30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015
A Very Good Year for Some Very Good Poets
This year Literary Hub asked over 30 poets who published books in 2015 (or more exactly, between December 2014 and December 2015) to tell us about their debuts, which as any author will know is an incomparably special moment at the end of an inexorably laborious process. Their answers and collections reveal the enormous vitality and diversity of contemporary poetry—and while these debuts (from indie, small and big presses) showcase a diversity of identity, style and subject matter, it cannot be forgotten that there are many debut poetry titles not on this list, such as Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, this year’s winner of the National Book Awards in poetry.
Nikki Wallschlaeger, Houses (Horse Less Press)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
Psychological horror. Black horror filmmaking is a genre that is underrepresented. After all we’ve/I’ve been through, I feel that Black directors, especially Black women, have collected enough terror to be able to create profound stories for the screen. I would co-direct it with Sade Murphy because she gets me.
Emily Hunt, Dark Green (The Song Cave)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Dark Green was inspired by many years of reading and recording observations, along with an interest-in-being and struggle-to-be fully alive during a stretch of time impacted by ruptures that occurred long before I wrote the book. I needed to speak about confusing, frightening things that had happened and their residual effects while registering beautiful and mundane elements of my present. I was energized by poems that showed me this was possible, by writers who demonstrated that plain, direct statements and strange phrases are powerful mechanisms for communicating honestly. The lyric’s use of compression, sound, and refreshed connotation/association line to line resonated with me, as did narrative poems that achieved a living mixture of sensations through the arrangement of small events, observations, and exchanges.
Endless combinations and repetitions of visual material—plants, windows, dogs, fish, air conditioning units, corn, Hyundais, fences, dragonflies, paint, snow, etc—that I encountered on walks, drives, runs, bike rides, bus rides, and subway rides sparked many of the poems too. Moving from New York to Northampton to San Francisco, always with a backdrop of Atlanta (where I grew up) on my mind, shaped the various landscapes, speeds, textures, and forms.
Rickey Laurentiis, Boy with Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
I imagine it would be less a “film” as much as a kind of fluid collage of images, soundscapes and shapes, more sculptor approaching the moving image than filmmaker. I keep thinking of Kara Walker’s dark silhouettes as a possible model, but even less narrative, less “human.” The image I chose for my cover gives a clue: it’s one of Glenn Ligon’s “Stranger” paintings, in which he abstracts a given passage from James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” until the words themselves become literal texture and grow strange. I knew I did not want anything directly figurative: no boys, certainly no thorns, but rather a kind of suggestion of motion, shadows, sort of like what occurs in a unknown, dark room before one’s eyes adjust: you can make out something in the distance, maybe a body, maybe two, maybe none at all, but vision won’t allow you to see it precisely. So, for a moment, it could be anything. I see a “film” of my book taking that technique, with again certain sounds that may more fully ground it in the landscapes the book explores: the black body speaking, sounds of embrace (queer), sounds of rupture (queer), the South speaking, New Orleans specifically, birds, the absence of birds, and the silence/noise of water that potentially erases all of these other sounds, violently, like a storm surge. If someone came from viewing such a film slightly dizzy that would probably be a good thing, I think. I almost think.
Sheila Squillante, Beautiful Nerve (Tiny Hardcore Press)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I tell everyone this is an anxious book that reflects its anxious author. Anxieties arise from bodily disorientation and breakdown, recurring dreams and fears that go with them, misunderstandings and missed understandings (if you see the difference) between people—lovers, others. The collection is braided with these things. You can find them. I am a motif seeker in life as in poems. I search for the recurring note, and then listen for to it change, slightly bent, askew. This brings me much pleasure. I prefer the lateral, the peripheral, the sidelong. As Suzanne Vega said in 1987, “if you want me, you can find me left of center, off of the strip. In the outskirts, in the fringes, in the corner out of the grip.”
