DeeSoul Carson: I’ve seen so much weird art. And I’m like, I don’t know if the artist is worried about how I’m encountering it, or I don’t think they care. When I got to it, I’m like, “I don’t think they wanted me to understand.”

I appreciate poets who have that consideration, like, how [are] the people that are going to actually encounter my work going to sit with it? I appreciate not just a text where I — not necessarily a text where I feel confused, ‘cause that’s not always what it is, but a text that asks me to do more than just look at it once.

Nick Martino: Mm-hmm.

Subscribe now

DeeSoul Carson: Helllllllo poets of the internet. I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word? , the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Nonce! I am here today with my pressmate, Nick Martino.

Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection, Scrap Book (from Alice James Books) won the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award and will be published in June of 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.

Nick, hello!

Nick Martino: Hello, so good to be here. Thanks so much for having me, DeeSoul.

DeeSoul Carson: Of course, thank you for being on. It’s so nice to be having a more extended conversation with you. I’ve been really excited for your book.

Nick Martino: I’m so excited for yours, as well. It’s an honor to be press mates with you. Really blessed.

DeeSoul Carson: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I keep telling people how in love I am with your book’s cover.

Nick Martino: Oh my God, yeah. Alice James [Books] did such an amazing job, I love it. This beautiful collage work by this Australian artist named Lizzie Buckmaster Dove, who’s just incredible. I’m very lucky.

What Are Nonce Forms?

DeeSoul Carson: Something that I’ve been enjoying, and I think this will kind of segue us well into the episode: I’ve been really enjoying thinking about how your cover really reflects what’s happening inside of the book. I mean, also a reflection of the title itself being Scrap Book, but that [cover] as also a clear indication for what we might encounter inside of the book, because I know your book has some really fun visual stuff going on.

And so, thinking about that and thinking about the innovations that you’ve been taking inside of your book — this is, first and foremost, a learning podcast. [We] try to teach people new terms, new words, and today we are thinking about nonce forms, which is a term that I think I only learned like a year or two ago. So I would love it if you could tell the people what nonce forms are.

Nick Martino: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m so excited to talk about this and I have to begin by confessing that “nonce form” is a term that I only learned maybe a year and a half ago, actually.

DeeSoul Carson: Okay. So right around the same time. Yeah.

Nick Martino: Yeah. Someone pitched an AWP panel to me that didn’t end up getting picked up about the employment of nonce forms, and I was like, “Yeah, thank you so much. Absolutely. What is a nonce form? I don’t actually…”

DeeSoul Carson: “What the hell is that?”

Nick Martino: “What is that?” Yeah. And they’re like, “Oh, well, it’s what you’ve been doing.” And I go, “Oh, thank you for giving me… furnishing me with language for what I’ve been doing.” I’ve been just striking out in the dark, [and] have no idea what I’m doing. What I’ve come to understand, what a nonce form is, is that it’s a form created to fit one particular need. A kind of one-time form that’s created to address a particular topic that the poet wants to bring up.

And so we have the traditional forms of the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then nonce form, which is for a one time use, but all traditional forms started out as nonce forms.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. The one I always think of is the golden shovel. Like, Terrance Hayes made the golden shovel for this particular poem. And then other people were like, “That’s sick. Let me do that.” So now it’s like a form.

Nick Martino: I think of the duplex by Jericho Brown, that has the repetition in couplets. The first line of one couplet is the previous line, or a play-off of, or repetition/near repetition of the previous line.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. It’s like a sonnet pantoum. It’s doing a lot of different stuff.

Nick Martino: Call-and-response kind of thing. And now that’s become tremendously... yeah, I have a duplex in Scrap Book actually, too, and so that’s, it’s taken on its own life and moved beyond the scope of Jericho’s amazing book, The Tradition, where I think he debuted that form.

Other Nonce Forms To Reference

DeeSoul Carson: Are there other — we’ve already just talked about Terrence and Jericho — are there any other existing nonce forms that you’re already a fan of, or I’ll even say ones that spoke to you, like, “Oh, it’s cool to see a poet doing something, like, for this project.”

Nick Martino: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that some of my favorite poets play with nonce forms, or I’m just very captivated by the nonce form. I think of Diana Khoi Nguyen, who, in her book Ghost Of, has the triptych poems that take family photographs and then write into the spaces that have been cut out of those, based upon that particular biography and write around it.

I think of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, which is replicating the language in that congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans in this satirical or scathing kind of way. Her poem, “38” as well, which is featured within that book. There’s a lot of Layli Long Soldier’s poems.

I was just reading one of our pressmate’s books, R.A. Villanueva’s A Holy Dread. Incredible poet, incredible person, incredible book. He has a poem, one of my favorites within the book itself. I’m forgetting the name of it1, but it’s a kind of play, he wrote in the notes, off of Layli Long Soldier’s “Obligations 2,” which is a poem that you can read through in various different ways. Like a garden path methodology of approach.

I think Solmaz Sharif plays with nonce quite a bit as well. I think her first book, LOOK, is the dictionary of military terms, yeah, and employing those in her writing as well. Danez, their book, Bluff, opens with the anti-poetica. It’s kinda like an ars poetica, which feels like a play on a nonce form as well.

Before I sat down today, I was looking through all of my poetry books and trying to pick out other [examples] like, “Oh yeah, this one and that one.” And I came across Olio by Tyehimba Jess, which is incredible in its use of existing forms and building off of existing forms. One of my favorite poems in the book, or series in the book is [the poem] that talks about, I think it’s the McKay sisters, the conjoined twins2, and he writes in these contrapuntals, then he makes contrapuntals of the contrapuntals.

DeeSoul Carson: Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh my God, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick Martino: It’s just, it’s mind boggling. It’s such an incredible book and project. Most recently I just read Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, which is this really long epic poem. Her project was to feature a woman as opposed to a man, which typically is centered within the epic tradition. She’s playing with the epic form because they’re varying lengths, the poems themselves, across the entirety of the novel-in-verse or however you might describe it, but they all engage with quotation marks and there are certain phrases that are encapsulated within quotation marks. And I think she has a note where she’s gesturing towards the tradition, the oral tradition of the epic, and allowing those quotation marks to syncopate certain beats for the reading of it. It’s this cool, crazy project that I loved reading as well, so yeah. I could go on and on. torrin a. greathouse’s burning haibun too, which —

DeeSoul Carson: That’s another one that’s like, those nonce forms [are] now just becoming a traditional form, which is kind of beautiful to see. Obviously I love when poets make a thing and they’re like, it’s mine. But I also love seeing a form catch on because it has activated something within people.

I think the burning haibun is one of those forms that just captures a very particular energy about loss or erasure. I’ve written two, actually. They’re two separate ones, but they’re both thinking about memory. I wrote one thinking about my mother, who passed away recently from an illness, just thinking about…

What’s nice about the burning haibun, for anyone who doesn’t know what a haibun or a burning haibun is: So a haibun is basically a long-ish prose block followed by a haiku. And a burning haibun is a haibun that then erases itself down into a haiku, which is like a nice change in that form.

It’s kind of an excavation of language from language that’s already created by the poet. But what I was thinking about when I was writing it was, just thinking about the inability — like I’ve said so much, and then there’s less and less that I’m able to say; it has to be encapsulated down into this core feeling. That’s something that I felt was really well done with the burning haibun.

The Possibilities of Visual Poetics

DeeSoul Carson: There’s something about the element of visual poetics that touches on something that language itself cannot necessarily capture, right? Like, when I’m thinking about Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Triptych,” which strikes me besides, you know, obviously her verse is great, her language is great, but what gets me is the literal shape of the poems, either in the shape of the missing brother, or it’s shaped around his absence, right? So it’s either filling in or filling around that space. And there’s something that visual poetic is communicating to me that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t looking at it. And I’m wondering what you think about those ideas of visual poetics?

Nick Martino: Yeah, I am really glad you brought that up. Whenever I’m thinking about visual poetics or talking about visual poetics with others, I think about this podcast with Paul Tran, who’s an amazing poet. I believe they said it was Denise Levertov who said, so this is like, Denise Levertov by way of Paul Tran: you read the poem before you read the poem.

Meaning: When you, as a reader, encounter it on the page, regardless of whether or not it’s engaging with an explicit visual tradition or, you know, visual poetics or not, the shape of it, that’s arrangement upon the page, the way in which the poet is using or not using white space says something about the poem. We’re visual creatures. We’re inclined towards, you know, taking in that kind of visual data and coming to some sort of conclusion, be it explicit or implicit before we necessarily encounter with the content of what’s being said. So I just think of the visual medium within a poem as another way to perhaps emphasize or highlight or say something that the poem in its content is already saying. A kind of doubling of what is being denoted or noted.

And it can emphasize what’s being said. It can undercut what’s being said. And so I think that, like, to bring up the triptychs, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poems within Ghost Of, make me think about how seeing the arrangement of words on the page in the shape of the cutout of her brother does more than just providing those words that in that space upon the page in a kind of normal way. There’s something haunting about it, gesturing towards this form or this shape. It’s just another way to include additional data or an additional atmosphere or mood or feeling atop what’s already being said.

DeeSoul Carson: Something about that impression, right? The impression of the brother upon the text and the way that his shape kind of moves with us. Claudia Emerson has this terrific poem that I talk about all the time, called “Artifact,” and it’s from her collection, Late Wife.

In this particular poem she’s talking about this man that she’s with; she’s recently divorced [from] her ex-husband and she’s now with a new partner. And this new partner’s wife has passed away, which is the late wife that the collection is thinking about. In the poem, she’s thinking about the energy that this wife has left behind. And so, there’s this… I’m just gonna read this part of the poem that I’m thinking about, right? So it says:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

…You have told me you gave it all away

then, sold the house, keeping the confirmation

cross she wore, her name in cursive chased

on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,

and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed —

small things. Months after we met, you told me she had

made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft

and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath

her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.

from “Artifact” by Claudia Emerson. Copyright © 2001 by Claudia Emerson.

Originally published in Poetry Magazine.

And so I’m thinking about that shadow that we’re thinking of, moving with us. That’s the sense I get when I’m reading “Triptych”. But just like, how is that person haunting the narrative? It’s not a prose class, but nonetheless. But yeah, so those are all things that I’m, I’m thinking about.

Nick’s “Polaroid” Form

DeeSoul Carson: Which is now gonna bring me to your nonce form, the “Polaroid.” I would love it if you could just tell us more about this form. What prompted it? What was your process for deciding its rules? Were there other things that helped to inform it? ‘Cause when I’m looking at it or thinking about it, I’m already thinking of burning haibuns, maybe in reverse or something like that. Tell us about how that came to be.

Nick Martino: Yeah, so the burning haibun was really foundational for my approach to the Polaroid form, which I kind of fell into, honestly, into writing, in part because I was in the third year of my MFA, at the time that I first started writing these, and I was writing a lot about my father’s history of incarceration, and the effect that it had had on our family and the way in which I found out about this history because he had been imprisoned prior to me being born.

This was something that kind of came out, slowly, over, the course of a decade and a half, essentially. I think I was 16 when he first told me about this history. And it was something that I really kind of repressed because at the time, I had a very unnuanced or unsophisticated understanding of prison in general, and who would go to prison, and so I was trying to write into and through that experience and that history.

I was home taking care of my mother, and she did the very classic family —or I dunno, mother — thing, which was like, “Oh, have I ever told you about those photographs that we have of your father when he was in prison?” She kinda referenced them as if I knew full well all about them.

DeeSoul Carson: Very casually.

Nick Martino: Very casually. And then so, “the Polaroids of your father in prison,” I was like, “Wait, hold on, stop. You’re telling me that there’s actual visual evidence of this time period that I’ve been thinking nonstop about, that I’ve been talking to you endlessly about?” This is a history that I talk quite a lot about with my mother.

And she’s like, “Oh yeah, the Polaroids, the photos.” And I was like, “Please, let’s find those.” And so she was able to excavate those out from the attic. And there are nine Polaroid photographs of my father, and my mother as well, on select visitation days of his, and I just was fascinated by these photographs. I couldn’t stop looking at them. My father was not too much older than I currently am at the time of taking those photographs, and seeing this window into the past was just fascinating and saddening and I really just was obsessed with them. I just wanted to spend some time kind of looking at them. And because I was in the middle of writing a full-length thesis and trying to figure out just how to address this history, I thought, well, let me just sit down with these Polaroids and write ekphrastic poems about the photographs themselves.

And honestly also, too, I needed a little daily break from one-on-one mom and son time a little bit as well. So I was like, all right, I have a project for myself. Every day, I’m gonna spend two hours in this coffee shop that’s right next door to her apartment, and I’m gonna sit down and I’m just gonna look at the Polaroid and write about what I see. And as I was starting with that premise or that project, I was thinking about the actual concrete object of the Polaroid itself, and the idea of the Polaroid developing.

That kind of process was made plain to me as well, because there are certain spots on certain Polaroids that didn’t fully develop, these little marks or dings that didn’t really fully come out. So it’s made manifest, the process of development on the actual object itself. And so I was thinking too about how, and I was writing a lot about how when I first learned about this family history, I had this really unnuanced or unsophisticated understanding of it. And I really didn’t know a lot of the pertinent details, like how long he was even in prison for, what exactly was the nature of what he was in prison for, all of these things. And steadily over the course of, I don’t know, a decade and a half following my father first telling me about this history, little details started to fill in and I don’t know when it first happened, but I just made a connection between the Polaroid and things filling in and developing within a Polaroid, and the way that details fill in.

DeeSoul Carson: Like that revelation.

Nick Martino: Exactly. It was a revelation, but it was like a long or a slow revelation; we talk about epiphany, like these “aha” moments. For me, it was this period of 10 years wrestling with, not actively every single day, but coming to terms with the way in which this history predetermined certain elements of my life. My parents divorced when I was in eighth grade. I grew up in this household that was tremendously contentious.

There was a lot of silence and fighting and hushed conversations behind closed doors, and I have a lot of memories of that, but I had no idea as to what was the nature of these things that they were fighting about. And coming to an understanding like 5, 6, 7 years later, “Oh my God, this history of incarceration, their eventual… the collapse of this relationship and of our family in some ways.” And so I thought to myself, okay, what if I play with that idea on the page, the idea of how I have only certain details at first around this family history, and then more things fill in and it’ll be like filling in like the way a Polaroid fills in.

I wrote the Polaroid poems first as erasers, or I wrote them with the gaps, basically, and so I would be like, “and then the blank color of the blank.” And I wrote those and I wrote a few, and I was like, “This is so contrived. This is not working. This doesn’t work. This doesn’t make any kind of sense. I’m just fabricating absences.” And they didn’t really feel real to me? So I thought, okay, what if my methodology is wrong here? I still really love the idea of a slow filling in of details, but what if I began writing the fully-developed image, you know, towards not only what’s happening within the photograph, but I was really interested in, or I felt like there was a lot of heat when I was writing about my looking at the photograph too.

What was I surprised at when I first encountered the photograph? What was my eye drawn to? What detail only emerged after repeated viewings? What is something that surprised me or I dislike about the photograph? Thinking about my positionality as a viewer of the photograph was more interesting to me, almost, than what was actually physically at play. So I said, “Okay, what if I write the full thing first and then erase the Polaroid from there and present the erasures first so that the poem fills in over the course of two or three or four, even, pages?” And then that’s kind of how it came to be. It was honestly a project or an idea that took months, if not a year or a year and a half.

DeeSoul Carson: I think very similar to the first one, that was my approach to writing my burning haibuns. The way I would go about writing that burning haibun is I start with the haiku, so I’m like, these are the words. What I’ll do is I’ll write the haiku, but I’m trying to write not like a perfectly congruent sentence necessarily, or I understand that in order for it to be a proper erasure, it has to arrange in a way that may not be perfectly grammatically correct, whatever. But I start with the haiku and then I build language around that.

And the reason I do that is just, if I know what I’m going to get to, like I just know these words have to appear in the original text in this order to get the haiku that I want.

I feel like I was on the opposite end of where I really wanted the heat. I really wanted the heat in what it was being erased down to. And so I was just like, “Yeah, I need it to come together this way, so I’ll throw these words at the wall and then I’ll build the bricks around this language.”

Print VS Digital Representations of the “Polaroid” Form

DeeSoul Carson: I think they’re both really interesting ways into it. What I really appreciate about — and this is maybe a triumph of digital poetics — when I see your Polaroid poems online: I get to see the actual development of the text into that full “Polaroid.” I’m like, “Wow, this is, this is exactly the way that it’s supposed to look and this is the way it’s supposed to feel.”

With it being in a physical book, unless you know some magic about the presses that Alice James is working with, it’s obviously not doing that same development thing. How do you feel like that changes, if at all, the energy of, how the poems are encountered? Do you prefer ‘em being encountered one way versus the other?

Nick Martino: That’s a great question. Yeah. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and I think it began with a conversation, again, another podcast. I think these were both podcast conversations on VS. And I think it was a conversation with Airea Matthews on limitations that a physical paper book holds.. and she was saying something like, “Maybe in the future books will have batteries and like we’ll be able to actually have something that kind of moves on the page,” or maybe in the future… like I think she has this hypothetical around like, you walk into a gallery space and the book is projected on the walls and you encounter it in that way.

So just like, allowing us or asking us, inviting us to think about different ways of engagement with text.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, the possibilities.

Nick Martino: I think, yeah, all those possibilities were at the back of my mind when I first sent some of these Polaroid poems — I think it was originally the Los Angeles Review. I was, at that time, listening to that conversation with Airea Matthews and thinking to myself like, “what if I made a version of this that could be presented in a book with batteries, so to speak? What if I made an animation?”

And so I sent these poems to the Los Angeles Review and the editor, Brent Ameneyro, he wrote back to me, and he was someone who was interested in video poetics or cinematic poetry or these video poems as well. And he was like, “Oh, well, like, here’s how I might imagine doing this.” And it was a collaborative project to animate these poems in this way.

And I figured out how to do it in PowerPoint and when I came to that iteration of the Polaroid poem, I was so excited to see, yeah, like, here’s the manifestation of the development actually happening before your eyes. And I think there’s something interesting about if it’s a GIF, having to sit with it and perhaps not catching all of the information at first, like two or three cycles of it. So on the one hand I was like, “Is it maybe an issue that I’m making this poem more difficult to read for people?” Like poetry, there is perhaps a higher barrier to entry for certain people, but then I was like, no, there’s something cool about asking or inviting someone to sit down and spend some time with this piece in this way. So I really loved that aspect of it, that you might not catch everything in the GIF and have to kind of sit through multiple cycles.

When I think about the actual poem on the page, I think there’s something really lovely in the way in which it becomes then a twofold arrangement where I am providing for the reader the Polaroid as it’s developing on the page, but it’s up to the reader to flip the page and kind of develop it themselves.

DeeSoul Carson: Right.

Nick Martino: Like the difference between putting a vinyl record on or hitting a button and it plays for you. So I like the way in which there will actually be, in the book itself, an invitation for the reader to develop the Polaroid.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, we’ve gone from the reader with the Polaroid picture to the reader who’s in the dark room themself, actually turning it, making sure that it’s developing properly. If they skip a page, right, then they’ve gone past a part of the development, like how does that mess it up?

If they skip a page and they don’t get to that final, you know, for some reason they skip that final fully rendered photo. Thinking about the possibilities of human error, right. But then the other ways that invites new kinds of interpretation. Like, what if someone stopped at the second page of the polaroid, right? And they were like, that’s all I’m gonna read from it, and that’s gonna be my understanding, for whatever reason.

Nick Martino: Wow. Yeah, because all of a sudden there’s like a million new opportunities or ways to read this poem. I mean, it has now instantly, yeah, a hundred million… as many ways as you can think of, different avenues of exploring it in that way. And it’s out of my hands, I can’t, there’s nothing I can do at this point.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. Which is really, maybe especially with like debuts, right? We can get really precious about this thing that we’ve made and we’re like, this is so cool, and now other people get to do it, like, fuck all with it, do whatever they want with this.

I had a conversation with Kay E. Bancroft, they have a new book coming out through Sundress Publications, Bloodroom.

Nick Martino: Bloodroom, right? Yeah. I’m excited for that.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. We had a conversation earlier in this podcast about hybridity and just like the possibilities of visual poetics, messing with other [texts], getting funky, and what does it mean for us to engage with other texts with a poetic eye.

Poetry is a nice, fun genre because it can really be anything it wants. The way I always explain poetry to other people, I’m like, poetry to me is anything that engages in some type of rhetorical experimentation with text. Basically anything that’s asking you to engage — and I say text, like I do say it has to be textual in some sort — but it’s asking you to engage with a text in some way outside of how we would usually encounter language. So I think our traditional forms fit that nicely because we’re not usually talking in rhyme. And so if a poem’s rhyming, that’s a different, non-usual engagement of text. That’s rhetorical experimentation.

But that also goes up to things like Layli Long Soldier turning the poem into “Obligations 2,” right? Or when you’re doing erasure, like Nicole Sealey doing an erasure of this very long Ferguson report, right? Or if we’re doing these pantoums or, like, you’re doing these Polaroids, poems that develop over time. Like, these are not how we usually encounter texts. We usually encounter texts in forms and applications and brochures and military propaganda and copy, yeah. And so when we’re thinking about poetry, we’re thinking about how we are estranging that relationship in some way. And so I love everything that makes me do that.

Nick Martino: I’m gonna hold onto that definition, because so many people will ask me, “What makes poetry, poetry as opposed to prose? And I’m like, “That’s a great question.” And honestly, the only answer I’ve ever been able to engage with is like, it’s doing something either purposely or not. Vis-a-vis like lineation. It’s attending to the line in a way different from prose, but I don’t know. That’s always been for me, like, a not fully satisfying definition. So I like yours a lot.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, and that was a big struggle for me. That’s why I had to come up with one.

Nick Martino: I mean, yeah, it’s like the first day of poetry instruction. ‘Cause I’m a high school English teacher. And they’ll ask, “What is poetry?” And I’m like, well, we could spend the entirety of the class talking about that. I hope I can show you things that expand your notion as to what poetry can be. And that’s what I love about your definition, which is that it’s engaging with the idea of surprise, which is one of the most favorite things that a poem can engender in me, which is surprise.

And I think it’s, at this point, really old hat kind of like advice, the phrase that everyone bandies about, which is like: a good poem surprises the reader, and a great poem surprises the poet. And that idea of reading and writing, alongside or adjacent to the notion of surprise, just makes it more fun too.

Like I’m always chasing pleasure. When I’m writing, I’m chasing experimentation and reverence, even if the subject matter is weighty and perhaps at times I’m leaning less so into a reverence than others, depending upon the matter. But that, at least, is what it allows for me to keep coming back. The ability that I have to hopefully surprise myself in some way, or to engage in text in a non-traditional kind of format, like you described.

DeeSoul Carson: I mean, I basically came up with it because I had the same issue. People asked me what poems are, and I have this the Essential Poet’s Glossary next to me at my desk. Poetry definitions are always like, “Yeah, a poem is not prose (unless it’s a prose poem). Or a poem is not music (unless it has music set to it).” Right? So it’s all these things. And I was like, well, I need to have something that is not just “poetry isn’t X,” you know? ‘Cause I hate [the] “this thing is not” answer.

I use this definition ‘cause it also takes away the idea that… whether or not it’s doing it on purpose, my relationship to language is now different, you know?

Nick Martino: Cool.

Where to Start with Making a Nonce Form

DeeSoul Carson: The last question I’ll ask you is: if someone wanted to approach doing their own nonce form, how should they start?

Nick Martino: So how, I mean, how to approach a nonce poem? I think that when I was thinking about this question, I was thinking about this experience I had in workshop once where I got a poem back from a mentor of mine, and at the top of the poem, she had written in huge block letters: FORM = CONTENT.

I was kind of confused about it until I went in and I talked with her a little bit more. And what she was trying to say was that the form that I had engaged in with this poem didn’t really do anything to further the message or to undermine the message or to highlight the message. Like, it was an arbitrary decision to, say, put it into couplets or tercets or something like that.

It felt as if it wasn’t necessarily doing anything to further an underlying message or idea or atmosphere. And so, I guess I ask You, dear listener, to consider what shape or rhetoric or syntax on the page might help emphasize what you’re trying to say, or perhaps undermine what you’re trying to say in some way to kind of come in conflict with it.

Like, how can you employ the kind of blank canvas of the white page, that 8 ½ x 11 — or, you know, however big piece of paper you wanna use — that in some way gestures towards, a kind of emotional valence that you’re trying to capture within the poem.

And you know, I think that’s perhaps easier said than done. Like, “Oh yeah, just consider what/how form equals, you know.” But I think, maybe taking a step back from that, I think first and foremost what you have to be willing to do is to just play around with things and to understand that your experiments in writing might not pan out in any kind of way. You might scrap it, it might never see the light of day, but you have to become less precious, or I had to become less precious with my own writing, so as to give myself the space to kind of dream up and grow into this form that became the Polaroid poem.

I had to sit for a long time with the discomfort of, “Oh, I like this idea,” or, “Oh, this is a fun idea, but the way that I’m evoking it on the page is not doing it justice and it’s not working right now.” And I had to become less precious and more willing to experiment and play. I was thinking about nonce and I was thinking about how I used to be an assistant first-grade teacher, one of the most happy periods of my life. It was a great job that maybe one day I’ll go back to, but, I think about nonce forms and the way that kids play on the playground.

You know, they’re inventing rules for themselves. They’re saying, “okay, this is lava, but this is safe. Then you can’t do this, but you have to do that.” And they’re kind of coming up with it, typically together. Maybe there’s one leader, but they’re like giving themselves these parameters in which to play. And I think that there’s something interesting about how sometimes, for poets, or at least for me, giving oneself constraints, okay, only 10 lines, or only lines of this length, or only engaging in this kind of syntax, or this kind of rhetoric or vocab. The constraint can actually be freeing or liberating, ‘cause, at least for me, it can actually make me… it gives me something to kind of bounce off of, and have ideas upon, basically.

A willingness to kind of play and experiment and a lack of preciousness in, like, ensuring like, oh, this has to be the perfect iteration of this idea, and thinking about how, visually, on the page, before you even read the actual content of what’s being said, what are you saying already to the reader?

DeeSoul Carson: Experiment’s a fun way to think about that too. Like the point of an experiment is never actually the end result, it’s the process. It reminds us the purpose isn’t necessarily to succeed or fail because the point of an experiment is to learn what’s happening and to observe what’s happening. We’re not making a product. We might succeed or we might fail, but we’re learning something every time, and that’s really helpful.

Nick Martino: You have to have fun in the process of it in that way, yeah.

DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. Perfect. Well, Nick, this has been a terrific conversation. Thank you so much for telling us about nonce forms and telling us about your nonce form. And to close this out, I would love it if you could read a poem that demonstrates your nonce form.

Polaroid: Prison Visit

July 7, 1989

Copyright © 2026 by Nick Martino. Originally published in The Los Angeles Review.

Used with permission of the author.

DeeSoul Carson: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in nonce forms, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guests in the Substack post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. Our guest Nick offers the following prompt:

Nick Martino:

1. Choose a photograph that’s significant to you OR that you want to spend some time with.

2. Write a poem in 10-12 lines of equal length that describes this photograph--what does it look like?

   • Who’s there? Not there?

   • More than description, consider the gaze itself: as the speaker of the poem looking at the photograph, where is your eye drawn?

   • What is present, and what is not present?

   • How do you approach this photograph? Can it be looked at sitting down? Standing in a hallway?

3. When you have your 12-line poem, copy and paste it onto the consecutive page of your document.

4. On the first page of your document, begin to erase certain portions of the text. Erase by rendering certain portions of the text white. This will preserve the spacing of your Polaroid.

   • Your erasure methodology is up to you: an embedded story within the overall narrative, or perhaps preserving only those details your eye was drawn to first. What narrative can you develop--about the photograph or your looking itself--across both pages as more details reveal themselves?

DeeSoul Carson: Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, and thanks for listening.

If You are Interested in Nonce Forms, Nick Recommends:

• Sand Opera by Philip Metres,

• Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez

• Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (more specifically, “Triptychs”)

• Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody

• Obit by Victoria Chang

Hellooooooo poets of the internet! When I put out the March round-up, I (perhaps too eagerly) expressed gratitude for being out of “that dreadful snowy season.” However, here I am, still pulling out my coat because summer can’t decide how soon it wants to arrive. I suppose for now I’ll have to settle for warm thoughts while the Californian in me yearns for warm weather!

In case you missed it: Earlier this month, I had a terrific conversation with Alison C. Rollins discussing her newest book, Black Bell. And what good timing, because Rollins was just awarded a Whiting Award! This past Monday, I also dropped an episode with my friend Jonny Teklit talking about the poetics of joy. Both of these writers are also incredible thinkers, so I hope you’ll spend some time with them on the podcast.

Keep reading below for some April highlights, and hey — thanks for being here :)

Subscribe now

What I’ve Read This Month

1) The Dead Don’t Need Reminding by Julian Randall

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Memoir

"It might sound ridiculous, but part of being Black is that you're game for any haunting the nation can dream up.”
- pg. 39, "The Bojack Horseman Story"

This memoir is what you get when you embark on the long journey of tracing the lineage of your loneliness, when what you're running from chases you back to where you began. Each essay in this memoir maps a new beginning or a delayed ending, showing us how often we reinvent ourselves to stay alive. Randall's lyricism & storytelling kept me engaged the whole read, carried me through Mississippi nights and days spent searching for the past that clarifies the future.

2) The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Rating: ★★★ ★

Genre: History (Anthology)

If Morgan Parker's You Get What You Pay For: Essays is an account of our modern day reckoning with the boat that brought us here, this project provides a road map back to that boat 400 years ago. As one reads this collection, one remembers that this nation's development was bit just happenstance; rather, it was the work of decades of policy that couldn't decide how much of a person Black people were, a nation that prides itself on the idea of freedom but has not yet actualized a freedom that applies to all.

New Poems in the Catalog

From Poem-a-Day

• “Dream Variations” | Langston Hughes, 1994

• “This Is Not a Small Voice” | Sonia Sanchez, 2018

• “Making History” | Marilyn Nelson, 2016

• “Imagine” | Kamilah Aisha Moon, 2014

• “Midnight Air in Louisville” | Afaa Michael Weaver 2018

Work to Look Out For

Stegner Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s third collection, Staying Still, is forthcoming from Tin House in September 2026. The book “ face[s] head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.”

Poet Talk host Sanna Wani’s second collection, Lantern, is forthcoming from House of Anansi Press in September 2026. This collection “explores how we fall in love and make a home” and is “a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief—all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness.”

Poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection, We Radiant Things, is forthcoming from Ecco in October 2026. As described in the book listing, “[i]n this luminous essay collection, Choi descends into the uncanny valley to encounter notable cyborgs and robots from across American culture and asks why so many of them bear the faces of East Asian women.” If you were a fan of Choi’s collection Soft Science (one of my faves), then this is a book to look out for.

The Watering Hole Fellow Sanam Sheriff’s debut collection, HUM ہم, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in October 2026. The collection “is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound’s power.”

Thank for reading! Until next time :)

Jonny Teklit: And I follow that impulse because it aligns so well with how I speak and how I view the world, right? The goal for me and my poems is, I’m gonna make the jump. They’re not always big, associative leaps as far as figurative language goes.

DeeSoul Carson: TL;DR, Earnestness: In, Irony: Out.

JT: Exactly. That’s kind of my TLDR for everything, but yeah.

DC: Yes. if you had to give it to like a six-word short story, like that’s — I guess that’s four words, but…

JT: Yeah, you know.

Subscribe now

DC: Helllllllo poets of the internet. I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word? , the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Joy! I am here today with my friend, Jonny Teklit.

Jonny Teklit is an award-winning poet who has had work appear in The Academy of American Poets, The New Yorker, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. His poems have been anthologized in Poemhood: Our Black Revival and The Gift of Animals: Poems on Love, Loss, and Connection. He is currently working on his debut collection.

Jonny, hello!

JT: Hello, how are you?

DC: Good! How are you doing on this beautiful … It’s Friday the 13th.

JT: I’m good. 2026 is like a carbon copy of the year 1998, which is the year I was born. And so —

DC: — are you having deja vu?

JT: I don’t know. But it made for a perfect February, a perfect square four weeks.

