the narrative. In later poems––as I took my own sexuality for granted––animals, crazy family life, consolations of nature and inevitable loss assumed thematic primacy. I think my literary shift here mirrors larger social changes, such as the ability of LGBTQ+ people to marry. 

LA: Can you say more about the shift of focus to poems about “crazy family life” in particular?

RB: Families—functional and dysfunctional—have fascinated me since childhood. I remember going to friends’ homes and studying the interaction between parents and kids, or among siblings. In an early poem, “The Conversion of the Jews,” the child narrator tries to understand the relationship between Christian and Jewish children. My sister’s epilepsy and subsequent emotional and psychological decline hovered over my family. One way of coping with the “shame” of illness was to write about it, and I struggled to do so. Having immigrant parents, my parents wanted, desperately, to assimilate, to fit in. Thus, my lesbian-feminism terrified them, as it separated me (and therefore them) from the heteronormative life they longed to have. Some of my poems reflect the gulf we navigated for many years. Another aspect of aging: My definition of “family” expanded to include a close group of ex-lovers and friends with whom I share my life.

LA: Many of your poems devote deep, appreciative attention to visual art, both in terms of specific artworks and artists as central subject matter and as deployed in various ways in poems not “about” art. How did this interest emerge and evolve over the decades represented in this collection?

RB: Drawing and painting, my first loves, gave childhood a material texture: paper and colored pencils; charcoal sticks and pen-and-ink washes; watercolor paints and sable brushes.  At my Quaker school, I excelled in studio art and in the required art history classes that anchored me in the visuals of western art and architecture. For a long time, I thought I was headed in that direction. Translating feelings into something visual became a natural response to loving something —a horse, a landscape.

LA: “A natural response to loving something” makes me think of the generous attention of poetry, and perhaps of all artmaking—the deep, long looking. Attention itself can be very loving, I think.

RB: Liz, your observation connects to what Robert Hass says in “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” The impulse to cherish something or someone in words exists alongside the inevitable partiality of the effort. I think of my repeated efforts to capture what I love about the American Southwest, how they’re always falling short.  

As a horse-crazy kid, I discovered a reproduction of Rosa Bonheur’s enormous painting “The Horse Fair (1855),” which depicts grooms and riders bringing draft horses to the Paris horse fair in the center of the city. When I first read the signature of the artist in the right-hand corner of the painting, I thought that Bonheur must have been the owner of the painting—it never occurred to me that a woman might have painted such a large and powerful picture. Many years later, I found a book about Bonheur and dove into her biography, and that led me to write the title poem for The Horse Fair (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

On a visit to the Maeght Foundation in the south of France, I saw a group Giacometti sculptures and became obsessed with his gaunt, life-sized, bronze “Dog.” I wrote pages of notes—describing the sculpture, speculating, free-associating. Eventually, all that writing became the title poem of Giacometti’s Dog (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), a metaphor for the abandoned among us, the scorned and left behind.

A collaboration with the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh resulted in the chapbook Venetian Blue, which the Frick published in 2002. My residency included writing poems in response to an exhibit of Old Master prints and drawings on loan from the Albertina in Vienna. That explicit ekphrastic assignment prompted a lot of research into 15th-17th century European artists such as Durer and Rembrandt.

“The Unfinished Painting,” which is the last of the “New” poems in Midsummer Count, has an interesting backstory. I saw the painting in a vintage shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and learned that the woman who brought it in to sell on consignment was the daughter of a woman who collected only unfinished paintings. What a novel idea, collecting unfinished work!

LA: I’m glad you bring up “The Unfinished Painting”—like many of the new poems, it has me thinking about mortality, about that brand of “finished” and the “unfinished” alongside it. Here are some key lines from the poem:

I keep coming back
to the muzzy shoreline—swatch

of wet-footed grasses and rocks,
a deferred undertaking that now never
will resolve into summer or fall.
The painter who abandoned this

landscape left me its abundant
incompleteness, a paradise
of possibility so spare I can walk
the pond’s perimeter and disappear

into the homespun mystery—

The dynamic between abandonment and abundance in these lines seems especially important in this collection––the idea of an “abundant / incompleteness,” spaces meant to be filled that weren’t, an emptiness that’s not empty but full of possibility or purpose. This also feels aligned with reflecting on one’s life and contemplating being on the far side of it.  

RB: You’re describing the feelings I had when I first saw the painting! I leapt to enter or attend to the “incompleteness” I found there. I wanted to wander around in the de-familiarized season and semi-recognizable marsh land. And yes, I intentionally ended the “New” section on “incompleteness” to suggest the work ahead, to gesture towards the poems and the living still to come. 

LA: We often return to certain paintings and novels and poems and music at different points in our lives and experience them differently across the span of those years.

RB: For me, returning to certain pieces of music over time has been revelatory. How did I miss so much? Listening to Beethoven’s string quartets today, I travel to an emotional place that wasn’t available to me decades ago. Bach’s pieces for solo violin, similarly, speak with a kind of singular beauty I couldn’t hear or feel as I do now. 

LA: “The Unfinished Painting” also sent me back to your poem “Midsummer Count”— originally published in your collection Domain of Perfect Affection (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) and now the title poem of your rich New and Selected––probably because of the lines “a deferred undertaking that now never / will resolve into summer or fall.” How did working on this book prompt you to re-encounter past versions and visions of your poetry—past work, past worlds, past poetics, past Robins?

RB: In the title poem to which you refer, the narrator imagines crossing “natural barriers” and eluding fixed gender identities, living as a “hybrid cultivar.” This indeterminacy is certainly linked to the condition described in “The Unfinished Painting.” In that poem, the “outcome” of the painting—its meanings and boundaries—never reaches a final form, because the painter is called away and never returns to finish it. On one hand, the uncertain season, the vague architectural structures, and the absence of clear landscape features are disturbing and unsettling; on the other hand, the open-endedness is dynamic, surging, suggesting forces still at work. Encountering past versions of myself as I read through my books, I saw time passing—I re-experienced beloved places and creatures. The feelings available to us (as fallible human beings) rose and receded like waves. I remembered how it felt to work on a particular poem, the struggle of each specific prosodic challenge. The variety in the poems buoyed my sense that my writing future will contain new, unimagined challenges.

LA: Readers and reviewers have often remarked upon the variety of animals, domestic and wild, featured in so many of your poems. Thinking of the title Midsummer Count, could you speak about the abundance of birds––especially owls––inhabiting this collection?

RB: I’m not alone in my fascination with owls. Mine began with experiences I had in New Mexico (“The Death of the Owl”) and Wyoming (“Meeting the Gaze of the Great Horned Owl”). Their otherworldly faces, their swiveling heads, their stealth, their night vision, their silences . . . it’s little wonder they hold power in Native myths and in many poems and stories. Mary Oliver’s “In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl” enacts the savagery of prey and predator in gorgeous language. With its “Who cooks for you?” mnemonic, Richard Wilbur’s “A Barred Owl” is a twelve-line masterpiece in six rhymed couplets. Arthur Sze has a delicate, nine-line piece called “The Owl” which seems to call the creature into being. And then there’s Edward Lear’s whimsical “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which turns the predator into a lover.

Animals have so much to teach us about living and dying. John Clare’s “The Badger” forces us to reckon with human cruelty—the depiction of badger-baiting and the eventual defeat of the badger is unforgettable. As a teen, I read D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” and never forgot the speaker’s fear and remorse. Donald Hall’s “The Names of Horses” evokes generations of working horses who lived and died on his family’s New Hampshire farm. Poems showcasing dogs and horses fill books by Maxine Kumin, who says, in one poem, “Dogs live in the moment, pursuing / that brilliant dragonfly called pleasure.” Pleasure and grief. Days in the sun and burials in the woods. Many of us live intimately with our dogs, their bodies and habits as familiar to us as those of our human companions.

LA: Your own beautiful renderings of birds illustrate the title page for each of your collections in Midsummer Count. Did you make them especially for the book, or did they already exist?

RB: Over the years, I’ve continued to paint, returning to landscape painting every summer. The birds on the title pages of Midsummer Count are black-and-white renditions of my watercolors. I made them because I thought I might want birds on the cover of the book, but then I fell in love with the Charles Burchfield watercolor of the open door. So I asked the book designers to find a place for the birds inside the book; they did, and I’m very happy with birds as repeating elements throughout the text. 

LA: How does one know or suspect that “it’s time” to pull together a new-and-selected collection?

RB: Whenever I thought about putting together a new-and-selected, I chose, instead, to keep working towards another full-length individual collection. I wanted to see myself as still fecund, generative, vital in the sense of having plenty of gas in the car. After my eighth book, The Black Bear Inside Me, I thought, okay, you can stop for a moment, and pause, and see what you’ve got and where you’ve been. I paid a poet-editor-friend to go through all my books and make a tentative list of poems she thought might belong in a New and Selected. I started with her list and went from there.

LA: So, you’ve paused to reflect with this collection, and I’m curious to know about your sense of resumption, of continuing to move forward again. Where will you go in that gassed-up car? What’s unfinished that you’d like to keep exploring?

RB: As I worked on assembling Midsummer Count, I was also tinkering with poems-in-progress. A few of those poems made it into the “new” section of the book. Others remain in folders. At this point in my life, I want to read the late work of poets I already love, and I want to discover poets from whom I can learn.  

LA: Which of your loved poets might you start with?

RB: Seamus Heaney. Wislawa Symborska. W.S. Merwin. Phillip Larkin. Denise Levertov. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Emily Dickinson. Louise Bogan. May Swenson.

LA: And beyond beloved poets you encountered on the page, who were your important poetry teachers or mentors?

RB: Though I had almost no women professors in college, Anne Sexton taught my graduate poetry seminar at Boston University the year before she died. Suddenly, women were not only the subjects but the writers of the poems. A new way of thinking about poetry opened to me, and I joined the crowded auditoriums in Boston and Cambridge to hear Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton read their work. The literary journals slowly changed, and we began to see women’s names in the tables of contents. When I was in my thirties, I met Maxine Kumin, who became a friend and mentor, and that friendship deepened over the decades. I spent many weekends with Max and Victor at their horse farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where I helped out with the garden and the horses. We read and commented on each other’s poems, but even more important to me was that Max, unlike Plath and Sexton, was a woman poet who loved her life. I needed that model to imagine my own.

LA: And you are now Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, having spent over twenty years teaching poetry there on the heels of seventeen years teaching at M.I.T. What role has the work of teaching played in your writing life?

RB: The academic calendar dictated the shape of my life for decades, and I submitted—grateful, at first, to have a job in The Writing Program at M.I.T and later at the MFA Program at Penn State. Like many teaching poets, I became a June-July-and-August writer, going to art colonies in the summer to carve out time and space to do my own work. During the academic year, I worked with terrific graduate students, many of whom now teach in universities, edit journals, and run non-profit language arts programs. I developed new courses in chapbook writing and literary book reviewing. I tried to model a kind of “literary citizenship” for my students, serving as the long-time Poetry Editor for The Women’s Review of Books, as a Board member for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), as committee member and judge of awards and prizes. A rich time, those years earned me the friends and colleagues I have today.

LA: When do you suppose the “midsummer” of your writing life was or will be? 

RB: This question makes me think of Matisse, who, when old, infirm, or confined to bed or wheelchair, continued to “draw and paint with scissors.” In other words, he made large cut-outs, such as the magnificent “Swimming Pool” series of blue figures against a white background. In 1951, three years before he died, Matisse saw the completion of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, for which he designed every aspect: the architecture, the priests’ vestments, the stained glass, the ceramic tiles.

Midsummer Count refers to the annual summer bird count that takes place around the summer solstice each year, in many locations around the country. It’s a phrase from the title poem, in which the speaker imagines herself a bird, a “star” in her own midsummer count.  For me, the word “midsummer” conveys a rich abundance, even as the word “count” suggests a tallying, a ledger-keeping. These words pull in opposite directions, at once being in the thickness of life and acknowledging the passage of time.

Like Matisse, I intend to remain creative and vital as I age. I love the image of him holding a long pole with a large piece of chalk at the end, drawing on the walls of his studio.

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Muriel Rukeyser's Lessons for Social Poetics Today: A Conversation with Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim

by Eric Keenaghan

Critical appreciation of American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) has waxed and waned for decades, but it is certainly having a moment now. The latest example of the renaissance underway is the recent publication of Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser (West Virginia University Press, $27.99). Editors Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim solicited other poets to write about the continuing influence of Rukeyser; the resulting collection features contributions from the editors as well as Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Stacy Hardy, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Jena Osman, Deborah Paredes, Khadijah Queen, and Nomi Stone, plus an afterword by Solmaz Sharif.

Through an innovative mix of long poems, serial poems, critical studies, lyric essays, and memoirs, the collection’s authors develop personal and studied responses to Rukeyser. They engage a wide range of her works, including her well-known poetry as well as her lesser-known biographies, children’s literature, musical theater, fiction, and documentary film. Their perceptive and often moving insights provide new lessons about both the possibilities and limits of contemporary social poetics grounded in formal experimentation, personal experience, and activist commitments—three hallmarks of Rukeyser’s extraordinary body of work.

Rukeyser scholar Eric Keenaghan conversed with Gander and Heim to explore a few of the aspects that make Beyond Ourselves an important addition to Rukeyser studies.

Stefania Heim has published two poetry collections, most recently HOUR BOOK (Ahsahta Press, 2019), and two translations of writings by the Italian metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, most recently his posthumous novel Mr. Dudron (A Public Space Books, 2024).  A former poetry editor at Boston Review and a founding editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation, Heim teaches literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

Catherine Gander teaches modern and contemporary American literature at Maynooth University in Kildare, Ireland. Her book Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) won the biennial book award of the Irish Association for American Studies; more recent scholarly publications include The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Also a poet, Gander is the author of Matches (Verve Poetry Press, 2024).