J. Mae Barizo, The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Maps. Wounds. Mornings. Cities. I’m very interested in Italo Calvino’s idea of “continuous cities.” Calvino suggested that there is one continuous city that doesn’t begin or end: “only the name of the airport changes.” The poems in The Cumulus Effect were written in various locations: Berlin, Saint Petersburg, New York. They explore how the intersections between geography and memory weave a kind of personal, unavoidable history. The poems themselves are not about the city per se; they explore the blue of distance, seduction of place, the aftermath of desire. All of the poems are untitled, and the book’s structure alludes to “method of loci” or “memory palace,” the ancient mnemonic technique of spatial memorization. For me, the concept of “The Cumulus Effect” explores a loss or orientation, condensation of remembered spaces. Like the erratic sky of the book’s title, the poems set on the page a complex topography of the body, forever en route.
Amish Trivedi, Sound/Chest (Coven Press)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
I am trying to think of a director who does really isolated, quiet movies, with an impending sense of doom and I keep thinking of Bergman. In so many of his films, we know the things coming, but it’s the journey, the idea that some level of thinking and meditating can help with this crisis that cannot help but arrive. The characters in his world are always in their own heads. There are external stimuli affecting the characters, of course, but thoughts are dealt with primarily, something I feel Bergman does better than most filmmakers. Sound/Chest is in the head, in a lot of ways: the dwellings of the “I” in this space, the motions one goes through automatically in order to cope, or worse, maybe avoid coping.
Sound/Chest as a film would have basically no dialogue. Maybe the main character would be whistling while wandering around the library, belying the terror that approaches from without. They shelve books that no one will ever read again. Life continues in this space, but it will not continue for our main character, busying themselves with the mundane tasks that we take for granted not only in society but also in moments of crisis.
Lynn Marie Houston, The Clever Dream of Man (Aldrich Press)
What was the process like between writing these poems and finding your eventual publisher?
The Clever Dream of Man was a product of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute where I had a manuscript review with Arisa White. I handed her what I feared was a random collection of pages—essentially all the poems I wasn’t afraid to show someone. I expected her to say, as other participants had heard, that what was there was not united by a common theme. Instead, she talked to me about the collection’s global theme of my relationships with men and the sub-themes of adultery, death, and betrayal. After receiving her input, I divided the book into three parts: poems about family, friends, and lovers. The third section is where most of the adultery-themed poems are housed, based on a relationship with a man I met in college and reconnected with via social media many years later. My grief after that relationship ended was inspiration to take my work to a higher level, to take more risks as a poet (and eventually what led me to a deeper commitment to writing and a fellowship to attend the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University). Generally, I think that the “relationship poem” does not get the respect it should as a genre. After all, diplomacy failures at international levels have essentially the same dynamics as break-ups. They are both about the jealousy, empathic shortcomings, and ego-drive of human nature.
Only a handful of poems in this collection had not been published, so I was surprised when it took me about 6 months to get a positive response from a publisher. What I realized in sending out this manuscript is that there is more good poetry out there than there are presses to publish it. And so I started a small publishing company, Five Oaks Press, specializing in poetry and literary fiction. I’m delighted that my experience of rejection in sending out what is now a successfully published first book prompted me to offer a publication venue for other writers. I’ve since had the great joy of helping to bring into the print world some very fine writing.
Oliver Bendorf, The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
I think it would be a Wes Anderson film. It’s a little bit of Moonrise Kingdom, except mostly in the Midwest and North Woods instead of the fictitious New England-y New Penzance Island, and if Sam Shakusky is in his twenties instead of twelve, oh, and also if he is transgender, but in both there is a trying toward becoming a man, and the whimsy and yearning feels similar, and the world-making and also a kind of sad confusion between childhood and adulthood. I actually went as Sam Shakusky for Halloween while I was working on the book. I had everything already for the costume, basically. So maybe that answers the question for me. What Wes Anderson does with the tension between childlike innocence and adult desires resonates a lot with what spills out into the book, and what I think my poems track about the violence and the tenderness involved with a speaker who is a girl becoming a man but wishes to remain a boy.
Sarah Blake, Mr. West (Wesleyan University Press)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Kanye West: His music. His music videos. His comments in public, on the radio, to reporters, at his concerts. His concerts. His desire and his drive. His knowledge. His pursuit of success in the fashion world too. His 2002 car accident. His love for his mother. Donda West. An English professor. Her son’s manager. Her love for her son. My son. My pregnancy. Nausea. The weekly reports on baby size and features. The display of my changing body in the mirror. Giving birth. Becoming a mother.