DC: Which I love.

JT: February is the best month to be born in.

Joy in Poetry

DC: Well, I’m super excited to have you on today. Thank you for joining me. I always start with the definition from my guests, and I’m not gonna have you define joy, which is maybe its own kind of challenge, but I would love to have you define for us: what is joy for you as it relates to poetry?

JT: Yeah, I am really into thinking about joy, not something that is meek and/or cherubic or cutesy, though those things can bring one joy, certainly. In a thing I was writing recently, I was talking about how I personally appreciate a joy with fangs, a joy that doesn’t stay down in the ring. Something that feels more like a means of survival, and also like a tool that one can use for their survival. And perhaps it’s utilitarian and cold to think of joy in that way, and that’s not necessarily my attitude, but I think that joy certainly has way more to it than fluff, or a sort of fluffiness, and in the way that I employ it in poetry or the ways in which I most appreciate it in poetry.

I think you can strike a balance between joy in poetry and the articulation of such that isn’t so removed from the world that we all live in to the point of feeling like it’s written in a vacuum or willfully ignorant or ignoring the conditions materially and politically, et cetera, that we live in. And at the same time, still being able to write about the mundane, right?

Over AWP weekend, I went to the aquarium; if I wanted to write a poem about looking at all the sharks and fish and all stuff like that, I totally could. And that would be wonderful. But there’s ways in which joy can be defanged to say nothing, just to have some sort of happy platitudes, and I’m much more interested in joy that gets you feeling, “wow, I love this world,” while also being like, in the same poem, “the world is sometimes difficult to love and/or difficult to be in. Period”

DC: There’s definitely a sense that I get from you, like, there’s not a use of writing about joy if we’re going to remove it from its material conditions, the things that Joy has to push through or work against or work with, or work in tandem, all the prepositions that go along with joy.

Feelings RE: “Joy is Resistance”

DC: I love what you’re saying here about joy with fangs, and joy is a thing that acts actively, working with us. I think there’s often an impulse to simplify joy, and I’m not unguilty of it. People love to say things like “joy is resistance,” or I have a friend who absolutely hates when people are like, “rest is resistance,” all the kinds of et cetera things that are like “x is resistance,” as opposed to, “resistance is resistance.” So I’m wondering, how do you feel about the general “Joy is Resistance” set of sentiments — does it resonate with you? Does it irk you?

JT: I am not a hater by nature. It is not my general mode of moving through the world. I do think it’s like, there’s humor in being a hater and it’s like fun to talk smack with friends and whatnot from time to time. But that’s like not generally my attitude.

In my non-haterdom, I understand where people are coming from when they say the phrase, right? And the idea that, for Black folks, for example, who live in a nation that over-polices, murders, right? Surveils, disenfranchises, incarcerates, dah, dah, dah, dah. To have all of that be the foundation for life for Black people in this country should be miserable. Yes, to experience joy is in resistance to that reality. However, at the same time, the person who is most often saying “joy is resistance” is someone that I’m like, yehhhh. Is that the sort of like slogan or a or term, for lack that you have seen used and attached to as a means of abdicating responsibility for yourself?

Yes, I am Black in the United States. Yes, there’s a bunch of things that Black people face, and also, I personally am not often experiencing the level of literal discomfort or prejudice that other people, like my neighbors and other people across the country, are, or other people across the world are. And therefore I could —again, speaking only for myself — I could use a bit more discomfort. I could use getting out there, doing the thing that is perhaps inconvenient.

I know there was some post, some copypasta-post going like a month or two ago about, like, friendship is about inconvenience and it’s like, yeah, I want to pick you up from the airport or…

DC: Maya Salameh has a really great poem on that in ONLY POEMS.

JT: And that sort of sentiment I understand, and it can be extrapolated. My own joy, my own pleasure is not so precious that I have to prioritize it above committed action or a variety of things. Donating money, work, volunteering at a variety of places, right? All of these things are work, but also feed one’s own joy. The idea of a” job well done, time well spent,” work that is valuable, but the idea that like, “oh, I feel like I’m contributing to my community, I feel like my community contributes to me, even in its very continued existence,” and the knowledge that the web is there, the safety net is there, that people look out for each other, brings me joy, and therefore for that joy to continue, I must contribute to it. So when I resist “joy as resistance,” I’m resisting what I think can sometimes feel like a resistance to truly get involved, right? A resistance to do anything that actually inconveniences you, which is to say a kind of laziness.

DC: We sometimes have an issue thinking about what it is that we owe to each other. It gets lost in translation often. I think especially living in this country, at this time, with the different kinds of forces that move against us and influence us, we often are asking the question, it’s like, “well, I don’t owe anything to anyone. I’m my own individual person.” And so in many ways, it could feel like my happiness is the thing that matters most, and as long as I’m happy in this terrible country, that I am winning. And it then also comes to the point where, well, that doesn’t really do much for anyone else.

And so thinking about, yeah, joy is resisting this kind of thing that’s working against us, but also, you maybe weren’t the most materially affected by said thing.

I know you host your own Substack, you do your own interviews called Writers & Their Cherished Hobbies (WATCH!), which is really great, ‘cause I know for each one of those, based on what kind of funds you’re able to procure, you donate those funds to different causes. I think that’s a really great idea of what joy can do. Like, okay, we’re creating an outlet for joy, for people to talk about their joys, and also we are materially, financially supporting another group of folks who actually could use that sort of resistance.

JT: There was a Palestinian man in Gaza who used to make these videos where he’d be smoking a cigar and he’d say, “Hello, my enemies, may you have a very bad day every day.” And he is always kind of grinning and whatever, and he loves cigars. Or when you hear about kids break dancing, or Ethiopian girls forming like a skating group. In that way, yes, of course joy is resistance because of what every other daily moment is.

But here, in the United States, yes, for example, I live in Washington, D.C., National Guard is present, da da da da. But also, I’m going through my days generally unbothered, right? So it’s like, okay, well, how am I gonna make sure I’m taking care of myself, my own mental health, my own physical health, right? My family and friends, et cetera. And then also be like, okay, the joy that I get from playing video games in my living room at night, or going out to eat with my friends or what have you, that has refilled my tank, so to speak. How am I then gonna turn that outward? The turning outward is also a source of joy for me, and I think for many people.

How Joy Shows Up

DC: I am wondering, with everything that you’re saying, how does joy show up for you within your creative work? How do you then channel it into your poetry or anything else that you write?

JT: I am a rambler, generally speaking. Someone asks a 10-word question and they get like a five minute answer. The amount of times in my life that I’ve told someone, “so like, the short version is,” and then I proceed to tell what, for them, might be the longest story they’ve ever heard. That impulse is also present, to a degree, in my poetry, which is just that I’m a big fan of long, kind of meandering…

DC: Like an effusiveness.

JT: Yeah. I have always been kind of earnest. Maybe briefly was gripped by irony in my early teen years, but thankfully was inoculated from all that. I don’t particularly find earnestness to be something embarrassing or to be bashful of. Especially nowadays, in the last handful of years, I think for most, an evidence of earnestness is actually kind of really inviting. Especially now when we get into not just people being fake, but like literal digital media sometimes being fake.

I have always enjoyed, very much in the school of Ross Gay’s poetics or Hanif Abdurraquib’s poetics, it’s almost like, they’re like, “We’re gonna go on a walk,” right? “And I’m gonna tell you something.” The poetic intent and craft choices come from, okay, how am I gonna guide the reader’s eye and sensory experience to the things that I want? And also perhaps that I, the writer or the speaker, was experiencing as they were navigating a particular thing. “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” which is probably the poster child of joy poems in the last fifteen years, or ever, I don’t know, is a prime example of that.

I tend to be a relatively narrative poet, but my goal, hopefully, is to be like, I’m gonna make sure that the reader follows me there. I don’t think poems are particularly difficult to understand, but I want them to be beautiful to experience. I feel like I try that in a bunch of ways. I try some metaphors and similes that I think are surprising, but also I just try to build an image that I think has, or details that have a lot of weight.

I think a lot of Rick Barot’s “The Wooden Overcoat” —

DC: I teach that poem every time I teach a class. Yeah.

JT: Exactly. Everyone teaches it because it’s such a brilliant crash course in how to build from details to images. Paul Tran talks about how you have details, and once you add dramatic context to a detail…

DC: …it becomes an image. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

JT: And so a tattoo can be a detail. Your grandmother’s faded tattoo can become an image. Or a flower versus a flower pushing up from the concrete, you can think about those sorts of things. I love that kind of stacking, that kind of compilation almost, those bouquets that seem almost too big … Sometimes I kind of want that effect, where I almost don’t even even know what to do with this, but the longer I look at it, the more I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t notice that this particular flower looks like this,” or, “This one hasn’t even budded yet, or bloomed.”

DC: When I talk about image with my students, another way that I go about it is — because my father does photography, and so there’s like some theories, and now, my father does not use these words, but there’s like theories in photography. There’s like the punctum and there’s like the studium, right?

So the studium is the context around the photo. It’s the intellectual realm of the photo, why it was taken, what it’s “about.” And then the punctum is the thing that pierces you. And so when I talk about image and details with my students, you can decide for yourself what image you’re going for, but sometimes you can’t actually decide what the image is. Because the image, when I explain it, it’s the thing that stays with you after you leave the poem. And for exactly the reasons that you’re talking about earlier, and that Paul Tran is talking about. The tattoo: detail. The grandmother’s faded tattoo: image, because it’s staying with me after I leave the poem.

When you’re talking about “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” every time I read that poem — which is not always super often because it is a 14 page poem, but it’s a lovely poem. I do have it on the vinyl. If anyone doesn’t have that vinyl, I recommend it, it’s so good. I can listen to him forever, which is why he’s the only one I’m trusting with, with four pages of text to listen to, to read — Anytime I listen to it, I think of “Note to Self” from the end of J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hill Drive. There’s this kind of the same kind of effusiveness. It’s exactly what you’re saying, it is a catalog.

Something that I appreciate about him and Hanif, who you mentioned, and yourself is a deep appreciation, a deep attention to the scene of the poem, what’s happening within the world of the text. I think that’s its own kind of skill. There’s obviously plenty of poets who are really good at honing in on whatever the particular subject or item or whatever it is that they’re worried about, but what I appreciate about all three of your work is just how much you create a world for us. I think it comes from different valences, right? Hanif does music journalism, and so much of music is about setting scenes. So he does a really great job of crafting that environment. But similarly, to you and Ross, is just seeing the way that you guys go about making sure that everything within this world gets its proper attention.

JT: I love listening to scores of particular movies and video games and things like that, and there’s times when I’m like, I wanna build that moment. And that can only work if you’ve scaffolded the, like, okay, you’re hearing this thread and this thread and this thread and oh my God, it culminates in this moment.

In the “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” recording with Bon Iver, the first time I heard it, I was like, wow, I’m having a great time. But then when we get — it’s like it’s pretty late in it. Maybe like the last two or three minutes — when he sings. Thank you. When Ross is like, Thank you. Thank you. It has — again, nothing about that particular recording is instrumental, it’s the reading of the poem — but it’s the only moment where it has singing, and I’m like, “oh, wow.” I’m like, so dazzled.

Or in… have you played The Outer Wilds? Have we? I know I talk about it all the time.

DC: I have played a portion of it. It did not end up being the game for me, but…

JT: No, that’s totally fine.

DC: Recommendation! My friend Amelia Crowther has played the Outer Wilds and has a terrific set of… they’re like poems, like found text poems pulled from them. Terrific poems.

JT: There’s a moment — I’m gonna be as vague as possible, ‘cause I think it’s the emotional punch of the whole —

DC: I mean, you could tell me; I probably will not end up going back in and playing it.

JT: Okay. Well, all of the side characters you meet play an instrument, and they’re all playing like a particular melody or a particular beat. And at one point in the game, you can assemble all of them and direct them all to play. You can choose who plays first, who plays second, who plays third, and they’ll eventually all play at the same time. And it makes a song. They’ve actually all been playing distinct parts of a song, and it has such a like… it comes at a moment when the plot is sort of like at its height and that kind of thing, and there’s some visual fun that’s, you know, the equivalent of like fireworks, to be more precise. But it’s just like, oh, this thing has all of these components brought into it. And I think when, I don’t know, I think I just like love when you feel like the snowball is getting larger.

DC: Something about the way that repetition will reveal, or, like, surprise and repetition. I was just talking about repetition with Summer Farah, but it’s something about patterns, right? Our brains love patterns, and so when we find patterns that then like to merge into each other, or we recognize that the pattern’s been doing something underneath that we didn’t notice all along, it’s like that element, that moment of “aha” or “wow” that really gets to us.

JT: And poetry is just patterned language. Like it’s literal definition.

Poetic Influences

DC: I would love to hear more about poets and writers you feel are really big influences for you.

JT: I love Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, true Not just the poem, the whole book. Highly recommend. I love Aracelis Girmay. I am also half Eritrean, and so that’s my Eritrean goat right there. She has a poem that many people know called “You Are Who I Love,” and it’s also tremendous. The Hanif Abdurraquib poem that I love — I know, perhaps he jokes about this, but I know some people associate him with, like, sad guy, and he’s always posting, he’s like, “I’m really funny, I’m really goofy” or whatever. In A Fortune for Your Disaster, his second poetry collection, he has a poem called “If Life Is as Short as Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already at My Feet?”

And I think it’s beautiful. It’s one page, and the images stick with me a lot. It’s a poem, to be a little reductive, about like, the speaker is told, “oh, you have to like, cut some foods outta your diet cause of cholesterol,” and it’s a poem about like, well, unfortunately the things I love are… they got a lot of that. There’s like a scene of eating fried chicken in the car, and it just really resonates with me. The orange light, the grease stain which gets described as a country, and I think it’s…I don’t know. I think everyone knows that Hanif writes with a very tender, loving eye, but that poem is joyful through and through.

June Jordan’s “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8,” — more commonly understood as [I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP] — is another poem that’s about joy, even though it’s mostly a list of demands, so to speak, wishes, hopes.

Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern”, which opens with the line:

The days I don’t want to kill myself

are extraordinary.

and it just goes from there. Yeah. Those works, they just really get me going. The poets really get me…. There’s so many more I could list, but like those are poems that, you know, some of them are short, some of them are long, but they have that quality. Even “I Must Become a Menace to my Enemies” by June Jordan is a joyful poem. I would make that argument, ‘cause it’s kind of gleeful in how the speaker makes their enemies uncomfortable.

DC: The joy of hate. The joy of hateration.

JT: Exactly. Anyway, those are the ones that I like to think about a lot.

How Joy Lives Alongside Heavier Emotions

DC: Maybe the last question I’ll ask you before we get to reading your poem, because I know we’ve talked about Ross Gay and you were talking about Inciting Joy, and in the introduction of Inciting Joy, he prompts us away from thinking of joy as an emotion that’s discreet and locked away from feelings like sorrow or grief.

And I know we were talking about this earlier, about the urge to reduce joy, or even thinking away from joy as a reward we receive when we reach some type of milestone or accomplishment. And so I’m wondering, as a closing thought: How does joy live alongside your other, maybe heavier, emotions? What does joy make possible or necessary in your actions?

JT: I love Inciting Joy a lot. I love Ross a lot, what can I say? I’m a fan boy, whatever. But I think… it’s funny ‘cause the cliche is also like, “oh, you can’t have pleasure without pain.” And that phrasing also kind of annoys me. Not because I disagree, but it’s just, you know, it goes the way that cliches do, which you’re like, “enough. I’ve heard enough.”

I think I appreciate the way, and again, it’s like, it succeeds in the way it stacks, in the way it builds this idea that you can’t live without the two things. Joy is not something that is devoid of heartbreak. Even the joy itself is not devoid of heartbreak, not like heartbreak makes joy possible because you’re experiencing the opposite of it. But even sometimes in the joy, there is something heartbreaking. In “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” there is gratitude to finding in a drawer the dreadlocks of a murdered friend.

That’s like the line, or close to the line, and that’s like a simultaneity, both happening at once. How everything must be kind of touched by grief if you’re going through the belongings of a deceased loved one of any kind. And then to find something as proximal as like the literal hair on their head, you know? And yet there’s like gratitude to that. And then it unspools to “I saw our murdered friend in a dream and he guided me towards this place.” And that kind of simultaneity, I think, happens all the time. I really distrust people that can shut off the kinds of things that are happening around.

It’s not to say that it needs to come up at every single moment. It’s not to say that there’s some sort of virtue signal-y attitude towards, like, “I’m gonna bring this up in every chance I get, this horror, this atrocity.” But I really distrust people who, like, it doesn’t even cross their mind.

Not just because we’re always seeing reports of bombings and things like that, but it’s just like, it’s all… it all happens. We’re experiencing it all at once, and therefore I want a joy that… or if I’m gonna write about joy, I enjoy writing about joy, but I’m not necessarily like sitting down to be like, “it’s time to write a new, joyful poem,” you know? It’s just sort of like one of my preoccupations.

DC: Thinking about how joy lives through, through these things.

JT: Yeah. I’m sober, right? I’m aware of people in my life with various, or have had a history with, addiction in the past and you can have joy and elation chemically administered at the cost of one’s own body, perhaps short term, perhaps long term. And if you’re gonna resist that, the thing that makes you happy, in this particular case, can also be the thing that deteriorates you. Okay, well then, in that case, how do you go about joy that grapples with all of these facts, that you have to resist the easy path to it?

The path that is as simple as a substance, right? I can’t speak for other people’s experiences, but if you’re gonna resist the easier “path to joy,” — which is again, of course, not to say that addiction is easy, you get what I’m saying? — What work are you gonna do to actually cultivate it? How are you gonna both protect it from the forces that be, surround us, while also understanding that you can’t protect it outright. You know, the passage in Inciting Joy’s introduction is like “joy doesn’t exist in this locked room with warm lighting while on the outside trying to get in is like all of the horrors,” right, it’s more so, “Okay, atrocities abound.”

I think of the first poem of Franny Choi’s “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On” —

DC: Yep. That title poem. Mm-hmm.

JT: “Before there was an apocalypse of this, there was an apocalypse of that,” right? Perhaps everyone has thought this is the worst it’s ever been.

DC: Right.

JT: And I’m like, okay, well, if that’s true, even if sometimes selfishly, I’m like, “well, no, I think this is the worst it’s ever been,” but then you really think about it and you’re like. I mean, not really. Not for me specifically. Then, if that’s the case, how do I make sure that I am balancing that, right? Not being afraid to write about the horror. Even if it’s messy, that doesn’t mean it has to be published. It can just be a way of moving through your own mind, right? Not just the world. And then the joy, you’ll find a way, I think, to include joy in a way that feels more genuine, in a way that doesn’t feel so forced or even, like, duplicitous.

DC: You wanna be honest with your joy and being honest with the joy means being honest about what’s happening around the joy.

JT: Totally.

DC: Perfect. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Jonny. This has been a terrific conversation, and I would love it if you could close us out here with a work of your own that showcases how you think about joy.

JT: Yeah, totally.

Winter Solstice

“Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming”

- Cameron Awkward-Rich

I wake up today—again—in a nation giddy as a nectared hummingbird at the smell of blood and immediately everything claws at me: the shower hisses against my neck like a doberman’s leash, the kitchen sink nurses a tower of filth I can’t bear to look at, winter has turned the brightest tree on my block into a snuffed chandelier. Today, the rain comes down in icy fangs. Tomorrow, the same. Nothing here escapes the physics of American violence, not even the weather. What good is a clock in a place where suffering never sets? Language makes for a lousy tourniquet, I know, but I get dressed, walk to the park, and throw my voice amongst the other protesters all the same. What else to do with the dozen kicked beehives in my chest? Beside me, a little girl no taller than my hip holds a sign and chants and it is enough to turn the institution of dreaming I was raised in into a ruin. This happens daily, this ruining, this encroaching darkness, but here, amongst these people so full-throated with their convictions toward a more abundant world, I’m rebuilt, mosaicked by their singing & tenderness & rage. The coalescing voices a hot tonic against the pessimism our nation pledges to. I walk home, on the precipice of sobs, and there’s the tree again, dark and towering, its leaves all yellow in the mud. One of its branches kisses the top of my head. A common finch assembles a nest in its canopy. It prepares for the life it knows is coming.

Copyright © 2025 by Jonny Teklit. Originally published in Split This Rock. Used with permission of the author.

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in joy as poetic practice, I have added some folks recommended by our guest in the Substack Post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. Our guest, Jonny, offers the following prompt:

Read the poems that are suggested at the end of this episode. From there, write out a list of things that bring you joy. Write an ode to one of them, or many of them.

All the example poems can be found in the episode transcript. Until next time, thanks for listening.

If you are interested in the poetics of joy, Jonny recommends:

• “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” | Ross Gay

• “You Are Who I Love” | Aracelis Girmay

• “If Life Is as Short as Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already at My Feet?” | Hanif Abdurraqib

• “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8” | June Jordan

• “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” | Gabrielle Calvocoressi

• “won’t you celebrate with me” | Lucille Clifton

DeeSoul Carson: You know it sounds silly, but especially when I think of poetry as an art form that, first and foremost, lives in the public sphere, right? Like, I feel like poetry being a private-ish thing is more new, in the broad history of poetry. So I’m just like, we are, we’re performers. That’s more or less what we do, but we’re trying to give our work to the public. You gotta know what gets the people going!

DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is e·pon·y·mous, an O, Word? podcast series interested in poets, the title poems of their collections, and how their work finds its way into our hands. Today’s episode is on Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins.

Alison C. Rollins is the author of the poetry collections Black Bell and Library of Small Catastrophes. Rollins holds an MFA from Brown University and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2019. Her work, across genres, has appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

Alison, hello!

Alison C. Rollins: Hello!

DC: How is it going?

ACR: It’s going well! And before we get started, I just wanted to give, as a former librarian, a shout out to you for the labor that you put into this podcast and just cultivating a reading community and really sitting thoughtfully with the work. I cannot tell you how much it means to have the work be engaged with, with that level of rigor and intensity, and it’s a true delight and treat to be on the podcast.

DC: Oh, that is so sweet! Thank you so much. I’ve been in my bag recently trying to get more people to read. I was just talking to my editor earlier this morning, and we were talking about poetry collections. We were like, yeah, people love to read poems one-off, but like, how do we read poetry as a group and a collection of artifacts?

So yeah, I mean, I was happy to. It’s a terrific book. It’s so fun to interact with. I’m sure I’ll ask you a little bit about this later, but something that I really love in the collection is your emphasis on performance.

ACR: Yes.

DC: I got into poetry doing spoken word, and as I’ve gone through the MFA and been in other kinds of spaces than I have been in for Spoken Word and slam, I’ve seen all kinds of engagements with the page. I often see that movement from the stage to the page, but not very often do I see the page then reflect back some of [those] performance elements. So I really appreciate that about your work.

And speaking about the book, Black Bell, I know from reading that the title is named after a physical artifact, this contraption of iron horns and bells, so I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the artifact and what drew you to it as you approached the writing of this collection?

ACR: Mm-hmm. I went down an interesting rabbit hole, I think, at the time… searching visual images of fugitivity. So, it started with a familiarity with Henry ““Box”” Brown, which I feel like most people have [as] an understanding of as a kind of canonical figure as it relates to fugitivity or enslaved persons escaping to freedom famously, or with a lot of public display.

I stumbled upon this image of a woman wearing this contraption that had an attachment around her neck and her waist. These three large tiers up above her, and I think it’s 12 total bells, or more than that, dangling above her head. And the pose, the way in which her body is posed, is very graceful. It looks almost like a statuesque dancer. But the weight, or the knowledge of the cumbersome nature of the actual structure of torture and punishment for her trying to escape did not align at all with the beauty of her body.

I was really captivated by what it meant to be made a spectacle in that way, the sound of that form of torture and the image or beauty of her body in that pose. And so I just kept returning to the image over and over again. It was a person I did not have a name for, there was no citation in terms of her. And then I found later Moses Roper, in a mid-19th century slave narrative, writes about her, this particular contraption, and she’s punished or caught wearing it, having traveled four miles.

And so this notion of fours in the book — it was previously called Quartet for the End of Time, which I could talk about later — but it has four sections. And so I was just thinking about, like, to wear for four miles this structure, to be making that noise or sound on foot as a method of escape. I wanted to be in dialogue with her in a collaborative way, or in thinking about sound making, utterance, silence, or quiet versus loudness. It really just grew out of an obsession, finding this particular image in the archive and really sitting with it as I wrote the book.

DC: Yeah, I mean, there’s this interesting thing you’re saying here as I’m thinking about fugitivity as it relates to spectacle, or rather the spectacle that we make, especially in this nation of fugitives, right? We have the 10 most wanted, when we had that whole Luigi Mangione thing, it became a whole nationwide [event].

In this book you have… there are so many artifacts within the collection, and I’m thinking about the poem that… it includes “Queen Lear” and I can’t think of the name of the other poems, but it has all the clippings of…. What are those called? The ads?

ACR: Slave ads. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

DC: Yeah. There’s the whole production of looking for these slaves, the description of these slaves. So just thinking about, what does it mean for our bodies to be physically marked and cataloged this way, right? I mean, I’m sure you also have thoughts on the cataloging or inventory, especially as someone who’s a librarian, and the energies that includes. There’s some really interesting valences there.

I would actually love to hear more about the original title, Quartet for the End of Time, and maybe even how changing the name of the collection maybe made the collection as a whole change its focus, or change its shape. And then maybe even what remained from the original idea.

ACR: Yeah, so that title is taken from a composition by Olivier Messiaen, who composed it in 1941 while a prisoner of war in Germany. And he had other fellow imprisoned men perform for other prisoners and the guards. And he’s borrowing from biblical images or notions of bird songs and sound and thinking about immortality or God’s love and relationship to music making and utterance. And so originally, I was like, I love this title. I love the concept, again, of the four, the quartet. I’m obsessed with death. I was re-looking at a notebook I had where I was just taking notes [on] like philosophy, literary theory, poetry, looking at death, which sounds morbid, but I find really interesting.

The concept of resurrection, scientifically and spiritually, is absolutely fascinating to me, and that kind of echoes throughout the book as well. But this notion of being literally in a state of imprisonment in a quite barren landscape in Germany with minimal access to things, cold, and making art and music and having a collective kind of public performance in nature and the value of both making music and enjoying community-engaged listening to that production in the time of war and actual imprisonment was just so fascinating to me. And I sat with my husband, the poet Nate Marshall. We were thinking about it and I was like, this will be the title for the book. And then I had the Black Bell series and he was like, “no, I think it’s Black Bell.”

And I was like, “damn, I think, I think you’re fucking right.” Like, I was like —

DC: Like he might have ate with that one.

ACR: I was like, I think it’s just Black [Bell] — because I love… a lot of my work and my thinking is highly referential. I’m always in conversation. I’m never standing or presenting or writing alone. It was a more arguably inventive or original departure, having it be Black Bell.

DC: I definitely want to come back to that referentiality, which is another thing that I loved about this collection. I’m a person that loves talking about referential texts. But before I do that, I wanna talk more about these title poems, as that is the aim of this podcast series

ACR: Sure.

DC: For anyone who hasn’t listened, as one reads the book, they will discover that “Black Bell” is not the name of one eponymous poem, but there are four in the collection that are encountered across it, one [in] each section.

Each of the poems invites us to strike a bell of a different note before reading it. The note in the back of the book concerning these poems invites us to reflect on our own encounters with bells in the world. Something I was wondering is — what have been your own encounters with bells, formative or otherwise, that informed your approach to these poems?

ACR: As a child, I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through 12th grade. And so, spirituality or the church setting for me was very much associated with bells or the sounding of bells to signal time, to signal the start of a religious ceremony or procession. For me, that was probably what was most grounding. I think in popular culture, in civic or political space or in social settings, the notion of a public square with the bell (the Liberty Bell), these symbolic references also ruminated for me. And then most recently, getting into more meditation, sound healing; I bought the bells from a black woman in the UK who makes them and uses them for sound healing.

I was thinking a lot about — especially also at my time at Brown — Alexis Marie Brown’s notion of echolocation, sound waves, sounds as things that we experience kind of ricocheting through our body and nervous system, as a method of healing. Those were some of the things I was ruminating on or thinking about.

DC: There is this interesting — I feel like I need to remove the word “interesting” from my vocabulary. I use that every time I start a comment, but I do think everything is interesting, which is actually my real issue. I think everything is interesting. But there is a thought I’m having regarding bells and resonance, and I think that feels very present in your collection. Like the way that a bell, you strike it, but that’s not the end of the sound. It reverberates across the collection. I think a lot of these poems, what’s happening within them, “linger” is really what I’m thinking of. There’s things that stay with me when I move away from them, and I’m thinking about this specifically with the ones that are less textual, right?

You were talking before about this, this woman that inspired the, in the archive, that inspired the name of the collection. And she comes up pretty early in the collection, in “The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading Female Figures.” It’s the image of a woman with iron horns and bells on to keep her from running away next to the image of a piece of a musical composition, but also has this white woman in this dress dancing. So there’s the juxtaposition of those two figures, and also this idea, the visual of the woman with the bell that I think stays with me as I go on through the collections.

Like the next poem is one of the “Black Bell” series. So there’s the actual sound of the bell now in my ear. When I was reading the poems, I actually went online and found like, there’s these tingsha bells from this guy in the temple, and different notes. In these particular videos, he continues to strike the bell, and so I read the poem at the cadence of the bell being [struck] and that created a very interesting kind of reading, but it’s just the idea of that. And there’s so much music in this collection!

DC: You make so much reference to music, like Sun Ra is a big reference for you. I would love to hear more about your connection to Sun Ra, especially as it applies to this collection.

ACR: I love, and I sometimes find it’s been maybe politicized, like the notion of a spoken word artist in contrast, perhaps to the page or to the written word. Because I think about the vocality of utterance, like what it means when we go to do a public reading or whatever from the book.

I remember when my first book came out, going to do readings and people having certain expectations for what the language would sound like in my mouth, for good and bad, being like, “this was a sad reading,” or “I thought it was gonna be more interactive” or whatever.

Some people that just really do not do well with reading their work aloud. And I think “Why did I come to this reading?” I could just sit at home and sit with the work in silence by myself. You’re not really thinking about what it means to occupy collective space and be in dialogue or a medium of reciprocity with listeners. And so, for me, and I think my husband Nate also says this, the poem is a type of musical score, directing the pace with which, the breadth with which people take, the way in which they move or orchestrate through their reading and experience. And so to me, that is not necessarily disparate from — it’s different, but also connected to the musical listening experience as well.

Like to your earlier point about a lot of poems become one-offs versus a whole-collection reading experience. The same way that I might go to Spotify and listen to that one top hit or one joint, or I listened to track number five, but I don’t bother to listen to the one through four that precede it, what does it mean to be able to kind of chop and screw or remix in that way to engage.

DC: Hmm.

ACR: And actually, a lot of my reading practice for poetry collections, and I maybe shouldn’t admit this, even as an educator, I would do this thing, I would rarely sit with a whole book. I’d open it or be in the bookstore, leaf through it, turn to page 12, “that poem was dope, “interesting,” like, I wasn’t really actively engaging with it as a whole thing.

And so that type of play or engagement, I’m actually kind of, I think into or find more resonant or interesting and, for me again, I don’t know why, I just think musicality lives alongside the poetic lyric for me, very much, like in this book, I compare like Dante’s Inferno to Wutang clan, those need to sit together for me.

I’m not gonna engage with canonical Italian literature and spirituality without also thinking about Wu-Tang. I think those juxtapositions are fun and playful and exciting. I don’t know. I’m not really much of a musician. I’m not a very good singer, but if I could, I think I would be in the vein of Sun Ra. I think a lot about Aretha Franklin’s album, especially in relation to this collection.

DC: There are so many poets who I love to hear read their work. So I’m thinking first and foremost, like Morgan Parker. Love to hear her read her work. Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, ‘cause who doesn’t love listening to Danez do their poetry.

I thank God every day that I did slam and I did theater, because you’re absolutely right. There’s some people whose work I’ll read on the page, and I do have expectations because I’m a person that reads their work. And so I’m like, “oh, I can imagine how this poem is gonna sound.”