Eric Keenaghan, who teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Ohio State University Press, 2009); with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, he co-edited The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell University Press, 2023), a recipient of the MLA Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship. His forthcoming book, The Middle of the Air: A Critical Edition (Cornell University Press, 2027), recovers a previously unpublished antifascist play Rukeyser wrote in the 1940s. For more on poetry as antifascist cultural activism and the first publication of two poems from the 1940s which Rukeyser suppressed, “In a War on All Fronts” (c. 1943) and “The Strong Angel” (1944), see Keenaghan’s “Unburying History: Two Lost Antifascist Poems by Muriel Rukeyser” on the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.

Eric Keenaghan: In her afterword for Beyond Ourselves, Solmaz Sharif movingly describes what first drew her to Muriel Rukeyser’s work, and it seems an attraction you and many of your collection’s contributors share too: “What I found in her was not unique to my own finding, but essential all the same: a poet who wrote of the material present in order to change it.” Why do you think it is “essential” to conceptualize poetry and other literature as vehicles or tools for social transformation today, and how do Rukeyser’s life and work in the twentieth century provide writers a unique and still-timely model for doing so?

Catherine Gander: What I love most about the line you pull from Solmaz’s deeply affecting afterword to the book is her description of the present as “material.” Our lived moment is not something in the abstract, but something real, alive, tangible. It is physical: it matters.

As we initially conceptualized the book, and then, as we came to assemble it, we knew Rukeyser’s approach to poetry was fundamental to our own understanding of how the various components of the book would come together—not as a self-contained, static arrangement of perspectives, but as Stefania beautifully phrased it in her essay for the volume, “a settling of the kaleidoscope,” a collection of parts that, like Rukeyser’s famous diagram of the dynamic relations within an artwork, from her poetics treatise The Life of Poetry (Current Books, 1949), “is false until all the components are shown in motion.”

Rukeyser, as you know, wrote and spoke often about poetry as a meeting-place: “Wherever it exists, it gives us a clue as to a possible kind of imagination with which to meet the world.” That kind of imagination, being motile, necessarily effects change. This is why she preferred the word “witness” to “reader”—because with its overtones of responsibility, it announces that, as Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry, “we are about to change, that work is being done on the self.” Rukeyser’s model is essential here, because she draws it from a model of physical science: poetry is the exchange of energy, and “exchange is creation.” What poetry and literature can produce, then, in her moment and in ours, is what Rukeyser calls an exchange of human consciousness: “the capacity to produce change from the existing conditions.”

In the poem from The Speed of Darkness (Random House, 1968) from which we took the title of our book, “Poem [I lived in the first century of world wars],” Rukeyser writes of the insanity that living in “the first century of world wars” can inflict. Her response is to “get to pen and paper.” The conditions that shaped that poem shape our century too. All this to say that your question is one I don’t think we will ever stop asking, and one as relevant today as it was then.

Stefania Heim: I’d like to build on this to grapple a bit more with that second part of your question, Eric, about how Rukeyser’s twentieth-century models remain unique and relevant. Her approaches to thinking about how poetry can be a force of change, a “resource” to be “used” beyond narrow aesthetic realms, are super various, in that truly interdisciplinary sense Catherine mentioned—and maybe even more importantly, they’re honest.

With “honest” I mean to get at something like not manicured, not tested or optimized. I want to foreground Rukeyser’s openness to––even courting of—risk and failure, which is something that many of the contributors to Beyond Ourselves notice and respond to in their pieces. I think often of the comments Rukeyser contributed to a 1945 anthology of war poetry (“War and Poetry,” reprinted in The Muriel Rukeyser Era), where she introduces a straw-poet who chastises her, “You bring the world in too much. Poems should not be written about the war. Are you not afraid of guessing wrong?” She responds simply, “I deny all of this.” Rukeyser understood poetry to be a vehicle both for approaching situations of tremendous complexity and for arriving at “the emotional meanings at every moment.” She eschewed easy or static answers as she eschewed orthodoxies. For Rukeyser, the straw-poet’s question is ridiculous because the consequences of not struggling to find the meanings are so much graver than trying with honesty, humility, and openness and getting it wrong.

At a time when we are experiencing existential crisis after existential crisis, when looking away feels sometimes like a relief, I think Rukeyser’s refusal to “put off” what is difficult, her insistence on looking unflinchingly at the world and at herself, and her commitment to “the truth of feeling” are part of what make her work essential and, as you put it, timely.

EK: Your characterization of Rukeyser’s work as built on honesty is provocative, Stefania. Such honesty grows out of her holistic response to her material conditions, including her body, emotions, intellectual ideas, and activist commitments. Making such a living poetic response, with her full self, is central to her continuing relevance, as you note, Catherine. In your introduction, you note that neither of you remembers exactly when the idea for Beyond Ourselves came about, but could you share how you identified poets who might respond to their moment in similarly honest ways as Rukeyser had to hers? What surprising revelations will readers discover in your collection through some of your contributors’ responses to Rukeyser, to present crises, or to poetry today?

SH: As we began to imagine the book and identify contributors, we reached out to writers we saw turning to Rukeyser in deep and surprising ways. A great example of a reference we encountered and followed up on was Khadijah Queen’s beautiful hybrid essay “False Dawn: a zuihitsu from the early months of the pandemic” (Harper’s Magazine, August 2020). Working in the zuihitsu form allowed Queen to move between facts, intimate musings, and miscellany as she explored modes for sustaining life—from a philodendron leaf to an aging mother and sick sister—amidst so much danger and fear. And interwoven among a “list of what [she] appreciate[s],” virus death tolls, and a trenchant examination of race and death was Muriel Rukeyser. In “False Dawn,” she reflects, “When I wrote that essay, about the value of studying Muriel Rukeyser even though, like Whitman and Melville . . . she operated from a baseline assumption of white supremacy, I meant to provide practical guidelines for analyzing older American literature . . . I meant to offer an alternative solution to throwing it all away.”

After reading the piece we immediately sent Queen an email, inviting her to build upon that “meant to” for our volume. Her essay for Beyond Ourselves—a reading of a wide range of Rukeyser’s works including her musical about legendary escape artist Harry Houdini (Houdini: A Musical, Paris Press, 2002), her children’s book More Night (Harper & Row, 1981), and her late book of poetry The Gates (McGraw-Hill, 1976)—rigorously and generously probes the effects, both positive and negative, of Rukeyser’s engagement with empathy, what Queen names her “open self.”

One thing I love most about our book is the way so many of the pieces use the occasion of writing to really think something through, to follow a question, some discomfort, the glimmer of an idea. I’m thinking too about Jena Osman’s confession in her essay on documentary, complicity, and critical consciousness about what is currently Rukeyser’s most famous work, “The Book of the Dead”: “For a long time, I wasn’t sure I liked the poem.” The confession makes it possible for Osman to interrogate the poem alongside Rukeyser’s short documentary film A Place to Live (1941) in a way that both honors and transcends discomfort, just as Osman’s grounding the essay in her daily commute insists upon a particular perspective, time, and space in order to both fully inhabit and move beyond that specificity. 

CG: Yes! This impressed me, too. And it’s important, as Rukeyser becomes more visible to contemporary readers, that we do not ignore the more challenging or troubling aspects of her work alongside the wider difficulties of poetic positionality. Queen and Osman both advance these challenges as part of the necessity of thinking with Rukeyser to confront our current moment.

To address that second part of your question, Eric, it was a joy to be able to lift stylistic constraints in this book and allow contributors to work in whatever form they felt best fit the nature of their inquiry (another very Rukeyserian approach). What was revelatory at the outset was how this formal freedom enabled our contributors to really grapple with something—a difficulty, a fear, a frustration, a politics, even trauma—in a way that allowed both form and content to actively work as examples of what Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry called “usable truth.”

For example, we knew Philip Metres would have something important to say about Rukeyser’s legacy, but we weren’t prepared for his astonishingly open and vulnerable meditation on embodied poetics. Likewise, Erika Meitner’s essay visits her family history, in which the Holocaust looms large, at the same time as it wrestles with the vicissitudes of being a mother in a multiracial family in an increasingly racist country. Both draw on Rukeyser’s models of speaking with the whole self, out of silence. And then there’s the illustrated poem sequence “The Breathers” by Daniel Borzutzky and Stacy Hardy, which extends Rukeyser’s “politics of breath” into a poetic treatment of “the mere act of breathing as a form of political resistance” to ongoing colonial violences.

There’s much more to say here, including how contributors engaged with such a wide range of Rukeyser’s oeuvre, but I’ll conclude by noting that “revelation” is such a fitting word for Rukeyser, not only because it denotes the kind of exposure to light of hidden truth that one associates with her most famous works, but also because it involves a disclosure of the self to the self, by which process our denied and muted parts are examined and made speak. At root—and building on Stefania’s earlier point—revelation is a gesture of honesty, and it was this honesty that soon revealed itself as a kind of binding agent of the book.

EK: And Beyond Ourselves is full of revelations, and self-revelations. For me, some of the most paradigm-breaking ones are in moments like when Queen and Osman admit their skepticism about Rukeyser’s methods or acknowledge her limits, as you pointed out, Stefania. And then there is Metres’s incredible reading of her long poem “The Outer Banks” (1967), which you mentioned, Catherine, where he admires Rukeyser owning the softness of both her body and poetic form, usually devalued in a culture focused on hard bodies and poetic rigor. Such moments demonstrate how to keep a poet’s legacy alive by—not in spite of—avoiding hero worship and appreciating the unappreciated. To invoke another contributor, Deborah Paredez, it’s an anti-epic approach to an anti-epic writer.

For a poet who prioritized the future over the past, as Rukeyser did, it’s fitting to avoid such mythologizing. Such refusal reminds me of a line from “The Fear of Form: Third Elegy” from A Turning Wind (Viking Press, 1939), that I’ve been obsessing over: “The useable [sic] present starts my calendar.” Beyond Ourselves helps bring Rukeyser, her person and her work, more fully into our usable present. Do you have any parting words about the future possibilities you hope she can help readers discover when they reengage her, after reading your book?

CG: Thank you, Eric! That wonderful line brings us back to Rukeyser’s conviction that poetry’s imaginative response to the world disallows the postponement of its meanings. For while a key device of poetry is metaphor, the work it does is not metaphorical: as Rukeyser notes in The Life of Poetry, “our lives may rest on this; and our lives are our images.” The possibilities readers may discover in reengaging Rukeyser are as multiple as poetry’s possibilities to generate meaning. Stefania’s deceptively capacious essay for the book provides key insight here, not least because it enacts Rukeyser’s thinking with, through, and about poetry—how poetry allows us “to hold on to all the possibilities for what word and world might have to do with each other.” Those word-world relations might be ignited in ways that involve activism and communality—found in both Susan Briante’s and Nomi Stone’s pieces for the book, as they each appeal to Rukeyser to challenge the barriers and violences materialized by the language of othering.

Readers might discover, too, the prevalence of children in Rukeyser’s work. Again, her engagement here is not the transference of responsibility onto future generations, but attention to (among other things) how a child’s presentism is inseparable from their lack of fear—toward poetry, toward failure, toward “otherness.” Among the many human freedoms for which Rukeyser advocated was the freedom to choose our own ancestors; embedded in this, I think, is the implicit reminder—however corny this may sound—that we are all ancestors of the future.

SH: Threaded through this question, Catherine’s answer, and our book, is a concrete concern with how our present acts reverberate beyond their limits, temporal and otherwise. The simple but profound question of what we have to do with each other. How to make meaningful choices about actions whose effects we will not personally experience.

There’s a line from The Life of Poetry that shows up more than once in our introduction; in it, Rukeyser turns her gaze outward, asking, “You reading this book, who are you?” She is making direct contact with the future, invoking her readers as much more than her market. Her readers—we—become those who might take up the collective work she imagines. It belies an understanding of lineage that is predicated on something other than the raising up of individual genius.

A beloved mentor of mine, Joan Richardson, has a beautiful figure in her book Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014) for this sort of ongoing and collective project of truth seeking. She points out that Charles Sanders Peirce’s term for continuity, “synechism,” comes from the Greek for “‘to have or hold together,’ as the activity of rowers on a bi- or trireme.” I love imagining that taking up of oars across time as, for example, Briante and Stone respond directly to Rukeyser, or Paredez, Borzutzky, and Hardy weave her words through their own. I guess my big hope for readers of Beyond Ourselves is that they may feel called, too, to climb aboard and join this work.

CG: To return to Solmaz Sharif’s galvanizing afterword: “It’s over . . . So let’s begin.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

Lyric is Cringe: An Interview with Ry Cook

photo by Emily Fairweather

 by Tiffany Troy

In their debut chapbook Freak of Nature (Choo Choo Press, $15), Ry Cook demands: “Look me in the eyes when / I’m talking to you.” The chapbook’s opening poem, “Burn Book,” introduces readers to many of its concerns, not least of which is its preoccupation with the aesthetics of cringe. Hewing to a form—single-stanza syllabic poems with alternating indented lines—Cook’s poems vacillate between self-deprecating humor (“On Monday a Dogecoin / tells me to kill myself / and I think about it”) and an almost-classical bravado (“I’m just waiting / here listening taking / everything in before / going downstairs knowing / exactly what to sing”).