Hip-hop: “Dying Nation” by CunninLynguists. “In the Ghetto” by Busta Rhymes. “Culture of Terrorism” by Capital D. “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West. The way I am outside of these songs as white, as a woman, as Jewish, but they are what I want to listen to. The way I feel inside of these songs and hundreds of others. The way they change how I live inside America.
The media: The media I’ve avoided all my life. The media that is so necessary, and yet. And yet. The media’s existence on the Internet. The resulting comment threads. The anonymity. The racism. How that in turn drives me to find the media that is proactively fighting racism. Roxane Gay’s “Racism Is Every American’s Problem” at Salon. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Good, Racist People” at The New York Times. And Brit Bennett’s “I Don’t Know What to Do with Good White People” at Jezebel.
Poetry books: The New Black by Evie Shockley. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine (Citizen wasn’t out yet). Skin, Inc. by Thomas Sayers Ellis. Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker. Milk & Filth by Carmen Gimenez Smith. When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz. Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire by Brenda Hillman. Hemming the Water by Yona Harvey. Blood by Shane McCrae. Thank you all.
Carrie Lorig, The Pulp vs. The Throne (Artifice Books)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I often feel broken by / invested in studying poetry / what it is to me / to the world / if it will kill me. The Pulp releases itself to the raw, brutal magic of language. An unquotable, unfathomable intensity that is my purpled, flowered experience of the world(s). THE FALLS, THE FALLS. The Throne revolves around the act of making / constructing statement / how statement can be made / if it can be made while refusing white patriarchal dams / the laws placed on poetry in order to exclude / to constrict the use of language as material / as texture / as art / as a body’s power. The Vs. considers the ever gathering / ever changing folds in the ocean / in the blood. The Vs. considers the versus, the verses. It considers love / the letter between you and me / a place in the book / in the page / where the poem expands / opens its wound / its essay / exactly as much as it needs to. I wanted to create a book that did not stop, but rather went on / to read / to study / to call / to cry / the joyous carnage of the word as it becomes speaking. I am not confiding secrets / I am showing you the ruins / their electrification. Dear Hélène Cixous, the Woman Ironing* / I am her / I walk beside her / wrk / pain / her love.
*See “Without end, no, State of drawingness, no rather: The Executioner’s taking off” in Cixous’ Stigmata: Escaping Texts
Danez Smith, [insert] boy (YesYes Books)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Here’s some links to the albums I listened to while crafting these poems:
K.Raydio & Psymun, LucidDreamingSkylines
Margaret Ross, A Timeshare (Omnidawn)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I think form is a kind of realism. The pressures its shape exerts in a poem are mimetic of pressures exerted in life by other formal structures—days, years, lifespan. Shared forms we inhabit whether we want to or not, and each a share of something larger.
Writing, I was interested in the regular stanza as a mimesis of clock time: this system of uniform containers which holds the trivial alongside the serious. The equipoise feels like part of the threat—that eerie mathematical equivalence of the hour in which something terrible happens and the hour in which nothing does. I know stanza means ‘room’ but I think of it as ‘minute.’ Regular stanzas can seem the temporal measures to which everyone’s subject. Then, sentences counterpoint the stanza’s cold absolute with a warm measure determined by breath and thought and feeling. There’s a lot of enjambment—in an earlier draft of the book, not a single line was endstopped—and the tension between sentence and stanza to my mind reflects similar tensions in lived experience. I can’t choose how long my minutes are, but I can try to choose how I fill them.
That fundamental conflict inscribed in the form is the common threat propelling the subject matter. So the poems are about choice and stricture in daily life, and the way the limits and extent of each shape relationships, to individuals as well to collective bodies.
Real time can feel sinisterly intricate. This shifting sense of what scale you’re living at—you’re deep inside yourself one second, then close to somebody else, then to multiple others, to a memory, a history, an object, objects, an economy, a different person, a system, a power structure, an environment. Everything more implicated than it is alone. And the question of what feels proportionate—emotionally, ethically, actually—gets constantly recalibrated.