And then they read it and I go, “wow, this is not what you wrote.” Like, I’m looking at the score, right? I’m not a musician, but like in the same vein, I’m reading poems as if they’re a score. I’m like, I could see what you wrote. And you’re not singing that song, you’re not playing the tune that you wrote out.

If I could conduct… I wish MFA programs would have a performance component. Like, I wish there was a class on reading.

ACR: It’s also, I got a performance certificate at Brown during my MFA. Like, I just elected to do that separately. And there was something about just — it sounds so cliche and like self help-ish — like, finding confidence in your voice. Like what? But it’s like, you’re at the graduate level studying to hopefully perfect, if that’s even what we’re reaching for. I’m never really reaching for mastery. I think that’s impossible and disinteresting, as it pertains to craft, kind of White-supremacist based.

But stepping into your voice, being able to command a space, to be in vocal dialogue with others in a way that is not shrinking or actively making yourself small or actively trying to disengage is in itself a type of art. I hesitate to use the type of the word like “calling,” but there’s something about the preacher, there’s something about the comedian even. There’s the person who’s able to rely on language to let people have an experience, to laugh, to be moved, to be called towards a higher power.

I think those trainings are really important. And I’ve even been in spaces where sometimes it’s like, do you even want to say your name? Are you feeling affirmed in saying who you are? Like where you come from? I think especially for marginalized subject identities especially, it’s like, you have to be able to claim, to stand 10 feet down —like 10 toes down, you don’t have 10 feet, 10 toes down in the moment —

DC: But that’s the energy you need though, 10-feet energy.

ACR: Exactly.

DC: Like even the confidence that I’ve gained from watching…I grew up in a Baptist church. And I think I used to be self-conscious about going up, speaking in front of people, that sort of thing. But what I think about now, especially like performance artists, thinking about preachers, is the reaction I have when I see someone else fully embody their work. Because I think when I’m doing it myself, I’m like, “oh, that’s cringe” or whatever, you know, and maybe we need to get rid of the idea of, the fear of cringe. Because we can get to like some really great stuff on the other side of cringe.

But also the idea, like, when I see someone else do it, I always go, “wow, that’s so cool,” because they’re really owning their space, like the space that we have given them. I came to their place and sat there to listen to them. And I think about that sometimes. I’m like, “oh, well people are here to listen to me. I guess I should give them something.”

ACR: Yes, yes.

DC: I’m gonna, I’m gonna go back now to what you were talking about with referentiality, because you do have a really lovely note section and I don’t often see note sections this detailed.

I love the notes section ‘cause I love to see what poets are thinking about. The last book that I read that had a notes section like this was Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home, which is a lovely collection. And she similarly is someone working in the archive. I loved what she was doing there and I loved to see what you’re doing here. This book, I think, largely asks us to reflect on those who have come before or who are working alongside with.

There’s Phillis Wheatley in this collection speaking through Turing Tests, in the spirit of Franny Choi, which I absolutely love. There are poems after Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton. This note section reveals to us that this is a collection of deep reverence and respect to a wealth of texts and music and art and so on. And so I’m just wondering how it feels for you to be in conversation with all the people that are in this collection. And then, what is your general relationship to the “after” poem?

ACR: I’ve heard people describe this collection as a type of call and response, and I think maybe that also might be how I conceptualize the “after” poem. It’s a polyvocal communication rather than a one-directional communication, and I think about that, not just in reference or relationship to the past or people that have passed, but also in relationship to the future.

Like, futurity was really important to me in this collection as well. I think so often it’s like, “oh, we’re just, it’s a historical book” or “it’s a book seeped in the archive.” And that has nothing to do with fantasy or science fiction or future pursuits, or even pleasure seeking or eroticism is necessarily binary or different from the past or history or pain. The work, or the way that I think, is always a constellation, it’s always a woven tapestry of multiple strands. And so showing or revealing those links, those connections, those stars situated in connection with each other is what I’m seeking or trying to do.

There’s a reference, there’s a poem for Harriet Jacobs, which I love teaching. I was a high school English teacher and librarian, and there’s just so many figures or names people don’t know that they should be familiar with, or that I want to point to and reference or nudge to if the reader has that curiosity or is motivated to do so. Yeah, it’s back to just the librarian at heart in terms of like, it’s a collection, it’s a conversation, it’s a polyvocal experience, across space and time.

DC: Call and response is really great. I think that goes back to what you were saying, especially thinking about the black church, thinking about sermons, that sort of thing. A lot of the way that we relate to one another is through our reaction, our continual reactions, which is another reason why I sometimes find MFA readings to be so off-putting, as someone who like started in Slam, ‘cause like, if anyone’s been to a Slam before, those poets are gonna let you know if a poem is working or not during the poem, which I love. I love the engagement that we give to each other, the energy we give to the — or even an open mic, I won’t even say a slam.

If you go to an open mic that’s being run well, the people are giving energy to the person at the front of the room. It is a giving and receiving of energy. Which is sometimes why, when I go to an MFA reading and everyone’s really sitting there all polite, I’m like, “oh, there’s no energy in the room.”

Like, there’s nothing to give. Nothing to receive. I love going up and being like, “hi.” And then they’ll look at me and I’m like, “no, I work with kids. I need you to say hello back”. Like, I need you to know that your voice is still working in this room, like, breathe for me.

ACR: I tell students to think about reading as a type of publication. You are collecting or garnering feedback. It’s a testing ground. You are measuring or seeing how these words live in the air. For me, it’s equally as important as an actual physical publication.

Like, I think there’s a lot of value in terms of testing things on the air and seeing the way that they resonate. And I think in a vocal performance setting, you’re always hoping people are like, “Hmm.” Or there’s the clapping, or like an utterance or, but I always love, like, if you’re ever at a musical performance or even like a drag performance, when people make that stank face, like that look.

DC: Yeah. My dad’s a bass player, so yeah, the stink face is very much alive.

ACR: Yes, yes. I’m always reaching for the stank face where it’s just like, it’s just so funky.

DC: I want language that contorts me. You know what I mean? Like, I want language that I physically can’t sit there and not make a face.

DC: Something I was struck by as I went through this collection was the amount of instructions given concerning how certain poems should be read and engaged with, which I also appreciated. I was thinking about the bells, thinking about all the instructions for “Hymn of Inscape”. In the opening poem’s epigraph, it states:

All “reading” is performance. Some performance is “reading.”

There’s another epigraph in the book that says something similar.

All “writing” is performance. Some performance is “writing”

We could think of a poem’s textual representation as a translation of how it is performing on the page. How does your relationship to performance translate to how you wrote the poems down? Like, as you actually approach putting them onto the page?

I’m thinking specifically of “Hymn of Inscape,” which is a poem in the book that’s meant to be ripped out. It’s meant to be put in these envelope, like there’s a whole performance aspect to it. How did that translate into putting it into the collection for you?

ACR: I think with this book, I guess in contrast to my first book, I was like, how can I further… I got my MFA quite late in life after having a whole career in librarianship after already having a first book. I went to Brown, which is known to be a quite experimental program. I was in the steel yard in Providence making metal sculptural pieces. I was taking hieroglyphics, like, I always tried to trouble or be subversive or be outside of the, like, I just recently started writing sonnets after like, I’m like, I teach graduate and I’ve never written a sonnet before.

So for the book, I was like, there’s just so much, I think, inaccessibility that surrounds poetry. I’ve heard Van talk about it in terms of poems as secrets that middle schoolers are struggling to figure out, or the answer is this obscured, hidden thing that is inscrutable, and so I was like, I just want it to be playful. I want it to be an invitation to play, to literally deface the book, to literally cut things up. To read in your own manner in a way that delights and perhaps invites like, I don’t know, sitting there with scissors, like cutting up a book, which you’re not supposed to do, or tearing things up.

I just wanted it to be an experiment almost, like to make reading, not a one-directional thing where there’s a traditional way that I’m saying you have to read it, but to engage with it as an experimental act of reciprocity.

When I perform that piece, which I’ve done quite a few times now, audience members get up, they come, they do, they look in the…, like, it’s a way to also engage with this notion of, there’s a reading where I come, I stand at the front, at the podium, at the microphone. You sit in your chair. I read at you. Then you get up. There’s a way I want you to invite, come up to the front of the space as well. Look in the mirror and have to utter words, like I’m gonna read things in the order in which you’ve selected them or brought them to me. Like that, there’s a duality, or a give and take as it relates to the reading process, either on your own and/or in the event space or reading space.

It’s also very much in conversation, I feel like, [with] Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, [which] was the only other book I’ve seen that was inviting this level of intertextual play in a way that was really exciting.

I wanted to be wild and free and imaginative in terms of the experience even of having a physical book. Engaging with the book, like thoroughly engaging and thinking about what it means to read as expansively as possible.

DC: It’s making me think, how do we as poets make the audience or the reader a co-creator of meaning?

ACR: Precisely.

DC: I think poetry is a genre that’s full of questions, especially ‘cause after it leaves our hands, there’s so little we can actually dictate about how someone will take that work, how they’’’ll deal with the work, how they’ll read into the work. And so I love the way that this book invites us to take active ownership of making that meaning.

You have to decide, if I was the one cutting up the book — which I have not done yet ‘cause it looks so good — but if I was the one cutting up the book, I decide which words go with which tercets, which images go with which words. The audience then decides how that book, how that poem is created and all those good things.

And so I think there’s a really interesting thing about how we engage, and there’s a lot of really good notes in here thinking about form, and how form invites different kinds of readings.

I think the last question that I’ll ask you before we get to the end of this thing is… I’m thinking about this book’s use of images and hybrid texts, which I’ve mentioned before. We don’t see a whole lot of images and stuff in poems, at least not historically, that’s becoming more popular as people get more comfortable with hybrid work. But in a recent episode of this podcast, my friend Kay E. Bancroft described hybrid poetry as getting funky on the page.

I was wondering if that resonated with you, and then, what’s your own approach to hybrid texts?

ACR: Yeah. I love, as we talked about, the stank face. Yeah, definitely in conversation with getting funky. For me, I think, again, about the visual, like, visual art in relationship or contrast, like what we’ll be willing to do at a contemporary art museum in terms of standing in front of a piece of art we don’t understand.

Like, you’re able to still engage and have experience and sometimes we’re more open to that than we are in a poetry reading or going or understanding or trying to attempt poetry. And so I think, in terms of just a multidisciplinary practice, like, what it means to be operating on its many registers as possible in that way. I feel like, as adults, it’s trained out of you, or what it means to be sophisticated or highbrow or whatever is books no longer have images, or we have this weird dichotomy in terms of like downplaying graphic novels or comic books or anime, and I just don’t believe that exists. I do feel like there’s pleasure in having visual images alongside written word, text.

It goes back to a type of childlike wonder in terms of picture books being often our first experience with literacy. And the Bible and Dante’s Inferno also, like, often text or prepared or experienced alongside visual images.

And so that was really important to me. I’m also just kind of like an archival geek. And like, some of the images are just like ones that are forgotten or wouldn’t be engaged with or looked at in any sense otherwise. And so resuscitating them and re-contextualizing them was important to me. I did a reading in New York and one of the other readers picked up the book and was like, “oh, there’s pictures!”

It’s just an unexpected, again, a delight or treat or like something to add another layer of meaning or possibility.

DC: Thank you so much for this collection. Truly, it was a joy to read, it is definitely a delight. If that’s what you were aiming for, it’s what I got from it. It’s a delight to engage with, and I think it made me think deeper. And I don’t say that lightly. The presence of such a wealth of different kinds of engagement made me want to engage with it more. I think the first time I read it, I felt empowered to not get everything the first time.

Because I’m definitely a spin-the-block kind of listener to music, spin-the-block kind of reader, like, let me do it again. Let me get to it again, and I promise things will come through to me, because the first time I just gotta get used to it. I gotta look at it and go, “okay, this is what’s going on. Got my lay of the land.” And so especially as I went through reading it again in preparation for this interview, I was really like, now that I know what’s going on in here, now that I know what I’ve gotten myself into, it’s like, wow, there’s so much careful attention that’s been given.

And I really love that kind of attention and seeing what kind of attention I can give the things that interest me. Because that’s really what it is, at the end of the day. It’s very clear you have a passion for this kind of engagement for the things that you’re working with. And it reminds me that I can engage with the stuff that I love in that same way. So thank you so much. I appreciate it. It’s been a wonderful conversation and I would love it if you could close us out by reading one of your eponymous poems.

ACR: Sure.

Black Bell [Wore the whistles…]

A bell’s dome represents the whole universe, the flat bottom represents the earth, and the hollow inside represents the space between the rest of the universe and the earth. When you strike a bell it sends a message from Earth out into the universe. Before reading, strike a bell tuned to A, the note connected to the third-eye chakra.

Wore the whistles
of men down her back.

Her clapper hung
like a saggy breast,
a piece of music.

Beneath her skirt was
the truth made ugly. Unsweet
as blackberry thorns.

Her laughter’s rattle, a mask
for secret contempt.
She took in as much

as she could. A homely,
or rather timely,
air about her.

Inside the wall of her cheek
was a sliver of violence
only she could trust.

The wind would witness
but wouldn’t chime in. 

From Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins, published by Copper Canyon. Copyright © 2024 by Alison C. Rollins. Originally published in Poets.org. Used with permission of the author.

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of e·pon·y·mous, a series of the O, Word? podcast produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. The music for eponymous and o word is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. Until next time — thanks for listening.

Tariq Thompson: It was an oral tradition first, and you can tell when a poem was written only on the page and then it’s arriving to air for the first time and it’s like, “I don’t know how to walk, I don’t know…”

DeeSoul Carson: Oh my goodness. I just had a whole — ugh, if you could have heard me in the car. It’s becoming so clear to me, especially recently, how much poets — especially folks who only go through the MFA or things like that — how deeply we need a class on poetry in the oral tradition. I’m like, I need a class where you’re forced to recite a poem…

Subscribe now

DC: Hellooooo, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word?, the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Prosody! I’m here today with my friend, Tariq Thompson.

Tariq Thompson is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. He’s the author of the chapbook LONE LILY (from Sunset Press, 2021). His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, Split Lip Magazine and elsewhere. Thompson was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. You can find more of his work at tariqthompson.com.

Tariq, hello!

TT: Hello!

DC: How’s your day going?

TT: It is going all right. I ate good this morning. The Daylight Savings Time definitely whooped my ass though, so, a little sleepy.

DC: Yes. As we talk on this Daylight savings day, I have just returned from AWP, which, if anyone here is a usual listener, I might sound a little slower than usual ‘cause I am rebooting from a long and beautiful AWP conference. We got to throw ass in Lucille Clifton’s home.

TT: I saw, yeah.

DC: Definitely kind of a spiritual experience. Like we were in her home. Her daughter, Sydney, who is just like this gorgeous being, was doing a little welcome for us, and at the end of the welcome, she started reciting “won’t you celebrate with me?” and all of the poets in the room, the majority Black room, started reciting the poem with her, and we all did those final lines together. And it was just like, “wow, this is what it’s all about.” Like the community that’s being created in this room. It’s what it’s all about.

And then a couple people walked into the room who did not look just like us and asked whose house it was, and that kind of broke the immersion, but …nonetheless, it was a beautiful time, a tiring time. But now I’m back and super excited to be talking to you. You are one of my favorite poets. I think you know this, but I love telling you anyway. I just love everything that you do with language, I love your attention to sound, and rhythm, and movement.

I’m really excited to talk to you about all those things today, but you know, this being O, Word?, we love this being kind of a craft-teaching podcast, and this episode being about prosody, I would love it if you could tell us in your own words what prosody is.

TT: Yeah. And thank you, also, for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. We get to speak all the time more casually, so it’s really nice to be able to talk about poems and, I guess, share with other folks. I consider prosody as a poem’s dance throughout the body.

DC: A poem’s dance… say more about that dance, or how do you interpret that dance when you go about writing?

TT: Yeah. I was thinking about this earlier today. I think about poems as a kind of physics. I teach this to my students as well, that instead of thinking of a poem as “bad” or “good,” I invite them to consider a poem as “strong” or “weak” and that they are like physical forces in the world.

So, when I say that, I’ve read one of your poems, right, DeeSoul, and I’ve been moved, I really mean that I started in one place, I arrived to the poem in one emotional state, and by the end of the poem, I’m somewhere on the other side of the room emotionally. And I assume for myself that I danced there, if it was a really strong poem.

I think about muscularity. I know we’ve talked a bit about a Carl Phillips essay related to that, but, how a poem kind of feels in the mouth, in the body, the surprises within that. And I think after reading a poem, also, the quiet that comes afterwards. Like, if a poem is really moving in a way that stays with me, I miss it after I finish the poem.

Does that make sense?

DC: It does. It does. And I’m definitely gonna come back to that Carl Phillips essay, ‘cause I know that’s one that’s important to you. I love what you’re saying there about the physics of it, and even “strong” and “weak” being distinct from “good” and “bad.” And how can maybe even a good poem be maybe a less strong poem, and what are the different ways that we quantify that, or measure that?

I also love what you’re saying here about the soundscape. Like the idea of quiet, and how quiet fills a room. And, I think especially with poets who play with sound and the relation between language and the mouth and things like that, the silence becomes its own actor in that — especially, I know you’re someone who thinks about and appreciates hip hop as an art form — so thinking about the way that space happens within like one’s “flow,” you know, how does that become a part of the line? As someone who appreciates hip hop, I would love to hear more about how you see that influencing your work as a writer.

TT: Word. Thank you. Yeah, hip hop, I mean, I love it. Oftentimes I wish that I was a rapper, or maybe a successful rapper. But alas, I’m a poet, which is just as good. I’m a very musical person. Folks that know me or have lived with me, as you have, can attest to all the times that I’m kind of humming or freestyling or just kind of singing, whatever, as I’m doing things.

What’s coming to mind right now actually is when I was younger, I would go over [to] my cousin’s house while my mom worked, and we would have to do the dishes, and it was always a slog and we’re like, “oh, we don’t wanna do the dishes.” And so, we started memorizing Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”1 and singing it to one another as we washed the dishes. So, I would do one verse and he would do the other. And even still, like to this day, I can, think I can, still do it:

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

We’d just be scrubbing away, singing the poems to one another. So, in terms of music generally, that’s how important it is to me, and with hip hop, it just feels like magic. I’m continually impressed by the way that rappers are able to wield language, both in a way that is sonically pleasing or even if it’s not sonically pleasing, just sonically moving, I’ll say.

The reason I said even if it’s not sonically pleasing is, I was thinking about Lamar’s “u.” That’s a very difficult listen. It’s one of my favorite songs by him, but there’s a cacophony in there that makes it difficult to listen to, on top of the subject matter. There are ways that a poem or a song can go against the grain of what we think is conventionally, sonically pleasing, and still have a profound effect of still [communicating] what the rapper or the poet intends.

TT: The reading of a poem is really, really important to me. And is, I guess in some senses, the most important part, I think? At least, that’s where I derive the most pleasure from poetry, the reading of it and the listening of it. I’m thinking of Kaveh [Akbar], who rocks on the balls of his feet as he reads. And another example of the poem dancing through the body, like he cannot help it, it is coming up through his feet. I really do appreciate when poets have considered what a poem is like when it’s living in air.

DC: I need a class where you’re forced to go to a slam. I need a class where you’re forced to get judged by strangers on how you deliver, because it’s obvious to me you didn’t write this with someone intending it to read it out loud. It looks great on the page. Terrific, beautiful on the page. But when it gets out into the air, it dies.

If we’re thinking about the poems as a conservatory for words, at some point we have to let those words go and live in the world. If those words are let out into the wild and they get into the world and they die, then we have not done our jobs as good conservationists of language. And so thinking about, like, how do we nurture those words? How do we nurture the sound?

Every syllable matters, especially in rapping, right? Hip hop, that’s what makes it so, like, if we want to talk about true inheritors of poetic tradition, in no place does iambic pentameter or anything otherwise matter than 16 bars. If you fuck up the flow, people are gonna let you know. There’s something really, deeply connected to tradition in the hip hop verse.

Growing up and listening to hip hop I think also imbues a certain kind of confidence in one’s ability to — and I say the same thing about growing up and doing slam — it imbues a certain kind of confidence in the work because if you don’t, that’s what your peers have. And so if you wanna measure up to your peers even, the people that you love, you have to kind of take on, even if you don’t feel it, sometimes you gotta put on a persona of confidence.

DC: I also love hearing what you’re saying about you and your cousin and “How the Caged Bird Sings,” and that act of recitation. I’m wondering if that act of reciting a poem, you feel, has [been] something that has gone on even as you go on to do your own work, the poem living in your head and then becoming some sort of music, [is] that something that resonates with you with your other writing?

TT: It does. A lot of times, a line will — and I think this is true of a lot of poets — a line will come into my head and at times it feels like… magic’s not the right word, but like a bird suddenly appearing in your mind, and it just, it’s there and the bird has music and you’re like, I gotta get this bird on the page somehow. And then it moves on from there. I think that having experienced poems living within me definitely has made it … I won’t say easier to be a poet, but more fruitful. I feel like I am being truer to myself into the language.

DC: Thinking more about this music and this idea of sound: in your writing process, what order of power would you say that sound lives in? Like, how does it govern your approach to poetry? How important is it to you in all the things that you’re considering when you’re crafting a poem?

TT: I would say that sound reigns supreme, and sometimes that’s to my detriment.

DC: Interesting.

TT: There have been many times where I have dug a hole for myself because I was really following the sound; it wasn’t until revision later that I was able to excavate more of the meaning that needed to be there. But I always, I think, lead with sound, because it just feels most natural and most exciting for me. A lot of times, I’ll begin with a free write, for example, and it’ll be based on this kind of associative sound play.

For example, I’ll try and write just without really thinking too much and just listening. So a lot of my free writes, if you look at it, the first part of it doesn’t make any sense, ‘cause it’s just words that are kind of similar sounding or have some sort of sonic connection. Then, as I’m warming up more, there will be more distance between those words that have stronger sonic connections. It’s like, if I’m swinging from word to word at the start, there are lots of small, quick swings, and as I get more comfortable and more meaning arrives to the work, the swings take a longer time between one another, but the swing is still felt.

As an example, if I were to start with the word conundrum, I might associate that word in three different ways. I could go with drum and the next word would be like drumstick. I could go with nun, and the next word is nunchuck, literally just n-o-n-e, none. Or I could go with con, right? And the next word is convict. And just going and going. Conundrum. Convict. Victoria. Orpheus. Just swinging from word to word.

It helps me, because it opens up my language, for one. Whenever I do this, I am encountering words that I know… they are in my body, they’re in my head, but I have not pulled them out as often in everyday conversation or maybe even in my writing recently. And that association reminds me that I have a much wider and more varied vocabulary to pull from for my poems, which is huge. ‘Cause there’s sometimes when I’m looking at a page and I’m like, “Man, I only know like 30 words.”

DC: Which is crazy, ‘cause you are one of the most well-versed niggas that I know.

TT: Thank you. I like being a versed nigga, so I appreciate that.

DC: That’s great. I was gonna ask you —because we were talking about hip hop and thinking about the joys of clever word play— I was gonna ask you how you find the word play and the sonic association guiding the work? So that’s really great, and any exercises that you had doing it, but I love that and that’s probably something I could do more.

I definitely lean on, I try to lean on sound, like I love a good alliteration to guide the rhythm of the work. When I see it in your poems, I think I’m always really struck by the clever sonic freedom of the work. It can maybe be a little bit contradicting, like that tight association does create some sort of sonic freedom. Like, I feel free saying it because the words are coming so naturally in my mouth, but I am thinking of your birthday sonnets.

And for anyone who’s listening and is not already familiar with Tariq’s work, Tariq shares a birthday with 20 incredible people. And then his parents also share birthdays with incredible people. I was recently teaching your poem, “On Their Birthday, Suge Knight & My Daddy Discuss Forgiveness,” and the interesting ways that 1) as “after” poems, which I define as really most poems of direct inspiration, it does not tell us who specifically the speaker is, or rather, there is a melding of voices between your daddy and Suge Knight, or in, your other poems, like you and Lorraine Hansberry. And just thinking about the way, not only that you’re in there, there’s two voices kind of now layering on top of each other, but also even the way that the rhythm and that sonic association is maintained even when you’re using the words from maybe a specific kind of…

TT: Maybe vernacular or…

DC: That’s exactly the word I’m looking for, a specific kind of vernacular, and I’m sure there’s something you’re considering there, ‘cause you’re very thoughtful about the play between those. But I think maybe if I was to phrase this as a question: When you’re going about those poems specifically, where you’re thinking about the vernaculars of other folks and how they live, how does that factor into those sonic considerations?

TT: Yeah. And thank you for the attentiveness to the work, I really appreciate it. I mean, everyone has their own natural rhythm, and if you are attentive to other folks and you listen to how they speak or how they’re writing it, it becomes more apparent. I actually, I wanna shout out Tangie Mitchell.

We were at a bookstore recently, and she was telling this story about her mom and her grandma, and she switched into this impersonation of them, ‘cause she was talking about a conversation that they were having. And I was just so struck by the specificity and clarity in imitating them. I was like, you love them so deep, and you know them so well that their words, their sound, their rhythms can come out of your mouth and it feels true. I was floored. And it’s apparent in her work too.

DC: And so many black women poets, specifically, the way that lives in, like… I talk about Remica Bingham-Risher all the time, and I will continue to, honestly, I’m not even sorry about it. But just thinking about the way that the words in Room Swept Home live. I’m thinking about Nicole Sealey, who only does certain, you know, she doesn’t do as much direct quotation, but thinking about when she talks about her mother or things like that, the way the words live in her body. What being known by someone does to the work, the reception of the work, like, I can see when someone has paid deep attention to a thing, or has deep care for a thing and that charges the attention to the work.

Not a black woman, but Keith S. Wilson has one of my favorite poems, in defense of Pigeons2 [sic]. And, it’s just once again, like, the kind of attention that is given to a thing and the way it changes the energy of the poem. It changes the sound of a poem. I’d also think, like, the rhythm and wordplay — maybe not directly or consciously — but there’s a subconscious euphony that happens. It’s really pleasing to us, and something about the way that it’s pleasing goes back to that sense of attention. You cared about this thing enough to give proper form and proper weight in the air.

DC: I want to go back to the essay you mentioned earlier from Carl Phillips. For those who haven’t read the essay, it’s called “Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax” by Carl Phillips. And in the essay, Phillips talks about the patterning of language that makes a poem, saying that the poem is “a bodily thing.” And that, like our bodies, it moves as a result of unseen mechanisms. So, just as the body moves from joints and tendons, the poem moves with volta and enjambs and rhymes. I’m wondering for you, Tariq, how does poetry become an embodied thing for you, and how do you find yourself patterning language?

TT: Thank you. I love this essay so much. I think it’s one of my favorite essays on poetry. It really has informed the way that I think about my work and the works of others. Once you start considering poems as bodies and start looking for those tendons and joints,and those patterns especially, it opens up so much. I just wanna say, I really invite folks to use color if they can.

We’ve been in class together, so you’ve seen this a bit, but I love to take a bunch of highlighters and kind of make up my own key for myself. If I see a particular image popping up a bunch, or a particular sound, or even a kind of sound, like harsh sounds versus softer sounds or sounds that require this certain movement of the mouth versus this other one.

Thinking about poems as bodies and how that relates to my own work and my own process… actually, what I kind of just referenced is the way that a poem or a line feels in the mouth, I think is what I’m thinking about often, whether I’m in revision or I’m in workshop with someone, or even if I’m just at a reading and something really moves me and I’m, like, rolling it over in my mind and in my mouth.

As an example, or kind of two examples, there’s a Suge Knight poem that you mentioned earlier. I was reflecting on this, because every time I read this poem, there’s a particular moment that always almost makes me buckle. When I was younger, I didn’t think about why as much, like I thought about it in terms of meaning, but I didn’t think about it in terms of, the mechanics of it as much, but the moment in the poem, the line is:

I caved & loved him. I left.

And the reason that I think that moves me, is because we have the, the V sound, loved, and then we get left; it’s like a similar movement, but it’s so much softer. And so that breaking of that pattern, I think, is what creates the energy or the heat in that moment. And then, talking again about Karisma, who is incredible, there’s a poem in her debut titled, “What’s It Like Escaping Something Trying to Kill You?” And the final line is:

Such sororal horror.

And that’s a line that lives in my head rent free. I think it’s also about the way that the mouth moves, ‘cause when you say it, your lips and teeth only meet at the very beginning:

Such sororal horror.

So that shhhh, chh. But the rest of that line, oral horror, such sororal horror, like you’re just, your mouth is just open, that sound around. And it’s haunting. You feel a bit disturbed, but also intrigued and it’s just, it’s masterful.

I think about things like that in terms of the tendons and the joints. And then there are two other things I was thinking about. Carl Phillips himself — Mr. Syntax — there was an exercise that you and I both had to do in Monica Youn’s class, think it was our, like a year or two ago. We had to write a poem that was just one long sentence that had a lot of twists and I think the poem we were reading was like, “Wherefore Less Lonely.” And when we were first given that assignment, I was like, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to get anywhere near what this man does with syntax,” and like the twists and turns, the surprises. So what I ended up doing, I sat in the library and I think I had like a piece of a sentence that I wanted to kind of play around with, and I just wrote it over and over.

I would write it on one line and I would write it again, and another part of the sentence would kind of come to me. I would write it again, and I’d realize that that comma I put there actually needed to be an em dash, or maybe a colon. And I would write it again. And I think I wrote through a third of my Moleskine, just that one sentence that kept growing and the turns kept changing.

It felt true to what Carl Phillips was talking about in the essay, like, literally my hands were writing this poem over and over and over and I could feel when something needed a tweak or where something was catching in just the wrong way.

I think that’s an example of where the poem is also living in other parts of the body, right? Not just the mouth. I think sometimes, too, I can get stuck, right? Even though I like to be led by sound, sometimes I can get stuck in the same place. And so, speaking of the Grace Jones sonnet, that poem, I had done, I had done all the emotional research3, right? I’d watched all the interviews, taken all my notes, listened to all the songs. I felt… the feeling was there. I knew what I wanted to say. Not exactly, but in terms of direction, right? But the music was not there, which felt really ironic.

So what I did — Terrance Hayes is one of the biggest influences on my work, specifically, American Sonnets For My Past And Future Assassin — to kind of get out of that rut, I sat down at my desk, which is actually literally where you are sitting right now, and I read American Sonnets [for My Past And Future Assassin] cover to cover, out loud, in one sitting. I went through each poem and once I got to the end, I put it down and then I wrote. And ‘cause those poems were dancing in my body for… I think it took me like an hour and a half to read the entire thing, I could hear everything. And I wrote that poem in one sitting —

DC: Damn.

TT: — Which does not happen very often, but I was really shocked by how helpful it was to just read aloud for an extended period of time and what that could unlock. So, the last thing I guess I’ll say about this is, I’m also a syllable counter. Not to the point that I’m a master of Iambic pentameter, I still very much struggle with that actually , but I think a part of the rhythm, or thinking about how a poem comes out of the mouth, is like, if it feels like too much is trying to get out at once.

So as I’m writing the sonnets or any of the other poems, I’ll just count. And with the sonnets in particular, nowadays, I have a stricter approach to it where I’ll —if you look at the later ones like Grace Jones, or there’s a forthcoming with Kevin Garnet, you’ll see that for the most part, the lines are about like nine to 12, syllables, but in the earlier poems, especially Malcolm X.

Malcolm X has a fat ass. Both — that’s not a sentence I thought I would say. [laughs] That poem… you know what? He probably did too. He was fine.

DC: And was, yep.

TT: But that poem is so big towards the end. You can tell that I was a younger poet that had a lot to say, and I don’t think that having a lot to say or it growing towards the end is a bad thing, necessarily. It is more so acknowledging the difference of what being more attentive to the syllables affords me. I think by the beginning of that poem, it kind of sticks to that nine to 12 ish. But by the end of the poem it’s 16, 17 syllables and you can hear it.

And so if I were to read that poem and then immediately follow up with Grace Jones or Kevin Garnet, the tightness and the specificity and the surety in those later poems, I think, is much more apparent because the sound is being attended to more closely. It’s a tighter dance.

DC: Yeah. I recently wrote my own birthday sonnet, thinking about yours, and I had a similar issue where I was writing it and I realized my sonnet was becoming unwieldy. I looked back at your sonnets and I realized how tight those, or how — tight’s not the right word, or maybe it is — but you know, the syllable count was consistent.