Dwelling in and beyond cringe, Cook asks what it means to cope with pain and shame through humor. These questions swerve like the back-and-forth “spine” of Cook’s poems and land them in a sense of absolution as they “wolf and howl / at Cher’s tomato moon.”

Recently awarded the Belladonna* Residency in Nonbinary Poetics, Cook received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has published poems in The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and other magazines. A resident of Brooklyn, New York, they have taught at Pratt Institute and currently work as a program manager at the Academy of American Poets.

Tiffany Troy: How did Freak of Nature come about?

Ryan Cook: It started because at a certain point during my MFA, everything I wrote felt too cringey to edit, and Timothy Donnelly told me to write about that feeling—the sense of shame that comes with looking at a past piece of work. As I did, I became interested in the idea that these kinds of feelings could literally be deleted in the past—it was possible to erase words from existence permanently. And there’s a luxury to that. People now pay services to scrub their digital footprint clean, even though theoretically the cloud keeps texts and images forever. 

When I started writing and exploring my gender, I found that I was making myself smaller so that fewer people could interpret my mess. By writing Freak of Nature, I forced myself to take up as much space as I could and to claim as many things as I wanted, and every time I tried to edit something out, I would see if I could instead lean into the bit, so to speak. Everyone in the MFA sphere loves to quote that Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”—but no one talks about how deep the slant can go.

TT: Let’s talk about cringe as an aesthetic. In “Rimbaud of Shit” the speaker introduces themself:

Me the Rimbaud of shit
         O my good! O my boo-
tyful collection of
          cringe. My potions my po-
ems.

As the poem goes on, figures like Rimbaud, Verlaine, and the “perfect genderqueer i- / con” seem to serve as foils to the speaker. The lyric magnifies some dark experiences—ranging from a car crash to suicidal ideation—into something beyond embarrassment.

RC: I’m glad you brought up “Rimbaud of Shit,” because writing it was probably the start of this project. I was thinking about how clowns find humor by being absolutely true to themselves when practicing their art—it creates a childlike sense of play—and I realized I hadn’t been allowing myself to play on the page because I was worried about the first thing I got published being the smartest, most groundbreaking work out there. To me, however, the self-awareness of a lot of contemporary writing feels like a way to avoid looking dumb, so I wanted this collection to be a lyric manifestation of, say, dancing to a goofy song to make someone you think is hot laugh.

The lyric itself is cringe; it requires us to look back on a moment or a feeling and conjure up an echo of it, or justify it, or try to understand it . . . while in reality, so much of what we experience is more complicated than understanding will admit.

During graduate school, a professor told me that you write a poem to try to figure out a question you have, even though most of the time you end up with more questions. To me, that’s like trying to get a fishhook out with more fishhooks—yet there’s something beautifully pitiful about that in terms of the contemporary lyric. I want to write about things that I’m feeling, or that matter to me, but I worry about how others will see them, or if they feel the same.

I also tend to over-intellectualize—as I think a lot of younger writers do—mostly because it feels safer to back something up with theory. This book actually started as a failed piece of theory exploring the aesthetic of cringe and how it has changed.

I think cringe started off as a physical reaction—at least this is how boomers tend to refer to cringe—you cringe at a rat in the street, for example. Cringe then turned into a weapon in the early 2000s through clips of people making fools of themselves online— early iterations of this became “lolcows,” or people who were made fun of on the internet—yet I found that a lot of the people who were being labeled as cringe were queer or neurodivergent.

When someone bullies another person in person, they typically only use the information they have available to them at the time, but that information is exponentially larger online—the digital footprint provides endless kindling for this type of behavior. I used to watch YouTube compilations of cringe moments, clips of people having meltdowns, singing poorly, claiming greatness, or whatever, that viewers found hilarious because they perceived these people as weak. So much of cringe compilation culture was a space for people to find community through making fun of the same targets—cringe as weapon. Yet I was also struck by the confidence of some of the people who were being deemed cringe.

The current phase of cringe is self-policing. I’ve had students tell me they won’t try something new because they don’t want to be seen as cringe. I’ve also seen people scrub their digital footprints in hopes that they won’t be seen as cringe later on. This fascinates me, because it feels so antithetical to the lyric.

Anyway, the more I tried to write about this theory of cringe, the less excited I became. I kept hitting blocks because I didn’t think I was smart enough. That’s when my amazing editor, Taylor Zhang, asked me to approach this idea in a different, more personal way—she suggested making it feel like a diary, a receptacle for all the self-aggrandizing and contradictory feelings. It was while working with her that I realized I didn’t have to write the perfect treatise on cringe right away; instead, I could explore the questions I had about how people feel about how much of their past is online, and how much of it ends up in their poetry.

TT: Your idea that the reactionary impulse to scrub the parts of the self that one considers cringe is anti-lyrical is fascinating. How are the aesthetics of cringe connected to the body? And does this connection reveal something about the speaker’s alter ego in Freak of Nature?

RC: I don’t know if there is an alter ego; I think we are all constantly testing out new alter egos online. I’ve seen people display themselves completely differently online than how they are in person. I often wonder how much the digital persona reflects the true nature of the person, or if it constructs something to the left of their personality.

At any rate, the speaker in these poems is certainly more outspoken than me, but they have the same amount of shame—of their body, their past, their work. I only recently noticed a lot of these poems feature bosses, which, while not intentional, shows where my head was at: I was working between three and four part-time or freelance jobs while writing this chapbook, and had a lot of different thoughts about the relationship between work and art.

Our bodies decay, bloat, and overflow. I was actually one of the clinical trial patients to try the fecal matter transplant pill (marketed as VOWST by Nestlé) because I had so many recurrences of C. diff—it worked, and I’ve never had a recurrence since, but this experience made me think a lot about the chronic health conditions myself and my loved ones have. Writing about the body is a cliche with the lyric, so “Rimbaud of Shit” gets in your face about that, while “Three Voices” discusses the speaker’s stepdad withering away and how quickly even that can be commodified:

I know
           he’ll probably pass in
the next 10 years. I don’t
            know what to do with that
information. Proba-
            bly write a book. Sell it.
Have people pity me
            with capital. Boo hoo
boo hoo boo hoo boo hoo
            goes the lament of the
loudest possible flow-
             er.

I wrote this poem from a place of disgust as I was trying to sort through my feelings about my stepdad’s health conditions. I don’t want to use his pain as a prop in my art, but at the same time I need to write about this stuff, or it stays burning away in my stomach. I love my stepdad dearly, but I found that in writing about him I was commodifying him.

TT: How is the aesthetic of cringe captured and heightened by the visual form of the poems in the chapbook?

RC: In regard to the visual form—the “spine poems,” as I like to call them—the main form consists of five-syllable lines indenting back and forth. The lines give an echo of iambic pentameter—the forward pulse. Working on the level of the syllable really helped me—it made the editing and writing feel like a puzzle, allowing me to play more within the guts of these words. I had to adjust what was there if I wanted to add more text. It felt important to me to explore the insides of these words and find moments where the sentence ruptures when fitting inside the verse. I wanted the clothes of the poem to feel too small. The feelings felt too big to write about, and the structure felt freeing.

I’ll probably look back on this interview and cringe, and I love that.

TT: What are you working on now?

RC: I’m finishing a new chapbook, called ASUSHUNAMIR. This one feels different from Freak of Nature. It works with a mistranslation of the Descent of Isthar myth, which features one of the first instances of a nonbinary/genderqueer character in poetry: Asushunamir was created by the god of wisdom to save Ishtar, who was stuck in the underworld; when they do rescue Ishtar, they and everyone like them get cursed by the goddess of the underworld. Here’s a portion of the classic translation by Pirjo Lapinkivi (edited slightly by me): 

I wanted to explore the implications of each curse in relation to nonbinary bodies today. It’s a big myth and it will probably take me many years to write about fully, but I’m grateful to Thom at Blue Bag Press for believing in the curse section of this much larger undertaking.

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for readers?

RC: Thanks for letting me be messy.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

The Real and Unreal: An Interview with Molly Gaudry

photo by Molly Gaudry

by Emily Webber

I first met Molly Gaudry in Florida during her book tour. As we walked along the Jupiter Inlet, a pelican dived into the water, scooped up an impossibly large fish, and held it in its elastic neck pouch. The fish wrestled for a long time, and the pelican mostly remained calm before swallowing it whole. As Gaudry and I talked about writing, I returned to this image again and again. Sometimes you’re the fish, where it feels like all fight and no reward; sometimes you’re the pelican just calmly waiting, and it all comes together.

Gaudry holds master’s degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. She is the author of two novels in verse, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2010) and Desire: A Haunting (Ampersand, 2018); both explore the same fictional world through the perspective of a mother and daughter. Her latest book, Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir (Rose Metal Press, $17.95), is a hybrid work revisiting other characters—including the tea house woman, who appears in her earlier works first as a bride-to-be and then as a widow.

In the following interview, Gaudry offers a fascinating look into her creative process.

EW: How did you become a writer? Was it something you always wanted to do?

MG: I don’t really know how I became a writer, but I’m sure that I was a reader first. When I was very young, I used to make up little stories and turn them into booklets with construction paper “covers.” In kindergarten, I remember my desk was separated from the other kids’ and I was encouraged to work on reading and writing skills. Later, in grade school, I was never the best student in my classes, but I was often allowed to turn in stories for extra credit to help save my grades. Eventually, I ended up studying creative writing in a vocational arts high school. Although I’d gone there to study jazz and music composition, I learned quickly that I didn’t have the chops or dedication that my fellow music majors did, so I ended up switching majors to creative writing. By senior year, our portfolios included short stories, poems, and a one-act play. I think it was around this time, transitioning out of high school and into college, that I began to think of myself as someone who could one day be a writer.

EW: So you were exposed to writing across genres early, and your first two books are novels in verse. Did you mostly identify as a poet in the beginning?

MG: Oh, gosh, no. I definitely considered myself a fiction writer back then. I still do, really. But when my first book, We Take Me Apart, came out, even though my publisher and I considered it experimental fiction, only the poets paid it any attention. The book was shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil, a poetry prize, and named a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, and this was when my identity crisis as a writer began. Because I felt like such a fraud, I ended up in George Mason University’s MFA program, so I could study poetry for three years, even though it terrified me. I think for three years, I sat in those classes thinking of myself as a terrified fiction writer. Even upon graduating, I still felt like I didn’t really understand poetry. I was wrong, though—I can see this now, more clearly—because my professors and my fellow classmates really did help me become a stronger reader of poems, and they gave me the skills I would need to continue to develop on my own as a reader, and now as a professor, of poetry.

EW: You had a period when you were renovating a dollhouse. What interested you about this creative outlet compared to writing?

MG: That was long after my MFA and toward the very end of my PhD program, when I lived in Salt Lake City. I was working on Fit Into Me, a hybrid novel/memoir for my dissertation, and I had become obsessed with 1:12 scale miniature artists from around the world. Two of my favorite Instagram accounts were @ibuildsmallthings and @lavenderbelle_miniatures, and just like other miniature artists they both included their hands in their photos. Without their hand, it was really hard to tell that their work was miniature!

On a whim I found an old dollhouse for sale on Craigslist, and I started refurbishing it. I spent maybe a month or two fixing it up. I think what I loved most was that I could focus on specific tasks and, by the end of the day, see tangible results. I would tell myself, “Today, I’m going to prime and paint the walls on the second floor,” and “Today, I’ll cut and install the floorboards,” and “Today, I’ll put the lights in.” I really needed it at the time. With writing, I often had nothing to show by the end of the day, but with the dollhouse I could see the progress I was making, day by day, even hour by hour.

EW: Speaking of blending the real and unreal, I hadn’t encountered a work quite like Fit Into Me. How would you describe this book?

MG: I think of it as a memoir titled Fit Into Me, which is about trying to write a novel titled Fit Into Me. To put this another way: Fit Into Me: A Novel is the subject to Fit Into Me: A Memoir.

EW: Rose Metal Press seems like the perfect publisher for a book like Fit Into Me because of their championing of hybrid work, but I know you had a slightly difficult path to publishing this work. Can you describe the book’s journey and how you persevered through some setbacks?

MG: Well, my first two books were published by small presses that no longer exist—Mud Luscious and Ampersand Books. After Mud Luscious shut down, Jason Cook at Ampersand offered me a multi-book contract, which included a reprint of We Take Me Apart. Together, we worked closely on my second verse novel, and I also completed the first full draft of Fit Into Me with him. We really had a great working relationship, and I’m grateful for all the time and attention he gave me and my work. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, he decided to shut down Ampersand, and so I no longer had a publisher for Fit.

EW: What kept you going? Did you continue to revise the book?

MG: I mostly put it away, but occasionally I’d pull it back out and revise a bit more. As the years went by, I was able to pursue leads with a few other small presses, but ultimately none of these panned out. In truth, I never really felt like I was in any particular rush to find a publisher. At some point, I set it aside completely and challenged myself to write more long-form, mainstream work. Over the course of three years, I wrote and published a few short stories and a long essay about my biological family in Korea. At first, I didn’t think of this essay as anything but a standalone piece. Later, though, I decided to include it at the end of Fit Into Me, and I subbed it in for what had been the final essay. Once I had done this, I knew it was the last substantial edit I would make on my own. Around this time, I decided to submit this version to the Rose Metal Press Hybrid Genre Open contest, and in my mind, this was it. If it didn’t get accepted, I would let it go and forget about it.

EW: In that essay, you start to incorporate fiction into your story, describing an incident with your biological family that didn’t actually happen. Why this shift to including fiction even within your own story?