Montana Ray, (guns & butter) (Argos Books)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
Jamie Townsend, Shade (Elis Press)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
It would definitely be a docudrama musical about the life and art of David Cronenberg, starring Jeremy Irons and Mariah Carey, directed and scored by John Carpenter.
Michael Morse, Void and Compensation (Canarium Books)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I’ve blatantly stolen my title from Simone Weil’s book, Gravity and Grace—there’s a section therein called Void and Compensation that I’ve loved for a long time—her work was definitely an inspiration, as were encounters with any number of friends and places and loved ones. The book is elegiac in nature—while a small number of poems are literal elegies for lost friends, teachers, lovers, and places, loss and its threats are in the DNA of the work. The poems feel like rehearsals for and engagements with loss and connection; It’s my hope that singing offers a kind of compensation and consolation. I’m going to cheat a bit and add, in lieu of answering the film question, that if I were looking for a cinematic cousin for my poems, I’d aspire towards Philip Groning’s Into Great Silence.
Laura Kochman, The Bone and the Body (BatCat Press)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I have spent a lot of time worrying about space and spatial hierarchy—how does a body move through a room? How does a body claim space, and how is a body the space that is claimed? In what ways are we the occupiers of our own bodies? I thought about refusal and removal, public and private, and I thought about Baba Yaga—who refuses entrance, turns away, turns away, who takes up so much space her nose pokes out her chimney, who I may or may not claim as my tradition. I thought about the Jersey shore and the body I once had there. The hollowed-out elephant. The empty shells. I thought about my new hometown, which I was only just beginning to claim, where other people’s houses were blown down to foundations and perfectly neat bookcases while the tornado shrugged and shook a few branches onto my street. I thought about the solid body of prose and the broken body of verse and the slippery body of prose and the self-renewing body of verse. How to make of these things a whole? A whale? A house?
Ben Estes, Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Looking back on the book after it has been published gives me a different idea about the things that inspired it, or me. But I guess I can say that putting together the book gave me a place where I could go and feel free to practice making mistakes, or to make wrong decisions for what I hoped were the right reasons. Which then allowed me to recognize and make correct decisions, which sometimes ended up being for all the wrong reasons. Most importantly though, it was that the book allowed me to try things out, and to see that it’s ok for me to do so.
And it let me try things out in a private/personal place, so that when I now leave the house and actually try to interact with other human beings, where the decisions I make are real, and matter, and might affect somebody other than myself, I might now be better at doing it. I mean, to learn something about having things in common with people, something to do with being an ordinary person, about being afraid of dying, or wanting to fall in love, concerned about being poor, or wanting to be healthy, or whatever it is. Most of the decisions made in this book were influenced simply by being a person who wants to be better at being a person.
Eric Amling, From the Author’s Private Collection (Birds, LLC)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
As a debut book takes years to put together—something I think most authors experience—I’d imagine the inspirations came from various peaks and valleys. Probably some night drives. Reading, I’m sure. Most of what originally consisted of this collection was stripped and new work written up to the deadline, and that work came from a time of living multiple lives. Many experiences, good and bad, needed to be kept to myself. Trips were secret. Thoughts were secret. As a result I think the book holds a guarded, private stance, giving it a one-sided isolated. The voice is like a monologue looking into an empty well-curated room and I think I say that because I was looking at Terrance Conran’s 1970s interior design trilogy, The House, Kitchen, Bed and Bath Books at the time. Oui Magazine. Reading Chelsey Minnis and Lisa Robertson. Dave Hickey. Ebay. Listening to what is essentially elevator music.
The book is a long conversation you have with yourself in the shower. It’s warm, it’s reminiscent, and it’s selfish. I think the collection is exactly what the title states; an author reporting on the world from a secure location, and maybe that is its failure, but it is a sincere failure. I had a direct line to the specters of daytime television. It’s how my life was playing out. I recently did a reading where someone came up to me and said hearing me read the poems gave the work a sad element different to what they experienced on the page, which was maybe something more aloof and esoteric. Maybe I am those things. But I’ve always been a private person. And maybe my social media presence suffers from my reluctance to use exclamation points. In future work I look forward to pushing myself to address the world and the consequences of being a part of said world from a more engaging place. All that being said; I strongly support this as a debut work.