There was a consistent length of that breath, and me realizing like, oh, the reason why this sonnet feels like it’s doing too much is because it is doing too much. Like, it’s too much language at once, and I have to allow the lines of the sonnet to breathe a little bit more. And so then I went back and I edited it and I was like, okay, this is a better Thompsian sonnet.

We could talk about your work all day, and the very clear attention you give to work. And dear listeners, if you ever have a chance to see it in action, Tariq does the most incredible close reads. It always was a joy to have you present in class in the middle of some other fuck ass presentations, because it was always so clear…

I was talking with — and this is no shade to anyone in our MFA program — but I was talking with someone earlier about the rigor that is or isn’t required of us sometimes in the classrooms, and maybe that’s at other MFAs too, just like, what [is] the MFA actually asking of us? And what I really appreciated about you as a peer is that you always brought your own rigor. Like, the bar was low. Some people limboed beneath that bar. And you always set the bar so much higher, and I think it inspired a better poetic landscape in the classroom.

Like, it made me just want niggas to like really read the stuff that they were reading, and to give it the proper attention and it deserved. ‘Cause you showed us that [in] any poem, there’s something to excavate. There’s always something to be gained listening — especially from you, talk about a poem — and your close reads.

But with that, I think I will thank you for your time, Tariq. It’s been so wonderful having this conversation with you, and I would love [it] if you could close this out by reading your own work that showcases prosody.

TT: Absolutely.

YOU LOOK JUST LIKE THE BASTARD

My daddy, all honey & heartthrob, smooth 
rain slid slick down panes of glass. My daddy 
bladed shade, all wicked glint & stride. My daddy 

pleads & weathers. My daddy a rage of absence, air 
viscous, all cuss words & steel. My daddy myth 
& muster. My daddy Mister Silence. My daddy missed 

suppers. My daddy’s silos & silos of loss. My daddy real. 
All moonscape & scar. My daddy’s freckled badness. 
His saccharine bass. So, my strawberry nose. 

Copyright © 2025 by Tariq Thompson. Originally published in Split Lip Magazine.

Used with permission of the author.

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guests in the Substack post. The music for O,Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

Our guest, Tariq, offers the following prompts:

• Write a poem that uses disruptive punctuation (like in Kaveh Akbar’s “Pilgrim Bell”)

OR

• Write a poem that meditates on a letter by overusing alliteration (like in sam sax’s “LISP”)

Both example poems can be found in the episode transcript. Until next time, thanks for listening.

If you’re interested in prosody, Tariq recommends:

• “Carolina Tryptich” by Tangie Mitchell

• “Triptych” by Diana Khoi Nguyen

• “Feeling Fucked Up” by Etheridge Knight

• “Wigphrastic”’ by Terrance Hayes

• “Motown Crown” by Patricia Smith

• “Kink” by Imani Davis

• “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

• “LISP” by Sam Sax

• “Pilgrim Bell [How long can you speak]” by Kaveh Akbar

Hellooooooo poets of the internet! We have finally, thankfully, found ourselves out of that dreadful snowy season. With Spring ahead of us, I’m happy to share this month’s roundup of what I’ve been reading.

In case you missed it, we dropped an episode with Summer Farah on Repetition, and this Monday, you can look forward to an episode with Tariq Thompson speaking about Prosody. These are two writers I love and respect, so I hope you’ll make some space for their words!

Keep reading below for some March highlights, and hey — thanks for being here :)

Subscribe now

What I’ve Read This Month

1) You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Essays

"Too often, for too many decades, we have had to forgo living for not dying."

—pg. 183, "Reparations (or Strategies for Boat Repair)"

In Parker's essays, we are forced to consider the boat — the one we were brought on, the one we keep in our minds, the one in need of desperate repair with no plan to do so. As Black people, we are haunted by our history, the way it passes down, how it rears its head when it thinks no one else can see it. And the lonely part is that sometimes it's true — just Black people alone with what's so plain to us & so mystifying to everyone else. Parker charts a course for us through this lens and shows us, when all is said and done, this is what we've been left with, and we're still paying for it.

2) Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil

Rating: ★★★ ½

Genre: Hybrid

Archetype: The Interrogation (combo of Essay and Formula)

"It is psychotic to draw a line between two places./ It is psychotic to go./ It is psychotic to look."
— pg. 53, "Partition"

Over and over in Schizophrene, I am compelled by Kapil's pacing and images. I am not too proud to admit that at times I found myself stumbling through the text. As a reader, I have a desire to "understand," and this book is a somatic experience, not necessarily one I can categorize neatly into a box. In this way, I believe the book achieves its project, the tracing of mental illness through a specific community, a psychosis borne of great violence. A collection I think I need to sit with a bit longer, but certainly a worthwhile read.

New Poems in the Catalog

From Andrea Cohen

• “The Committee Weighs In” | The Threepenny Review, 2012

From Maya Salameh

• “ALGORITHM WITH BLUE EYELINER” | Quarterly West, 2021

From Sharon Olds

• “Not Once” | Poem-a-Day, 2022

From Solmaz Sharif

• Essay: “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” | Evening Will Come, 2013

Work to Look Out For

Watering Hole Fellow Noel Quiñones’ debut collection, Orange, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in May 2026. Full of poems that invite the reader in through narrative and interactive forms, the collection “explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family.”

Cave Canem Fellow McKendy Fils-Aimé’s debut, sipèstisyon, is forthcoming from YesYes books in mid-May 2026. In the collection, Fils-Aimé “examines wounds left by abuse, familial estrangement, and racial violence” by looking “through the lens of Haitian superstitions.” I am absolutely in love with the book’s gorgeous cover, and super excited to get into the work inside.

O, Word? guest Kay E. Bancroft’s debut collection, Bloodroom, finalist for the 2025 Alice James Book Award, is forthcoming June 2026 from Sundress Publications. In our conversation, I spoke with Bancroft about hybridity and the possibilities that exist by excavating other kinds of texts, so I’m very excited to see what they accomplish in this collection!

Acclaimed poet Phillip B. Willams’ new collection, Lift Every Voice, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in July 2026. It’s title borrowed from the Black National Anthem’s first line, the collection “explores the capacity for the past to be both a source of dread and empowerment, an unshakable reminder of violence and an indelible testament to the endurance of love.” I particularly enjoyed Williams’ sophomore collection, Mutiny, so I’m really looking forward to this one.

What’s Going On? (with me)

I’ve got a couple of things going on in the near future, if you want to catch me/ know what I’ve been up to:

• Next week, on March 31, I will be reading as part of the Dr. Carl Calendar Visiting Writers Series at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, NJ. I will have the honor of sharing the stage with Jeanann Verlee. The event begins at 7 pm, and we will both read and discuss our work.

• On Friday, April 10, I will be reading at the O, Miami poetry festival for Family Meal: A Poetry Reading with Gabrielle Calvocoressi. For this reading, O, Miami and Dunn’s Overtown Farm invite you to grab a meal and a seat at Family Meal, a community-based poetry reading and dinner experience featuring Gabrielle Calvocoressi and this year’s Poetry Foundation Fellows (Jada Renée Allen, DeeSoul Carson, Andres Cordoba, Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe, Aris Kian), Miami Freedom Project, and potluck-style meal contributions from local chefs.

• On Saturday, April 18, if you happen to be in New Orleans, I’ll be at the New Orleans Poetry Festival as a panelist for the Humor/Horror: after Douglas Kearney session. In this panel, we’ll be discussing how humor influences our ways of writing towards not only diagnosing, but also imagining alternatives to the everyday horrors that are deeply entangled in the business of living. This is an under-examined area of craft that acts as a mode of resistance against hegemonic norms necessary for empire-making. This discussion will center on humor as a method of disorientation that lends itself towards an invitation for mutual care.

Thank for reading! Until next time :)

DeeSoul Carson: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DC, and this is O, Word?, the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O Repetition! I’m here today with my friend, Summer Farah.

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. She is the author of the chapbook, i could die today and live again, poems inspired by the legend of Zelda and published by Game Over Books in 2004. Her debut collection, The Hungering Years is forthcoming from Host Publications in 2026. She’s calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.

Summer, hello!

SF: Hiiiiiiii.

DC: How’s it going? I’m so exciting to to talk to you!

SF: I know, this is gonna be really fun.

DC: I’m looking forward to it. It’s been so long since I’ve been in California, so I’m really kind of challenging… challenge… oh my God. Channeling your energy over there.

SF: Yeah, it’s so weird ‘cause it’s like, you’re a California poet to me, but like, you’re not anymore. I don’t know, how do you feel about that?

DC: I think I definitely still feel like a California poet. I think New York has influenced me in a lot of ways, and I think that shows up in my writing. Right now we’re having a winter storm and I’m definitely feeling like a California poet. Like I’m not… you won’t get any romanticization of the cold from me.

I’m super excited for your, uh, collection coming out very, very soon this month, right?

SF: Yeah. Uh, February 24th.

DC: Oh, yay, perfect. Well, I’m so excited to have you on the show today. As you know, we are here to talk about repetition. I would love if you could start by telling us, in your own words, what repetition is.

SF: Yeah. I would say in the space of a poem, it’s the recurrence of a word or phrase, or device. And it is used in an abundance of ways. It can communicate, an urgency, a franticness, or it can communicate an important motif, a focal point for the piece. Or it can be a space of working something out. And many other things. But those are the worlds in which I most use it.

DC: Perfect. Yeah, and I was wondering, where do you feel like your affinity for repetition comes from? I know you use repetition throughout your work.

SF: Yeah, I am someone who repeats a lot of the art I engage with. If I were to say that any of my sort of craft moves are most representative of my life outside of poetry, I would say it is repetition. I’m a big rereader, especially as a kid. I would obsessively reread books. I would just cycle the same series over and over again in between new things, like I would read the Twilight Books. I’d get to Breaking Dawn and I’d just start over with Twilight again. I would read [A] Series of Unfortunate Events, get to that last... I think it’s 13 books. Just start back over again.

I repeat TV shows a lot. I had this… sometimes I’m like, “I don’t do that as much anymore,” but I did have this experience where I was on a plane and they had the third season of Parks and Rec on there, and so I was like, “I’m just going to watch Parks and Rec on the plane.” And then when I got home I was like, “I’m gonna keep watching Parks and Rec.” And then when I finished I was like, “I didn’t watch season one and two on this watchthrough, so I’ll do one and two.” And then it turned into me just going through the whole series again. And it’s like, I’ve watched Parks and Rec so many times, like I don’t need to do that. Especially because I was a little reluctant to start, ‘cause I was like, “what a strange show to watch in this political climate.” Like, Joe Biden appears, like he’s there. It’s like, “oh my God, you evil man. Get off my screen.”

DC: No, for real. Yes.

SF: But that used to be really common. I just, I don’t know, I’m really into that revisitation. And it is sometimes from a place of comfort where like, maybe I don’t have the mental capacity to really absorb something new, and I do want to be a little passive in my enjoyment, But I do think that, more often it is this kind of, “What else will I notice this time? How will it change? How have I changed in the course of this experience?”

I did a watch through of Gilmore Girls recently, which is a show that. I watched a lot when I was 10 years old I think it’s the first show I, like, binge watched ‘cause my family got the DVDs and I would just watch on a loop, the DVDs, and it’s a show that I’ve watched many times throughout my life, and now I’m like very close to the age that Lorelai is in first season. And it’s like, she’s a mother. And thinking like, wow, like I’m 28. Like, this woman is my peer and she has a 16-year-old daughter. That’s crazy!

DC: Yeah.

SF: Like the premise kind of setting in, enabled by the repetition, yes, but … yeah. And so I think when poetry came to me, the thing I always cite as sort of being my epiphany of poetry is, I was reading the introduction to Crush, Louise Glück’s introduction. And that first line is, “This is a book about panic.”

That really moved 14-year-old me, and I was like, “whoa.” If there’s anything that I would write, it would be a book about panic. Like how can I externalize what’s going on? And so I think I’ve leaned into the frantic in a lot of my work and repetition is a great place for it.

There’s a lot of established forms that play with repetition. I think pantoums are a really incredible use of repetition, the kind of working things out. As I’ve begun to talk about my work with the chapbook, to be faced with these questions of craft and method and realize that repetition is something that appears on the page because it appears in my life and it feels cool to have this kind of close relationship with a tool and a device that feels inseparable from my personhood and also the way I find myself into art and poetry.

DC: There’s this really interesting thing that you’re saying here, a human inclination to reengage with art. People love to go to museums and see the same paintings each time and thinking about what that painting — it’s the same painting — but what that does for us each time that we see it? Books for sure, like we have collections of poetry and, like, what that art does for us. Thinking about movies and TV shows, like what drives us back to see a thing that we’ve seen before?

And I think what you’re saying about the Gilman Gor… Gilmore Girls — me and alliteration have beef, too many of the same syllables once is hard for me. But, like, being able to… even if the object itself is static, how different points in our own lives or different experiences will recolor the way that we look at something. So if you look at something before and after loss, if you look at something before and after the birth of a child, before or after losing or gaining a friend, there’s a lot of different things that change the way we engage with art. I think about this even with music, and I know music is big for you when you’re thinking about repetition.

I remember when I used to be five and being in the backseat of my mother’s car and listening to Mary J Blige. And she’s yelling like, never be without you, baby. And I’m like, five. I’ve never experienced the loss of a love or anything like that, but I was belting it. But now I go back and I listen to the My Life album stuff, I’m like, oh, this is kind of really different. Or like re-listening to like a Jill Scott album and I’m like, oh, she was really horny.

SF: Yeah! Yeah!

DC: And I didn’t know that as a child! I didn’t know what that was! But now I’m like, I get it. I get why she was for the people [laughs]. Love Ms. Scott. I would love to know if you feel like there is a particular kind of music for you that lends itself best to repetition or repetitious thinking.

SF: You know, I have a pretty… I was gonna say narrow music taste. That’s not true. I like every…. That’s not true either. I like a lot of things. I’m not picky, but I have a very narrow [range of] what I do listen to, in that, it is a cycling of a few artists and eventually someone else gets into that kind of coterie. Two artists in particular, Mitski and Samia Finnerty, I find myself gravitating towards their music. Especially I think if you look at my kind of music listening stats, it is mostly them and then a smattering of others that shifts over the last like five, six years.

But I think Samia in particular has an incredible, interesting relationship to repetition. A lot of artists do this, just to preface, like it’s not an uncommon tool in music to sort of end with repetition, the repetition of a phrase. I think Samia has a lot of internal repetition. There is a song that came out in 2025, called “Cinder Block.” Did you know if you Google ‘cinder block,’ it shows you a picture of cinder blocks, not the lyrics to the song…

DC: Who would’ve thought?

SF: …by a not-super-famous artist? But it’s really interesting because every single verse ends with the repetition of a different line. And so, like, the first verse ends with, You’ll do what you want forever./You’ll do what you want forever. Verse two, All the light here is a bargain./All the light here is a bargain. Verse three, Something in there for me to keep. Something in there for me to keep.

And that’s the form of the song. It’s all verses, no chorus, which is normally the site of repetition, right? The chorus is something that comes back and through, the sort of differences in the chorus is how we build kind of emotional complexity in a song, how we build sonic complexity in a song, indicating some shifts in the journey of the music.

And I find the chorus-less song that is employing repetition of different lyrics on the same melody throughout so fascinating. And it’s so appealing to my poetic brain because I think that it is a more poetic composition, rather than a lyrical composition of a song, in that poems don’t have choruses generally. It is combining the expectation of repetition in a song with the motif of a poem.

Her repetitions are often so longing. I think that repetition is a beautiful space of emphasis too. And music allows you to put inflection into that language, right? You are giving emotion to the words. It’s not just the physical, the written language, and that’s the opportunity of music.

When I’m playing with repetition in my work, I am thinking a lot about a song and the variations in a song and what do various repeated phrases do and mean in that moment, and what can it do for an arc, for a reader who is hearing it as a song in their head?

DC: Something that I’m also thinking about is the repetition of images, especially if you’re reading a collection of poetry and the images come up throughout it. I think about this as I think about your stunning chapbook,

i could die today and live again. And I’m wondering, how do you feel images or characters reoccurring in a text inform the book’s project?

SF: Yeah. So, the chapbook is a broad Zelda book. There isn’t one game necessarily that the book is taking from more or less than others. There are ones that are more prominent, just because of either I was playing them at the time, or perhaps their materials felt more tangible and applicable. But I was thinking a lot about the sort of identifying features of a Zelda game and what makes a Zelda game, and music is one of the big things in it.

Music, not necessarily just the score being awesome, but music as a way of making things happen. It’s not as present in the newer introductions into the series, but past games it’s, you play a song to make something happen: to open a door, to make it rain, to make the passage of time that is critical to figuring out a dungeon, et cetera. There’s a sort of inherent repetition in that you’re hearing the same simple song over and over and over again. And that builds an interesting kind of familiarity.

And then also throughout this Zelda series, there are recurring characters and goals, motifs, plots. You got Link, you got Zelda, you got Ganon. But then there are also smaller little characters that kind of appear throughout. There is the couple in Majora’s Mask and in Ocarina of Time. And so that’s a beautiful little point of familiarity between those two games. There’s the kid who has the big snot nose in Wind Waker and in the DS games. I wanted the chapbook to be filled with this familiar iconography alongside a sort of glossary of image that is relevant to my work and my life.

And I always wanted them to be able to touch, I didn’t want to use images from the games that felt otherworldly to me. I wanted there to be a tight allegorical sort of relationship between the recurrence of images both across like the kind of general poetic images and what I’m grabbing from the game.

I think the core things that make a Zelda game a Zelda game are like why I like it. I love medieval fantasy as a genre. I am very attached to it. I think swords are awesome. But a lot of the warmth of the games, like the Koroks, — some of the characters that recur and who are kind to Link — as well as the thematic recurrences: A relationship to the moon in a disaster. A relationship to song and progress. This cycle of empire and domination. Those are things that I’m very interested and invested in.

I think video games, at their heart, there is repetition involved in them, right? Like you build a muscle memory to perform the gameplay. You’re smashing buttons, you are backtracking to dungeons or whatever, depending on the type of game. It was interesting to play with that poetic space that I’m comfortable with, of repetition, with a[n] art object that has repetition baked into the mastering of it alongside these structural themes where repetition can be devastating. The return, or the recurrence of empire, the failure of resistance or the attempt of resistance again and again against a similar enemy.

DC: Something that I love about the chapbook and something that I really enjoy about the way I’ve seen you approach ekphrasis I never know the correct is being able to, as you were saying, identify features of the thing, and so that the poetry is not necessarily a one-to-one recreation of the inspiration, right? It’s not like you took the Legend of Zelda and you gave us a portrait of the landscape of Legend of Zelda, although I think that’s in there. It’s really being able to distill what’s most important about these games, these characters, like what themes are coming out from them, and then being able to put that in the poetry, because anyone who has the knowledge of the characters already has that knowledge. And it just expands…

And it’s also like, if people don’t know anything about that game too, it’s still a nice entry point because it’s like, well, I actually don’t necessarily maybe need to know these things. It’s easter eggs.

SF: It’s kind of like, what is the function of the work? I think that’s a really useful question, and it’s one that I started sort of asking myself after reading Capable Monsters, Marlin Jenkins’ chapbook, or just their Pokémon poems before that where they do such a good job with taking these interactions with the world of Pokemon and then kind of asking, so what is this doing to me, mentally? Like, why am I responding in this kind of way? What is my attachment to this? And then unraveling that attachment into a beautiful, beautiful poem. And yeah, I think that’s kind of what I’m interested in with ekphrasis, rather than an ode to the work, but an investigation of attachment.

What am I projecting? What am I rebuilding from my memory of this thing? There’s also a really interesting experience where, when writing the chapbook, I think the games that I replayed while writing it, were Majora’s Mask — my brother and I did a play through together, which was really fun because that game’s hard.

DC: Yeah.

SF: Just make him do most of it. And we had the original game guide still, which was really nice. But, Majora’s Mask, Skyward Sword. Maybe I didn’t replay anything else, but I played Tears of the Kingdom after turning in my edits. There are times when I would Google something, ‘cause I was like, “I think I remember this,” and then realizing the ways in which my memory had recreated something to be not what it was, and maybe be more relevant to me and my perspective and my thinking, even just some small language things.

DC: Which is maybe more interesting anyway, yeah, that mis… what’s the word —I think the word I’m thinking of, like aphasia. Like the slight shifting of a memory or what, what we think a thing is. Yeah.

DC: I love what you’re saying about the frantic and repetition as an externalization of that feeling of trying to get things down and out and to other people. I know there’s also the thing with poetry and repetition and thinking about its relationship to the divine, thinking about poetry and repetition’s relationship to chants and prayers and other kinds of conversations with a thing larger than us, kinda like a re- and reengaging of that conversation. I don’t know if you have any more thoughts on that. Just thinking about, what does it mean for repetition as we think about speaking to something outside of ourselves.

SF: Yeah, definitely. I think perhaps a repeated thing can become different throughout. The first occurrence of an image can speak to the hyper context of the text. The second appearance of an image can speak to the broader context of the text, and maybe it can happen again and it will apply to something else entirely outside of the text.

I am thinking about a film I watched recently, All That’s Left of You. It’s a Palestinian American filmmaker, Cherien Dabis. One of the opening scenes early on is a father talking to his son in 1948 Palestine. And he’s asking him to recite the poem that he’s been teaching his children to memorize. And so, his son is like, seven. He is an adorable little kid reciting this beautiful Arabic poetry. But, he’s like, trying to get his son to recite, and working on his education despite the escalations of Zionist militias.

And then the last scene of the movie is that son as an adult, in his return to Palestine since then, with his wife and, he’s like reciting the poem again, and he’s teaching it to his wife now. I think it’s really interesting to have both this art object that contains repetition repeated and how is it recontextualized in both of these scenes.

It’s a poem about the Arabic language being metaphorized as the sea and the desire to remain and grow. And there’s [a] very interesting kind of meta context of the recitation of Arabic poetry as people who are about to be expelled. And then the recitation of Arabic poetry, now within a state that has an active criminalization of the Arabic language. But then that poem is a real poem that exists outside of the text as well. And it’s by an Egyptian poet, I think published in like the thirties or something.

And so in that case, I think repetition functions as a sort of book ending in the film. And this reaffirmation of place, but then it also can lead you to a broader world outside of the text because maybe you wouldn’t have thought that there is a significance to this poem if it had only had that early occurrence. But the reintroduction of it, the repetition of it, makes it more of a thematic tether.

DC: [Are] there any particular poets that come to mind to you when you’re thinking of repetition?

SF: Yeah. Forough Farrokhzad. Yes. She’s an Iranian poet. This collection I’m showing — I forget, this is an audio medium — is Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, translated by Elizabeth T. Gray. This book was a big inspiration for me, syntactically, in i could die today and live again. She uses ellipses, which I was like, that’s crazy. I love ellipses in a poem. But, my favorite poem in this collection is called, “Grief-Worshiper.” It begins:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I wish I were like autumn….I wish I were like autumn.
I wish I were, like autumn, silent and depressing

And then it goes through, other points of repetition are:

Oh… how beautiful it would be if I were autumn

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Before me:
the bitter face of youth’s winter
Behind me:
the tumult of a summer of sudden love
Inside me:
the home of grief and pain and suspicion.
I wish I were like autumn…. I wish I were like autumn.

So, it is this really interesting poem where it’s bookended by a repeated phrase, that in itself is a repeated phrase. It’s:

I wish I were like autumn….I wish I were like autumn.

[Entire poem]

I wish I were like autumn….I wish I were like autumn.

And the second line of the poem introduces a little variation on the phrase:

I wish I were, like autumn, silent and depressing.

And so it is this sort of — I wish I were like autumn…. I wish I were like autumn — a longing. And it’s kind of like revving up to expand on desire. And then throughout she has these like mild repetitions and constructing a visual-emotional space —

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Before me:
the bitter face of youth’s winter
Behind me:
the tumult of a summer of sudden love

— that also mimics the calendar space of a season. And so I love her syntax of this kind of phrase, repeated, phrase repeated but with another phrase attached to it, a finishing of the sentence. Solmaz Sharif has a poem called “Into English,” and it’s from Customs, her second collection, and it starts:

from “Into English”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I think I will translate
Forough.
I am urged to translate
Forough

as soon as possible.
In my
hours, I find it is
very

private. It is very
private
to be in another’s
syntax.

And so what I love so much about this poem is that she is talking about the act of translation and what it means to be in someone’s syntax while borrowing the syntax of the poet she is seeking to translate. And there’s all of the emotional relationship of translating a poet from your heritage/native language and the complication of like, what is your relationship to that language now? But then also the kind of broader political context of this poet in particular.

I love this poem so much because it highlights that method of repetition that Farrokhzad uses in a kind of unraveling of desire through repetition. It’s like, she has to say something a few times before she’s able to really let you know what exactly that is it means. And so there is a kind of tension of repetition as withholding, as indication of withholding rather than revelation or a franticness that I think that I am often seeing and drawn to. Yeah. God, love it so much. It’s so cool.

DC:. I think repetition also allows for a lot of transformation, right? So if we’re thinking about books or collections that have like a repeated poem title, what does that then get to do for expanding our idea of like, whatever that title is, or what the collection means. Very recently, I read my friend jason b crawford’s new book Yeet! and there [are] several poems in the book called “Essay on Yeet!” and thinking about, what is giving these poems the same title then allow us to keep saying about the same thing. ‘Cause they’re very formally different.

Like they’re contextually, they’re very different. They’re doing different things in different poems. They’re visually different. And so then it creates its own conversation within itself. I.S Jones also just put out her book, Bloodmercy and the title, “Bloodmercy” comes up twice. Each one is from a viewpoint of a different sister, Cain and Abel. And so, once again, thinking about, how are they in conversation with each other, now that this thing has a shared name? That was a bit of a tangent, but just thinking so much about the possibilities of repetition.

SF: Yeah. And in Bloodmercy in particular, she also breaks apart the title itself at some point, and that allows for this kind of dismantling of the kind of argument of the book of this kind of connector of blood. And is it possible to have mercy between blood?

You’re able to have a poem that successfully is like teasing apart the conceit because of the repetitions of it otherwise. It’s not just the container of the book being poked at, it’s the recurrence of the container appearing.

DC: Yeah. Now we have all these different images and the images that come in between and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It allows for a lot more room to play when you give us more to, to work with.

SF: Yeah.

DC: Summer, you have offered us so much great poetry from other folks today, and so many great words about repetition. So I’m so grateful for all of your thoughts, and I would love it if you could close us out by reading a poem of your own.

SF: Yes. Okay.

GAME OVER

“A moon will rise out of my darkness.” - Mahmoud Darwish

new moon blood moon moon with the ghastly face moon I took for granted moon that kisses the sea the little moon that dilates pupils to madness I worship whatever claims to make me sane I worship sun & sky I kiss the dirt & run from bugs I respect the spider living in the window I ask what have I done to deserve this I ask what have I done to deserve this I ask what have I done to deserve there is blood in places I could have never imagined wrists rimmed with time back of palms tattooed with wisdom courage power dust moon there has always been that possibility of madness when we encounter our shadow selves every once in a cycle reflective pools reveal our dance I could die today & live again I could die today & live again I could die today & live again I could die today & live

From i could die today and live again by Summer Farah, published by Game Over Books. Copyright © 2024 by Summer Farah. Originally published in Poetry Online. Used with permission of the author.

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guest in the Substack Post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

For this episode, I offer this prompt: Write a poem that begins and ends with the same line. Repeat one word in every line of the poem.

If you’re interested in repetition, Summer recommends:

• “Grief-Worshipper” by Forough Farrokhzad

• “Becoming Moss” by Ella Frears

• “the ghosts of the dead sea rewrite the history of drowning” by George Abraham

• from “frank: sonnets” by Diane Seuss

I.S. Jones: Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but this is for Monica Lewinsky: Jay Leno is a bum, he’s a bozo, and he owes Monica Lewinsky apology, and I’m never letting this shit go, I don’t care. I do not care. I Usually women who are subjected to overly powered men die. They get killed. But Monica Lewinsky lived and had a life on the other side. She jokingly has in her bio, “I’m the chick from all of the rap, from all of the rap productions,” and I’m like, that’s so cunt! Oh my God.

DeeSoul Carson: . Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is e·pon·y·mous, an O, Word? podcast series interested in poets, their collections & related title poems, and how they find their ways into our hands. Today’s episode is on Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones.

I.S. Jones is the author of Bloodmercy, chosen by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and the chapbook Spells of my Name, selected by Newfound in 2021 for their Emerging Writer series (and might I add, an O, Word? 2025 5-star read). Currently, she is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest, where she runs her column, “The Legacy Suite.” Her works have appeared in Granta, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Itiola, hello! How’s it going?

ISJ: It is going great. Post-book life is wonderful ‘cause I sleep a lot. I’ve gotten so much rest, it’s been nice.

DC: Yeah, you were on a world tour last year promoting the book, which is exciting to see. Was there any particular place you were excited to go and read?

ISJ: I love when I got to reading Detroit last year, that was really special. This year, I’m also excited ‘cause the tour is still going, though it’s a bit sparse. For example, in April, I will be in California reading at my alma mater, Cal State University, Northridge, which I’m excited for.

I’ll also be at AWP reading. I’ll be at Haymarket House here in Chicago, reading from the book, and I have a few other things planned too, but it’s been, it’s a beautiful, scary, wonderful, frightening thing when a project you have poured years of your life into comes to fruition, and people can have it forever, and it’s fixed in place. It’s weird. It’s like my life starts again now.

DC: It’s such a stunning debut too. I hope everyone who listens to our voices here goes out and buys the book. ‘Cause when I read it, I was absolutely blown away, and I knew it was gonna be good. I’ve never, ever doubted your pen. But it is really something spectacular when you see a project come together, especially one that you’ve been hearing about so long.

Of course, Bloodmercy is this lyrically rich re-imagining of the relationship not only of Cain and Abel, but also their parents, Adam and Eve, and how they all fit into this kind of early creation story that’s also set very modernly. There’s this time slipperiness that’s really nice in the book.

On this podcast, we like to talk about the title poems, and what’s interesting about this collection is that there is not one singular title poem. Instead, we have two, one in the voice of each sister, and the language of blood and mercy also reoccur over the course of the entire work. So, my first question to you, my friend, is how do you feel that this term. “bloodmercy,” manifests across the collection? And what does it even mean for you, or what does it start to mean?

ISJ: I love this question. The term “bloodmercy,” it’s a term for the immutable bond between sisters, the suffocating nature of familial ties, right? And how we are so willing to sacrifice and sacrifice every part of ourselves to keep these bonds together no matter what it costs us. Because someone is of your blood, you show them mercy. Before I even fully knew the shape of the book or what its urgency was, I already knew the title of the book. I don’t know if it sounds “woowoo” or prophetic or what have you, but like the book told me this is my title and this title is not moving, which, I’m really grateful for that kind of clarity ‘cause nothing else about the book was clear, but I always knew the title. It was always going to be clear.

It was always going to be a way to explain the invisible braid between them, which in the book symbolizes a metaphorical umbilical cord, that no matter how far away they are from each other, because they own a piece of each other, that will always belong to each other. Also amidst this desire to be seen as the most useful in the eyes of God. When I was first writing this book, I knew that I wanted to have an Old Testament feel to it, meaning I wanted God to feel as immediate as possible, at least the way that I read it as a child growing up. So with that, I always knew that I was gonna have to… I was going to write two title poems, one for Cain and one for Abel.

And, Dee, as someone whose pen is also ridiculously good, you know how hard it is to write title poems. It’s easy to fall into the anxiety of feeling like if this title poem is not good enough, then the book is a wash. But I figured I’ve already done the most challenging and rigorous thing. I mean this for a debut is wild.

DC: Yeah. It’s not very often we get a debut that is so invested in persona, and not so much to mean that you’re putting on a voice, but there is like a narrative and you’re really speaking in the voices, like there’s two… there’s characters in this book, these characters have their own full world. There’s a lot of trust in the reader’s ability to take that journey with you through the psyches of these characters, and I just thought it’s ambitious, but it really works. You write in a way that I think invites that kind of freedom.