MG: That essay was written in 2022, while the rest of the book was written in 2015. By then, I had been teaching and writing across genres, and this multi-genre identity had served me well on the academic job market. But somewhere around my third-year review, I felt I was spreading myself too thin, and after I had a chance to catch up with my former dissertation advisor, Lance Olsen, I decided to focus on a specific genre so I could try to home in on just one area of expertise. I chose nonfiction, and that essay was my first attempt at speculative nonfiction.

EW: What are some good examples of speculative nonfiction?

MG: I recommend the online journal Speculative Nonfiction: Jerald Walker’s “Advice to an Honorable Man,” Caite McNeil’s “She Ran Like A ______,” and Sean Prentiss’s “Buying a House: Every Story Is True and Every Story Is A Lie” are particular favorites of mine. Of course, there’s Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir (Mariner Books, 2023), and Larraine Herring released an anthology fairly recently titled Becoming Real: Women Reclaim the Power of the Imagined through Speculative Nonfiction (Regal House Publishing, 2024).

EW: Your two previous verse novels and the fictional novel that constitutes part of Fit Into Me feature the same characters. They don’t need to be read together, but I had the pleasure of reading your work in reverse. Getting an introduction to your fictional world along with your creative process through Fit Into Me, I loved that I could dive into your novels and get more of these characters with this inside knowledge. Did you always know you’d write multiple books with these characters?

MG: No. After We Take Me Apart came out, though, I came up with the idea for Desire: A Haunting. It was not, from the start, a companion project. But once I realized it could be, I knew I wanted to tell one of the main events in We Take Me Apart from a different perspective—to show how the same event could affect another character differently.

I think there’s something wonderful about books that have a shared universe. I’m obsessed with Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, for instance, and more recently I’ve gotten into the Lucy Barton books by Elizabeth Strout. Even as a young writer, I loved interconnected books. Probably one of my greatest early influences was Gabriel García Márquez, and I always loved seeing Macondo from the different perspectives of his characters across books.

When I began writing the fiction sections of Fit Into Me, I wasn’t thinking they would become a book. But eventually, when I realized Fit Into Me could be a novel, and that Fit Into Me could be a memoir about that novel, that’s when I realized I could say goodbye to one of the more important minor characters, Sam, who appears across all three books as the tea house woman’s father.

EW: Do you think you’ll revisit these characters again?

MG: It’s possible, but in some ways I feel I’ve moved on. During the editing process, I was asked to change the name of the city from a made-up city to a real city. The easiest answer was to call it Salt Lake City, whose grid and street names I had used as inspiration anyway. But because, suddenly, the tea house woman existed in Salt Lake City, in the real world, rather than in the made-up place I always thought it was, that made it feel like the end of the tea house for me. I no longer live in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City feels to me like the past, not like any part of my future.

EW: At your book event, you said every story we tell is a love story to everything we’ve read; Fit Into Me embodies this on every page. You have over 170 footnotes, many of which serve as citations for where you seamlessly weave in sentences from other works of literature. Without the footnotes, the reader wouldn’t even be able to tell. What was your process like, and how did you choose the source material and formatting?

MG: It’s only because of interviews like this one that I’ve been able to go back and revisit my process for including quotations. In my memory, all the cited texts were always there, but in reality, they were not. The only time I quoted anyone in the earliest drafts were when I was in fact engaging with authors that were, themselves, the subjects of my nonfiction: Marguerite Duras, Sappho and Anne Carson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the fiction, one of the characters is reading José Saramago’s Blindness to another character, and so that was quoted text from the start as well. But every other author, every other quotation, was added later, at various times.

EW: In a multi-page footnote I adore, you finally give the tea house woman a name, Constance or Connie, in a very offhand, casual way. Can you talk about how you name your characters and why you sometimes don’t?

MG: My first book was largely influenced by fairy tales, fables, and myths. So, the tea house woman didn’t have a name in We Take Me Apart. She didn’t get a name in Desire either. But by the third book, since the tea house was handed down through the generations, I suddenly had multiple tea house women, and it was becoming confusing telling them apart. So I just had fun in the footnotes and directly addressed the problem of needing to name them. I chose the name Connie because my grandfather’s name was Conrad, but he went by Connie his whole life. Then I named the tea house woman’s mother Clarissa, after Mrs. Dalloway, because why not?

EW: A lot of your writing leans into this sense of play. In Fit Into Me, you demonstrate the process you use to generate your work: You take a piece of literature meaningful to you, cut up the words, and select some to incorporate into your own writing. You show the word lists you pull and how you use them. How did you develop this process? Have you used it for all your books?

MG: With my first book, I was up against a deadline, so I transcribed words from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as an act of desperation. I get into the specifics in Fit Into Me, but the quick version is that I created lists of ten words each and had to use these lists to quickly write and finish that book. Because it worked for We Take Me Apart, I did the same thing for Desire, using words from John Ratti’s poetry collection A Remembered Darkness.

I like to think that this process helps to infuse your writing with the spirit of the works you pull from. We Take Me Apart is obsessed with food, rooms, and objects. Desire turned out to be a Gothic-ish ghost story. Both reflect the spirit of Tender Buttons and A Remembered Darkness. So I repeated the process for Fit Into Me, using words from Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s If Not, Winter.  

EW: Now that you’ve finally seen Fit Into Me go out into the world and receive positive reviews, what comes next?

MG: Well, I’ve finished another hybrid work, The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel, which is currently out on submission. It’s a novel, but it presents as a speculative memoir that asks: What if I got stuck in a time loop as a metaphor for being stuck in grief?

When I began this manuscript, I still did not have a publisher for Fit Into Me, and I knew I had to finish this one quickly in order to have any chance of meeting my publication requirement for tenure. Because I’m such a slow writer, though, and from day to day often delete everything and start over, I needed to find a way to make consistent forward progress. That’s how the idea of the time loop came to me, because all I had to do was write a version of the day, and if I hated it, I could just write a different version of the day without deleting all of that material. The many variations of the day in the time loop allowed me to keep making progress without losing pages in the process. The conceit of my narrator’s need to finally get her day right applied perfectly to my own need to finally get the writing of her day right.

EW: What advice do you have for writers, especially those trying to do something experimental or in a different genre?

MG: It’s funny that you ask this, because I find myself now in need of such advice! I suppose a lot of it comes down to just trying different things on the page—like word lists, or like any other constraints you might come up with for yourself—and seeing what happens. The writing process can and should be messy (which is something I’m emphasizing for myself by saying, and repeating, it here!). Likely, what’s in your heart will eventually come out onto the page. Just trust yourself, let go of fear and doubt and ego and the idea of whatever it is you think you need to have happen on the page, and see what emerges instead. I think, if we’re lucky, it’ll feel fresh and weird and exciting and interesting, and we’ll want to keep molding that clay until we can step back and say, “It’s done.”

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop.org and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

Anatomy of a Chapbook: A Conversation with Li-Young Lee and Oliver Egger

photo by Donna Lee

by Dianne Bilyak

Editor’s Note: In the following roundtable conversation, we go behind the scenes of the recently published chapbook I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee (Wesleyan University Press, $7.95), which was edited by Oliver Egger. Pocket sized and smartly focused, the chapbook draws on poems from Lee’s six acclaimed collections but also presents seven previously unpublished poems. Lee’s longtime friend Dianne Bilyak spoke with both Lee and Egger about this unusual publication.

Li-Young Lee is the author of six books of poetry, a “remembrance” titled The Winged Seed (Simon & Schuster, 1995), and a new translation (with poet Yun Wang) of the Dao De Jing of Laozi (W. W. Norton, 2024). He has received many honors for his writing, including the 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. He lives in Chicago.

Oliver Egger is a Connecticut-based writer and editor; his anthologies I Said That Love Heals from Inside: Love Poems of Yusef Komunyakaa and The Route 9 Anthology: A Collection of Writing from Wesleyan Students, Faculty, Staff & Middlesex County Residents are both published by Wesleyan University Press, where he is a consulting editor.

Dianne Bilyak, a graduate of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, is the author of the poetry collection Against the Turning (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2011) and the memoir Nothing Special: The Mostly True, Sometimes Funny Tales of Two Sisters (Wesleyan University Press, 2021). She lives in Connecticut.

 _

Dianne Bilyak: How did this chapbook come about?

Oliver Egger: The chapbook series at Wesleyan University Press started on a whim in 2017 because Rae Armantrout wanted to do a really short book, and we couldn’t say no! But it grew from there. After I edited I Said That Love Heals from Inside: Love Poems of Yusef Komunyakaa in 2023, you mentioned that a selection of “mother poems” by your friend Li-Young Lee would be a good chapbook, and I found the idea interesting because I’d always thought that the father was the dominant figure in his work. But as I started reading his books again and circling “mother” every time it came up, it was in at least fifty or sixty poems. I knew you were on to something!

Li-Young Lee: I was just so grateful and happy and surprised to hear from Oliver that Wesleyan wanted to do this. I always knew that my mother was present in all of my poems—she’s not necessarily the one talked about, nor the one speaking, but she is the one listening, and it’s the quality of her listening that I was trying to make in my poems, like a giant architecture of listening. I actually used to wonder if anyone would ever catch on that my mother was much more present than my father, who appears to be the ostensible subject of my poems.

OE: It became apparent to me as I was reading through your work to assemble this chapbook—I felt like I was uncovering something that had obviously been there all along. When we approach a text with something in mind, it’s just such a powerful experience.

LYL: Yeah, it’s fascinating. Who was it who said, “Poets are always trying to recreate their mother’s body” or “every poem is the recreation of the mother’s body”?[1] I always felt it wasn’t just her body I was trying to recreate but her audience—the quality of her listening—it’s something a little more nuanced than just her body. The human body is such a fraught site, for me, anyway.

DB: What was the process of choosing and ordering the poems? Did you work on that together or apart?

OE: I originally envisioned the book as an anthology of previously published poems, but when I showed it to Li-Young, he said, “Oh, I’ve been writing some new poems about my mother, can we put those in here as well?” And I said, “Of course. That’s incredible.” Those new poems transformed the final book: After the title poem (which is from Li-Young’s first book, Rose), we roll straight through the new poems—I wanted to center where this poet is right now—and then wind our way through a journey to the present. I didn’t make the order chronological, though; rather, I tried to sequence the poems so that they tell a kind of story. And of course I don’t know your mother, I didn’t experience your life—I was just looking at the text and letting the poems speak to me and to each other.

LYL: I remember, Oliver, when we were doing interviews to create an introduction for the chapbook, you said something like, “Your mother’s presence is always that of an overarching observer,” and I thought that was very astute of you to notice. Do you remember that?

OE: Yeah, I do. I don’t remember my exact words either, but I felt her presence in the work. As I alluded to earlier, when I approached your work thinking, your mother, your mother, I realized I couldn’t get away from her in any of your poems. She’s not necessarily a literal subject—it’s not my mom did this or my mom said this to me—but she is this presence that’s always seeing you, interacting from one step away. She’s almost beyond human.

LYL: I’ve been thinking for a while about how we poets all belong to a cult of the word, and therefore adhere to the structure of definitions, which says that the word being defined must never appear in its definitions; if that word appears, it nullifies the definition. I think my mother’s presence in the poems is something like that, or at least I’ve experienced her that way: she is the word. Everything about me comes from her and will go back to her. She does appear in many of the poems, but even when she’s not the subject, every word is directed toward her. And all the poems have their being, their existence, by virtue of her.

OE: Yes, many of the poems in the chapbook have no mention of the mother figure. But when I came across the poem “In the Beginning,” I thought, What is the mother but the beginning of us all? I knew instantly that poem belonged in the book, along with others that touch on that mother spirit of creation.

DB:  Li-Young, you chose the chapbook’s cover because I sent you a photograph of a statue in Italy. I’d like you to talk a little bit about why that image spoke to you—I probably sent you twenty pictures that day.

LYL: First of all, it looks like my mother, and second of all, I love the way the child is grasping at her robe and is obviously starving for her. It seems to me that my relationship to poetry is exactly the same: I come to it starved. When I read poetry, I’m starving for something. When I write it, I feel starved. Dante said that all successful poems are informed by infant longing, and this photograph looks like infant longing to me. Even to this day, as old as I’ve become, I feel infant longing for my—is it my mother? Or the mother? The great mother, or the bosom of the universe, or something—I don’t know.

I also love that the sculpture looks kind of eaten away. There’s something so moving about images that depict the difficulty of remaining, images that get eaten away by time. This one is just barely making it. And I love the colors in the picture, the blue and the red, classic Mary colors, representing the heavenly aspect and the earthly aspect of Mary. Ever since I was a child, I mistook my father for the Father God and my mother for the Virgin Mary. Even after she had eight children, there was something very virginal and untouched about her. She worked hard to be that, even at the cost of having a personal being. I think my father set out to be a male icon, and my mother set out to be a female icon, and this statue looks like an icon. I love icons. I think I’ve been trying to write my versions of icons by writing poems.

OE: Obviously, you have awe and love for your mother, but did her performance of being distant, almost like a God in your life, ever make you sad or resentful that you didn’t really get to know her as a human, with a multitude of flaws? Or did you see her in a deeper way?

LYL: I think I did see through the icon to the person. She couldn’t hide it completely. We have this phrase in Chinese, “kàn chuān,” to see through, and she would say that to me a lot—“I feel like you see through me.” What I saw was a lot of pain and struggle. It moved me.

It was a gift to me that she wanted to be an icon. It allowed me to see existence as an icon. I see the universe as an icon. I see the self as an icon. I see the poem as an icon. I saw in her life something that was not entirely personal, something that was fulfilling patterns older than her—female patterns, Chinese patterns.

DB: Is an icon something that stands alone, or is it something to be worshipped?