Syd Staiti, The Undying Present (Krupskaya)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
The book is actually a film. I guess I was the director: Supporting crew was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, William Faulkner, Samuel R. Delany, Maya Deren, Werner Schroeter, Bela Tarr, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and many others. The set was Oakland and also not-Oakland. Some of the actors in the film were Quentin Compson, Franz Biberkopf, the Kid, Francesca Woodman, the corpse of Che Guevara, Isabelle Huppert, Archimedes, Zeno, me in real state, me in dream state, me in non state, not me, imaginary creatures, poets, some of my neighbors.
Tonya M. Foster, A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I’m moved by the syllable, by the way that the mind and the heart can be directed and provoked by slight shifts of the tongue and breath, by how meaning is multiplied by breaths and spaces. Breathing as possibility, as potential action and direction at the same moment that specific actions and direction are undertaken, specific words are chosen.
Years ago, I was moved by the vibrant chromatic chaos and the haunting title of Max Ernst’s painting—“A Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice,” which were important to what became A Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice.
I’m inspired and changed by Harlem. The shift in focus from Ernst to Harlem tracked changes in location, in geographies of attention. First, I arrived at the title. There are no surviving palaces or much talk of palaces in Harlem. There is a basketball court, where one might through practice and chops rule. There is constant courting on stoops and corners. There is the etiquette of courtship. There is the train to the courthouse. There are the nearby cops who card neighborhood congregants. There is the height of the hills, the height of the apartment buildings; the height of the cameras focused on streets and doorways and the small St. Nicholas Park. Highs from rocks, totes, and forties. Hightops hanging from phone lines. There is the high of the noisy and high-flying ghetto birds that flash their brights some early summer evenings. Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice became “A Swarm of Bees in High Court.” A Swarm of Bees in High Court became.
Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, in its observations of the epic nature of the daily (a feminist reconfiguring of Joyce’s epic day in Ulysses), suggested, for me, a way of burrowing into, and thereby extending the duration of a moment. I think of my Swarm as being contained within the conceptual body of a day within a specific geographic location. I collected the language of the place—of people and things that occupy the place. The cameras, bodies, televised portrayals, voices, doorways of the place demanded shifting pronouns for dealing with the multiple as subject and as swarm of actors.
I’m often hearing Sarah Vaughan, D’Angelo for ways of (re)making sonic sense and soul.
Christian Schlegel, Honest James (The Song Cave)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Nearly the last poems I wrote for Honest James were the title poem and “Little Ballad”—the first in the Table of Contents. That was about a year ago, after I’d moved to Massachusetts. I was worried about PhD school… papers, seminars… the end of “creative life.” Between submission of the MS and its acceptance, I realized there had been long stretches previously when I hadn’t written at all. My whole junior year of college… the year after college, when I was doing odd jobs and working at a non-profit… the six months or so before Iowa City… I was going to have to negotiate the writing/not-writing divide for a long time—not only negotiate it, but be happy doing it. Our professors used to tell us this, but I didn’t believe them.
I loved Iowa City and I still miss it. For the first few weeks in Somerville, I’d wake up—I was sleeping on a couch in my sublet bedroom—and feel a cramp of nostalgia for my low-ceilinged studio apartment with red walls. I’m nostalgic about everything. I turned 25 my first year and felt I was “playing for keeps.” So I associated Iowa, in the beginning, with high stakes and adulthood, although I spent weeks reading baseball books in bed.
The Goethe Variations were the most enjoyable poems in the book to write, because the weather had turned in Iowa after a frigid winter… maybe April of my third year. I remember finishing “Pictures of C. S.” in the coffee shop downtown, walking to the campus swimming pool, and doing a bunch of laps. That was the fall of 2013, which had the most beautiful multi-week span of warm days… not unlike today in Cambridge, when people were sitting by the Charles River without their coats.
Emily Wolahan, Hinge (National Poetry Review Press)
What was the process like between writing poems and finding your publisher?