ISJ: I appreciate that. Yeah I love that association with my work, being attached to freedom. Especially because that’s what I was trying to get to in writing this book. ‘Cause I’ll be frank, there was a time where in the production of this book, I almost scrapped the project ‘cause it did not feel urgent to what the current sociopolitical time was calling for. But then I just remembered like, I wanna write, what did Toni Morrison say? If there is a book in the world that is not written, you were obligated to go out and write it.

And that feels apt because Sula by Tony Morrison was one of my book’s first progenitors before I understood what the book could do. I knew that it was really important for me to create a world where girls are at the center, which is a lot, very similar to what Sula does. Young girls whose lived experiences are often discredited being the center of a compelling and biblical story. It felt scary. It felt risky, it felt dangerous. It felt like freedom.

DC: I was really struck by the reimagining, and I’ve been leading this course where we’re talking about how to read different poetry collections, and your book is one of the ones that I was using in the class. And by the way, my students got a real kick out of reading the different poems, because part of the class we were talking about how do you go from one section to the other? And with Cain’s section, and then we start with that first poem by Abel ,and my students had a lot to say about Abel.

ISJ: Ooh, spill.

DC: Dear listeners, when you read the book, you’ll understand. But there’s this really interesting subversion of what we know, of the story of Cain and Abel. ‘Cause I think in the story of Cain and Abel, something that remains is this idea of jealousy and this idea of Cain being jealous of Abel.

In the story that we know from the Bible, there’s an assumed innocence of Abel. And so what makes Abel’s voice so delicious in this collection is that Abel is really a little bit more pompous than the story would suggest. And it just creates such a more rich and dynamic character. But, basically, we were talking about how the first poem of the book starts with Cain talking about Abel. There’s this kind of… obsessive is the wrong word, but she’s really concerned with her sister. And then Abel’s first utterance is talking about the power that she’s been given, which I think is a really different take on that.

DC: I’d love to dig into the title poems a little bit more. So the first eponymous poem comes from Cain, and there’s this really interesting intimacy and, almost devotion, that tinges this confession, as I call it, there’s this bit of a kind of a spilling that happens here from Cain. And I was just wondering if you could just talk more about what’s happening in this first title poem.

ISJ: Yeah. What I wanted to do was make it clear that Cain is clearly obsessed. with Abel, because she has been conditioned to see Abel not only a part of her, but like her property, quite literally. Like in one of the first poems, she says

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

…you are mine
Mine.
Mine to hold & hold
beneath me

from “Sister’s Keeper”, pg 10

When I first started writing this book, two albums that helped me learn how to order the book were Tetsuo & Youth by Lupe Fiasco and… the name of the band Moonchild; the name of the album that inspired me is called Voyager. In Tetsuo & Youth, the album is governed by the four seasons, right? We begin with summer, spring, we go into fall, winter, and then we go back to spring, right? And that ordering was really pivotal to how I ordered this manuscript, especially in the first two sections.

So the dying light of summer, I think, is something that was really important to this poem as we make this transition into the colder summers — colder winter, rather. There’s a kind of mourning that’s happening, right, as the season is fading out. Cain is also lamenting about how they are starting to grow up and it is clear they’re beginning to grow apart, especially when we get to the line:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

My life made sense when we were of one mind & two bodies.
Now you keep secrets from me. Your diary says as much.
The seasons turn and we stop knowing each other.

from “Bloodmercy,” pg 20

As the seasons begin to end, there is a clear sunset happening on the dynamic of the once had where the little sister was always going up to the big sister needing things. Now it’s clear that as Abel’s getting older, she doesn’t need Cain anymore. And it’s a clear anguish, right? I used to be the one to clean up your wounds. Now you’re too much of a big girl to come to me. And in terms of the three voices — Abel, Eve, and Cain — it was a loose structure, but it was really important for each of them to represent the three poetry modes.

Eve is dramatic. Cain is lyrical. Abel is narrative. Obviously throughout the book, I don’t expressly keep that, but in the title poems, it was really important for me to emphasize that, which is why the last half of Cain’s poem is so lyrical:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

…My blood meeting
yours to become “cainabel.” My name eating yours has to become
“cannibal.”  Mercy at your still body becomes “claimable.”
Call it “grace” or “pity,” you my ancestor, my wife…

Ibid

Right? And then Abel’s poem. Her title poem at the end is a bit more narrative, though I do think it has some lyricism in it though. Yeah. Also, I just wanted to rap. I really wanted a poem where I just got to rap a little bit and be like, “Oh, what more can I do? How much farther can I stretch and make language fun and playful?” Because that’s something that I really wanted to do with Cain’s voice. I think Cain is very playful.

I don’t think Abel becomes very playful until maybe towards the end of her section. And to me, because Abel is also wrestling with the fact that she’s gay and that as her section progresses, she starts to slowly build and find the language to eventually come out, I wanted her progression towards maybe a more relaxed narrative to come as she makes peace with who she is against the world that will not accept her.

DC: Cain is such an interesting case because she’s so many firsts, right? She’s the first ever daughter, she’s the first ever girl, like Eve didn’t start off as a girl, she came out full-woman. And so she’s the first one to go through girlhood and the violence of girlhood. She’s the first older sister, first eldest daughter. There’s so much that I think she’s building with, which I think also goes into that kind of like the whole world of language is hers.

DC: I love everything that you’re saying about Cain’s poem. And on the other hand of Cain’s devotion and ostensible jealousy, especially what we get in that title poem. In Abel’s view, we have this sort of cleaving herself almost from her sister, so in this collection, my read is that she’s actually a lot more proud than her story makes her out to be. And she actually feels a bit of pity for Cain? I would love it if you can speak a little bit more on your process of really differentiating and developing these two sisters throughout the collection.

ISJ: Yeah. Cain and Abel obviously are also fictitious layers for my fraught relationship with my own sister. It was also really important for me to call out my younger, arrogant self as well, which is what I do with both of those girls, both Cain and Abel. I think a lot about good kid, m.A.A.d city, but specifically the song … the line where he goes:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I pray my dick get big as the Eiffel Tower
So I can fuck the world for seventy hours
Goddamn, I feel amazin’.

from “Backseat Freestyle” by Kendrick Lamar, on good kid, m.A.A.d city

I think a lot about that song and how Kendrick was poking fun at his younger self. And I was like, “that’s so, like, this man’s mind. That’s so good.” So, I wanted to adopt that, making them both feel more familial in that way when cultivating their personalities. And then also just injecting some of the anxieties I had in my own girlhood, right? Like, with Abel, she is coming to terms with her sexuality, knowing that her mother won’t accept her, right? And then she has these very beautiful romantic experiences. I couldn’t put all of them in this book, even though I’m very sad about it. But there was a version of this book I had in which Abel had multiple girlfriends.

But she wouldn’t have said it that way. She would’ve gone up to a girl that she liked and put a ribbon in her hair and then they would’ve been girlfriends. That’s the kind of thing, you know what I mean? Like in a very sort of cute, childish kind of way. Like she had already been used to kissing girls and telling girls that she likes them. So it wasn’t it… she had already created this sort of world full of girls. Then later in the book, when you read, you see how Abel says, “oh, my mom says I hang around girls too much.” Me making the illusion though, I make it clear throughout the book that Abel is very gay. I’m like, “oh, that’s why she’s so damn depressed. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.”

DC: She’s figuring things out. She’s figuring things out.

ISJ: And then with Cain there is… I was a very intense tomboy growing up. Set It Off was very influential to my development as a child, Dee, you have to understand. Queen Latifah did something for me, but I was a very aggressive tomboy as a kid, I wrestled with boys. And so I wanted to pay homage to that in Cane, right? Because she developed very young and very early. And while I was a late bloomer, I really wanted to pay homage to a lot of my homegirls growing up and friends that I’ve had who developed very young, who developed sexually very young, and had to reckon with the world now wanting to put their jaw around them, right?

While it is true that, like Abel represents my sister, Cain is me, of course, and then my mother obviously is Eve, what all three of these archetypes represent are the ways in which I moved through and made peace with those parts of me as a child, right?

Like, for example, in “Psalm for the Fast Girls,” Cain makes it very clear that [she’s] actually the danger. You actually be scared of [her]. And in “Twice as Many Stars as Usual,” and then also in “First Sighting.” In “First Sighting,” Abel falls in love. She has her first romantic experience, right? And then, “Twice as Many Stars as Usual,” Abel comes to understand what it means to love something with such devotion that it is almost like being a mother. A lot of things that young girls come into as they age, it was really important for me to pause and make space for these milestones of girlhood.

DC: Baba, in this book, obviously that being the word for “father” — in my reading of it, there’s this nice slipperiness of it. And sometimes, because it’s Cain and Abel, the assumption is that they can be talking about their father, Adam, but also the idea that Baba could also be talking about God, as those of us who are of faith, or have been of faith, referring to God as our father. And thinking about the conflations that could even happen there when we think about, sometimes, the violence of the father. And I would love to hear more about your process of how you’re writing… I’m gonna say “Baba” as the character, and you can clarify if it’s Adam or God or both. But how was writing them in this collection, especially with it being so centered around the women of this story and this dynamic?

ISJ: Thank you for this question. Yeah, I appreciate what you said about the slipperiness, it is deliberate throughout the book. It was really important for me to make that slipperiness clear, because as a child whenever I thought about celestial rankings —I’m saying this as an adult— in my headcanon as a child, my father was second in command to God, right? If I follow the word of the Lord, I follow the word of my father, right? So, it was really important for me to incorporate that sort of child logic into the book by making it… not clear sometimes, whether it was Baba-God-in-Heaven or Baba-Here-on-Earth. So that was one.

Two, when I was trying to figure out the urgency of both Adam and God, it was really important for me to not give either of them poems, because much like an overpowered perfume, they already permeate through so much of the book, it would almost nerf their power if I gave them a poem, right? Much of what makes God so evocative is the fact that he never speaks, He is the center of the crisis everywhere throughout the book. Even with Eve, so much of her anguish and her rage and a lot of the things she feels is towards her unresolved feelings towards God, right?

On the one hand, she is not sorry at all, and she’s unrepentant as hell for eating the fruit. Because it was the first time in her entire creation that she got to make a choice for herself. God, in a lot of ways, ended up being a filter for all of the desires and the urgency of all of the voices throughout the book. In the case of Adam, Adam obviously represents my own blood father. And when I was trying to think about how to adequately talk about it, I think fear, obviously, was the first thing that comes up. Especially ‘cause I grew up in a house that — I can be honest — I grew up in a very particularly violent house. There was a lot of yelling and screaming and physical fighting and threats. And it was important for me to tackle this concept of being God-fearing, right? How can I say that I love you, God, if a part of me also fears you, right?

I really wanted to try and write a poem titled “God-fearing.” I couldn’t do it. The original title of “Epithalamion in the Field” was “God-fearing,” because I really wanted to write a poem to confront Lord, how can I love you if I’m also meant to fear you? I still haven’t answered that question, Dee, but luckily for me, I got a long life and I got time. “Epithalamion in the Field” was a failed attempt to get there, but this poem at its core is meant to talk about that, that unbridled devotion, right? Lord, I will be so devoted to you all my days. I will be your bride, I will be your wife. I will protect your good name. I will be your everything and anything.

This book, at its core, is me confronting my enduring questions to God. It was really important to have my child self echo the way that I felt when I was a child, this poem captures exactly how I felt like for God, I would have done anything, been anything, follow him anywhere. And it was important for me to put that there.

God is such a powerful and evocative figure in the story, even though Eve is the one whose actions set off everything that happens in the book, right? There is no tension in this book without God. And this book also gave me safe passage to question God’s intentions, to make language around like, “Lord, if I’ve done everything you said, why is it that I’m still suffering? Why does suffering exist on the earth? Why, what do I have to do to be perfect to you?” There’s a poem in the third section, the poem ends with:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Baba, You have given me this dominion to master.
You want perfection, yet You want the labor done
by human hands. How do I win if there’s no pleasing You?

from “Husbandchild: Etymology of Cain”, pg. 49

So, in a lot of ways, God also just represents this impossible and impractical human desire for perfection. That if I can please God, it will absolve all of my mistakes. If I please God, it will make my life happier, if I please God, all of these things, right? But then it also goes back to the one of the Epigraphs, right?

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.

Romans 9:16, NIV, from epigraphs on pg. 6

I think about that all the time because, especially when it comes to Cain and Abel’s offerings, as traditionally in the Bible, Cain’s offering was rejected — and there’s a whole extended allegory about how the shepherd and the farmer were meant to be allegory for the time, for the conflict between them — but also to show that if God just decides that what you have to offer is not good enough, then it is just not good enough. And I think about that all the time. Like we could do everything right and still lose anyways.

DC: There’s this idea of falling short of some arbitrary and mysterious. Rubric, right? I think as a people of faith, one of the most important things we can do is be able to question the faith. Why we believe, how we believe? And there’s a really interesting thought there about … if I’m doing everything that I can and I’m still falling short, what is really expected of me?

I think something that I struggled with a lot as a child was the idea that God was perfect just because he’s God. And I struggled with that because I’m like, as a child, I’m like what makes God perfect? And it’s like, “Well, He’s God”; I’m like, God decides what perfection is, so whatever he decides, that’s perfect. And that feels unfair.

ISJ: Know what I mean?

DC: Like, I have nothing to do with that. What do you want me… so if the person with all the power decides that they’re good because they are, like, okay!

ISJ: What do I do with that?

DC: Yeah! And how am I expected to measure up to that? I don’t have that power, I can’t decide my own perfection?

ISJ: Like you literally can’t. One question as a child that I always found myself just completely puzzled by is that: if God created all creation, then who created God? Or did he just pull himself outta the primordial soup and then he just was?

DC: Yeah, like what comes before before?

ISJ: Yeah. Because the only thing that existed before God was the literal darkness. ‘Cause in Genesis 1:2, “and God floated over the darkness and the water.” So, the only two things that existed before God [were] darkness and literal water. Which makes sense, because… the idea of water always being makes sense to me. The idea of God always being does not.

DC: I’m glad you brought up Eve, who I also thought about a lot in this collection, ‘cause she shows up as [a] definitely rebellious figure as you’ve pointed out. She occupies another really specific kind of space in this story, right? Just as we talked about her never being the first girl, but she was the first woman.She’s the first wife. Depending on who you ask about the Bible story, she’s the first wife. And so she makes these appearances throughout both of her daughter’s sections.

I love what you already said about her, but I was just thinking so much about her presence in this book, and what you refer to as the “mother wound.”

There’s so much of her presence that is tinged by the fact that so much of her daughters’ energies are directed first at each other and then at the, or moderated by, the fear or respect for their father. Where does that leave Eve? Especially as a woman in this collection who’s also tired of her husband? I would love to hear more about what you’re thinking about there with her presence in the collection.

ISJ: Yeah. So, throughout the writing of this book, I had several teachers and peers who — and even my thesis advisor — who were adamant on me cutting you out of the book. And I said, no.

DC: I’m glad you didn’t.

ISJ: I’m glad too, because she was really important. Like, I just, I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and she was also very important to the catalyst of tension in the book. While it is true that Cain and Abel are the ones at odds, they can’t be at odds without Eve. She is the crux of conflict between them two, and that’s really important.

When I was trying to figure out my relation to Eve and why is it that I couldn’t stop thinking about her, I realized it’s for two reasons. One, obviously, she’s supposed to represent my mother, right? And, by virtue, a mother wound I didn’t know I had, right? But two, Eve was a great opportunity for me to explore my adult self and the enduring questions I have, the obligations of womanhood, getting older, my body being used as a tool to… like, forward movement in a family means having babies. And, in that vein, me trying to make peace around my relationship to my body.

And then also, obviously, her relationship to her husband. One of the first lines I ever wrote for Eve is “this strange creature called husband.” Because, the thing about Eve never made sense is that she was given dominion over the entire Garden of Eden. That was, like, before she had children, the Garden of Eden was her baby. All of the animals that walked the earth were her children. And — this is why Milton and I will forever have static, because you would have me believe that God put her and trusted her with all of these animals and keeping everything alive and watering the plants and all that, but then she was dumb enough to eat the fruit because she was seduced by a snake? What? That don’t make no sense. That doesn’t make any sense, what are you talking about?

So I always believed that Eve made the choice, right? There was a moment where she realized that this heaven on earth that she is in is more of an elegant cage than a form of heaven, right? Because she doesn’t really have a say. She does not… she knows of Lilith, in terms of how the body keeps score. The way that Eve knows about Lilith, it’s almost like the way a woman’s body knows when her husband has cheated on her. “I can’t prove it, but I know you’ve been doing something funny shit behind my back.” ‘Cause in my head she doesn’t, she was never told about Lilith, but she knows about Lilith because that is her sister. Especially in one of the first poems in the book:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

When I catch my reflection in the [river,] I see your face…
When the wind lifts my dress, just so, I know it is your breath.

from “Eve Unto Lilith”, pg 65

I wanted to create a mirroring between Eve & Lilith and Cain & Abel, and so that was really important to me. The book would’ve been longer, and I would’ve written one poem in Lilith’s voice, and then I wanted to make a parallel between Eve and Li and Monica Lewinsky and have all three of them sit at a round table. There was a moment in the book where I really wanted to talk about Monica Lewinsky, in the last half of it, but I just didn’t have the space. But the reason why is because, the running thread of all three of these women is that they have all been punished by overly powered men, right?

Lilith was blamed for not wanting to lay beneath her husband, which, depending on biblical scripture or scholars, is often translated as to, “Oh, my wife wouldn’t give me sex. God —” because, so here’s how it happened in my headcanon, right? Adam went to Lilith and said, “Alright, woman, I want some sex.” And then Lilith was like, “No? I don’t wanna have sex with you. Get away from me. Your balls smell.” And then, Adam was pissed and then he went to God and said, “God, she won’t do, as I say, get rid of her.” And then God was like, “Word.” And then he got rid of her. And then Lilith is the first woman to ever be subjected to gaslighting and having a man lie on her because her name, her literal name means “Night Banshee.”

I find Lily’s character so fascinating because I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t know what Lilith’s story feels like. To tell a man no, and then he makes a point to destroy you for it. And then for Eve’s part, I think she understood that [she has] two options, right: I could fall the way my sister did, or I can find a way to get outta here, right? And now when I think of Eve as an adult woman, she feels a lot of regret for her choices, much so the way that my own mother does. That…there are parts of her I will never know, because — throughout the book, Eve does not talk to her daughters as much about the life she had before. She’s living post-garden.

Cain and Abel in the book know about the Garden of Eden, but it’s more like family myths and stories told over a campfire. They have no idea what it’s actually like because Eve does not talk about that part of her life, much the way that my mother doesn’t talk about her life before immigrating to this country. Which is why in the book I make the parallels between Nigeria and the Garden of Eden, the sort of mythical place that we can no longer return back to, so to speak. And in that way, it was really important for me to give Eve and Lilith and, in the future, Monica Lewinsky their flowers, right?

These archetypal women who survived, who are often used as cautionary tales. Same thing with Lot’s wife too. Lot’s wife has mentioned in the book as well, and I’m so fascinated by these women in the Bible who are so powerful and so urgent and important to the core progression of the story, but are often treated like, like they’re often treated if-not-for-women, mankind-could-be-at-peace kind of nonsense, and not seen for what it is.

DC: A catalyst for some type of doom when very often they’re just, they’re really like the bystanders or the victims of some other man’s bullshit.

ISJ: You feel me? I think a lot about this picture of Monica Lewinsky, a young twenty-something, and she’s standing with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, and he already has a full head of gray hair by then. And I think to myself, if you’re a twenty-something year old and a powerful man that you’re attracted to gives you the option to suck dick in the White House Oval Office, I wanna know: who among us would say no? Let’s stop pretending like Monica Lewinsky is some sort of sexual deviant. She did what anyone in her position would do. And I stand by that.

DC: Shoot put me in the White House with the — I mean, not the current White House — but put me in the White House, in a room with a million dollars… whatever, anyway.

ISJ: You know what I mean? Anyway. Yeah. That’s why I just, when I keep thinking about Monica Lewinsky, I keep thinking about her and Eve and Lil all in the same house, right? I think if Eve was in the same position as Monica Lewinsky, she’d have done the same thing, shit.

DC: Yeah.

ISJ: Yeah.

DC: On that note— Itiola, it’s been such a wonderful conversation, and I was so glad to hear more about your stunning collection. Once again, I think this is one of my favorite debuts that I’ve read, and it really shows how much care you put into — you can see how tabbed and researched stuff I went on this collection, I really, I had so — there’s so much delicious language in here. And so I would love, I would love if you could close this out with one of your title poems.

ISJ: Yes, please. Yeah. I will read the last poem, which is one of the title poems. I really wanna encourage folks that if you’re embarking on the debut of your book, even if the title poem does not make it into the book, I think it’s worthwhile to just challenge yourself to do it anyway. Because it just, it feels crazy and scary, but also like when you pull it off, you pull it off, you feel me?

Bloodmercy (Abel’s Version)

Now that one sister is seven years returned, so too is the other.
          Into Cain's eyes, the oleanders suddenly loosen their sutanas & 
                    sweep heady perfume about our ankles.
A mirroring of faces creased into separate womanhoods.
I once thought it reflexive— how I reached for you 
                    like another limb fixed into place.
Our gestures circling the other— your long fingers, 
          my scalp racked clean of worry;
                    my upturned wrist; your lips press
to the skin; I trip & you twist your ankle;
loneliness clouds your mind; the pain invades my dreams;
                    I bite the blood orange; the juice colors your mouth.
Speak your name into Baba's ear & you stand before me.
As promised in youth, memory returns us to dig 
          for that cedar box buried in the woods. It's true, sister:
time elongates its reach
                    & soon your childhood fits into a palm.
The future bisecting the past. On this lone hill where heaven stops 
just short of our shoulders. You were more than my sister:
                                                                  you, my child,
guardian, ancestor, my husband & wife: I do 
carry you with me all my days & even when the maggots 
          will make tender work of our flesh.
I close my eyes to see you with my heart; I close my heart
          to see you with The Spirit.
What we knew to be ‘love’  was more habit than conviction.
          To live, I remove the yoke bearing 'sister' 
& leave you here. Nostalgia & origin are two points
                                                    that come to meet again,
the singular braid forever binding our fates
                    fox to hare; myth to song; mercy to sister.

from Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2025 by I.S. Jones. Used with permission of the author.

Thank you all for listening to this episode of e·pon·y·mous, a series of the O, Word? podcast produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. The music for e·pon·y·mous and O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

Until next time — thanks for reading :)

Hellooooooo poets of the internet. After a very chilly run of weeks, we find ourselves at the end of the best month of the year. I’m very happy with the work I was able to do this month on the podcast! We dropped Victoria Mbabazi’s conversation on Persona, and very recently started a collaboration with Honey Literary to publish reviews ahead of upcoming e·pon·y·mous episodes. The first review is “Offering of Flesh & Dirt: A Review of I.S. Jones’ Debut Collection, Bloodmercy,” which you can read now ahead of Jones’ e·pon·y·mous episode dropping Monday, March 2nd.

With all the work I’ve been doing to set the podcast up for the future, I feel behind a bit on my reading, but I plan to get back on that horse properly in March! Keep reading below for some February highlights, and hey — thanks for reading :)

Subscribe now

What I’ve Read This Month

1) The Siren in the Twelfth House by Victoria Mbabazi

Rating: ★★★★

Genre: Poetry (Debut)

Archetype: The Playlist

dear god if you didn’t want to hunt for me
you should’ve came with more answers
- pg. 19, “Ninth House Target Practice”

The Siren in the Twelfth House is a collection concerned with confrontation. Confronting love, confronting heartbreak, confronting what may or may not be written in the stars for us. The presence of the siren washes over us, drawing us in with its lyrical freedom & shifting as needed for the environment, immersing us in game nights and target practice and messy relationships. With siren songs, one typically hears and sees what they desire, which is sometimes a truth they have not yet faced.The Siren in the Twelfth House dares us to face our truth, and more importantly, to survive it.

2) The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil

Rating: ★★★★

Genre: Poetry (Debut)

Archetype: The Interrogation (combo of Essay and Formula)

Another thing about fishes: they are constantly submerged in the element of their waking.
-pg 31, “19. And what would you say if you could?”

I previously called the intersection of the formula and essay archetypes “the experiment,” but after reading this collection, I believe that interrogation is far more apt. This collection resists the idea of narrative, instead making each of its 98 prose poems their own brief worlds. I was mostly interested in Kapil’s translation of image, her syntactical choices, & the ways poems were put in conversation due to the collection’s 12 recurring titles. I think this book is a great lesson in estrangement and recursion.

New Poems in the Catalog

From Emily Jungmin Yoon:

• “From An Ordinary Misfortune” | the Offing, 2015

• “Hello Miss Pretty Bitch” | Rattle, 2014

From Eve L. Ewing

• “testify” | Poem-a-Day, 2022

Work to Look Out For

Derrick Austin’s third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in May 2026. The book “engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation”), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space.” I was a big fan of Austin’s debut, Trouble the Water, so I’m really looking forward to this one as well.

Reuben Gelley Newman’s debut collection, DEAR DEAR, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2026 and “renders queer love through the lens of music, art, nature, and politics.” In the collection, Newman “ flirts with nostalgia but refuses to dwell in the past, asking how remembering our ancestors can reinvigorate our present struggles.”

Also forthcoming in July 2026 is Kyle Carrero Lopez’s debut, Party Line, from Graywolf Press. The book “centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.” Lopez’s poetry is both humorous and sharp, and I’m excited to see this collection in the world soon.

What’s Going On? (with me)

I’ve got a couple of things going on in the near future, if you want to catch me/ know what I’ve been up to:

• On Friday, March 6, at 6 PM, Tyger Quarterly, dialogist, and The Year are collaborating to bring you an AWP off-site reading, featuring Emily Pittinos, DeeSoul Carson, Sophia Terazawa, James Garwood-Cole, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Emily Bark Brown. If you’ll be at AWP, I hope I’ll see you there!

• On Saturday, April 18, if you happen to be in New Orleans, I’ll be at the New Orleans Poetry Festival as a panelist for the Humor/Horror: after Douglas Kearney session. In this panel, we’ll be discussing how humor influences our ways of writing towards not only diagnosing, but also imagining alternatives to the everyday horrors that are deeply entangled in the business of living. This is an under-examined area of craft that acts as a mode of resistance against hegemonic norms necessary for empire-making. This discussion will center on humor as a method of disorientation that lends itself towards an invitation for mutual care.

Thank for reading! Until next time :)

DeeSoul Carson: You know, if y’all don’t get anything out of this episode, have beef with more poets

Victoria Mbabazi: Yes. And I think my issue is that I wish that I had more beefs, but instead I was just a victim screaming, you know? But…

DC: And we, and we can change that.

VM: We can change that! Let’s have more, what is the word? Partial, like impartial beef?

DC: Impartial, yeah.

VM: Yeah, impartial beefs. Where, both sides — who cares? But the work is great. I love that. That’s what I want.

DC: What we need. What we need.

VM: Yeah.

DC: Hello, poets of the internet. I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word?, the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Persona! I’m here today with my dear friend, Victoria Mbabazi.

Victoria’s work can be found in several literary journals. They have two chapbook collections, chapbook, through Anstruther Press, published in 2021, and Flip from Knife Fork Books in 2022. Both are sold out. However, their first full length poetry collection, The Siren in the Twelfth House, from Palimpsest Press, 2024 is available where books are sold. Their second poetry collection, The Stone Who Strapped Me, will be available with Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring 2027. Not so long ago, they moved to the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada.

Victoria, hello!

VM: Hiiiiii.

DC: How are you?

VM: I’m good. How are you?

DC: Good. You know, you’ve moved so far away from us, over to Canada, but glad to be connected in this virtual space. Are you getting a lot of the cold up there too from this winter storm?

VM: What do you think? If you think that yours is bad, don’t you think it’s worse further…

DC: I don’t know what the extent of the storm is. Like, I don’t know how far up the, whatever it went.

VM: I could… I was unable to go to work the other day, because the snow was quite bad. I was surprised there was snow in New York, ‘cause last time I checked it was a tropical zone. So I guess the “island gyal” era is done for New York.

DC: I always like to start this podcast with a definition. So could you tell us in your own words, what is persona?

VM: I think if I were to say what persona is for me, it’s like the way I’ll be writing, like it’s very, it’s fleeting. It’s just like the thing I wanna take on in that moment. Like how Beyonce was, briefly, Sasha Fierce. I’m briefly, in this moment, writing this way.

DC: Okay. So it’s like this kind of fleeting embodiment sort of thing, like an alter ego?

VM: Yes.

DC: What draws you to that? How would you characterize the way that it shows up in your work? Because I am, I’m thinking of specifically, like I, I just finished reading through the full collection, [The] Siren in the Twelfth House, and I mean, there’s persona, like the whole book is kind of an extended persona of the siren.

And then there’s kind of these more specific instances of persona or heightened persona, if you want to describe it that way, that happens throughout the book. And so I’m wondering, how do you feel about the way that it shows up for you?

VM: So in The Siren in the Twelfth House specifically, I think that I wanted to embody like my most vulnerable, like, raw self. So for me, the symbol of Pisces, like as the water sign, it has no shell. So it’s hard to, like, reach, it’s most emotional and it’s not great at communicating emotion.

So it’s just through action and everything is personified or like, I don’t know if the word is objectified, but like, it just becomes, like, a physical space. So I just wanted to make a room of my feelings, and of a certain time period. So for me, the persona there was, if I was unmedicated, I think that that’s how I would describe it.

DC: I mean, that’s really interesting thinking about the persona of the self, so it’s not even just like you’re embodying, like, another voice. It’s like, it’s me at a different point in time, what you’re saying, me at a different point in time, like that’s another kind of persona.

DC: I like what you’re saying also about the raw self. Do you ever feel like using persona in a poem is a mask or do you ever feel like it’s maybe like a removal of a mask?

VM: I think it can be both. Like I think, like, sometimes when I’m writing a poem, and I wanna be, like, angrier. I think that it could be like a putting on of a mask because truthfully, most feelings that I feel are some form of grief. Like, when it comes to writing poems that are emotionally devastating, or piercing. So if I am putting on an angrier or cheekier, it’s in response to something like, some kind of betrayal or boundary or someone overpassing a boundary, then that would be the way that I go about it. Either if I’m removing the mask, it’s at it’s most sad, or if I’m putting on, it’s at its most comical or most angry.

DC: When I think about your work, and I think about the way that I see persona happening in your work, I think about it as an extension of intimacy. So the intimacy that we share with friends, the intimacy that we share with enemies, the intimacy writers share with their speakers that may or may not exactly be themselves. And so I’m wondering how you feel like persona or occupying these different valences of a self colors intimacy in your work?

VM: The question I’m always asking is what it means to be intimate. And then I think what the persona becomes is someone who knows what that means. So I’ve made a decision on what intimacy is or what love is in a poem, and then I go about defining it through my actions throughout the poem.

And then I think that The Siren in the Twelfth House was basically like a persona who’s decided they truly don’t know, and they’re hoping to know throughout, and then they are wrong at each turn as the houses keep breaking down, until they realize that love has to be some form of healing.

DC: Do you feel like persona gives you space to contradict yourself?

VM: Yeah, ‘cause I think that I love to just tell people what I like, what I could just be like, I’m being direct and I’m telling you what it is. Even if I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter ‘cause we’re living in my world right now. And it’s exactly what I said because I’ve decided, so it doesn’t really matter if I’m right or wrong because, it’s the world that I’ve built within a poem. So I do think it gives me permission to be wrong because no matter if I’m wrong or right, I am right. ‘Cause it just has to define the rules of what I’m writing right now.

DC: Something that’s also coming to me is, embodiment not just as a voice, but also like embodiment of certain forms. So I know your collection is dealing with astrology and it’s dealing not just with the signs, but it’s also dealing with the houses. It’s dealing with relationships between different signs and houses and, like, kind of the relationships that happened there. And because of that, I know a lot of your poems take different kinds of forms. So like you have one that’s in the form of a psychiatric assessment, or there’s one in the form of a game night, or there’s one in the form of I think, it’s like, it’s two signs, at the movies writing a play.

VM: Yeah.