LYL: I think about it this way: To me there’s something sacramental about writing poetry. A sacrament, the way I understand it, is any practice we perform that makes the invisible visible. So when I’m writing a poem, there is my visible mother with a history and a body and a temporality, and there’s a kind of invisible mother, too. When both are present in the poem, it becomes iconic.

My wish is to create icons; it always has been. I love icons. I’ve looked at them my whole life. My father painted his own icons, using his own blood to paint the red. He would bleed himself to paint the red to make the icons. He was a madman.

When you look at icons, you know they’re not necessarily portraits. I think the Byzantine artists must have been very upset when subsequent artists started painting the saints and Jesus and Mary to make them look like real humans—and I understand that. There’s something profoundly enchanting about Byzantine icons because they’re not entirely human.

Some viewers who look at the Byzantine icons might think, didn’t they know how to paint better? No, it isn’t that—that’s not what they were setting out to do. Similarly, I never set out to make a Polaroid or a snapshot of my mother; I was trying to understand my mother in the context of the great mother.

OE: My mom is also an icon, but in a different way: She is a really strong woman who doesn’t take any shit. But she had just gotten diagnosed with breast cancer when I began working on this chapbook, so I finally began to see her as vulnerable, too. Working through your poems was a good companion as I wrapped my head around this; as they kept pointing to the universal mother, I found that icon in my mom. I dedicated my contribution to the book to my mom.

LYL: I think of poetry as the locally inflected voice of the All. I want to whittle down this local inflection—that is, the personal—as small as possible, leaving just enough there so that the reader has something to hold on to, but my real hunger is to get a glimpse of the All, which I can’t see except through some local or temporal detail. So it never occurs to me that my personal life is that interesting to write about—it’s just a glimpse of the All, of eternity, that I’m seeking.

DB: I wanted to ask about writing as a form of expressing grief.

LYL: In my own experience, writing from grief or out of grief or through grief just makes the grief deeper, more visible for me, more potent . . . But this allows me to carry it. I think this is because a really good poem creates a profound stillness, a silence, at the end—a musical rest. That rest intrigues me, because it’s not the rest of inaction, of vacuity, of nothingness; rather, it’s a fullness, an awe. I love the saying, “Adoration is the proper attitude for a soul in awe”—that would be me.

I think this notion of rest is articulated in the Book of Genesis: The world is created in six days, and the seventh day is one of rest. Rest comes after creation. And then throughout the biblical tradition we hear, “the Lord’s rest is true rest.” I don’t think that means death; I don’t think that means taking a nap; God didn’t rest on the seventh day because he was tired. What kind of God is that?

So I’ve been trying to create that musical rest in my poems—the kind that resolves everything, that lets you look back and say, “It is good.”

DB:  Would you like to read a poem?

LYL:

Mother Comfort and Who

Little One, you can come out now.
The soldiers are gone.
They’ve had their fill of blood for today.

Mother, I saw God, and God was three
bare-chested men carrying machetes.

God’s three bodies glistened
with sweat and spattered blood.
God’s three breasts heaved, God’s three mouths
open and panting from a morning of hard work,
killing and dismembering.

I’ll come out
when the new moon comes out.

Little One, you can come out now.
The mob has moved on.
They’ve had their fill of rage for today.

Mother, I saw God and God was three.

And one third of God pointed with his finger and said,
Let’s kill this one too.

And one third of God said,
No. Let him go.

And the last third of God
turned his face to me and said,
One day, you must return
to this country where you were born.

Mother, I’ll come out
when the new stars come out.

Little One, wake up.
You’ve been dreaming again
about what happened so many years ago.

Mother, I’m awake.
I saw God and God was three men,
and the three men became three blades
turning this way and that way, dull on one side
and sharp on the other side.

And the three blades became three tongues.

And the three tongues are inside one cave.
And one tongue keeps saying, You must return
to where you were born.
And one keeps saying, Kill this one too.
And one keeps saying, Let him go.

You know, I am still knocked out by that, that the soldier said, “Let him go.” I don’t know why he said that. Why did he let me go? Why did he let us all go? They spent all morning killing the neighbors; he could have killed us all. It haunts me to this day.

OE:  How old were you when that happened?

LYL:  I was three. My father was holding me. They were trying to decide which one of the kids they were going to kill, and my parents just had to stand there and listen. They couldn’t even object. They were surrounded by a mob. It’s strange when you see your parents in that kind of disempowered situation—the humiliation of it, and the parents trying to come back from that humiliation, trying to reassure their children that for the rest of their lives, we can protect you, we just couldn’t then. . . . It created a lot of shame for them.

DB: Do you actually remember it, or did you just hear about it?

LYL: My father told me that story all the time. I don’t actually remember it.

DB:  When I first interviewed you over twenty years ago, you related that as a child you didn’t speak for a very long time, but when you finally did, you said something like “When are we going home?” Is that right?

LYL:   Yes, the minute we got on the prison boat and it left the harbor—this is what my parents tell me—I just started speaking in complete sentences, saying, “I want to go back.”

OE:  Have you ever gone back?

LYL:   I have. I went back there to look for my brother who was buried there, and when we finally found the graveyard, we found out that they had buried nine other people on top of him. This is in Jakarta. But just this morning, man, I heard that Jakarta is sinking, that all of Indonesia is sinking, so they’re looking for another place to build the capital. It’s strange to think about all those graves being underwater.

We also went back and visited the prison where my father had been. The leper colony that they put him on was gone, but we visited the hospital, the prison, and the insane asylum. They put my father in an insane asylum to get him to stop preaching the gospel. I always wondered about that; I was a little hurt that he wouldn’t recant. Wouldn’t you recant if your family was being threatened? You know, if they said, “Recant, say it’s all lies, the God, the New Testament, or we’ll kill you and your family.” But he said, “No.” I always wondered why.

OE:  Perhaps he saw himself as an icon.

LYL:   Yes, maybe so. I don’t know, it’s very strange.

[1] Editor’s Note: It was Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller. “No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure. For the writer, however, this object exists: it is not language, it is the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body…in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body: I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of the language, and opinion will strenuously object, since it opposes ‘disfiguring nature’.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

How to Submit: An Interview with Dennis James Sweeney

photo by Melanie Zacek

by Elise McHugh

Every acquisition editor can tell you stories of the ones that got away—those projects that excited us and that we had a great conversation with the author (or the author and their agent) about, but that ultimately ended up with a different publisher. Dennis James Sweeney’s How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses (New World Library, $18.95) was one of those manuscripts for me, so when I spotted the finished book at a local bookstore I snatched it up. The book is positive and supportive while also realistic about the challenges of getting published. Sweeney packs How to Submit with practical advice bolstered by both personal examples and profiles of authors working in different genres.

Sweeney, a lecturer at Amherst College, is the author of four chapbooks, including Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted (Ricochet Editions, 2020). Their first book, In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press 2021), won the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and they were featured as part of Poets & Writer’s Debut Poets of 2021. Their second book, the essay collection You’re the Woods Too (Essay Press, 2023), was the Editor’s Selection for the Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell MFA Book Contest and went on to be a Small Press Distribution bestseller. And their third book, The Rolodex Happenings (Stillhouse Press, 2024), won the Stillhouse Press Novella Prize.     

If a new book wasn’t enough to keep them busy, Sweeney and their partner just welcomed their second child into the world. In the midst of sleepless nights and busy days on multiple fronts, Sweeney took time out to sit down and speak with me about their newest book.

 

Elise McHugh: Can you talk about how you got the initial idea for How to Submit?

Dennis James Sweeney: How to Submit began way back in the old days of the internet (about ten years ago), when the literary website Entropy was just beginning. Janice Lee, the editor of the site, began a “Where to Submit” list that she asked me to run. It became a surprisingly popular resource, and it helped me understand how communal it can be to submit writing (if you’re a writer) and publish writing (if you’re a publisher), especially in the small press and literary magazine worlds. After Entropy closed, I went on to teach a “How to Submit” class at GrubStreet in Boston, and it showed me the importance of having conversations about submitting—not just logistical information distributed by an “expert.” I wrote How to Submit as a node, a middle point, in that conversation.

EM: Why do you think it’s important for writers to find community, and how might someone begin that search for themselves?

DJS: Community is a wonderfully vague though magnetic word: We are always searching for it, and it’s hard to know when we find it. In my experience, finding community begins with a feeling. When I read a book and I recognize it somehow—when I feel belonging in its pages—that is writing community. I also feel it when I meet a fellow reader or writer, and we just know each other even though we’ve never met before. I feel it during the publication process, too, when an editor digs into the nitty gritty of my word choice and we both show our deep care for the minute problems of language.

That’s what community is to me: a shared orientation toward a particular form of magic. Beginning the search for that is as simple as finding what you care about and then finding other people who care about it too. More practically, I think it often means contributing your energy, once you’ve identified others who are invested in that same thing. Giving your labor to a publication, sharing work in public spaces, and showing up for fellow writers bring the community into more determinate, physical being.

EM: Throughout How to Submit, you remind the reader to keep in mind their reasons for wanting to be published. In fact, having readers reflect and write about their reasons for submitting is the first writing prompt in the book. Why do you feel this is so important?

DJS: The biggest obstacle to having a positive experience seeking publication, I think, is getting caught up in the “I must achieve maximum prestige and maximum book sales!” whirlwind. Asking why you want to publish is an essential antidote to that mindset. Do you want to connect with people? Share a story that needs to be shared? Just enjoy your creative practice? Each of these will entail different approaches to submissions, and they’ll often depart from more conventional, measurable markers of success. Success is when you feel fulfilled, and we’ve got to swim upstream a bit to remember that.

EM: What do you find attractive about the small press community and the work it is producing?

DJS: Small presses usually operate by a logic kindred to the one I describe above; they ask not how much can we sell, but how can we prioritize the writing and the people involved in it? Two friends hand-stitching chapbooks in their basement actually have a lot in common with a mid-size non-profit publisher, at least in terms of their overall ethic: They want to create alternative economies for readers, ones apart from the capitalist mindset that often drives productivity. For me, these alternative economies result in writing that’s weirder, more fun, more risk-taking, and more representative of marginalized experiences than writing produced by systems based on profit.

EM: Early in the book, you discuss how Margaret Atwell of Feminist Press responded to publishing executives of Penguin Random House calling small presses “farm teams” for the large commercial houses. In your opinion, what is the ideal relationship between small press publishers and literary magazines and the large houses and their imprints?

DJS: My take on these different publishing communities is that we should do away with that hierarchical mindset, where publishing with the Big Five is considered “better” than publishing with a small press. There are economic realities involved, I get that—the Big Five houses generally have more money and resources. But increasingly, those resources still aren’t enough to make a meaningful dent in writers’ living expenses. So we can begin to think of different publishing circumstances as horizontally related instead: They are simply focused toward different audiences.

EM: The publishing landscape is vast and keeps shifting. It can seem overwhelming for someone just starting out. What are your recommendations for a writer who feels they are ready to start this journey?

DJS: I try to remind my students, when I teach the live version of “How to Submit,” that they don’t have to do everything at once. Subscribe to a single new literary magazine each year. Expand your reading habits to one small press you’ve never read from before. Submit a piece of writing to a single venue that resonates with you—especially one that isn’t big and intimidating. This flourishing ecosystem is made up of little interactions; it’s not some big community that’s located “out there.” Every moment of connection that is meaningful to you is exactly the thing you’re looking for.

EM: Why do you feel writing book reviews is beneficial for the review writer, and how would you suggest a person get started? In what ways do reviews remain important for authors and their publishers, and what do you see as the future of book reviews as traditional venues for them continue to shrink?

DJS: Writing reviews is such a great way to get involved with literary community. Magazines and literary websites always want to publish reviews, authors always want to receive reviews, and it’s just fun to read new books that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve. I remember what a joy it was to start getting books sent to me in the mail by publishers after I wrote my first few reviews. People complain, sometimes, about how book reviews have gone from a format for critique to a cog in the hype machine, and there’s truth to that. But it’s different for books that might only ever receive a single review: That one review might make a meaningful difference in the book’s ability to get into people’s hands. Like literature itself, book reviews and the venues for them will change—especially as social media becomes the de facto venue for sharing thoughts on literary writing—but the need for people to say what they think with care, enthusiasm, and nuance will never go away.

EM: Everyone wants their book to connect with the people they believe will find it most enjoyable and useful. Who are those audiences for you? What role would you like to see How to Submit play in the lives of individuals, classrooms, and the small press community itself?

DJS: I see my book as a middle point in the conversation—I didn’t start it, and I won’t be the last word on it either. My first hope is that How to Submit will help writers enter that conversation, allowing them to become part of the literary community more actively and confidently than they might be able to without having access to this information. Second, I hope that its use both in and out of classrooms can make a subtle corrective to the prevailing logic of submitting your writing, which, without a bit of supervision from the deepest part of ourselves, can veer toward commodification and cycles of ambition without satisfaction. Even though this book presents itself as mostly logistical, I’d also love for others in the small press community to see it as the love letter it is, a paean to a context that has been so welcoming to me and transformative to how I practice writing.

EM: Putting together a book about the multifaceted publishing world is complicated. How did you go about researching the material in this book?

DJS: So much of the research that led to this book came from my own submission process, which I was very focused on for years, plus my development of the “How to Submit” course. That meant the hardest part of the research was the “Case Studies” chapter, where I interviewed three fellow writers in depth about their experiences seeking publication: Lisbeth White, Jackson Bliss, and Zoe Tuck. Talking to them was lovely, and it is always an act of vulnerability to open yourself to others and see how their story affects your work. In keeping with the connective spirit of the book, it turned out this was the most rewarding part of writing it: getting to have conversations with writers I admired about what submitting means to them.