Hinge found its publisher like many first books, by a contest. The National Poetry Review Press runs an annual contest and Hinge was a runner-up chosen for publication. I found the process between writing the poems and seeking a publisher remarkable. In the middle of writing this collection, I moved from New York City; it felt like I left an entire life behind. I was working on my manuscript, often quite alone, and sending it out into the ether to be read and judged. I lived in the northeast of England during that time and had decided to look only at American presses and contests. I felt like I was truly sending my pages off on a long trans-Atlantic passage and hoped they might land somewhere safely. When they finally did, it was like hearing that a cousin somewhere had delivered her healthy baby. I felt both joy and remove. That experience has some correspondence with the poems themselves—many are studies of the distance that circumstance, agency and emotion can both open and close. My poem, “Ballad,” which ends the book, explores the repercussions of the kind of decisions one makes without appreciating their immense nature. I first read the acceptance email from my publisher in the middle of the night, in a hotel room in San Francisco, as I nursed my son. Receiving that news in a space of privacy and primacy, one that can be carved out in any setting, seemed fitting.
Aziza Barnes, i be but i ain’t (YesYes Books)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Richard Pryor. Cockroaches. Pulp Fiction. Queerhood. Motherhood. Mutthood. Brooklyn. Mississippi. Los Angeles. Accra. Gentrification. Home. Black Mecca. Land. Plantations. All the Homies and Mentors and Heroes. My family. Erasure. Reproduction versus sexualization. Failure to reproduce. Failure to be intimate. Consent. The imagination behind consent. The imagination behind control. The Bible. Definitions. Pronunciations. Proclamations. Ancestors and lineage. The criminalization of the Black body. The language of economics. Capitalism. The Confederacy. Richard Pryor deserves repeating—his stand up was a huge influence for this book, his Sunset Strip and That Nigga Crazy album were on repeat in excess. Alcoholism. Garbage. More bugs. I’m concerned by how humans treat bugs. Mainly the language used in that relationship. I’m realizing more and more everyday how much bugs are a major influence on this book.
Chloe Garcia Roberts, The Reveal (Noemi Press)
What was the process like between writing poems and finding your publisher?
For me the process of finding a publisher was really a question of finding a press whose narrative I was inspired by and could identify with. Being my first book, I realized only as I began sending the work out that my priority was not just to get the manuscript published anywhere but rather to locate it within a community. I began to understand that the poems and my own drive to write them was a yearning to be a part of a larger dialogue and that publication was the means to do so and not an end unto itself. I was working at the Woodberry Poetry Room ordering and processing new poetry books when I first began sending out the manuscript and I kept finding myself attracted to the Noemi titles. I submitted the manuscript to them just as they were beginning to read for the fledgling Akrilica series. That a press I was interested in aesthetically was also starting a series of innovative Latino writing felt fated. I wanted to be a part of it even if just by having my manuscript considered there. The subsequent acceptance and publication of The Reveal continues to feel like a homecoming of sorts.
Lisa Ciccarello, At Night (Black Ocean)
Is there something else you’d like to discuss specifically about your book/work?
I didn’t formulate a question, necessarily, to respond to, but I wanted to think about influence vs investigation, and escapism.
Nearly any time someone talks about At Night they bring up the Newgate Calendar, because it is the most explicit influence felt throughout the book. It was such an important document because so many details—jewelry, language, common practices, entire narratives—were taken from it in order to make the book. The fact is, however, that I am always looking outward in order to write, and this book was no different.
I often refer to it as “research,” but it’s more like a greedy kind of magpie-ing, because I build poems from a mishmash of things that delight me, things which I am constantly hunting for. I read through decades worth of stories in the Calendar in order to gather enough peculiar bits to build upon. I looked into the specifics of candle-making, Southern sympathetic remedies, witchcraft, folk tales, the khatuns of Mongolia. I spent a week living solely by candlelight.
I know that everyone has their treasure trove of influences, but I want to make plain the distance between the stuff and the self. Of course I am at the heart of it—there is no way for me not to be. I am the cauldron and the arena. I choose the direction, I seek out the influences, I make the connections, I am drawn towards or away from things, I experience the fear or desire I hope to provide, I set the images against one another. But I am not distinctly present.