DC: And so I’m wondering, when we’re thinking not just about where do the voices come from, but how does it feel … because I feel like I know your usual style. If I had to like, pick out poems, it’s like this poems, there’s not punctuation. They’re kind of, they’re enjambed in the middle of lines, so you kind of have to get a feel for the rhythm of the line as opposed to like it being laid out for you. And so, and so those moments of other kind of nonce forms, created forms, really stick out to me. I wonder what it’s like going into those, or if you feel anything going into them, versus like what your usual “voice” is.

VM: Sometimes I find form really interesting, especially when I’m reading prose truthfully. Like I love when a book is in letters or, I think I read this book when I [was] way younger that was just a series of phone conversations. Like, it was just playing telephone with a bunch of different people. So when it comes to poems, with playing with form, I love when it’s just an ordinary thing that becomes a poem, you know, you do that too, with the video game, like with the Hades video game, which is really cool.

So for me, I do feel a way because I sometimes I feel trapped by form. Like with the “Ninth House Stellium” poem, it’s just not, it’s just not who I am. Usually, I’m very stream of consciousness. But when it comes to, like, writing a play at the movies, it’s just absurdist. So it’s just stupid. So it feels really in my wheelhouse. It feels like I’m moving more into prose, which also in a way feels really in my wheelhouse. Like it’s not something I get to do a lot.

And I felt like, with this book, it felt like a draft of everything I want to do now, where I get to just try something because Jim Johnstone was just like, “I like what you do, do what you want.” And then I just did. I was very uncensored and I was doing what I want, and I just wanted to see if it worked. I only feel trapped if it’s quite traditional. If anything, it gives me, like, a good vehicle if I’m excited about what the form is.

DC: Do you feel like, when you’re doing these poems, it takes a lot of research on any of the particular — I know you’re already pretty knowledgeable about astrology and such — but for any of the poems that you’re writing, do you feel like it ever takes you doing a lot of research, background research to get the right kind of voice that you’re looking for?

VM: Research-wise with poems, it depends. Like for the signs, like for the houses in particular, I wanted to match a theme in each house in a dark way that breaks it or a positive way that rebuilds it. And that was really hard for some of the houses; there’s so many themes, like for the game night house, because the fifth house in particular is a pretty joyous house. It’s the house of play. It’s kids, and then there was suddenly gambling. I was like, that was suddenly like, I was like, okay, cool. That can be, like, gambling with my life or something. And I’m like, all of a sudden it’s not fun anymore, you know, games over.

So I had to do a lot of relearning on certain astrological aspects and how to subvert them. And to do that, you have to understand them first. And same with, like, aspects, because that was new to me at the time, which is really what made me wanna write the book. That required a lot of research, just making sure that my poem actually resonated with how this aspect functions.

It’s hard ‘cause with love poems or when poems are really intimate, people don’t really think about that. You’re like, oh, here’s all of my feelings. This person just thinking about feelings. And astrology too, like people don’t take it very seriously because they think it’s like a religious belief instead of, like, math, honestly.

DC: I think of it as like a guidepost. It’s less so much like a dogma and more sense like… I don’t know if probabilities are like the right word, but…

VM: Yeah. It’s all probabilities. It’s all probabilities. It’s also like, it’s degrees, it’s all angles. It’s just like, where is the sky today? And what this is, it’s all interpretive. It’s not religious in that way.

DC: I find it interesting how some people are so resistant to believing that they can be influenced by things outside of themselves. Like there’s things that I’m like… I think it’s nice to think about how we interact in the universe.

VM: Yeah.

DC: Like I don’t believe that nothing is influencing me.

VM: Yeah, well I think it’s funny ‘cause one time I was talking to this person, I think it was like an old coworker or something, and he was telling me how he doesn’t believe in astrology because he spent this time with a psychic who told him that he was definitely an Aries and he acted like an Aries. And he was like, “and she was wrong ‘cause I’m a Cancer.” And then he gave me his chart and he had no Aries placements.

He had a lot of cancer placements and all of them were in the first house, which is Aries. So she was sensing him as himself. She saw him; he didn’t have all the language to see why she would know, why she would think that about him. And how like that influenced him and… not that everyone’s gonna be right about stuff like that. Like, you’re gonna meet a lot of people who just say anything at you. But yeah, I thought that was fun. Like, how in denial he was, and even like him, you know, being so in denial at me was a lot like what she was probably sensing.

DC: Yeah. She was like, there it is right there.

VM: When it came to a persona in siren, I was like, okay, like the Pisces as an archetype, and then all these archetypes responding to Pisces doing shit. Especially in the first half of the book where I’m just focusing on oppositions. So we just talk about sister signs ‘cause they’re opposite aspects to each other. And then I just wanted to really be like all the Tumblr posts about signs. Like, how would a sign do this or whatever. ‘Cause that was really fun to read when I was in high school or something.

And then, the signs, how are the signs responding to this cosmic event where all the ways of life are being broken down as their relationship with their sister signs are in tension. That’s a backstory to like the current, the stream of consciousness that is the siren. Just like, nobody loves me and I feel really weird about that. Yeah.

DC: Do you…because I know now you’re working on a new project, The Stone Who Strapped Me — which, I continue to say, love that title. But I know you’re working on the next poetry collection, I know you’re also a very prolific prose writer, nonfiction writer, memoirist, however you want to describe it. Do you feel like the way that you approach persona in The Siren in the Twelfth House is coming back up for you again in these other projects that you’re working on, or do you feel like it’s something completely different that’s happening for you in these endeavors?

VM: I think that the siren, like the siren as a persona, is definitely more focused on themself as an isolation. And then everything else, in The Stone Who Strapped Me, it just seems… it’s like character studies of other people. And how they make me feel so, it feels more like character study.

Something has opened up inside of me that has made me more open to other people. So it’s like me in conversation more with those around me, whether or not I like them as people or respect them, or you know, find them interesting. I just am. Yeah.

DC: There’s an interesting thing happening there with interiority versus exteriority. Like how you embody the self in different ways, versus how you do observational studies of other people, is super interesting.

Thinking, you know, talking about persona, being an embodiment of intimacy, of course, is one thing. But, as we know, on the other side of affection is hate, which is its own kind of intimacy. And so I would love to hear more from you on how you feel that persona gives you an avenue for rage or disgust or disdain or any of those things.

VM: Okay. ‘cause I did say I really wanna talk about hate, because I have a lot of feelings about hatred and poetry. ‘Cause — and no one can see, but you’re smiling now ‘cause you want to laugh. But I love writing about how much I dislike someone. And honestly, when I have a drought, any kind of poetry drought, it’s like usually the first time, like, when I’m feeling angry, it’s like, great, I finally know what to do. I can finally write a poem and I feel great about it. And it’s because… that’s kind of what mixes in with persona, where, sometimes I want to embody the person, like when I’m really upset, I want to embody the person who’s upset me and mock them as I’m writing, because I feel that I truly understand them in a way that they may not like, and I just, and I feel so proud of the outcome of this mocking outcome, which is not great.

But you know what? They do it on SNL every day. And it’s fine. I think that, in [The] Siren [in the Twelfth House], I don’t talk about hate that much. I think that it’s more focused on like, I am angry in the poem, but it’s always an anger out of love. And in The Stone [Who Strapped Me], there is poems where I truly dislike who I’m dealing with. But it’s usually, it’s just a very deep indifference, usually. And lately I found it hard to do either of those things, write angrily or hatefully. And I think it’s partly because my life is quite softer now, you know, I’m just, I’m just happier now.

So I’ve found it hard to write disdainfully, and I found it to be a very powerful source for me. So I feel a stall in my writing, poetry wise, which is interesting ‘cause I think I’m feeling like Zuko, in season three. You know, when he’s with Aang and he’s like, “I’m about to help you, you know, defeat the fire nation. ‘cause I’m the greatest fire bender ever.” Then he goes, and he can’t; he has no fire. He’s no longer operating from a place of anger or hatred. So he has to go find a new fire. And I feel like that’s kind of where I’m at.

I haven’t felt angry enough lately to — I don’t think it’s ever gonna happen. And it might never happen again for me to use it. So I’m glad that I’ve had that period. Yeah. I’m glad for the shift, but I’m glad for my hate — my red — period.

DC: I think that kind of shift would, I think, startle anyone.

VM: I do kind of miss being kind of, like, ragebait-y in my work. I think.

DC: [Laughing] You miss pissing people off on purpose?

VM: Yeah, I mean like those subtleties, you know.

DC: There is something special with being known by your… or your enemies being known by you. I think about this with my students, you know, and they say something that really … it was like, wow, that was a really astute observation. You guys really had to be focusing on me to be able to like throw that one out there. And I always feel a lot of respect for them in that moment. I’m like, you absolutely cannot say that again, or it’s gonna be an issue. But like, you ate that. Yeah.

VM: Yeah! That’s, yeah, that’s usually what I’m going for. I think that that was my main goal with, I think, hate poems, was I want the person to feel so known, and I want them to feel so known.

DC: Almost uncomfortably known.

VM: Uncomfortably known and then uncomfortably proud too. And I’ve never felt that way reading about me, and I’ve always wanted to. I think that’s why rap battles are so fun, because they get to feel that way about each other all the time, you know, that kind of passion.

DC: Yeah. Now I’m thinking of your playlist that tracks the [rap] beef.

VM: Yes, because I love when a, how a beef starts with other beefs and how it just brings everything together, you know, like a whole…

DC: The confluence of beef.

VM: Yes. I think that we don’t talk about the romanticism of hate in a way that is fun anymore, you know? And I feel like that really brought that back. Even though people are like, “the Drake-Kendrick beef is dumb.” I’m like, well it brought back romance into, into rap, and I love that.

DC: One of my favorite disc tracks ever is 2pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up,” and I just think — that song’s insane. And I think it’s even more saying, ‘cause it’s like this is. The same man that was doing, like, “Dear Mama,” “Keep Ya Head Up.” And then he’s saying some really [laughing] heinous things on this track…

VM: It’s just, it’s the way it starts. It’s the way it starts because it’s like, what — Where do you go? You know that there’s nowhere good that’s gonna come from the rest of what he has coming up.

DC: It’s like after he said all that, it was like, the only way out here is someone has to die. Like, I don’t know what to tell you.

VM: He said, I hope all your children don’t grow. And he meant that shit, and I love that, I love that energy. And that’s what I wanted — that’s what I want in my work. It’s what I want in my work.

DC: We don’t have enough of that in poetry. We don’t have enough of that.

In a review of this collection, The Siren in the Twelfth House, that was featured by Stone of Madness Press, the reviewer described your work as, “the poems sound like prayers of assonance.” I was interested in the embodiment of a particular kind of energy, and like the interactions happening between these personas. But I was just wondering if you felt resonance with the way that they… like prayers, I think prayers imply a certain kind of relationship to an audience who can’t be seen. And I was wondering if you felt a resonance with that sort of aspect.

VM: Yeah. I really loved that because I do feel like… sometimes I feel like I’m trying to conjure something when I write a poem. And I feel like with the siren, it feels like a lot of spells, like spells, like behavior. Like, I just really wish this were… I think prayer, it’s like a form of begging, you know: In some way, I want this to be different. The original feeling is yes, there is like some person I’ve made God, which I shouldn’t have. I’m trying to reach them. So I feel like prayers of assonance was like, yeah, it was kind of apt, where it’s just like, I’ve made a god out of nothing and here I go.

DC: Yeah. Well, perfect, perfect. This has been such a terrific conversation and I really thank you for your time, and I would love it if you could close this out by reading a poem of your own.

VM: Okay, yes.

CELESTIAL HIJACKING

I’m sitting in the Black park listening to Black music thinking about the Black friend who doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. If I told you they didn’t want to talk to me because they love me so much you would have to believe me because you got to the end of this sentence.  If every version of me is someone you know I’m sorry. The version most like best is the one they just met. The version you leave is the one you know. If you tell on me and don’t decorate the language you are selling me out in poor taste. I don’t understand space and I don’t always care what I mean. I think everyone who hates me should point a finger and see three fingers pointing back at them. I think missing me is the same as wanting me gone. I think being nauseous meant you were along for the ride. I spun you in circles pulled the moon from the sky and hoped you wouldn’t drown when the tides couldn’t control themselves. I did nothing to stop it and I knew the consequences but if I tell you it wasn’t on purpose please believe me.  I’ve never cared enough to cause harm with purpose. I am ruled by Jupiter and when it cracked I became the lucky planet instead. If you made it to the end I got your attention. Don’t worry. Your discomfort is your friend.

Copyright © 2025 by Victoria Mbabazi. Originally published in Stone of Madness Press. Used with permission of the author.

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guest in the Substack post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

Our guest, Victoria, offers this prompt: Describe the person you love as a beverage in four short sentences OR write your enemy writing a love poem about you.

Check Out These Recommendations from Victoria Mbabazi:

• Heather Christle

• Harryette Mullen

• Audre Lorde

Hellooooooo poets of the internet. Now that I’ve started the podcast series in earnest (new episode dropping soon, I promise), I have been wondering how to incorporate this Substack’s original intention, which was to keep myself accountable to my reading and share work with you that truly interested me.

With the podcast episodes so long in text form, and with me wanted to give proper time to the guests, I don’t want my reviews and such to get lost in the mix. So I’ve decided that I’ll drop a monthly roundup of the things I’ve read and things I’m excited for on the horizon. Hope this is useful for some/any of you, and hey — thanks for being here :)

Subscribe now

What I’ve Read This Month

1) We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word

Rating: ★★★★

Genre: Poetry (Anthology)

Stand out lines:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I want to transition into a bird, not a boy. Try that one next time at Kaiser. Gender marker? A caw. A hollow bone. A pair of lines slitting a burning blood-orange sky. 
— Jenevieve Ting, "Bird Blue Bones"

you're safe until you're alone. you're american until the towers fall. until there's a border on your back.
— Fatimah Asghar, "Partition"

The ancient sapien instinct: love is an approximation to danger
You make me feel safe, so I want to run away.
— Jireh Deng, "An Algorithm Matches Me with a Nice Girl and I Tell Her"

What disappeared is not a metaphor for anything.
What disappeared is gone.
— Luisa A. Igloria, "Postnatural"

Anthologies are such important references for offering folks a diverse body of work under a common theme. I have also been historically daunted by anthologies. I am grateful for the clear intention that went into the curation of this collection, the broad spectrum of joy & anger & grief & love that comes with an assumed or bestowed identity. This book is a terrific sample of the wealth of AAPI poetry, and a start for any of us asking how we come to belong to one another.

2) The Death of a Jaybird by Jodi M. Savage

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Essays

Quotes:

On one of these nights full of signs, Granny calls 911 again — pg 4

The Death of a Jaybird reminds me that there is no easy way to prepare for loss, but we can cultivate the community that cares for us when it happens. Reading Savage’s essays about her mothers brought up all the similarities I see in my own — my step-mother who raised me and passed from cancer, my responsibility-avoidant biological mother, my granny, thankfully still in retention of all of her faculties. Our mothers shape us and show us the way, and as Savage demonstrates, they continue to lead us long after they’ve passed.

3) Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Poetry (Debut)

Archetype: The Speaker’s Journey

Hunger is a savage god all bodies must kneel to
- pg. 28, "Feast"

Bloodmercy is a spectacular reimagining of the relationship between Cain & Abel, an exploration of violence & desire & what is done with our hands. This entire collection, I was enamored with the richness of Jones’ language, the clarity of the voices she was writing in. the world of this collection is haunted by questions of belonging, how we move through a world that shows us so little mercy, how merciful we choose or choose not to be. Hands down one of the strongest debuts I’ve read.

4) Yeet! by jason b crawford

Rating: ★★★★

Genre: Poetry (Sophomore)

Archetype: Archeype

1. How did the great migration begin?

   we cannot talk about history without mentioning its war-

   drawn blades.
   - pg. 64, “History of Leaving: a pop quiz”

Yeet! imagines Black people somewhere alive and safe, imagining a new language for the way we breathe. The poems of this collection are formally daring and expansive, asking us to consider the architecture of our experience, the systems and powers that mediate our existence. In this collection, we are dancing, and the flowers bloom with our living. The only thing we must worry about is what to do with all of this beauty.

New Poems in the Catalog

• “Finna” by Nate Marshall (Adroit, Issue 31)

• “PIG BTTM LOOKING FOR WHEN” by sam sax (Adroit, Issue 30)

• “TRACK 4: REFLECTION (as performed by Diana Ross)” by Jericho Brown (Callaloo Volume 32, No 1, Winter 2009)

  ---

Work to Look Out For

As you may have seen in my end-of-the-year wrap up post, there are a few folks whose collections I am presently hyped for!

R.A. Villanueva’s sophomore collection, A Holy Dread, is forthcoming in February 2026 from Alice James Books. In the collection, Villanueva “reckons with identity, family, and history to illuminate the tenderness and calamity of the world we make together--the beauty and grief our children will inherit.” I am drawn to the way Villanueva observes and witnesses, and I think you will be too.

Summer Farah’s debut full-length, The Hungering Years, is also forthcoming in February 2026 from Host Publications. It is described as “a rush of breathless song, voicing confessions so often left unsung amidst personal and collective crisis.” Farah’s sense of the lyric is so singular and enticing to me, so I’m excited to dig into it.

Maya Salameh’s sophomore collection, Mermaid Theory, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in April 2026. On the heels of her chapbook rooh and stunning debut, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, this new collection “offers a profound exploration of Arab American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage.” A defining feature of Salameh’s poetics is her inventiveness and experimentation, so I look forward to the journey she will take us through in this new work.

Nick Martino’s debut, Scrap Book, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in June 2026. On the poet’s page for the book, the description reads “Set within a Midwestern family home along the shores of Lake Michigan, Scrap Book explores the prison sentence Martino’s father served before he was born and its aftermath in which he was raised.” Central to this book are Martino’s “Polaroid” series, some of which you can find on his website.

What’s Going On? (with me)

I’ve got a couple of things going on in the near future, if you want to catch me/ know what I’ve been up to:

• We’re already a few weeks in, but I’ve been leading a course for Poets House called Better Readers, Better Writers. The purpose of the course was to discuss how we cultivate our reading practice and incorporate it into our writing practice. In that spirit, we’ve been focusing on five collections that I highly recommend you check out:

  • I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande, 2023) by Karisma Price

  • Yeet! (Omnidawn, 2025) by jason b crawford

  • Bloodmercy (Copper Canyon, 2025) by I.S. Jones

  • I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2023) by Summer Farah

  • Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) by Franny Choi

• On February 21 at 7 pm ET, I will be reading for the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center’s Poets in Print reading series with Saba Keramati. It should be fun, and they’ll be making broadsides of our poems. Neat!

• On February 25 at 6:30 PM, I’ll be reading at P&T Knitwear to celebrate the release of My God’s Been Silent by Darius Phelps, along with Andrew Chi Keong Yim, Karl Michael Iglesias, & Taiyo Na.

• On February 26 at 7 pm, I will be leading a workshop, The Afterparty, as part of PSNY’s virtual workshop series. It will be a workshop about how we approach “after” poems! The ~description~ reads:

  • As artists, there is always a concern with the originality of our work and how we stand out without biting off someone else’s style. However, as the old adage goes, no man is an island. We are constantly inspired and influenced by the various mediums we encounter in the world. How can we use these influences to jumpstart our own writing without creating parody? In this workshop, we’ll read work by Nate Marshall, Summer Farah, Shara McCallum, and others as we consider how we borrow from, take inspiration from, reinvent, and recontextualize the texts and media we consume on a daily basis while maintain our own poetic voices.

Thank for reading! Until next time :)

DeeSoul Carson: I think, you know, I also, I have to say for the record, I think every episode, I say that people either aren’t reading, don’t like to read, or are bad readers, or something of the sort, and I just wanna… dear listeners, I believe you can read! I believe you can read, I just, just expand… expand what reading can be. I promise I’ll stop bashing people who don’t read, but…

Kay E. Bancroft: Yeah, I mean, people can be, you know, I mean, just because you are a bad reader doesn’t mean that you’re not reading.

DC: Yeah, you’re doing your best.

KB: Yeah, you’re trying. Honestly, people who are reading at all, that’s better than most people, you know?

INTRO PLAYS - CANARY BY ESOTERIC CREATIONS

DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson , and this is O,Word?, the podcast that is interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is “O, Hybridity!”

I am joined by my friend, Kay E. Bancroft. Kay E. Bancroft is a writer, educator, and artist from Cincinnati, Ohio. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA in Rhetoric and Professional Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, Rhino Poetry, Passenger’s Journal, The Rumpus, and more. Explore more of their work at kayebancroftpoet.com. Kay, hello!

KB: Hi, DeeSoul.

DC: It’s so nice to see you.

KB: It’s so good to see you, too.

DC: I feel like I haven’t, we haven’t seen each other in person since AWP?

KB: Yeah, yeah, it’s been a minute.

DC: Yeah, so it’s so nice to see you and to hear your voice. What’s been going on with you?

KB: Oh, gosh, what has been going on with me? Well, my debut poetry collection comes out next year.

DC: Yeah?!?

KB: you know, just working on finishing that. She’s coming out…

DC: Tell the people what it’s called.

KB: Yes, it’s called Bloodroom. It comes out next June, with Sundress Publications. I’m sooo excited. Yeah, we’re just finishing editing, and I just picked fonts the other day. Yeah, very excited.

DC: Super excited for you, super excited for your book.

KB: Thank you.

DC: As you know, the thing that I have invited you here to talk to me about today is hybridity. I would love if you could tell me in your own words, or tell the people in your own words, what hybrid work is in poetry, or what that entails?

KB: Yeah, I think… okay, so I have my own definition of it, which is, getting really freaky on the page, and whether that’s finding a document and breaking it, and taking it apart in pieces, or… using found footage, or photography, and doctoring with that, and using something that already exists, or taking a photo and getting weird with that. Hybridity is all about play and being able to find ways to break something and build something, or break the page, or find a new way to use the page.

That’s how I define it, and I think it’s really fun. I think it’s very loose, so I don’t have to stick to too much of a definition for it, but I mean…that’s how I ultimately perceive hybridity, is that there’s a way to break and then rebuild something.

DC: I think the way that I usually think about poetry kind of goes into this. I love what you’re saying about play. I think a lot of poetry kind of inherently is based on play, some sort of thing with language. Yeah. The way that I usually define poetry at large, is “any kind of text that engages in rhetorical experimentation.” Cause I know poetry is a weird genre, because usually if you ask someone what a poem is, they’re like, well, it’s not prose, except, you know, when it’s a prose poem.

KB: Right.

DC: You know, or it’s not XYZ thing until it is, right? And so, because poetry can be whatever it wants, the way that I usually try to tell people is, well, if I think someone’s writing a poem, I think they’re doing something intentional with rhetoric that’s different from how we usually use that rhetoric, right? So I love what you’re saying about hybrid work. I think a lot about hermit crab poems. Because I think it estranges our usual relationship to those kinds of documents, right? So if someone.. who has a really good one?

Aris Kian Brown has a poem in the form of a multiple-choice test. And I think…you know, we don’t typically think of a multiple-choice test as a…kind of poem, right?

KB: Oh, yeah, but it is inherently.

DC: Yeah, and especially when you’re, you know, when you’re doing the… when you’re using the form of a multiple choice test as a basis for some other kind of commentary, right?

KB: Yeah, absolutely.

DC: That’s really fun. Do you have any particular kinds of hybrid work that you really enjoy, or that you find gravitating towards? I know you mentioned a different kind, like, there’s documents, there’s photos, there’s found poems. Yeah.

KB: Yeah. I love this question, because I kind of dabble in all of them, but I think my favorite is, I find that erasure is hybridity, and that you’re redacting something and finding something new in it, and that in itself feels hybrid to me.

And the work… I really love visual erasure, so…the work of torrin a. greathouse with the Burning Haibun, and also, Krista Franklin‘s work. Huge, huge inspiration to me. I mean, I’m… everything that Krista does, I’m just constantly blown away. So yeah, I think that that kind of work is what I’m most drawn to, is finding something in… finding new elements of something and something that already exists.

And even if it’s just erasure of an article you find online, or… you know, whatever. I’ve done erasures of medication receipts before, and I think… I don’t know, it’s just fun. It’s… it’s also just kind of, a fun warm-up when you haven’t written for a while, and you’re like, I just need to have something to dig myself into the space of being a “writer” again, you know what I mean? And it’s just my favorite thing. I don’t know why. I’ve always been drawn to it. And I also love when people get really freaky with an erasure, and they make it super, visually stunning,

The work of Tom Phillips in A Humument, I’m particularly obsessed with, because it’s so beautiful, and it just gets so weird, and sometimes you just draw a random shape on a page, and then you’re like, damn, that’s actually just a poem that I just did, and that’s pretty cool. So yeah, I always find myself drawn to that, but also I really love hyper-experimental hybrid work, like Anthony Cody‘s work, or Mai Der Vang, those…those titans of… just abstract hybridity, ugh. I could go on and on. I’m obsessed with that.

DC: I’m really glad you brought up erasure, too, as a kind of hybridity. I think… very often, and even I fall into this sometimes, I think of erasure as it’s, really its own thing, so I don’t even always think about it as hybridity, but I think there’s a really expansive way of thinking of hybridity, not just, what you’re… like, how freaky you’re getting on the page, but also how you’re choosing to engage with other texts, to the hybrid nature of interacting with someone else’s work.

So as you’re talking, I’m thinking about Nicole Sealey’s book, The Ferguson Report. Which is that palimpsest of the actual Ferguson report, and it really becomes… it’s really interesting, because the whole book is the entire report, but there’s actually only, like, 7, 8 poems in it. But it’s such a painstaking — for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, if you go and look at the book, you’ll find that Nicole is really, she’s pulling out pieces of words and letters, and as you’re going through it, it slowly unfolds these poems over the course of this, really long and bureaucratic and probably not really interesting to read texts, and she makes these really beautiful poetic pieces. I’m also thinking, Chase Berggrun’s R E D, which is a redaction of Dracula, if I’m not mistaken.

KB: I love that book so much. It’s so good. I think about that book all the time. It’s so good. I love that. And I also, Mary Ruefle has a book of poetry, A Little White Shadow, I think is what it’s called. (The erasure poetry. Obviously, she has a book of poetry). But I love that small, just, handheld, pocket-sized book of these white-out erasures that she did. I don’t know, there’s something so tactile and hybrid about it to me, and so funky.

DC: I think you’re right. Yeah. And that’s another really cool thing, we’re going off our knowledge of other kinds of texts. And there’s a really interesting thing, too, I think, that applies often to… erasure poems, but I think, you can really probably get expanded to any kind of hybrid work. But, when you’re using whatever that source material is, what commentary are we also making on… use or reconfiguration or redaction or destruction of a work? What are we using? How are we manipulating it? There’s a lot of ethical things that go into a lot of these.

KB: Yeah, the ethics of it is really interesting, and I’ve done a lot of… I’ve done a lot of sitting with this personally, because some of the work that I’ve done is… is personal, my familial archive, using some, like, photos and documents from that, and yeah, there’s kind of a lot of… ethical discussion that goes on with it. I’ve heard Diana Khoi Nguyen talk about this with her collection, Ghost Of, which is just perfect.

She talks a lot about the redaction of people’s faces and… and… and different likenesses, and… talking about people who aren’t necessarily in the room. And I… I think that that’s really important to think about, and… I talk about it a lot, and I’m thinking about it a lot when I’m working in erasure, of, like, okay, how… how is this in conversation with what the text is originally saying, and who was originally here? And I think that’s a really important part of hybridity, too, is… really thinking through that… that source material usage, and… whether it’s photographic, or video, or sound, or whatever that is, really digging into, like, “why am I using this specific thing?” and, “what’s the impact of this, and then what’s the further implication of that?” and sifting through that as you’re moving through the work, because I think if you’re not doing that, then it, it just feels… I don’t know, a little bit empty, maybe? I just feel like it’s really important to think about as you move through work in a document, you know?

DC: Yeah, and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s, especially, is super interesting. I mean, she’s using… is using photographs, which I think sometimes poets get a little more scared when you’re asked… when we’re asked to bring up, we’re like, whoa! But she’s doing something so interesting because she’s writing around absences. Like, physically on the page, she’s writing around an absence, or writing into an absence. And I’m thinking of her poem “Triptych,” which does that kind of inversing or inverting of a photo through the text, and what that becomes throughout the collection, as you’re mentioning, right? And so I think about often what we sometimes lose when we move to the page, and luckily we have so many examples of great poets who find their way to the page and do a lot of really great innovations, and I think that often even goes into the hybrid work, because there’s a kind of a sense of freedom, or an idea to fuck shit up, to get freaky on the page.

But I think, yeah, hybridity on the page is a great example of what that form can achieve, what that medium can achieve, rather, is what I’m trying to say.

INTERLUDE PLAYS - BUOYANT BY ESOTERIC CREATIONS

DC: Do you ever feel intimidated by hybrid work? Not even just writing it, but even when you approach, when you see hybrid work, do you sometimes get scared, or like, oh, how do I read this?

KB: Oh, I don’t know if I feel fear. I think I get excited by being intimidated on the page, because… I think it’s just something new that I haven’t experienced yet, and maybe that sounds cliche or whatever, but I just…

DC: We love cliches.

KB: Yeah, they’re replicates for a reason, right? They exist for a reason. But I think a lot about, if I’m going into a collection of Douglas Kearney’s poetry, and I’m looking at that page, I’m like, yeah, I’ve never seen that before, and that is, like, mind-blowingly cool. And I think that I just view it as a way to find new elements of writing that feel cool to me. Does it feel like they’re fueling my creativity, and like…how… how are these artists thinking? What are their intentions with the motion of words on a page, the way that they’re using media, the way that they’re making the page the screen, they’re making the page their surroundings.

I think it’s really exciting, and I think people often are like, well, that looks crazy, how do I even approach that? It’s like, just look at the first word, and then if… move to the next one, and see where you land, because I think that that’s part of the point. It’s not supposed to be this beautiful, polished thing, that it’s just a rectangle on a page, and that’s beautiful in its own right. But I think digging into being a little bit excited and scared is a really good thing. And…

DC: It drives us!

KB: Yeah, it drives us… it keeps us curious. I was just talking to my dear friend, Dr. Taylor Byas, the other day. And I was talking with her about writing, and we were just chatting about, kind of, you know, like, how we reignite our love for writing when we have had, like, kind of a dry spell. And she was talking about how we as writers need to stay curious, and a lot of writers maybe don’t stay curious. And so I think that that’s what excites me about hybrid work, and how people are deciding to break and reshape, is that they’re staying curious. And so that helps me stay curious, because then I’m not complacent. And then I find a new way to work.

DC: Yeah, there’s this great invitation for astonishment, when you get to hybrid work. I know when I get to a poem that I don’t immediately understand, I think that I used to feel fear, because I felt a need to understand. I felt like I had to understand what was going on. And I think the way that poetry is often taught — especially when you’re in grade school — it’s taught with, like, here’s what the poem means, here’s what this metaphor means, right? And we’re expected to just, like, get it. We’re expected to know what the metaphor means, what the image means, what it’s all doing, right? So when you get to some of these hybrid works, which they’re not giving me in grade school, you know, they’re not giving me Douglas Kearney in 10th grade lit.

KB: They sure aren’t.

DC: They should be. They should be, but they’re not. And I think it would be so fun in high schools to give more kids hybrid works, to have them experiment with… what does understanding even mean? What does it mean to come to your own understanding of a text, right? That’s a big part of critical analysis, or, you know, literary analysis, is to be able to pull things on your own from what you’re looking at, right? I had a professor who told me, you know, if you don’t understand necessarily what’s going on in a poem, it’s a great opportunity to ask, what is this poem telling me that I have permission to do? So even when I come to a poem, and I’m like, I don’t have… the slightest clue what this poem is trying to say, what it means, but… oh, but they’re doing this really cool thing with language, or, oh, they’re doing this really cool thing with image, and maybe I can try that with something that I do understand. I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing over there, but…

KB: Oh, yeah.

DC: But I can do it!