EM: You developed and tested the material that became How to Submit in a class you taught by the same name at GrubStreet in Boston. What advice can you give to teachers of both traditional and nontraditional creative writing classes who want to either a) develop a full course on how to identify potential publishers and submit to them or b) find ways to address some of this material in their classes even if they can’t devote a full course to the subject?

DJS: Start with the personal. What has submitting been like for you as a writer? What are your personal strategies? What do you struggle with? It’s tempting to share information about publishing in a top-down way, in order to give students some level of certainty in this always-shifting landscape. But I think it’s much more productive to inhabit the tensions together, whether that means each writer regularly sharing their evolving practices during a full course on getting published or making time for a heartfelt conversation about writers’ anxieties regarding publication as part of a one-time addendum to a writing class.

EM: What have the book’s reception and feedback been like so far?

DJS: It’s been delightful to talk about How to Submit with people who see the Big Five, agented publishing model as the model, which makes my book the “alternative.” I’ve seen the literary magazine and small press world as the center for so long that it is sometimes hard to describe what I do in terms that make sense to people who aren’t already part of this. That said, when I ask people questions about what they really want out of publishing, they almost never focus on making it big. At the end of the day, our priorities are all pretty kindred. That’s why the conversations I have been having about the book ultimately feel so energizing—especially this one, since speaking with you (as an editor at a mid-sized university press) and directing it toward the Rain Taxi audience feels like such a home to me.

EM: What are you working on now, and what do you hope might be your next long-term project?

DJS: I needed a break after writing How to Submit, which I did quickly because I sold it on proposal. For me, that break looks like being as creative and weird as possible about my writing style, as opposed to the prescriptive mode of How to Submit. In process are a memoir-in-essays about coming to terms with my Inflammatory Bowel Disease, a poetry book called “Biolamp” that continues to surprise me, and a novella about an imagined Antarctic. Plus whatever energizes me to write in the gaps, because that’s what I need right now (and maybe we all do): energy.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

Flight into Fiction: An Interview with John Tottenham

Photo by Robert Ascroft

by Zack Kopp

Originally from England, John Tottenham has made Los Angeles his home for over two decades. A sharp critic of both writing and visual art, he has published reviews and essays in numerous publications, including a long-standing column in the art magazine Artillery. Tottenham gives his acerbic instincts free reign in his creative work as well; merely to read the titles of his four books of poetry to date—The Inertia Variations (Kerosene Bomb Publishing, 2004), Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment (Penny-Ante Editions, 2012), The Hate Poems (Amok Books, 2018), and Fresh Failure (Hat & Beard Press, 2023)—gives one a sense as to why he was dubbed a “magnanimous misanthrope” by the Huffington Post.

Tottenham has now published his first novel, Service (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, $17.85), and if the title of the book seems a bit restrained, rest assured that there’s plenty of invective in these pages. A deadpan satire about life as an underpaid, jaded bookstore clerk, the book follows hapless narrator Sean Hangland as he rails against an illiterate society; Tottenham’s prose strikes a tone of deliberate unconventionality that manages to come off as self-deprecating and arrogant at the same time.

 

Zack Kopp: Before we get into Service, I have to note that you began as a poet. Which of your books of poetry do you recommend most highly, and why?

John Tottenham: My first book of poetry, The Inertia Variations, consists of 125 eight-line poems on subjects such as work avoidance, indolence, and failure. It was the fruit of many fruitless years and was subsequently adapted into a film and recording of the same name by Matt Johnson, the singer-songwriter behind the band The The. The Hate Poems is the most popular volume I’ve published, although that’s possibly owing to the photograph of a cute cat on the cover. The most recent and probably final collection, Fresh Failure, came out last year. Any of those will do.

ZK: I remember seeing The Hate Poems in bookstores when it came out. Who conceived of the cover?

JT: The cat cover was entirely my idea, as has been the case with the jacket designs of all my books. I don’t know how to use Photoshop, so I stand there and direct people who have mastered it and give them the credit—until now. I rifled through thousands of cat postcard images online and elsewhere to come up with that particular one. I used to be a keen deltiologist.

ZK: How did you come to work with Matt Johnson, and how did you feel about the translation of your writing to another medium?

JT: Matt was introduced to The Inertia Variations by a mutual friend while experiencing a long creative drought. He took it upon himself to interpret the work, producing a full-length CD and using my verses as a sort of soundtrack that was woven throughout an auto-documentary chronicling his own years of inertia. The film is mostly of interest to hardcore fans of The The, who want to know what Johnson was up to during the decade when he wasn’t producing any new work.

ZK: Turning to Service, how long did it take to write the novel?

JT: The novel itself was actually completed five years ago, although I’ve tinkered around with it since then.

ZK: Your main character works in a bookstore, as you yourself have done. In the age of auto-fiction, what makes Service more than autobiographical?

JT: Some people might recognize the novel’s setting and assume it’s entirely autobiographical, but since I don’t have much of an imagination I used a recognizable reality as the basis for a flight into fiction. Ninety-five percent of it is invented.

ZK: You’re one in a long line of writers about modern life in Los Angeles. Who among your predecessors, if anyone, has been most influential on your development as a writer?

JT: I read John Fante’s Ask the Dust at a young age and it was responsible for some of my formative impressions of L.A. It was recommended to me by Charles Bukowski, whom I corresponded with for a while. Although Bukowski was popular in France and Germany, his books were only available as imports in England at the time, and it was a novelty for him to hear from an English reader, especially a teenager.

ZK: Trying to make a living as a writer usually involves a lot of freelance work, and that usually involves reviewing the work of others. What’s your best, worst, or most significant memory related to your involvement with Artillery?

JT: What comes to mind is that it was painful to do editorial work. The main problem with a lot of aspiring art writers—and this also applies to literary criticism—is that they desperately want to be taken seriously, so they try to make things sound more complicated than they actually are. By spouting theoretical jargon and art-damaged nonsense, they strive to be difficult, but they lack the chops to pull it off with any conviction and wind up sounding like idiots. Editing that stuff was excruciating; I often felt it was giving me brain damage. Critical theory can be a lot of fun, but that’s all it is, fun—precisely what it’s supposed to not be. It’s an elitist game played by the affluent and the overeducated. Nobody’s going to go there for wisdom, guidance, or solace; at the end of a day’s work, nobody’s going to want to come home and read theory. It’s only for people who want to feel smart about art they don’t understand. In the end, the tedium is the message: aesthetic rigor mortis.

ZK: Who’s your favorite contemporary author, and why?

JT: My favorite living author is probably the English prose stylist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair. I like the way that he constructs sentences. But regrettably, I haven’t been reading much lately. I enjoyed Hans F. Wagner’s latest poetry collection, The Vegas Layer (which was published by a small press out of Colorado, Lithic Press, earlier this year). I picked it up in the same week that I finally bought a copy of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and found that Wagner’s collection delivered what I had been disappointed not to find in the Dorn book: a richly impressionistic evocation of the mysterious Western landscape.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

As Necessary as Cupcakes: An Interview with Rachel Trousdale

Photo by Nick Beauchamp

by Stephanie Burt

Rachel Trousdale is a poet and scholar; her critical studies to date include Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (Palgrave, 2010), as well as the essay anthology Humor in Modern American Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her debut full-length collection of poems, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem (Wesleyan University Press, $15.95), was selected by Robert Pinsky for Wesleyan University Press’s inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love, the entropic joys of parenthood, illness and grief, and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us and illuminate our most important relationships—whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. 

Stephanie Burt: Often your poems make me smile, or grin, or laugh; they make unserious, loving requests, or playful allusions, or absurd leaps. You’re known as a scholar and critic of humor in modern poetry. How does your scholarship on the topic speak to your poems that embody it?

Rachel Trousdale: My scholarship focuses on laughter that comes from fellow-feeling. While we can laugh for a thousand reasons—embarrassment, confusion, aggression—the laughter I’m most interested in comes when you suddenly recognize part of yourself in someone else. I’m also a big fan of the improvisational comic riff, which gains its humor from surprising variations on a theme; when this works, it can make a whole new pattern snap into shape. When my poems are funny, I hope it’s because they’re doing one of those things—not so much playing with comic incongruity as finding surprising congruences.

SB: In “Optics Lab,” you write, “That’s how you make sestinas—with a laser.” When and how do you see your own poems as made things, as craft objects? When and how do you see them as kinds of speech, as communication in time between persons, instead? Is there even a difference?

RT: I like to make things with my hands. I bake bread; I used to make pottery; I’ve recently started sewing. The purpose of baking bread is to nourish and to give pleasure, and even if I eat the whole loaf myself, the bread can achieve this goal—but it’s better when it’s shared, because if I give slices of bread to my kids and they slather them with butter and eat them, I get the additional pleasure of watching people I love enjoy the food, and the nourishment takes more forms.

It’s the same with poems. If I write a poem and am satisfied with it, that is probably because I’m happy with it as a made object: its parts fit together in a way I find pleasing. So in that sense, I think all my poems are craft objects, even if the “craft” elements are not always the kind of thing you’d talk about in, say, a craft class. But I’m happiest when the poem is also talking to someone who is not myself, whether that someone is a real-world reader or the ghosts reading over my shoulder. Of course, the best of all is when you get a response.

SB: Your life has led you to many places, and to more countries than most of us get to visit. How have those travels informed your approach to writing poems?

RT: One of the things travel teaches you is to question your premises. When you’re in an unfamiliar place, especially somewhere you don’t speak the language, questions as simple as “Where is the coffee?” and “How do I get a ride to this address?” can turn into research projects or philosophical enquiries. Did you know that building numbers in Tokyo are assigned by the order in which they were constructed within a given block, rather than by their relative locations? So the simple task of trying to get across town turns out to be a challenge to your sense of order and structure. I hope some of my poems do something similar.

SB: Your lovely and gentle“Self-Portrait as Noble Pen Shell” constitutes a response to which of the following: a. Keats’s “To Autumn”; b. Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus”; c. Marianne Moore’s “The Fish”; d. William Carlos Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital”; e. Come off it, Stephanie! Please select one and only one answer. Explain the reasons for your choice.

RT: The answer is absolutely B, which stands for Bizarre, because it is bizarre to write a response to “The Paper Nautilus” that (on the surface) lacks mothers and children. But they’re both about protecting something fragile, and the threat of starvation, and hope.

SB: Works for me. What’s the difference between writing (and revising) a prose poem and a lineated poem? Do their shapes work, for you, in different ways? How do you know when a prose poem is finished?

RT: There’s no room for talkiness in a prose poem, because if you let extra words in, it starts behaving like regular prose. And you don’t have the luxury of line breaks as a way to build in surprises and double meanings, so you have to make the most of other opportunities for multiplicity. I find prose poems much harder to write and am somewhat surprised to discover how many I’ve written, because you can’t depend on the form to keep your focus.

SB: Some humor sounds Jewish. Some Jews sound humorous. Almost all Jews have a humerus. You and I identify as Jewish. Does some of your humor, to you, sound Jewish? Or Jewish American?

RT: My sense of humor is probably the most Jewish thing about me. I learned to love puns, irony, comic critique, and playful rhyme from family members like my songwriter uncle John Meyer, from Sondheim and Gershwin lyrics, and from the inspired, anti-authoritarian nonsense of the Marx Brothers. “Old Joke” in particular isn’t just a Jewish poem, it’s a New York Jewish poem. But as with the Marx Brothers, you don’t have to be Jewish to get the jokes; what I think of as the Jewishness of my humor isn’t a set of references so much as a set of comic techniques—particularly the ironic deflation of pretense and the free-associative crescendo.

SB: Your astonishing and generous “Syllabus” constitutes a response to which of the following: a. The dearth of poems about raising and caring for more than one child; b. Robert Frost’s “Directive”; c. Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; d. The emotional challenge of raising children during the reign of our current Mad King; e. That Robert Hass poem with the blackberries that absolutely everyone used to read until we got tired of it (complimentary);  f. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s “The Palace-Burner.” Please select only one answer, and please justify your choice.

RT: The letters b and d are mirror images of each other, so if I choose one, the other is implied. When “Directive” walks you up the mountainside, it’s walking you backwards, past all those slowly closing cellar-holes, to a lost play house. In “Syllabus,” my little family of four is all walking together away from the house, the rest of the way up the hill, to learn the names of things and what you can eat. “Directive” is about nostalgia, looking back to the children; “Syllabus” is—I hope—about looking forward, with the children, toward a future where we will have to know far too much about Mad Kings but where there will also be blackberries.

SB: Well now I’m alarmed, since Robert Frost’s “Directive” is the scariest poem in the American language: dude wants to kill us. You, however, can save some of us! No, really, you can. Please don’t feel you should have to justify anything in the following answer, but can you talk about justifications, defenses of poetry, and the moral charge (or lack of it) underlying your delightful verse and prose?

RT: Some time in the fall of 2020, after the summer of shutdowns, the small bakery near our house reopened, and we were able to go in again and buy cupcakes. It completely changed my relationship with art and what art is for. My spouse and I had spent the previous few months holding on by our teeth, working full-time jobs from home with no childcare for our preschool-aged children and worrying about our elderly parents. And now here was a tiny transaction we could make, in person, that resulted in pure, unambiguous pleasure. It was the best thing to happen to us for months. And I thought: I want my poems to do this for people—I want to make moments of definite happiness. Because joy isn’t trivial, even if the things that make it can seem silly. Good poems aren’t all cheerful, and they mostly don’t have rainbow sprinkles on top, but they are just as necessary and important as cupcakes.