In fact, not being present is one of the original pleasures of literature for me. It is much of the reason that I read. It is also the reason that I constantly, hungrily collect details from which I can assemble poems. I want to build a world and history that is not my own, something that doesn’t exist anywhere except inside of itself.
Elaine Kahn, Women in Public (City Lights Books)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
If my book were a film it would be a puppet show directed by Catherine Breillat.
Jay Deshpande, Love the Stranger (YesYes Books)
Is there something you’d like to discuss specifically about your book/work?
Can there be a fertile relationship between creepiness and empathy? It’s something I always wanted to explore in my work. If shared feeling, or coming together in the place that incites feeling, is the purpose of poems (and I believe it is), then what we really need a poem to do is bring us to a state of feeling. Doesn’t have to be soft or amorous. This can be an intellectual feeling, too: that glimmer of an idea’s heart beating. But there are more ways to get to that feeling than we sometimes think. Poems often seek beauty as the route to feeling, and I like that, I want that in my work. But not just.
Beauty is something to pursue. I don’t think we can help that; I think it may be, to some extent, in our blood, behind our teeth, splintering into our skin. The beautiful calls us to the hunt, whether for good or ill. But beauty in a work of art is not enough. Beauty seduces us into showing up for an experience, but then that experience must tangle. Beauty needs something to butt up against. It feels best to hit a wall sometimes. That cool affirmation on your pate.
One option for that counterpressure comes in the form of creepiness. Because it arrests us. It’s not the grotesque, not something that incites horror. Rather, creepiness involves a little bit of the familiar, a likening impulse, braided in with the hair of revulsion. That I see myself in this trouble. The recognition in the hand that is not the hand.
So I say, where can we make room for both? Those strange marriages of the sensuous/seductive and the troubling/defamiliarized can, I think, bring us (as readers, as beings creating, as livers) into the rooms of empathy. That’s what I wanted to do in Love the Stranger. The weird pressures that beauty and creepiness play on one another heighten the work of the poem, the work of the mind in feeling, and can help us thereby to do what we’re always trying to do: get closer to each other.
Richie Hofmann, Second Empire (Alice James Books)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
For Second Empire: The Movie, which I imagine would do terribly at the box office, I want the full Merchant Ivory treatment: Edwardian costume, seaside vistas, minimalist score, performances of refinement and restraint. I think their films, like my collection, are interested in time, in change—with its joys and pains—all so subtly expressed. They aren’t afraid of subtlety. They aren’t afraid of decoration. I also think they could manage the poems’ interest in elements of history with precision and accuracy. I’d like to cast a new favorite actor of mine, James Norton, for the starring role of “the speaker.”
Amanda Ackerman, The Book of Feral Flora (Les Figues Press)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
I like plants, especially weeds, because they are feral. I also see language as living, and not solely human, in origin. The feral recognizes that language has become a series of closed symbols. As part of our domestication, we’ve recast language as a trauma, or inadequate, and we often speak of it as system that has been fashioned to work against us. When we speak of language in this way, we collude with our own repression, and we collude with our narrow sense of humanity. The feral takes the closed symbols of words and opens them up again. The earth is at a tipping point, and we need the intelligence, counsel, and wisdom of other creatures. My writing process for Feral Flora attempts cross-species collaboration. With the aid of programming poet Dan Richert, some of the poems in this book were written by plants themselves. To first generate the pieces, I used a lot of somatic devices (altering my body by ingesting plants, touching them, putting their scent on my skin). Then I recorded myself reading these pieces and sent them to Dan. Dan hooked some willing plants up to sensors. The plants responded to the frequencies of my voice, and in turn were able to compose their own, new, versions of the poems. I also wanted to write a book that deliberately collapses the difference between poetry and prose because the feral collapses containment, and also, because in my own work I don’t draw a distinction between the two.
Lo Kwa Mei-en, Yearling (Alice James Books)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
This book is the book it is because of these things, among others: the story of Pinocchio; an article about duck decoys from an upscale Southern lifestyle magazine; trauma and its aftermath, which is one way to say, the space-time continuum; one hour spent wandering the greenhouse at Indiana University; the language of the Old Testament; the language of telegraphy; long overseas airplane flights as a child; my fear of flying as an adult; racist misogyny; Anne Marie Rooney’s first book, Spitshine, and her commentary on the relationship between form and eros; Patrice Malidoma Somé’s commentary on the relationship between broken rites of passage, adolescence, and addiction; addiction and its aftermath; the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Ariel by Sylvia Plath; commentary I overheard about Sylvia Plath in the English department; my family, near and far; and water, water, water.