KB: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot about how…how my mentors have broken and rebuilt things, and how they’ve inspired myself and many other writers in that way. And so, like, I think about Eloisa Amezcua, one of my mentors, who is just a master of hybrid work, and she’s creating all of these stunning video poems, and I’m like, oh man, it makes me really want to, like, get into Premiere and just, like, mess around. I don’t know, it just… it’s… it provides you with new tools that you haven’t gotten to explore yet. And…on your note of people not knowing, like, what’s going on in a poem, I think whenever I talk to people who don’t read poetry about how much I love poetry and how I’m a poet and live in that space, people are like, well, I just never know what’s going on. Like, people always say that they know exactly what’s happening in a poem, and I’m like, well, people who are telling you that, that’s bullshit.

There’s no way that you can have just one interpretation of a poem. It’s also subjective who’s reading it. In what context are they reading it? Are they really sad? Or are they just coming off of a date with someone who they’re really into? Like, what’s affecting their perception of this poem right now? So I don’t know. I think… I just think it’s so cool. I don’t know.

INTERLUDE PLAYS - BUOYANT BY ESOTERIC CREATIONS

DC: We’ve talked a little bit about it already, but how… what are some other, like, kinds of ways you’ve seen poets approach hybrid work? Or how even do you yourself approach it when you go to write it?

KB: Oh, gosh. I think… I think it’s a lot to do with what you’re obsessed with, and… and what kind of space you’re sitting in with your work, like, what you’re working towards in a project, or if you’re discovering what the project is that you’re working on, or if there is a project at all. I think that it’s what I’m obsessed with, is what really gets me into it. So, like, when I was writing Bloodroom, I was really delving into my familial lineage and what does… my relationship with the matriline mean, and all of these things, and so I was asking myself a lot of questions, and I was given this box of ephemera that was my grandmother’s, and it was correspondence with my grandfather while he was overseas, and there were tapes, and all these things, and there was this one document that I ended up latching onto, because it was the perfect… thing, and I was obsessed with the idea of, like, it’s a military ID document, and it has our fingerprints on it, and I was like, okay, well, what if I… what if I make this, like, the structure of a poem, and then that becomes this thing that… it’s… this embedded in the book? And so I did that, and I just became obsessed with it, and I started tinkering with it, and… and so I think it’s, like, I find a place that I am just constantly writing about, and then I find something that I’m like, this is the thing. And I get really into tinkering with it, and breaking it apart, and, like, getting into its guts a little bit. And I think that’s really fun.

DC: Yeah.

KB: I also, you know, it’s scary.

DC: Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine. It’s… I mean, part of it’s really great when you can see a poet being led by their obsessions, you know, it makes… I think it makes the work a lot more interesting when someone’s writing about something they’re really passionate about, also allows for a far more diverse kind of field of literature. I, you know, I like to think that there’s not anything too sacred for poetry. Especially when you think about poetry as, like, almost like its own kind of act of… of talking to the divine, the spiritual kind of thing, right? There’s nothing to, you know, if we can write it down in history records, we can write it down in poetry, like, it can be poeticized.

KB: Yeah, I mean, I also think… I’m thinking a lot about the people that, their… their hybrid work is inspiring to me. I don’t know, Layli Long Soldier, her hybrid work is incredible, and she plays with form and breaks it in such unique, incredible ways, and I think a lot of her work is so inspired by her culture and history, and the storytelling in that way, and I think about Eloisa Amezcua’s work, and the way that she uses hybridity in her work, and shape, and repetition, and just all of the things that make her work so hybrid incredible. And it all feels like it’s centered around the thing that they love and are “obsessed with,” right?

All of the writers that we’ve kind of talked about, it’s like, there is a crux upon which they are hybridizing. We’re gonna make that a word. Yeah, yeah. There’s a central thing that they’re orbiting around, and so they have this space in which they can play and break and get super weird and find new ways to dig into language.

DC: Yeah, I think… I think hybridity also becomes really interesting, especially for folks like yourself, or… I just spoke with Remica Bingham-Risher, people who are working with their familial histories, records, ephemera, those sorts of things. Instead of being stuck in the sonnet, or the ballad, or whatever kind of, like, the stuff that we’re used to, it gives us new ways to dig into that kind of work, and I think expanding our, even our idea of form expands the ways that we even feel that we can engage with those kinds of materials, right? I just love the kind of permission it even gives us to go back to things.

It’s like, now that I know that I can do this with a photograph, or I know I can do this with a pill bottle or a medical form, it’s not necessarily, … for example, it’s not necessarily a hybrid work, I won’t say, but Nicole Sealey has this other poem that I really love, it’s called “Medical History,” right?

So it’s not a form, but she’s going back and she’s going through, you know, in a sense, her family’s medical history. And it would be really interesting, you know, if we were thinking in a hybrid sense, like, what would that poem look like if it actually was done in the form of, like, a medical form, right? Like, if we’re thinking, like a presentation or a translation of that work into a visual artifact, you know, what can that look like?1

I think you talked about this a lot already, but just in case you have any other thoughts, just how do you feel, how do you feel existing document… document forms, how do those serve as a unique basis for visual hybrid work? Where do you feel like… are there any particular kinds that you see yourself gravitate towards the most, or anything like that?

KB: Man, I love that question so much, because there’s… I don’t think that there’s a single kind of document that I wouldn’t be interested in seeing be broken, you know? I think it goes back to, the basic of, you know, the grocery list poem, the receipt poem, like, those are awesome, and they’re such great entryways into seeing what expansive territory there is for form breaking. Which is just so fun and liberating when you realize, like, oh, I can just throw some words in this thing, and maybe that would be… that could be poems, I don’t know.

Yeah, I’ve worked within this particular kind of document before, the government agency application and so that’s really cool, because I think it gives you agency in a place where maybe you don’t feel like you have a lot of agency, which I think is really fun. But yeah, I think every kind of document, like, I want to see someone make something out of a birth certificate, or an adoption form, or, like…

DC: I want a brochure poem. I wanted a brochure poem so bad. Once again, I’m not doing it, but I want someone….

KB: Yes. And, like, I think we’re also kind of entering, like, a zine territory, right? Because zines are awesome, and that’s just…

DC: Shout out Summer Farah, one of my favorite zine makers.

KB: Yeah, I mean… listen, I love a zine. I love a zine so much. And, you know, you could do, like, you could truly make anything of, like, any kind of document, poem, and I think I would be kind of into it, because I think it just… when you remove some of the content, or all of the content, and leave some intentionally, there’s so much weird wiggle room to play in, because there’s already…

a scaffolding upon which you can complete. It’s a new linguistic jungle gym, because there’s not… a structure like that before. So it gives you a lot of agency to move about it in a way that nobody else has before.

So I just want people to be playing in documents. I just want them to get super weird, like, oh no, look at your tax form. Look at a donations request form. Look at, like, a sample ballot you get from your local election office. I don’t know, just…

DC: I actually am… I am working on a ballot poem. It was because I saw something, or I had a poem where I was… I had a series of questions or something, and I was like, you know what would be really good here? If this became something else.

KB: A dotted line? Sign me up!

DC: Yeah, I love the idea of, you know, call it a poem and see what it does to the thing, right? See how it changes our perception of it, our reading of it. I think that’s great. And…I would like to thank you, Kay, for your wonderful time. I think we’re nearing the end of this episode here, but I would love it if you could read a hybrid work of your own.

KB: I would love to.

INTERLUDE PLAYS - BUOYANT BY ESOTERIC CREATIONS

Read “Applicant” by Kay E. Bancroft

OUTRO PLAYS - WAIVER BY ESOTERIC CREATIONS

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guests in the Substack post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

Check Out These Poets from Kay E. Bancroft!

• Anthony Cody

• Mai Der Vang

• Diana Khoi Nguyen

• Krista Franklin

• Sarah Sloat

• Tarik Dobbs

• Tom Phillips

DeeSoul Carson: Every time I see it, my brain wants to think “Conversion”, so I’m just gonna do the whole thing over again.

Remica Bingham-Risher: I appreciate you, that’s a completely different title, by the way, so…

DC: Right! It would be something different

RBR: You know what I mean? It could work, but it’s not what I’m doing over there.

DC: Right, it’s not… and that’s not what you meant when you titled it.

RBR: That’s right!

DC: So I’m gonna try that again.

[Intro Music Plays]

DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is e·pon·y·mous, a segment of the O, Word? Podcast that is interested in poets, their collections, and title poems, and how they find their ways into our hands. Today’s episode is on Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher.

Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem Fellow and faculty member, an Affrilacian poet, and a member of the Wintergreen Woman Writers Collective.

She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013), and Starlight & Error (2017), winner of the Diode Editions Book Award.

Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up (2022), was published by Beacon Press. Her newest book, Room Swept Home (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) , won the LA Times Book Prize.

Remica, hello!

RBR: Hey! I’m excited to be here!

DC: I’m so excited to have you! Thank you so much for, you know, accepting my invitation.

RBR: Oh, please. I mean, really, I was super excited, and I just… I have to say on record, you read all those lovely accolades, but we haven’t spoken since you won a pretty large prize. Is that… the case?

DC (laughing): Hahaha, yes. That is the case, yeah.

RBR: Am I remembering that correctly? And that prize was?

DC: The Ruth Lily. That’s my biggest thing, yeah.

RBR: That’s what I was talking about! Is there something else? Well, listen, break the news.

DC: No, no, Ruth Lily is definitely the biggest one since then.

RBR That’s right! Amazing! Congratulations, poet!

DC: Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Yeah, I’ve been trying to keep the work going. I try to keep it fueled, but, I keep myself fueled by reading poets like you, so it keeps me going. I mean, I’ve been super, enthralled by Room Swept Home ever since you talked about it at, AWP1, and so I… it’s kind of like one of those books where I’m like, oh, I kind of need everyone to read this.

Because you’re doing so much cool stuff in this book, and it’s such a deeply… Well, I’m… from what I’m reading, it’s a deeply personal book. I mean, I know you have so much of your… I try not to make assumptions, but I think the whole conceit of the book is…

RBR: No, but you would be correct in that assumption, yes. Yes, absolutely. It’s a book about my grandmother, so it’s deeply personal in kind of every way, and that puts a different spin on things.

DC: Yeah, I’m sure, and there’s so much work in the archive that I want to talk about later, about what you’re doing, but first, the first thing I want to talk about is your title poem, “Room Swept Home.”

It’s this nice, almost quiet ghazal that comes at the end of the collection, which I thought was really interesting. And I was wondering if you can maybe just talk a little bit more about the book’s placement and the form for it.

RBR: Absolutely. I mean, it’s so interesting. Even though it’s a really simple poem, a lot of people miss that it’s a ghazal, so I’m so glad that you got that right off the bat. There’s so many different forms in this work. You know, I don’t know if I think of myself as a formalist, but I am a poet who loves form. And so, interestingly enough, “Room Swept Home” is the first, it’s the oldest poem in this collection.

DC: Oh, wow.

RBR: When I wrote the poem, though, I had no idea that this would be the collection. I was really, just kind of thinking about all the things that my aunts had taught me, and particularly an aunt that this book is dedicated to, my aunt Evelyn, who is the child of Mary, when we start talking about the book, but this is the child, her first child that she had, and she was sent to the asylum shortly after.

But my aunt Evelyn, you know, we… listen, we’ve been a lot of things, but rich ain’t one of them, so we’ve been broke for a long time. And I remember going to her house as a teenager and seeing her sweep the dirt on her front porch, sweep lines in the dirt. She didn’t have nothing else, but she was gonna keep it clean, right?

DC: Yeah.

RBR: And so that kind of shows up as part of Room Swept Home, and it just reminded me, like, whatever we have, you know, these women, particularly these matriarchs in the family, tell me, you know, you care for what you have, no matter what it is, right? And you keep it up as best you can.

And particularly, you know, your faith, all the things surrounding, keep it up as best you can. And so that’s where the idea for that poem came from, and all of the imagery is physical imagery from Norfolk, Virginia, where I was just moving at the time of where my aunts lived, and where a lot of the things in the book take place. So I was getting used to the space. And, trying to remind myself of all the things they wouldn’t let me forget, and that’s how the poem emerged. And strangely, I started calling the book Room Swept Home long before I ever knew, really, what it was.

DC: Nice. Yeah, one of my next questions was going to be if the name for the collection, like, immediately jumped out of you, or is it something you kind of rediscovered when you were going back through your poems?

RBR: No, in my mind, because I had written that poem, and I knew in my mind it was kind of about what these women gave me, when I started writing these poems about my two grandmothers. That whole endeavor was about what these women gave me. So, there was already a connection there, but it’s strange for me. Titles are not easy. Especially titles of manuscripts, my goodness.

But there was… it really… and there was something about the sound and the wordplay that happened with these kind of three one-syllable words pushing up against each other, but also the double entendre that happens when we’re talking about, keeping something clean and then sweeping something under the rug, you know,

DC: Yeah.

RBR: what folks don’t know, right? So it was all of those things at the same time, and I think that’s why it stuck.

DC: I mean that captures the spirit of the collection so well, so I appreciate you elaborating on that. It also makes me think of my grandmother, who lives in East Oakland. And this is a woman that goes out, I’m not gonna say every day, but very quite often to go sweep the street. She’ll sweep the sidewalk, she’ll sweep the street…

RBR: …And go all the way down past her path on the other...

DC: Yeah, and I would… for the longest time, I was just like, “Granny, why are you sweeping the street?” And what my grandmother would say was, you know, “Just because we live in the ghetto don’t mean we gotta look like it.”

RBR: Come on! Listen!

DC: Yeah, and she kept that place clean, and it was so, I love, I mean, as… I think another reason I was gravitated toward this book is I love grandmothers. I love the kind of wisdom that they have, and I love my grandmother specifically. She’s a really great woman. The other interesting thing about my grandmother that I always think about, she grows a cotton plant on her fence. And I remember… that’s another thing about my grandmother I just remember being so struck by, you know? I was… and I was like, why…

RBR: Yeah, why?

DC: Why would you grow a cotton plant?

RBR: Why are you growing bulbs of cotton, right? But she’s like “Listen, it’s mine.”

DC: And, and you know what, her answer really was, “because I have the seeds and I know how to do it.”2

RBR: That’s right!

DC: And I was like, wow, how simple that is. She could take care of a thing, and she did.

[Transitional Music Plays]

DC: Something else that really interests me about this collection is there’s an emphasis on both archival work and the work of trans-generational empathy, if we can call it that.

RBR: Yeah.

DC: And so you’re writing these poems from the viewpoints or, you know, the time around these two different women in your family tree, and the way their stories parallel and show up in the book is so really well done. And so before I get too far into it, I was wondering if you could just, like, explain a little bit more about the book’s background and the women who bookmarked these sections, especially for people who haven’t had the chance to read it yet.

RBR: Sure, thank you for all those kind words about the book and its construction, too, because that’s, you know, a different thing. The poems are one thing, the makeup is another. And so, you know, my two grandmothers of mine, my third great-grandmother, paternal, Minnie Fowlkes, and my maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, were both in Petersburg, Virginia, within one mile of each other in 1941. They didn’t know each other, these families weren’t connected, and when I found out that they were within one mile of each other, it was just a little bit too much for my poet heart to tell.

DC: Yes.

RBR: Those kind of “coincidences,” and you see I’m putting quotes around them, because whether they are or not, those things you don’t walk away from as a poet. You find out the why, the how, and then where that leads us, right? And so, I wanted to write Minnie’s story. Minnie was in Petersburg because she had lived there most of her life, in Chesterfield County. She was born enslaved in 1859, and was interviewed for the WPA Slave Narratives in 1937, and stayed in Petersburg until she passed away in 1945.

My maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, was on the opposite end of her life, very young when she was in Petersburg. She was only 18 years old. She had just birthed her first child. And postpartum was an ongoing mystery then, so she was taken to the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Negro Insane, which was in Petersburg in 1941, 9 days after she had birthed her first child.

So that’s how they ended up being only within a mile of each other. Minnie lived only about a mile away from the path to the asylum, which is now Central State Hospital, still in existence. And so I wrote their two stories, because they lived fairly ordinary lives with extraordinary circumstances. So I wrote Minnie’s section, Mary’s section, and then kind of wrote through the historical and personal that leads us to today.

DC: Right, and I mean, that’s the strength of the archive, right, is we get to weave those things in, like, the personal… our personal, daily lives are not exempt from history.

RBR: Oh, no.

DC: It’s really wonderful, I mean, getting to see this work, and there’s this collapsing of that distance, of that mile, but there’s also this great expansion, right? And it’s this expansion through history, since we have this feeling that time and space are not, they’re not finite, right? Especially in the work of poetry. Like, the beautiful work of this… of this book is that those circumstances and those things that we’re talking about in 1941, they come back to… to speak to us now, in 2025, however we may need to receive them. So I thought that was… that was really wonderful.

What was the experience for you writing from the place of these two women? I don’t know your own personal relationship to these grandmothers beforehand, but just what was the experience of writing from this place?

RBR: Yeah, so, you know, I decided early on that these were going to be persona poems for the most part, so I would write them in the voices of both my grandmothers, and Minnie, of course, passed away in 1945, so I, you know, came about 40 years after Minnie had already left this earth. But my paternal grandmother, the other person that the book is dedicated to, is still alive, Shirley Bingham, up in New Jersey. She will be listening to this…

DC: Hey Shirley!

RBR: She makes sure she’s on it. Yes, hey, Nana! And Minnie was her great-grandmother. She was born in Minnie’s bed. She remembered Minnie from the time that she was, like, 5 or 6. So she became my intercessor in many ways, for Minnie. My other grandmother, Mary Knight, I was holding her hand when she passed away in 2006, so, these were, you know, this was a grandmother that I was deeply close to.

I’m the 15th of 15 grandchildren. My mother’s the youngest child of hers, so we were… we were extremely close. So her voice was a whole lot easier for me to capture, because I knew it, and I still hear it all the doggone time.

But that did not make it an easy path to write the voices. Because, like you said, I love, I love… no one has talked about, you know, kind of the expansion of the mile beyond that space. That was a beautiful way to put that, DeeSoul. And so what you don’t think about, is you’re doing, certainly historical work. I’m doing archival research, and that research, for lack of a better term, is very cold, right?

DC: Yeah.

RBR: It’s, you know, you’re looking at ledgers, you’re looking at text, you’re looking at microfiche, if anybody remembers microfiche3. You’re looking at all of these different things that are absolutely… the person is left out of those things. And when you try to bring those things to voice, especially things like children passing and the difficulties that they had to recall in their lives, and then you’re doing it in their voice. I have never cried so much writing a book in all my life, right? Because you, you… absolutely start to embody some of the trauma that they had to endure. And it teaches you a lot about yourself.

But also, you know, I think one of the things that it reminded me of very early on, as I wrote these very difficult poems, was that a book like this also has to be filled with beauty inside and out, because I knew it had to start in trauma, there was no way around it, but we were gonna end, with them living out their 84 years — both lived to 84 — and teaching us how to be happy despite. So that was, you know, kind of the goal of the collection overall.

DC: It makes me think of the work of witness, right? The work of these persona poems. There was a long time where I had this moral dilemma of thinking about how to approach poems about other people, people that I love, or people within the Black community, because I had felt that I got to a point where it was wrong of me only to write about the bad things that had happened to us, right? Or that were happening to us, right? And I wasn’t doing the proper work of honoring the people who came before us by honoring the lives they lived, and how they had them, and how we live happily in this world despite the things that happened to us, so I really appreciate you talking about that. The need for both, right? It’s not just about these things that we went through, but also how we survived them, right? And how we get through them.

[Transitional Music Plays]

DC: I wanna go back for a moment to this note on the archive that I know you’re working with so much in this book, and this book is so intentional about the sources that it’s including, and that it uses, and that’s used as inspiration for several of the poems. Why did you feel that those were foundational to the grounding or understanding of this work, right? I mean, as far as it being a very personal work, you know, the ones that you included that weren’t necessarily about your grandmothers. Why were they so grounding for this work?

RBR: I mean, there’s a number of reasons. Thank you for reading that closely. You know, I’m a poet that turns to the notes pages and the acknowledgements first.

DC: Same. Yeah.

RBR: I think, you know, now, I ain’t lumping you into my category, but I think it’s just because I’m nosy, and that’s fine. It gets me to know many things. But that for me is really important. Also, I love a bibliography. I knew… when I started embarking on this book, and I really… I have to give a shout out to Wesleyan University Press that published the book. Because, I knew I could trust them with this, with this text, because they had done some really brilliant work beforehand.

One of the books that comes before it, and that in many ways is a precursor to what Room Swept Home was able to do, is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Age of Phillis, which is a book of historical, archival research poems about Phillis Wheatley Peters, but also has a thick bibliography in the back of the book, and you don’t see that in most poetry.

And it was important for me to at least have a selected bibliography and to make meticulous notes about which part of the archive, whether they be personal, whether they be historical, whether the images in the book — there are family photographs, and historical photographs, so we needed to offset those. And I thought they all helped tell the story of these two women and of the country, right? Where it was in 1859 all the way to where it sits right now, you know, the muck of us in the moment.

And so it was really important for me to have all of those, notes and, archival pieces, there so people could trace their own past, right? Not just their own past, family-wise. I would love if people were doing ethnographic research and archival research and doing genealogical research, you know, that’s there too. But really, if you don’t believe me, go look.

DC: Yeah. I was so impressed by the bibliography, because like you were saying, I don’t think I had read a book before that had one, and I was like, oh, poets can be scholars! We can do this! Absolutely. I mean, it’s not that we’re not scholars, but it’s such a great reminder that there’s real work going in. Like, we’re not just, you know, it’s not just woo-woo-woo, we’re writing poetry.

RBR: And that’s what people think, they’re like, oh, you put some butterflies, and you talked about how they felt. Baby, no. What I’ve done is 10 years of work.

DC: Right, exactly, right. And it’s deep, intentional, focused work, right? Like, the ability to… the ability for you to distill these things that you’re reading. Because here’s the thing, people don’t want to read! People don’t want to go and read, you know?

RBR: My work at the university where I am now, it’s teaching faculty how to integrate critical reading, so if I was doing a book like this and not doing the critical reading work and not leaving a path, I’d just be a hypocrite. So I don’t want somebody to call me on my stuff.

DC: No, I mean, it’s such a… it’s such a good inspiration, cause we gotta… we have to be able to… the beauty of it is that it takes those things that other people aren’t reading, and it’s able to distill the feeling of it, right? And that’s the core of the poetry, is it distills the feeling, the anger, or the fear, or the life that’s there. It does that so well. In this book, you…

RBR: It contextualizes things.

DC: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

RBR: The archive does not do that, right?

DC: Right. And it’s up to us as the people putting it together to frame it.

RBR: Absolutely.

DC: Yeah. In this book, you go through a lot of different, forms, and I say forms broadly, I don’t just mean received or given forms, I also mean you do a lot of, kind of, novel things in this book. And so I was wondering, is there any form in here that you enjoyed doing the most, or if there was any that gave you a hard challenge?

RBR: Oh, what a good question. It might be the same. Listen. So, there is a crown of sonnets in the book

DC: Yes, the “Lose Your Mother…”

RBR: Yes, thank you. “Lose Your Mother,” talking about, like, brilliant folks, Saidiya Hartman, a brilliant writer, scholar, thinker, she… her book, Lose Your Mother, is about her tracing the path back to the continent, and thinking about, you know, what Blackness means in the diaspora, kind of large.

And, you know, I started reading it, and I was just so blown away that I just started highlighting, like, almost every line, I realized, this could be an epigraph, and so all of those titles, ended up being, epigraphs from Lose Your Mother, and kind of traced my path through my grandmother’s back to the present.

And I… absolutely did not want to write a crown of sonnets. I was real mad when that crown started appearing. I love the sonnet. It’s one of my favorite forms, it comes up in so many different ways here, but I was not enamored with writing so many of them. And then there’s another, it ends with Saidiya’s cento, which is made up of the line that I used… so it’s like a crown of sonnets plus one.

DC: Yeah.

RBR: And that… it took me so long to kind of write those poems, and to make those poems different from each other, and to build on, different parts of my understanding of who I was, and… how I was tracing my path through these women’s lives, but I think it just couldn’t have been any other way. There had to be real connective tissue there, and I think the form was the perfect space. For that work.

Now, was it hard? yep.

DC: I think when I read it initially, I think it was a… I thought it was a heroic sonnet, or a Heroic Crown, and I think it is still pretty close to that. Close, yeah. I’m not gonna discount it, because it’s still much harder than anything I’ve done. To write a collection of sonnets is daunting, and I think what’s interesting to me about these sonnets and what you did, is that they’re not all written the same.

RBR: Oh, no, yeah

DC: Like, you know, you have one in the beginning here that’s, like, a contrapuntal, the first part of that suite is a contrapuntal, you have ones that are in… in tercets, you have couplets, so even within this, this constraint of the 14 lines, there’s a lot of innovation within the sonnet, which is another really… and there’s one that’s, like, you know, it has these, it’s like, these mono stitches and couplets and things like that. There’s just a lot of interesting stuff happening with the form in this collection, or in this…

RBR: You gotta keep yourself interested once you start writing fourteen , you know, second straight sonnet, you’re like, okay, 14 lines, left justified. What else can we do? So yeah, so it becomes forms on forms on forms, yeah.

DC: It was great, it was great.

RBR: Thank you.

DC: What do you feel like the forms, or the expansiveness in the forms of this collection, allowed you to accomplish that you wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise?

RBR: Oh, yeah, I think about this all the time. I was just meeting with a graduate student this morning, who’s really into form right now, and translation in particular. I’m not on that boat, but we were talking about form, and I was talking about one of my teachers, Natasha Tretheway, who is a brilliant formalist, as we all know, not to mention the sonic crowns and Native Guard and beyond, but…you know, she… when I interviewed her years ago, we talked extensively about form, but she reminded me that form is a way that you can keep the emotional spillage from just taking over.

And of course she’s writing about losing her mother and all of these different things, right? So, I mean, things that could, if you let the tears start, they would never stop. That’s what she said once. And I… was just trying to figure out in this book, how I could keep from just banging people over the head with, “Man, you should have loved these women. You, you should have cared for these women.” And, and, and… I had to keep finding ways to rein myself in, right?

But to do it well, right? Like, a sonnet still gives you… poets know this, you know, we can do a whole lot with 14 structured lines, right? That still leaves me room for expansion beyond it, but doesn’t give me time, to kind of wail in the way that you might have wanted to emotionally. So I feel like form is a lovely box in many ways, and it really helps me rein in emotion, but be as precise as I possibly can in any given moment, and that’s the job of the poet to me. Beauty, one, but clarity first.

DC: I appreciate a poet’s commitment to clarity, because I… sometimes I need that.

RBR: Yeah. And those are the poems and poets that I like to read. I’m not saying that we can’t have ambiguity and lyrics and all of those things, because those are, that’s what makes poetry an expansive art. But clarity, for me, is first and foremost, what I value as a reader of poems.

And also, just as an aside, something I was thinking about deeply as I was writing these early poems in this book: Neither one of those, Minnie, did not learn to read until maybe her 70s. Mary, my grandmother, had to leave school in the sixth grade to work the fields with her family, so I thought often about those early poems, you know, if they were standing beside me, would they understand them?

DC: Yeah.

RBR: Yeah, and I owed it to them to make sure they did.

DC: Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Remica. This has been such a wonderful conversation, and I would love if you can close this out by reading your eponymous poem.

Room Swept Home

Remica Bingham-Risher

Mama say, Jah holy. House holy. Both clean.
Keep things in their places. Is disorder ever clean?

Preserve the skin alive by soaking,
bathe and lather high end low, clean.

This water in the Chesapeake, the Bay
bodyfull and green. All tide swept by heavy row: clean.

The needle’s eye and day’s work both seamless:
hem and stitching, knife-edge sharp, sewn clean.

Gristle bone sucked and crushed—teeth
mincing meat to red marrow—clean.

Sweep porch steps, no steps, dirt path—pristine;
any small patch of earth we’re given: Godstruck, bare, but so clean.

DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of e·pon·y·mous, a companion segment to the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in Remica’s work, there are some links in the substack post to some poems of hers online.

• Poems on the Poetry Foundation Website

• “Interrogation Suite: Where did you come from / how did you arrive?”

• “Mary Taken to the Central Lunatic Asylum”

If this book interests you, Remica recommends that you also check out:

• Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

• The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

• Load In Nine Times by Frank X. Walker

The music for O,Word? and e·pon·y·mous is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

DeeSoul Carson: And it was just like, what a crazy thing to say! You know, you’re a professor of poetry at this big institution and you’re just like, people of color aren’t doing sonnets?!?! They aren’t doing sonnets?!?!

Taylor Byas: Yeah, like just say, you don’t read. Just say that.

DC: Right! Just say that. I would have respected that answer. I won’t like it, but I respect that.

TB: Right. I might email you some recommendations after class, but okay! Yeah!

DC: But you’re like, what am I going to do? I get it. I also have the things that I prefer. But she was just like, they don’t write them.

TB: Like alright, well —

DC: Wrong answer, fo’head, let’s try that one again!

[The poets laugh and the intro music plays]

DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is Eponymous, an extension of the O, Word? podcast that is interested in poets, their collections, their title poems, and how they find their ways into our hands. Today’s episode is on Resting Bitch Face by Dr. Taylor Byas. Dr. Taylor Byas, PhD, edits for The Rumpus, Jack Legg Press, Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, among others. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), which we’ll be discussing today, is a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary. Taylor, hello!

TB: Hello, hello.

DC: How are we doing?

TB: I’m wonderful. Happy to be here. How are you?

DC: I’m doing great. I’m so happy that you’re here. I’m super appreciative. Your new book is in the world now. How do you feel?

TB: It’s like, exactly a month now, maybe two days past a month, and it has been good. It’s interesting because the first book came out almost exactly two years ago. And, you know, I had no expectations for the first book. And somehow, interestingly, I’m, like, simultaneously more nervous about this one. But then I also have these moments where I feel kind of completely detached to it. And I think that’s a symptom more so of just the state of the world more than anything else. And maybe things just feeling not as important as maybe they would if we were in a better moment.

DC: Yeah, I mean, I’m super excited about it. I finished reading it yesterday. I was trying to prepare for this interview. And I think it’s just so great. I understand what you’re saying, like the second book is kind of its own thing. Like there’s that energy around the first book, you’re like “the debut, now it’s out,” then it’s like, “oh, I have to do that… again.” Is that kind of the sensation you had while you were putting it together?

TB: It is. You know, I think one thing that maybe people didn’t really tell me was… you know for a lot of people — unless you have just won like a ton of huge awards, and you’re someone who just has a lot of eyes on you — it’s very easy for people’s second and, you know, third, fourth books to kind of like not get the same attention as the debut as well.

DC: Yeah. A lot of hype around a debut.

TB: Yeah, yeah, a lot of hype around a debut and then it’s just, there’s just a difference with that second book, and I’m very fortunate that there was still some really great publicity around Resting Bitch Face but, for example, we didn’t get any blurbs for the second book. Like, we sent out blurb requests we didn’t get any blurbs for Resting Bitch Face, and they were like “this is actually something that’s pretty common with second books,” which I didn’t know. And so I just think it’s so interesting that there are things that happen the second go-round that no one really kinda tells you, that you aren’t really prepared for. And I know now it’s not personal, like I know those people that we asked were just busy and had 10,000 things to do but you know sometimes you do take a little personally and your feelings do get hurt and you do feel...

DC: I mean, it’s your baby. How could you not?

TB: You know, it’s my baby. Right. And of course, you know, no one cares about it likely more than I do, and that’s its own thing. But there is a way that I think you have to reshape your expectations for a book after the debut, for sure.

DC: That’s fair. I never even thought about, like what that… ‘cause in my head, I keep tabs. I’m like, “okay, I want this person to talk in the second book, this person talking in the third book,” but that’s really actually, really eye opening.

So given that this is Eponymous, I did want to start with the title. And I’m curious, was Resting Bitch Face always, like, did you always know that’s what it was gonna be? Or were there like other titles that you were also kinda juggling?

TB: So the first version of this book was my dissertation. And Resting Bitch Face absolutely was not the title.

DC: [Laughing] That’s not what you put to the — to the people at the PhD?

TB: — That’s nottttt what I put on there. Don’t go look it up y’all. It’s a different title on the dissertation. The title for the dissertation, if I remember correctly, was Corrupt[i]on and then the “I” was in parentheses because I do think that there is something in the collection about the I, that it kind of emerges or kind of breaks out of this mold and moves towards a more autonomous being. And so that was actually the title. Then we sold it to Soft Skull. And that’s actually when we changed the title.