SB: Most of your references in Five-Paragraph Essay speak to the sort of literature you might expect an English department to teach, from King Lear to Robert Frost and WCW. You’ve also read a great deal of non-realist fiction, including work in (or else adapted from) Russian literature as well as folk and fairy tales. Do any of those kinds of writing and storytelling influence these poems in ways that we might not see?

RT: It’s funny—when you asked about Moore earlier, it made me realize that many of the overt Norton Anthology-style references in this book are to poets I want to argue with. I’ve been tempted to offer a prize to the first student who correctly identifies the three obvious Shelley references in the book. (The prize is homemade brownies. Email me. Undergraduates only.) But Shelley isn’t one of the poets whose books I open when I read for pleasure or company—he’s part of the Big Intellectual History that goes into the classes I teach—whereas Keats is much harder to find in my book, although his poems are the ones I actually recite to myself for comfort at the dentist. No one has influenced my work more than Moore, but her presence is less obvious.  

And yes, I read non-realist fiction of many stripes, including Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrew Lang’s rainbow of fairy books. Rushdie and Bulgakov, for me, perform some of the same transformative associative leaps I admire in the Marx Brothers, or in the poetry of Harryette Mullen—creating patterns which combine long-established meanings and references on the one hand with the fruits of coincidence on the other. And, as a counterweight, a fair amount of science writing: Oliver Sacks, or Einstein’s general-audience book on relativity, which, despite their totally different content, sometimes follow a similar process of discovery.

SB: What’s the best Andrew Lang fairy book? Or the right first one for people who never got given Girls’ Books when we were girls? Your magnificent and open-ended “Narrative of the Tribal Bard” responds to which of the following: a. Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”; b. Kenneth Koch’s “Mending Sump”; c. Recent scholarship on the high intelligence and social behavior of crows; d. Watership Down; e. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls”; f. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Five Ways to Forgiveness. Please do NOT try to justify your choice.

RT: None of the above: “Narrative of the Tribal Bard” is a direct translation from the cawing of the crows in my yard. I should probably have disclosed in the notes that I don’t actually speak Caw and am working entirely from Corvo’s New Standard Caw-English Dictionary, but I think I’ve captured the essence.

SB: I’m not going to trust any dictionary compiled by Baron Corvo, but OK. Your pentameters and your Sapphics sound fluently conversational, and your free verse (like Bishop’s, Hayes’s, MacNeice’s) plays off against the background of the pentameter. Can you tell us something about your metrics, or about your relationship to received metres?

RT: The first poems I wrote were all strictly metrical, and like a lot of us, I find meter useful in part because it reminds me to find the right word. I’m glad I didn’t start by writing free verse, because the years I spent writing only in meter helped me learn to concentrate. But that’s an answer about meter as method of composition, as opposed to meter as a formal element of poetry.

SB: You get to spend the next six months anywhere on Earth, so you can write your next book of poems there. You can’t take your kids or loved ones, but they will not know you’re gone, due to faerie time distortion; you’ll get back home, from their perspective, just two days after you left, so it’s not irresponsible to go, and you don’t have to pick your location with their welfare in mind. Where do you go, and why? How does the site affect the poems you write next?

RT: Fortunately, faerie time distortion also distorts space, which means I can find an isolated mountain cabin within twenty minutes’ walk of a major research library. I would like to go there, please. I will arrive with a clear proposal for a manuscript about the local birds’ foraging behavior, but when the six months are up I’ll discover that instead I’ve written a series of love poems to my absent family in the form of a medieval recipe book featuring ingredients I was able to raise in the little garden behind the cabin.

SB: Sometimes I think you and I share tastes and preferences and then I run into an answer like that, which reminds me that even our close friends contain Bizarre Hidden Depths. Watch out for Robert Frost, who might be hiding in the sugar bushes. What’s in the recipe book? More seriously, or perhaps less seriously: What’s next for your poetry?

RT: I’ve been working on a sequence of poems giving the answers to questions asked of an imaginary advice column. Just the answers, not the questions. Galileo writes in for help, and several characters from fairy tales. One of the poems, “Dear Ilsabil,” made it into Five-Paragraph Essay, but I think the rest may want to be a chapbook, or the skeletal system of a longer manuscript. But more generally, I want to write things I haven’t read yet.

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One Dreams of Place: An Interview with Esther Lin

Photo by Antonius-Tín Bui

by Tiffany Troy

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. Her debut collection Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, $24.95) is the winner of the 2023 Alice James Award. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and her poem “French Sentence” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been selected for numerous prizes, anthologies, and fellowships; most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. With Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Janine Joseph, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

Cold Thief Place begins in the dark of night, where the threat of deportation is existential for a child-speaker who is both beguiled by and terrified of the Prophet. Through tales historical and fantastical (from sources as variegated as the Chinese Revolution on one side of the speaker’s family and migration from Taiwan first to Brazil and then to the United States on the other), and drawing insight from texts ranging from Madame Bovary to “a book about dragons,” Lin shows her readers how humanity isn’t defined by what documents a person carries or the status they signify. Instead, in the chiaroscuro of the three-train transfer to the Met Cloisters, we find “a more perfect whole / enclosing // gardens laid by scholars of tapestry / and stained glass and the poetry of flowers // and inside one of these / a tree.” Cold Thief Place teaches us that place isn’t what we own but an emotional sphere that we dream to obtain.

Tiffany Troy: The opening poem, which is also the title poem, begins by comparing knowledge of imminent deportation to a kind of religious damnation (“he said my soul as well / as my body could suffer”). There is unknowing and mystery—the fragment “Offering me what I love best” lacks a subject—before the final movement towards the bureaucratic precision of a name and date of birth. How does this poem set up the rest of the collection?

Esther Lin: “Cold Thief Place” showcases the book’s central themes of fear and instability—both bodily, in the fear of deportation, and metaphysical, in fear of the Christian hell. But I should clarify that the metaphysical fear was not metaphorical; it felt real. Now that I’ve had some time away from the book, I see that the characters of the speaker and her family (not uncoincidentally, me and my family) lived in multiple rings of fire, some of their own making. No one demanded that my mother convert to a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which increased the danger I felt as an undocumented child far more than it created any sense of community. I think “Cold Thief Place” speaks to that vulnerability a child experiences, when no adult seems entirely reliable.

TT: Poems like “The Ghost Wife” or “Attachment Theory” challenge the child’s belief in her own worthlessness (or worthiness by lineage) and the age-old wisdom that before marriage “you are simply / one without a story” in the richness of hell, which is conflated with a sense of statelessness. Place, then, becomes an emotional state, reflecting hunger, non-belonging, and silencing. Can you speak to the organizational principle in the overall structure of the collection, particularly how time functions in developing the family at the heart of the collection?

EL: I wish my answer would reveal the beautiful orchestration I devoted to this book, how I composed a symphony in three movements. But my decisions were practical. Because the same characters appear throughout the book, I wanted to introduce them as a novelist or playwright would their characters. The poem “The Ghost Wife” was handy in presenting the father, the sister, and the death of the mother, so it came early in the collection. I wanted to bring in the husband early to draw parallels between the speaker’s and mother’s lives, since they both use marriage to claim nationhood—one in the U.S. and the other in Brazil.

I’m a restless reader, so even when I dwell happily in a poem, a part of me is already looking for a shift of some kind: a new dimension that heralds what else the poet can show me. After a handful of poems, I want to disrupt what that handful has established—a short lyric poem if the previous were lengthy; a different tone; another perspective. This way, the reading experience feels alive and dynamic, I hope.

The one intentional bit of orchestration was to not break the book in sections. There are so many elements to my complicated life, moving in tandem, that to separate poems by a restful white page seemed disingenuous. The white page is a place of pleasant nothing. Place is very difficult for an undocumented immigrant. One dreams of place as a solid, immutable thing, although it’s simply not true. Place is emotional. And when the place called home doesn’t feel like home, or the place that feels like home is not acknowledged as home, one lives with a fundamental disconnect.

TT: In thinking about my favorite writers from a place, I found that really what I’m drawn to is writers writing from a particular sensibility, one drawn from their struggles being from nowhere, whether that’s an ethnic enclave or not. In Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang, for instance, you’ll find this concentrated dose of energy in a mantou or in the Chinatown sweatshop. How do you feel this desire to concurrently escape and belong finds its place in your work, and how do you root your readers (or your characters) in place?

EL: The most significant geographical place for me is not my birth country, Brazil, or China, which my parents defected from. It’s the New York City borough of Queens. My feelings remain complicated about the sanctuary Queens has been for many undocumented New Yorkers because it’s also where my most difficult memories reside. In my second book, I probably write more about place as an entity—Queens and parts of France. Leaving the U.S. on my own for the first time gave me the fresh perspective I desperately needed. In Cold Thief Place, Queens is perhaps less visible because it is so up close, but my speaker is still very much bound to it, like a ghost.

Place is tricky. I’m not sure I’ve cracked the code on it.

TT: The speaker in Cold Thief Place turns to various texts, such as science fiction novels and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as a counterpart to her mother’s almost austere but simultaneously expressive form of evangelical devotion. How does fiction operate in the protagonist’s mind, and how do you as the poet complicate the world where the archvillain is grander but also so much bigger than the speaker?

EL: I love this question because I love the novel. A year after my mother died, I read Madame Bovary, and I experienced for the first time some empathy for her in the character of Emma. Emma was trapped in her marriage, station, and little town, and she struggled wildly for more than was her due. Empathy! Such a difficult imaginative leap between a daughter and mother. It allowed me to write “Up the Mountains Down the Fields” and “Wuping, 1969,” wherein my mother was the heroine of her own story. I felt closer to her, yet perversely, the closer I felt, the more unknowable she grew. Having written these poems of her youth, I was at greater ease writing poems in which she appears as a force of pure violence, striking children and destroying books. I hope Cold Thief Place provides a complicated portrait, one that neither demonizes nor absolves.

TT: What you said recalls these lines from “Attachment Theory”:

                           How to

hurt a person in the way
they allow. Every person allows
for it, sooner or later. My mother

was my first.

How does the paradox of closeness and unknowability pan out in the collection as you reimagine other family members in their historical contexts and/or as they approach old age?

EL: It seems to me that one of the tragedies of our existence is that our life spans are long enough—if you’re lucky—to see the tail end of your grandparents’ lives and for them to see you as a baby. It is truly rare for someone to get to know their grandparents as people. As for parents, I wish I could see mine now that I understand them better emotionally. That the people closest to you, like your parents, are unlikely to be in more than half your life. What can I do besides acknowledge that paradox? Yes, we need time away from our parents to understand them better within the historical moment they came of age. I suppose this is why I write the poems; I can talk to them in some way.

TT: I’d like to talk about how your poems work on a micro level, on the level of craft. It seems to me you really work the syntax of your sentences carefully to create particular modes of thought: paranoia, shame, fear, ambivalence, and attachment, to name a few. Break it down for us: How might you encourage other poets to use syntax in this way?

EL: Regarding syntax in poetry, I suppose I would encourage syntactically complex sentences on drafting, and then as one begins wrapping those sentences around lines—I’m thinking of how one wraps a large room in wallpaper—to simplify, simplify that syntax. Poetry enjoys but does not demand pyrotechnic sentence structures, because the line break adds nuance, emotion, direction, and music to each phrase. Probably the longest sentence in Cold Thief Place is from “Winter”:

In order to see my first
pear tree

I took three trains

to a cloister shipped stone by stone
from Spain to Washington Heights,

then reconstructed to a more perfect whole
enclosing

gardens laid by scholars of tapestry
and stained glass and the poetry of flowers,

and inside one of these
a tree. 

This sentence’s task was simple—to compel the reader to forget about the pear tree after the first couplet until it returns in the final line. It’s by no means a complicated sentence, but with white space, I think it achieves this small goal. The sentence travels away from the natural world to list human-made objects: trains, industry, scholarship, stained glass, and the meanings we imbue on the natural world via language. Similarly, the regularity of the (mostly) couplets encourages a sense of order, an embroidering of beauty.

Repetition, on the other hand, can heighten all those dark things you name—paranoia, shame, fear—and I try to use it toward that end. I closed “Done Right,” for example, with the lines “A note has been made. / A note has been made.” I think the repetition there increases the paranoia of a surprise visitation from Homeland Security. It also alludes to the repetitiveness of the immigration process in the U.S., a bureaucratic Gordian knot that requires many forms bearing the same questions over and over, which must be received by various agencies at precisely the right times. Repetition is one of my favorite devices.

TT: There are registers of language and forms of language, and then there are the differences between or among languages. How does the presence of languages inform your collection?

EL: I don’t think about their presence much; languages besides English should be a given in any poetry, and not just poetry by immigrants. Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka, Paisley Rekdal. Why not? A non-English verse that suddenly springs up in the field of an English poem adds texture and vitality, and Chinese characters do a lovely job of resonating against all these Roman letters. I’m worried someone will accuse me of using Chinese as decoration in my poetry, but I speak with the might of the one language that may eclipse American English soon. In any case, one Chinese character in a sea of English—as it appears in one of my poems—is a pretty good image of my own language skills.

TT: The code-switching felt authentic to me, having grown up in an ethnic enclave as you did, especially as conversational Chinese often differs from reading Chinese characters. I wanted to turn next what you told me once, which was that best poems hurt—and your poems really touched me in articulating what is typically brushed beneath the carpet as the “norm.” How did your vision for Cold Thief Place begin to take root, and what was the writing process like for you? Do you have any tips for aspiring writers who are approaching their family stories in lyric form?