Natalie Eilbert, Swan Feast (Bloof Books)
What kind of film would your book be and who would direct it?
Were Swan Feast a film, it would be codirected by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Sofia Coppola. The book is so visually driven, drawing first from the Paleolithic figurine, the “Venus” of Willendorf and compounding millennia of body dysmorphia and gendered mistreatment. V, as I affectionately call her, is a bratty party girl-cum-philosopher, enacting this Flusser-Sontag hybrid ethos of objectivism, gesture, and the gaze, while simultaneously bossing around her audience into adoring her. There’s a deep element of conversation in the book—what it might mean to reach into the epochs and pull out a thread of power despite fetishization and burial. One of my epigraphs is an exchange from The Philadelphia Story by Katharine Hepburn’s character, Tracy Lord:
Tracy Lord: How do I look?
Seth Lord: Like a queen. Like a goddess.
Tracy Lord: And do you know how I feel?
Seth Lord: How?
Tracy Lord: Like a human. Like a human being.
It’s one of my favorite pieces of dialog in film because of its horrific meta-layering of bodies, glamor, the desperation of flesh. That V is both the culmination of flesh and stone is notable because the speaker—me—was addicted for a long time to the sensation of bone under skin, where food was a symbol of waste, a challenge of refusal. The myriad flashes of image and jarred multilayers of experience would be Jeunet’s jam while Coppola whittled the flesh of the women into a gesture of stone. The more I think about it, why haven’t they teamed up yet?
Corina Copp, The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Is there something you’d like to discuss specifically about your book/work?
I’m unsure whether I am the correct person to talk about it, lately.
Somewhere along the line I came to believe hope was corrosive if not simply conservative and noncommittal—this might have gone into my thinking during the writing of The Green Ray.
It was eventually composed as I came to believe in “intuitive logic”—in that said methodology will act to generate an according reality—to work near sources named or not (a few of them: Jules Verne, Eric Rohmer, Tacita Dean, maybe Duchamp, Denise Riley, are cleared by the title[s]); but other references in the book function as ornaments, also flags—those can be looked at, and then read themselves, and might correspond as if another “book” exists entirely—another one is always unread, or written already; there is no end to this, this is not a debut; this is a version. Maybe it refuses to be read at all if it seems to point only at its own making, but it reappears. At the least it makes sense that a reader and author should be physically involved. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
The act of creating unsuspected intimacies paradoxically shuts “people” out, romanticizes writing alone, to destroy as I go, in order to have fewer options. A battle with form (here) took me a long time to sort out. I’d like to gender this but I also want to refuse that impulse…she is a good image, so why not use her. I have to say, I hoped the book would resemble, formally, these near-constant fights. “In such a structure if you move / One point all the others have to move along with it,” (lines I meant to use).
Natalie Scenters-Zapico, The Verging Cities (Center For Literary Publishing)
What were some of the important inspirations behind this debut collection?
The Verging Cities is deeply rooted in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México, where I am from. While working on the collection I became interested in how people who are not from this border space were depicting El Paso-Cd. Juárez as a violent and hellish landscape in art and popular culture. This felt very inaccurate and foreign to me, so I set out to explore how I conceive of my home. I wanted to write about my sister cities in a way that both delved deeply into femicide and narco-violence while still showing the dailyness of life there. I was interested in exploring too how love can exist on the border, and how it is because of all the outside pressures inserted on the border, like the difficulties of border crossing and immigration, that love becomes complicated. One of the biggest influences on this collection aside from books by Roberto Bolaño, David Dorado Romo, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz, was the film Voy A Explotar/ I’m Gonna Explode in which two teenagers fall in love and run away to live on the boy’s parent’s roof. I liked that they showed their love as passionate and self-destructive, while longing so deeply for a sense of identity. And, of course, I did a lot of work mining my personal relationships in connection to place to weave this collection together.