EL: I struggled with the fact that there is so much event in the book: my mother’s life during the Cultural Revolution, my father’s journey to the West, their deaths, my being undocumented, my marriage . . . It seems like a soap opera. But if I could live it, then surely I could harness the energy around these events to make a shapely book, right? Forgive this platitude: as I wrote, I listened. I noticed that the more direct and plainspoken my language, the stronger the poem. I learned not to rest on metaphor or surrealism; they seemed to evoke too much the comfort of beauty, and the poems were stronger if they comforted no one. Ultimately an aesthetic of severity and starkness guided me through to the end of the book.

TT: In a similar vein, what was the research process like in piecing together the lives of your parents? How did you compress or select the highlights from events and harness their energy?

EL: Most of the stories in Cold Thief Place were what my father shared with me. He was a twinkle-eyed storyteller who specialized in monologues that swept from the T’ang Dynasty to the American occupation of Afghanistan, connecting them by folklore of the Silk Road. You needed some stamina to listen to all two hours of it, but it was marvelous. He gave me so many poems. “For My Father the West Begins in Africa” is an almost direct lift of a conversation I had the foresight to record. All the poems I wrote about my mother’s experience in the Cultural Revolution were what he shared with me—my mother rarely talked about her past. Besides my father, I am lucky that my mother’s niece is close with me and my siblings, and that she was willing to give me some dirt!

I like to think of these poems as a continuation of that oral history—my father’s stories, my cousin’s stories—with the energy of confidence, of sharing of secrets. Very helpful for a lyric poem, which demands an editorial point of view.

TT: Who are some poets who inspired you in the writing of Cold Thief Place? How do you pay it forward as a co-founder of Undocupoets, which recently helped spearhead Here to Stay (Harper Perennial, 2024), an anthology of current and former undocumented poets?

EL: I just wrote an essay about how sitting in a workshop with another undocumented poet liberated me to write openly about my status. A lot of the poems in the book arose from the happy coincidence that Eavan Boland invited Javier Zamora and me into the Stegner Fellowship in overlapping years. I don’t think she knew I was undocumented, so it was a pure coincidence! I had just met Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, too, so my world seemed suddenly more generous, more peopled, less lonely. My art transformed.

I hope that the anthology does the same for other undocumented writers—that we can act as a lightning rod for the attention that they are perhaps nervous about. So that they know there is community waiting for them.

TT: What are you working on now?

EL: I’m trying my hand at ambivalent love poems. Because I’m ambivalent, I don’t know if any of them are worthwhile. I am impatient with love poems—the evocations of rapture, betrayal, and sorrow don’t move me much. Lately what I want is the sort of perversity that Plath, Bidart, and Henri Cole are masters of. I suffer; I hate; I want to humiliate—why not remind my reader what a thrill those emotions are?

TT: We the readers stand ready to be enthralled by your next collection. Do you have any closing thoughts to share with readers?

EL: Lately I’ve been thinking about how New Criticism may have quashed the love of poetry in high school English classes—when I was a student and probably for generations before. When I talk to non-poetry readers about poetry, they reflect on how they despised seeking symbolism or hallmarks of formal unity in the poems they were assigned. A poem presented a scavenger hunt so esoteric that readers walked away feeling stupid, rather than enlivened or curious. How devastating. Perhaps creative writing’s last few decades of popularity have come about due to students trying to find their way back into poetry—if not to write it professionally, then to take pleasure in it.

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Ecstatic Mundane: An Interview with Elaine Equi

by Jim Feast

A mainstay of the New York literary scene since the late 1980s, Elaine Equi is known as a writer of aphoristic wit, philosophical depth, and visual precision. Her many books include Voice-Over (1999), which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems (2007), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain (2015), all published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and in many editions of The Best American Poetry, for which she served as guest editor in 2023. In 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Equi has always been fascinated by how the consumer products we live among form ties with the self. In The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), for example, discussing her mother’s scent bottles in “Perfume Dioramas,” she links family memories to these store-bought items, deepening both. In Equi’s latest book, Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press, $18), her fascination continues, but here the products are more often connected to fantasies—as in “Maple,” where observation of a bottle of syrup leads to a vivid daydream of vampires. Few other writers have so gleefully and trenchantly examined the commodification of everyday life.  

     

Jim Feast: In poetry, the notion that we should appreciate the simple things in life has become something of a cliché, but you take this theme in new directions, working at times straightforwardly and at others ironically. In “I Saw Delight,” for example, you describe walking after a rain shower with extraordinary precision: “The shadows were dark and luxurious / beneath silver trestles of light.” My sense is that you put great pressure on words to capture the everyday, using terms that are suitable yet never expected. Does that sound true?

Elaine Equi: I’m happy you started with this poem, because it’s an unusual one. It’s true I often do write about mundane things and everyday life, but I think of this particular piece as being the record of a real vision—a true moment of illumination. It came about as the result of my drinking a cocktail made from several different gem elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body and energy field. Gem elixirs are small bottles of water or alcohol in which different stones or flowers have been steeped in order to charge them with their essence. You can buy them online or in some health food stores. I’m not an expert by any means, but the idea of them appeals to my imagination. Their effects on me are usually subtle, but on this occasion, they were quite dramatic—almost psychedelic. When I stepped outside my front door, I swear I could see light traveling. As I say in the poem,

I saw a woman carrying the trophy of a gold balloon,
letting it bounce lightly above her head—
her thoughts golden.

Someone else was walking a diamond dog.
Each of its hairs was polished to perfection.

From every object, prisms of paths opened.

I was ecstatic. Of course, when I tried the experiment again, it wasn’t the same—not even close. The title “I Saw Delight” is a one-line poem by Robert Creeley called “Homage to Hank Williams,” a play on Williams’s famous spiritual song “I Saw the Light.”

JF: Another way you handle the quotidian is to mention one of life’s small pleasures and then use it as a springboard into magnificent whimsy. An example is “Maple,” which begins with a deft description of “its high-pitched sweetness,” but then segues into a lurid territory where in a dream vision you are swigging syrup, saying, “I am drinking the blood of the forest.” Can you talk about creating these flights of fancy?

EE: I’m often influenced by writers of short prose works that have a dark, fantastic, or satiric side. Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen is tattooed on my heart. I’ve taught and read it many times. I’m also thinking here of Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms, and Robert Walser’s quirky sketches. From all the above, I’ve studied the art of making absurd statements with a straight face and matter of fact tone. In the poem you mention, I found it funny to treat maple syrup as a dangerous substance. I was exaggerating but not all that much; I do find maple hard to resist. Plus, I like the idea of using its sweetness to mask a hidden wild or aggressive nature.

JF: Both these strategies of dealing with the everyday could be considered labors that bring poetry closer to the real. Alain Badiou says that to reach the real, “there is an art of rarefaction, an art of obtaining the subtlest and most durable results, not through an aggressive posture with regard to inherited forms, but through arrangements that place these forms at the edge of the void, in a network of cuts and disappearances.”[i] Could you talk about your approach to the real?

EE: That’s an interesting quote by Badiou. I don’t think I come close to “the edge of the void” in my poems. I do try to use very precise and vivid language, and often focus intensely on a simple subject, maybe to create a sense of the hyper-real. One of the things I like about photography is how it shows you a very different aspect of what you think you’re seeing. I’m also a fan of the sur-real, a reality that encompasses dreams, the irrational, the unconscious. Is there just one “real” with different levels? I’m not sure, but I think that as a writer, whether you’re committed to absolute realism or pure fantasy, the real is something you can’t avoid. You can use language to explore and engage with it, but I don’t know that you can ever come close to actually describing or representing it, even in purely mathematical terms. It’s bigger than that. When I write, I feel, or perhaps imagine, that I can sense the real as a kind of gravity or pull. It’s the page beneath the page.

JF: Your ability to discern effervescent qualities of ordinary reality is often used to examine slight objects to which most people would offer little attention. In your previous collection The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019), poems such as “Monogrammed Aspirin” and “Still Life with Radish” did this too. Can you discuss your communion with things?

EE: Objects have always been one of my favorite subjects. When I first began writing, I was an avid reader of the French poet Francis Ponge. He wrote almost exclusively about objects. He had a book called Things and another one called More Things, and another called Soap, which was all about soap. As a tribute to him, I named one of my early chapbooks Friendship with Things. I also had a full-length collection inspired by his work, called The Cloud of Knowable Things (Coffee House Press, 2003).

Not surprisingly, I was also a fan of William Carlos Williams—and of all the Objectivist poets. They gave me a way to think of the poem itself as an object—“a small machine made of words”—and to see words themselves as objects.

We’re now so used to digital and virtual realities that real things seem a bit dated. As I say in the poem you mention from my previous book, “These days, all objects are antiques.” In my new book, I was pleased to find a way to write about mental states as if they were objects—I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner. In the poem “Emotions: A Boxed Set,” for example, I write about the heebie-jeebies as “the kind of tail-in-socket anxiety / that plugs directly into the body— / manifesting in myriad symptoms of dis-ease.”

JF: When you were going to school and growing up as a poet, Chicago had a bustling and distinctive poetry/arts scene. How did that milieu influence your work?

EE: I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather have studied poetry than Columbia College in Chicago—it was a fun, loose, and creative place in the ’70s. It had an excellent film and photography department, and in creative writing, they had just hired an exciting poet, Paul Hoover, to replace Bill Knott. Paul and his then wife, Maxine Chernoff, edited a very cool magazine called Oink! They knew everybody and were really plugged into contemporary poetics from the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain, fresh takes on surrealism, and beyond. I was in heaven. Every semester I’d sign up for an independent study with Paul just so I could hang out with him and Maxine in their Rogers Park apartment, peruse their bookshelves, and discuss goings on in the poetry world.

Shortly after graduating, I met up with another young poet, Jerome Sala, known for reciting his work to growing numbers of enthusiastic fans in a punk bar called La Mere Viper. By then, I had published my first chapbook, Federal Woman. We each had a glimmer of reputation and the desire to do something out of the ordinary (maybe a tad more flamboyant) with our writing, so we started reading together, mostly in bars and art galleries. It didn’t hurt that we were wildly attracted to each other, too. We had good chemistry off stage and on. Our events were more like parties; sometimes they involved bands, and people you wouldn’t necessarily think would enjoy poetry would show up. You could call us performance poets—we did perform our poems, but we were also performing the idea of poet-ness, often in a satiric way, inventing our identities as we went along. Everything we did had a DIY quality. We’d spend hours combing thrift stores for just the right retro fashions. What I remember most is that the arts were not so separate then—there was much more overlapping between different scenes. Partly it was the times, but it was also something Jerome and I cultivated by exploring the idea of a poetry that could be entertaining and appeal to non-poets.

JF: Earlier you mentioned trying “elixirs designed to increase the flow of light into your body.” This ties in with the poem “My Mother And I Send Each Other Circles,” where we learn that when your speaker talks on the phone with mother, “We telepathically juggle globes of color.” Both seem like nurturing forms of practice, but I wonder if you are working from a particular spiritual framework—or if, like a bricoleur, you are putting together different customs that seem to work together.

EE: I credit my maternal grandmother and my mother—Out of the Blank is dedicated to both—for giving me a deep appreciation of magic, the metaphysical, and the occult. But it was never connected to a particular tradition, and it certainly wasn’t formal. The spirit of our investigations was more like an imaginative game. My grandmother had a lot of superstitions. She also told good ghost stories and was really into Greek and Roman mythology. My mom and I liked to read horoscopes and tarot. We used to drink tea and do our cards as a ritual after I got home from school.

When I moved to New York, we’d talk on the phone a lot, and we came up with the idea of sending each other circles of different colored light before hanging up. It was mostly done as a fun way to liven up our conversations. What I especially like about this poem is how it captures, almost word for word, exactly what we’d say. Another poem later in the book, “My Mother Dreams of Dying,” is entirely in her voice. I didn’t add anything to this amazing dream she had told me about, also over the phone.

JF: You usually have a number of short poems in your books, and Out of the Blank is no exception; maybe there are even more in it than usual. What is it about them that appeals to you?

EE: Formally, I’ve always been drawn to compression and tend to write shorter poems with short-ish lines. Like one of my all-time favorite writers, Lorine Niedecker, says in “Poet’s work”: “I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery.” I remember, when I first came upon her work, feeling a sense of joyful recognition, almost as if we were related. I identified with her—here was a Midwestern woman poet who came from a more working-class background and who valued brevity. Her poems are so lucid—simple yet subtle and nuanced.

Other writers who have dazzled me with their ability to do more with fewer words would have to include Robert Creeley, Charles Reznikoff (there’s a poem for him in the book called “C.R.”), Joe Brainard, Tom Clark (there’s a poem for him in the book called “T as in Taut”), Aram Saroyan, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, to name just a few.

To return again to photography, another passion of mine, I think of short poems as being able to zoom in like a telephoto lens and create a close-up of a few words. If they were buried in a longer line, you might not notice the tension or vibration between them as much. Take, for example, my poem “Goblet”; it lets you taste or swirl the shifting sounds as if you were sipping a glass of wine:

my grape       my globe      my gape

my glazed     my glare      my grimace

my glint        my grant      my giant

my goose      my gravy      my grail

I don’t always write such compact things, but even in pieces with more syntax, I try to boil down my ideas to make them more concentrated, as in this next poem:

The Marrow

Of a poem.

Meat of meaning

that travels with Bashō
the narrow road—

network of veins
leading to leaf-lip.

Magnetic pull
of green-blooded words.

Actually, there is no short answer to why I find short poems endlessly fascinating. I just do.

[i] Badiou, Alain, The Century (Polity Press, 2007); English translation by Alberto Toscano.

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