And I was so happy that they were like “Resting Bitch Face is it” because I was kind of like, “oh, I don’t know how the press would feel about, you know, having this curse word in the title. If they’re kind of like, oh, that’s too much.” They were like “Resting Bitch Face is the title.” So it actually didn’t change until we had gotten to the Soft Skull and talked about it with them, yeah.

DC: Speaking of that I that you’re talking about, your eponymous poem “Resting Bitch Face,” kind of speaks a bit to this phenomena of both being observed and the observer. And I’m wondering if you could speak to more of how you feel this poem represents the collection as a whole.

TB: So, that poem came into being because of the height of the pandemic when masks were like, heavily mandated everywhere, I like, it occurred to me that men had stopped telling me to smile because I couldn’t police my face because I couldn’t see it. And so then I got to thinking about this way women are not only observed, not only constantly under surveillance, but all of the different ways that we are expected to appear a certain way, expected to behave a certain way, how even as we’re going about our days, minding our business — as we’re deep in our thoughts, as we’re stressed, as we’re worried — we’re expected to kind of be approachable and welcoming and warm and inviting.

And interestingly enough, the phrase, “resting bitch face” is this thing that gets weaponized and thrown at you if you don’t appear that way. It’s like, you know, this insult. So I, the poem, kind of confronts that gaze, which is something that I wanted this book to do. I wanted this book to be the stare down, like, that stares back at the, sort of, watcher until they back down ,sort of thing. I wanted “resting bitch face” to go from this insult to this kind of act of resistance, like yes you’ve called out my resting bitch face and now I’m going to look even meaner in your face until you leave me the hell alone, type of thing. And I think the book is very much engaged in a similar sort of movement. It definitely goes from being watched, poems in which there is a lot of watching happening — the speaker is being watched, the speaker finds themselves in these scenes where they also find themselves being watched. And then, as the book progresses, the speaker emerges more and more, “Resting Bitch Face” is kind of, like, right at the center of the book. It’s kind of like a hinge point. After that poem, you see the speaker kind of getting more ballsy, and getting more empowered to speak in similar ways.

[Transitional music plays]

DC: There’s definitely this emphasis in the book on performance and presentation that I felt throughout, that I think you’re speaking to here. And, you know, this assumes this sort of interpretation of the woman’s expression by some external party. You know, a lot of what we’re talking about is like the presence of the male gaze. And I’m thinking a lot in this book of just how much the speaker is moving through that, right? It’s a book that is ostensibly dealing with a lot of art, you know, art pieces, art styles, art techniques. But it’s really kind of the subtext that is tracking this woman’s movement through these things. There’s this double consciousness happening.

Speaking more about the art part, though, for people who haven’t read the book yet, the sections of the book are named after different kinds of art making techniques. And so much of the book itself is inspired by various kinds of art. So I’m wondering if you can — this is more of a craft question — can you speak about your relationship to ekphrasis?

TB: Yes. That’s my girl. Yeah, I was a fiction writer in undergrad and, you know, I had it in my mind that I was gonna graduate and go on to write the great novel and that’s hilarious and —

DC: — you still can, you still can! It is poets’ time for fiction, it really is.

TB: I know, I say that as I’ve actually started a novel, so just like, just bear with me. But at the end of undergrad, I actually took an ekphrastic poetry class. The entire semester, we were just given art to write poems in response, and we had to do all of these different approaches. And then there was one class in particular where the professor literally, I think it was a folder and we had to like pick a piece of art out of the folder and I got, I can’t remember the name right now, but it’s a Rene Magritte painting. It’s just a huge egg in a cage. And I was like, “What? What am I supposed to do here?”

But that challenge of figuring out a way to enter that art somehow or to have some sort of conversation around that. I was like, “Oh, this is fiction.” In a different way. Like I’m still telling stories, but in this way that can be, you know, weird and experimental — not that fiction can’t be weird and experimental — but it was just, there’s this different obsession with language. There’s just this different way of thinking.

DC: And a different kind of permission.

TB: Absolutely. Yeah. Different, a different way that you can kind of move throughout space and time and things. That might not feel as welcome in fiction and so I think that was the moment that really unlocked it for me, and so then I switched over to poetry for the masters, for the PhD, it’s like my main, it’s my main baby now. And so, it’s important to me because it quite literally is what kind of brought me back to poetry, it’s sort of like my central artistic practice.

But I also, there’s something about ekphrasis, and as I’m also now getting back into photography, which is something that I had an interest in in high school. I took a photography class, and then I just never really kind of came back to it. And now, coming back to it is something that I’m enjoying doing. I think there’s a lot of kinship between the poet and the photographer in a way that we’re kind of asked to look at the world and consider the world. And so I think to be engaged with visual art feels very natural to me.

DC: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting bringing that seeing that you have in the poetry ekphrasis out into the world. I really enjoyed reading “Discomfort at the MoMA,” not only because I was there when the events of this poem happened. [Laughs at the memory]

TB: In… in the building.

DC: But it’s like, it’s really interesting watching… It’s really interesting to see a real life moment become a piece of, captured in a moment of time, which is often what poetry is, right? We’re often capturing these moments and that, the real life thing is kind of ekphrasis, right? And it’s interesting watching and considering these things as a piece of art or, you know, almost like a performance piece, right? For this couple to be moving around the space to these different paintings all up on each other and things like that. And in the space of all these people, it’s kind of like, what does that do to the gallery space and the space that we’re in? So I thought it was really interesting, and also, I was just happy to be there. I guess, because I could see your mind working when it was happening. I’m happy to see the product.

This is another kind of craft question. But can you talk about your broader interest in form, both in Resting Bitch Face and in your previous collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times? There have been a lot of times where I’ve read a poem of yours — for example, there’s a poem in here called “When I Say No, The Joker Smiles” — and it’s not until I get to the end of the poem that I realize a form has been done because you’ve done it so seamlessly, which I really appreciate. And I’m wondering how it feels for you, working in these really tight forms and how that relates back to like the project as a whole, if at all.

TB: My introduction with form, I think, greatly influences how I continue to interact with it. So I was introduced to it by way of what I affectionately called “Formal Bootcamp,” which was quite literally, like, an 8-week summer course with my instructor, within the first week, we went in the classroom and he gave me an Expo marker and like quite literally on the whiteboard, we were like, “okay, write a sentence in this meter” or, you know, “do this, scan this out.” And I, you know, I quite literally had to start hearing the meter and those sorts of things in my head. So then we got the meter and then each week you hand me a form and say, “here’s the form, here’s the rules. And then here’s like two other weird things I’m going to throw in the box. You got a week to come back with this form.” And it kind of gave me this opportunity, like the pressure of it turned it into kind of like a game, I think for me.

And so now form and working with form very much feels game-like to me. It feels like I’m puzzling through something. It feels like this thing that I, it feels like a Rubik’s cube and I have to kind of solve it, that sort of thing. And I like the challenge of form. But what form also does for me, and I think that really comes through in this collection because I do revert back to prose poetry, for example, so I do come out of the traditional forms quite a lot in this collection, but form sharpens my language sword.

When I’m working in a sonnet and I have those syllables and I have only 14 lines or when I’m working in a villanelle, which is, you know, “When I Say No, the Joker Smiles,” and you have those repeating lines, for example, you have to get really, really creative with how language is turning on those line breaks or how we’re using punctuation. Working in forms, it sharpens my poetry brain every time. I have to get creative. It pushes me out of my comfort zone when we could very easily kind of stay in our comfort zones. And I’m not in school anymore. I’m not in class where people are pushing me in that way. So I think form is a way that I can keep myself accountable when it comes to, you know, staying kind of comfortable and stagnant versus challenging myself. Form always challenges me.

And then there’s the historical aspect as well, thinking about the way form has existed in history, how it exists in classrooms, how it’s taught, and who sort of gets lauded as formalists, who gets taught in those environments. I keep saying, the students who are in class today are not the students who were in classrooms 5 years ago, 10 years ago, are not the students who were in classrooms when we were in those classrooms. And so you’re still going to have your students who love Shakespeare and who love the old formalists. But I think more often than not, these days, you’re going to have students who are going to struggle to engage with the material, are going to struggle to access the material if they don’t have any examples that they can see their own lives reflected back to them, they don’t see language that is familiar to them, you know?

And also, because I love form and I want form to continue to be taught and to be a part of the way that we think about poetry, I think it’s important to be writing the type of formal poetry that I want students to be, to have access to. And so also for that reason, I think, it’s always going to be important for me to be writing in form because I want those examples to be there. Like, reading Patricia Smith’s sonnets was critical for me.

DC: Yeah, oh my goodness, absolutely.

TB: I wouldn’t be the poet that I am if I hadn’t found her sonnets. And so I hope there’s a student out there that becomes the poet they’re supposed to be because they found my sonnets or my pantoums or my whatever.

[Transitional music plays]

DC: This is my last, it might be my last question for this whole thing, but it’s also my last form question. But as a lover of this form, from one to another, I am really wondering what draws you particularly to the pantoum?

TB: So, the pantoum… and I, oh my God. I think this is what I did my first ever craft talk on — incredibly nerve wracking. I was, like, ready to pass out the entire time. But what I love about the pantoum, ‘cause you have those repeating lines that come super close. Like, they’re like, right, next stanza, they’re like, “hey, I’m back.” And there’s something about that challenge, because it’s not even about the language then, because the language is the same and there’s nothing you can do about that, unless you’re, you know, kind of breaking the form and playing with it. But the way that I do it, the language is there, and there’s that sort of whole new challenge. And I’m never as creative as I am when I am in a pantoum and I’m faced with that exact same language and I’m like, “okay, I have to make a new sentence, this has to hit differently in some way, shape or form.” Like we have to break it in a new place. Punctuation’s gotta do some crazy stuff. This has to be dialogue all of a sudden. I am never as creative as I am when I work in a pantoum.

It’s probably the form that challenges me the most. It’s probably one of the hardest forms for me to complete and get right. And there’s also something really rewarding about that. Like I think a sonnet, which still has its challenges, I think that’s probably one of the easier forms that I can work in. I feel like I have a sonnet down to kind of a science, which feels kind of crazy, but I put three sonnet crowns in I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, like, it was insanity. But it was practice. I was working that muscle until there was some sort of ease in the repetition. I don’t know if that will ever happen for the pantoum, just because I feel like that challenge always sort of reshapes, reforms each time I approach it.

And the reward, when I get it right. And I feel good about it, like nothing, no other form feels as good as when I get a pantoum as well. So it’s like, high-challenge, high-risk. But also that reward is just as high. And for that, you know, I love her. And I continue to come back to her when I can.

DC: Yeah. And I mean, it feels rewarding as a reader as well, right? I think what’s also nice about a pantoum, it’s one of those forms where you recognize pretty quickly that it’s happening, as opposed to maybe some of the other ones. When you see a pantoum, or you hear that, you see that first two lines appear or whatever, you’re like, “oh, we’re in it.” And I think it’s kind of a magic thing as well when you see the way that the, you know… sometimes I’ll encounter a line in a pantoum or one of your pantoums and I go, “how the hell is she going to change this line up to make it feel different?” There’s that magic in the same language, same words are there, but it’s a different sentence. Ostensibly, it’s a different thing happening, And so it feels just as, you know, when talking about observed and observer, it feels just as rewarding reading it to go, “oh, she did it. She got it.”

TB: That’s a good point. Some of the other forms can kind of sneak up on you, like in a way, like a sonnet, you can go through a sonnet and be like, “oh, wait, I didn’t realize it was a sonnet.” But because you have that language so soon, it’s harder for a pantoum to kind of sneak up on you. So then it’s you like, you gotta, the reader at this point, because they know the challenge now. So it’s like, are you gonna, are you gonna…

DC: — you know, rise up to it —

TB: — Yeah, you’re going to rise up to it. And yeah, there’s something rewarding about rising up to the challenge for the reader.

DC: Taylor, thank you so much for this conversation, I really appreciate it. I would love it if you could close this out by reading your title poem.

TB: I would love to. Look at her, already marked, because I have been reading her as much as I can. Okay.

[Taylor reads her eponymous poem]

Read “Resting Bitch Face” in Hooligan Mag

DC: Eponymous is a companion segment to the O,Word? podcast, produced by DeeSoul Carson. The music for the theme is called “Canary” and is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.

Hellooooooo poets of the internet. Have you ever had that thing happen to you where you passed the imaginary deadline you made for a thing you were trying to do, and after you missed that deadline, it felt more and more impossible to return to said thing? No? Just me?

Well, this is me trying to get back into this project of a newsletter I set out for myself. Cozy up, cause in this post I’m reflecting on the summer, my journey doing the Sealey challenge (along with a breakdown of the whole '“archetype” thing some of you asked me about), and some things I’m looking forward to regarding this Pubstack in the future (yes, I’m still trying to make Pubstack ™ a thing). And hey! Thanks for being here :)

Subscribe now

Where in the World Have I Been?

No one is asking that question, but I’m going to answer it for you anyway, cause that’s how I am. In short: everywhere! In long: nowhere at all, really!

Because of my job, summer is the busiest time of year for me. I help to oversee a program that, in the summer, involves me overseeing 150 middle- and high- schoolers everyday for a month, not to mention their undergraduate advisors that have their own set of worries and wishes and life happenings to attend to. I absolutely love this job… and it is also the most tiring part of my year. I get home from work each day in July ready to fall into bed, and the next thing I know, I’m up to do it all again. And this is just from ONE MONTH of doing this. All of this is to say: please thank the K12 teachers in your lives. They are truly God’s strongest soldiers.

July is also an emotionally draining time because it marks the anniversary of my mother’s1 passing. I know what you’re thinking: how many times is DeeSoul going to work his dead mom into a story? And all I can say is, if you knew this woman like I did, she’d be on your mind all of the time too. The Dead Mom’s Club is a strange one to be in, especially as a poet, but I am grateful for the work of many poet friends that has gotten me through the past year of that transition. While I am noticing that poets have a LOT to unpack about their parents, I am always so inspired by the endless ways we can talk about the people who have molded us into the people we are.

Some other things that happened this summer: I was named a 2025 Ruth Lilly & Dorthy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow AND I had the awesome opportunity to be a Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Fellow, thanks to the invitation of my former professor. The experience was so much more insightful than I even expected it would be, and it was nice to imagine, at least for a few days, what kind of world we could live in if writers were regarded in the way we regard our doctors and lawyers and other kinds of well-regarded people.

It was also very strange to be in a place marked by so much wealth and where so many of the attendees looked… not like me. There was an interesting thought that occurred to me, not just about who gets to write and have their work lauded as a writer, but what demographics of people are afforded the time to read and then shape conversations about literature. As I found out during The Sealey Challenge, having the time to maintain a consistent reading is a privilege. My ability to read 31 books in one month was greatly aided by having a job that’s workload decreases greatly in August.

Many of us suffering under capitalism do not get this same kind of break, and that kind of obstacle really limits the conversations we can have with folks. Imagine a world where work wasn’t our life, where we were afforded the time to go and learn more about our interests, reading or television or gaming or knitting or dancing or so much more, a world that valued our artistic enrichment as much as it capitalizes on our productivity. A bit of a tangent, I know, sorry, but what a thought!

The Sealey Challenge (and a breakdown of what I read)

As mentioned above, the other major part of my summer was participating in the Sealey Challenge.2 It has been a while since I attempted this challenge, frankly due to the stamina it requires, but I was motivated by the Open Books fundraiser for the Sameer Project. I documented my reading journey on my instagram story3 and posted daily reflections on the books I read, but something I got several questions about was my “archetypes” category in my reading journal.

I’ve briefly touched on it before, but the archetypes thing comes from a talk I attended by Franny Choi at the Watering Hole Writing Retreat.4 In this talk, Choi presented us with four kinds of collections poetry books can fall under, and being a visual learner, I synthesized this into a kind of graph for myself. This framing has helped me think about the ways I put collections into conversation by considering two dimensions that comprise the book-shaping experience: What drives the collection (concept or emotions) and what dictates the ordering collection (are the poems ordered in a way that makes logical sense or emotional sense?). These two dimensions create four possible kinds of books you could encounter, but as I found through my reading, it does not encompass what every book is trying to do, requiring a flexibility of these archetypes. Below, I will offer a more specific explanation of the book archetypes I encountered and which books (for me) fell under them.

I think it is important to note, however, that the way one receives a book is subjective, despite the author’s intentions. How I classify a book may not be the way you classify a book, and that’s okay! I think it is more important that you form a vocabulary for work that suits you and helps you to put things in conversation with one another.

The Speaker’s Journey

The first four of these archetypes are taken from those presented in Choi’s talk: The Speaker’s Journey, The Essay, The Playlist, and The Formula. Of these, I believe the Speaker’s Journey is perhaps the quickest to identify, although I complicated the category a bit for myself later on. Although the “properties” for these categories are flexible, collections in this archetype seemed to me to be ordered in a way that was logical for the speaker. This does not necessarily mean we started at the beginning, but there is some kind of narrative that the reader is led through. The collections are driven emotionally by the stakes of the narrative and the speaker’s relationships. In short, the collection is telling us a story of the speaker in verse that we piece together as we move forward.

Examples from My Sealey Challenge:

• Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin

• Love Locks by Kieron Walquist ★

• Root Fractures by Diana Khoi Nguyen ★

• Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds

• So Long this Wound Stayed Open by Juliana Chang

The Essay

The second archetype, The Essay, can sometimes be a bit harder to pin down, but I generally interpret it as a collection that is prompted by a central question, argument, or artifact, with poems circulating around that central point. For example, I would categorize my own collection, The Laughing Barrel, in this archetype (and yes, this is a shameless plug). The central artifact, the laughing barrel, is an image that encapsulates the absurdity of racism and the thin line between joy and survival Black people face, and the poems in the book (as much as I can help it) respond back to that image. Collections in this archetype are often ordered in a seemingly logical way as they build the argument, and some poems in these collections may serve to support the work’s argument, as opposed to standing on their own. In this same vein, they are driven by their concept or question and seek to speak back to it throughout the work.

Examples from My Sealey Challenge:

• We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik

• Bint بنت by Ghinawa Jawhari

• Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates

• Survived By: An Atlas of Disapperance by Stephanie Niu

• Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins ★

• Composition by Junious Ward

The Playlist

The third archetype, The Playlist, is all about vibes. Instead of communicating a clear narrative like the Speaker’s Journey or an argument like the Essay, the Playlist often centers itself around a feeling — love, loss, loneliness, anger, hope. These collections are more interested in walking us through an emotional journey than a hero’s journey. Poems in these collections are often ordered in a way that centers the emotional arc, the momentum that carries readers from one poem to the next. Poems in these collections (with exceptions, of course) do not lean on each other as much as they seek to uphold the emotional umbrella of the work.

Examples from My Sealey Challenge:

Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen ★

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde

Testify by Douglas Manuel

I Would Define the Sun by Stephanie Niu

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson ★

I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes

Flip by Victoria Mbabazi

Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Mizna | Catastrophe, Volume 25.1 (Periodical) ★

Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay

Spells of My Name by I.S. Jones ★

Brood by Kimiko Hahn

the space between men by Mia S. Willis

The Formula

The last of the original four, the Formula, is the most “you know it when you see it” of the bunch. This archetype encompasses collections with very specific kinds of rules for themselves. I actually don’t have any books from the challenge that I read that fall under this category, but one I read earlier this year would be American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. In this collection, every poem shares the same title, and they are all sonnets that rope into heroic sonnets. This tight formal constraint, like those of other collections in this archetype, rules the book and its structure. While not always as concerned with an argument or narrative, there is an emphasis on play and engagement.

The Soundtrack

As I progressed farther into my challenge, I realized that the four archetypes weren’t completely encompassing the books I was reading, and how could they? There are as many ways to write a book as there are writers. With that in mind, I added new archetypes that would help me give language to the books I was reading. If I was to do the challenge again, I’m sure some of the books I categorized in the beginning would fall under these additional descriptions.

The first new archetype was The Soundtrack, which I felt had aspects of both the Playlist and some combination of the Essay or Speaker’s Journey archetypes. As a playlist, the collection still has an emotional drive, and I believe the ordering is also governed by a desire to attend to the emotional journey of the reader. However, the poems themselves I feel are more closely related to their central concept and each other than I sometimes see in Playlist collections, feeling more to me like the soundtrack of a conscious project than various translations of a feeling.

Examples from My Sealey Challenge:

If Pit Bulls Had a God It’d Be a Pit Bull by Gabriel Ramirez

I Could Die Today and Live Again by Summer Farah ★

The Memoir

The second archetype I added was the Memoir. Now, I know that memoir is its own genre and I don’t seek to disrupt that, but I do think it is interesting to consider a poetry collection as a memoir. For clarity’s sake, the way I usually distinguish memoir from biography is that a memoir is concerned less with the facts of one’s life and more with commenting on one’s personal experience of a specific personal phenomena, an illness or a recurring event or something of that sort. So in that way, the Memoir archetype connects the personal aspect of the Speaker’s Journey with the central concept or argument found in the Essay. Is that just me poetsplaining what a memoir is? Possibly. Likely. Nonetheless, it’s here now, so do with it as you will!

Examples from My Sealey Challenge:

Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass ★

Murmurations by Anthony Thomas Lombardi ★

My Grief, The Sun by Sanna Wani

Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds

The Experiment

My final archetype (at least for now) is the Experiment, which I view as a combination of the Essay and the Formula. The best way I can describe it is Weird for a Reason ™ . In a collection in this archetype, the poems themselves take a lot of risks and play with the page in some way, either rhetorically or visually. However, the risks and poems of the books aim to speak back to a central argument or question the book is holding. As a whole, the collection is trying out different entry points into the conversation the book is inviting.

Examples from My Sealey Challenge:

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier ★

What next?

I think that’s it for this newsletter, but I’m excited to say I’ve made some headway into the ultimate goal of this newsletter/podcast, which is to interview poets on craft elements that mean something to them. I have an interview with a friend and poet that I’ll be sharing in the next installment of this newsletter, as well as a conversation with a poet at the top of their craft that I’ll be interviewing for my Eponymous series, which looks to talk to writers about their collections, their names, and where they come from.

Thanks for rocking with me this long. Until next time :)

Y’all. I have to talk about SINNERS. I need to talk about SINNERS. The issue is that every time I try to say something coherent about SINNERS, it comes out as an incoherent mess (the same reason I dare not venture into memoir writing). If you want to read some good thoughts about it, I recommend reading Olivia Selam’s Substack article on the movie and some of the questions it raises. My thoughts will not be ~as~ well formulated, but I do want to preface my rambling with this tweet by Ajanaé Dawkins *SPOILER ALERT?*:

I saw this tweet from Ajanaé after my first watch of the movie, and I really love the line of questioning it takes. I’m really focused on her question - “what you think spiritual intervention looks like?” What do we expect from God or any higher power we put our faith in? She expands on her questions with the following:

To approach this question, I have to go back to the strongest example of faith that I’ve seen: my (step)mother.

SINNERS is a movie that is considering, in part, our legacies, the ones we adopt from our people, the ones expected of us because of our shared blood, and the ones forced upon us from the horrors and whims of history. Our legacies, of course, are all tangled up in one another, weaving in and out and tying us together. Part of the resonance I feel with this movie (and the reason I’ve seen it four times in the past month) is because I am feeling the particular weight of the legacy passed down to me.

May is the month of my mother’s birth. Last May was the last time I saw my mother before she passed away. For much of her life, my mother was afflicted with various illnesses and conditions, ultimately discovering a Stage-4 cancer that should have been caught months prior by her doctors. In many ways, I considered her to be a Job-like figure, whose faith and goodness, as far as anyone could be good, was constantly being tested by God. Despite her constant afflictions, even as her body slowed and she was nearing the conclusion of her life, she maintained her faith. You might even say it grew stronger. With each passing day, she proclaimed her trust in the Lord, she comforted those around her, and she made her peace. Not once did she give up on God, even when on the outside it seemed he had stacked the cards against her.

Truthfully, this confused me. It aggravated me. All my life I was led to believe our actions were the true measure of our character. What was happening to my mother, in my mind, was not the will of a loving God. I had to deal with that very question that Ajanaé poses: what is it that I expected of God? What did I think spiritual intervention should look like?

There have been arguments that SINNERS is an anti-church movie, but I think it’s much more complicated than that. When Sammy prayed that Lord’s Prayer — when my mother gave her daily thanks — what would it have it have taken for us, for me, to believe his faith had real power? A Hand coming down? A Voice bellowing from the clouds? A Snap to make the maligned blood or bloodsucker disappear? As Ajanaé notes, our faith has never prevented the horrors inflicted upon us, so how do we measure their effectiveness?

And the answer, I think, is us. The measure of a practice’s effectiveness is what we believe it to be. Which is really corny answer, I know, but chewing on that has helped me come to terms with my mother’s passing. It hasn’t made me less angry. It doesn’t make me wish it didn’t happen to her in the first place. But that practice gave my mother the peace she needed to let herself receive that final rest. That prayer distracted Remmick long enough to see the sun.

There are of course things in the movie I would have like seen troubled or explored more, but I appreciate the legacies of faith, violence, and community the film is holding. Makes me feel that more empowered to approach those legacies in my own work.

What’s Going On? (with me)

• On Friday, June 13th, I’ll be reading for the Speak, Light summer reading series at Accent Sisters, alongside Dylan Gilbert, Laetitia Keok, and Tianyi. Register here.

• On Thursday, June 26th, in collaboration with Saturns Wilds Motel1, I will be leading a workshop titled “Game Mechanics in Poetry: Form, Function, and Expanding What Poetry Can Be.” We’ll explore how video games and other visual media can serve as generative frameworks for writing poetry and rethinking the written word. There’s a sliding scale of $20 - $40. Register here.

• On Monday, June 30th, I’ll be reading at the book launch for Anthony Thomas Lombardi’s debut collection of poetry, murmurations. There will also be readings by Rhoni Blankenhorn, Megan Pinto, John Murillo. $5 virtual/ $9 in person. Register here.

What’s Happening? (with my friends)

Speaking of Ajanaé Dawkins, she recently released her chapbook, Blood-Flex, winner of the 13th Annual New Delta Review Chapbook Contest. For a taste, check out this reading of her poem “O Eve, I Could Never Hate You” (Shoutout to the apostrophe O).

I.S. Jones’ debut full-length, Bloodmercy, is forthcoming this year in September 2025. The collection “reimagines Cain and Abel as they navigate the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood to explore violence, love, sex, faith, and man’s dominion over the earth.” For a preview, read two of her poems published in Brooklyn Rail.

jason b. crawford’s sophomore collection, Yeet! is forthcoming from Omnidawn this year! The collection “envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars.” While you wait for this drop, check out crawford’s first collection, Year of the Unicorn Kidz.

Kay Bancroft’s debut poetry collection, Bloodroom, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in Summer 2026.2 In Bancroft’s own words, the collection is “ full of explorations, of diving into intergenerational trauma, parent/child relationships, identity, queerness and sexuality, pop horror from the 90s to now, and some freaky cool hybrid visual poems,” which I’m always a fan of.

Reuben Gelly Newman’s debut collection, Dear Dear, was chosen as the winner of Trio House Press’ 2025 Louise Bogan Award winner. It features “queer love poems and their politics against a backdrop of today’s warming worlds and a fraught America” and is forthcoming in July 2026.

Dr. Taylor Byas’ sophomore collection, Resting Bitch Face, is forthcoming on August 26th with Soft Skull Press. It is described as a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. If you want a good introduction to Byas’ work, check out her first collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times.

What I’m Reading

1) Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness by Bob Kaufman

Genre: Poetry (debut)

Archetype: Playlist (heavy on play)

I want to prove that the sun was born when God fell asleep/ with a lit cigarette, tired after a hard night of judging. - “Unholy Missions”

I was first introduced to Kaufman through a bonus weekend workshop Professor Terrance Hayes taught during my time in the MFA program. I was immediately intrigued by this Beat poet I hadn’t heard of before and the rhythm of his work. Kaufman uses words in combinations I didn’t even know folks could do. Just an incredible dexterity of language, sound and humor. It is a true shame more people don’t recognize his work & and his contributions to Beat Poetry (which I’m sure is now changing), but I am grateful to have been introduced to it. His clarity and fluidity are something to strive for as much as they are marvels to admire.

2) In the Key of Decay by Em Dial

Genre: Poetry (Debut)

Archetype: Playlist/Essay

And at the scale of geological time,/ the epoch in which violence ripped across lands/ like a seed planted without prayer, will appear/ brief as a keyhole - “Necropastoral for the Anthropocene”

Long (but not too long) before this book came out, I knew Em as the coach of my college slam team, whose care and close attention was vital to me as a baby poet. Much of the confidence I gained as a poet, I gained because I knew Em. In the Key of Decay is interested in the failures of both the natural and human-intervened world. As such, it places itself squarely inside considerations of the Anthropocene and the human tendency to fuck shit up. Despite this, the book is not defeatist, and Dial does not despair, Instead, the book considers how, in a world of failures — medical failures, the failure of race/science, empire — do we make space ourselves? How do we sing our own songs? Overall, a really great collection of ecopoetry (with a really gorgeous cover).3

3) Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher

Genre: Poetry (Fourth Collection)

Archetype: Speaker’s Journey

What will love demand forever? What can we make clean? - “I. Unlike my grandparents, I thought the past was a country to which I could return” from the Lose Your Mother suite

I don’t know what I was expecting from this collection, but I was completely blown away. Remica joins a long line of Black women poets engaging with archive and pulls from it something so incredibly musical & sincere & new. Our histories are alive in this book, in her hands. This collection shines a light not just on the daily injustices of this country, but also on the way our lineages persevere how we all make it back to a home swept clean. This book is a great example of received forms working to reinforce content, and a masterful consideration of archive.

New Poems in the Catalog

• “being property once myself” by Lucille Clifton

• “Etymology of ‘Fuck 12’” by Darius Simpson

Photo Credit: Brooklyn Poets

Last week I had the pleasure of being at the Brooklyn Poets Poetry Festival and sharing the stage with Lara Atallah, Noah Arhm Choi, and Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, considering the responsibility we have as workers of language in a country that weaponizes language. I was honored to be part of the panel, and since I drafted my remarks in Substack anyway1 , I figured I would post them here (with slight editing for clarity). To start, here was the description of the panel, titled “A Language That Could Produce This”:

Is language the box we find ourselves locked in or the key to its escape? What does it mean to write against oppression, against trauma, against empire, against our own histories—using the same language that created them? What tension do we hold when we write for our survival using the same words that form legislation that renders us at best unimportant, and at worst, nonexistent. In this panel, we’ll explore a question “What does it mean to be a poet working in a language, a medium, a nation, that can produce this?” raised by Kaveh Akbar with poets that poke and pry at the edge of language. We’ll learn from poets working in translation, found materials, multiple languages and more what it means to work in a language that could produce this and what opportunities and responsibilities we have in doing so.

And, as promised (threatened?), my remarks below:

I think my first question for any panel is “who the hell is this guy and why is he up here,” so hopefully I can answer that for you briefly. For the last several years, I have been working on my debut manuscript, The Laughing Barrel2, which is an examination of Black joy and perseverance in the face of relatively ridiculous circumstances. For context, the laughing barrel3 is a slave-era construction in which enslaved people who felt the need to express laughter or other emotions would have to go to a barrel in the field and lean in to laugh to disguise their laughter from their enslavers.

From this construction, the absurdity of having to hide one’s joy for fear of literal bodily harm, I am interested in the various absurdities that permeate our lives, those of racism, capitalism, genocide, and constant personal & communal grief, among others. I am interested in how Black people maintain their joy and sanity – sometimes fashioned from nothing – despite the violence the world subjects us to daily and historically. In my work, I attempt to set considerations of faith, God, and our fraught histories next to scenes of the things and people that keep our joy alive.

As I turned this panel’s topic over in my head, “A Language That Could Produce This,” I struggled with how to enter this discussion, which is to say, there is no shortage to the ways language rules over lives. Indeed, at this very moment, the language of the state — which is to say, empire, which is also to say, fascism — attempts to hinder or altogether stop the work of writers, artists, and other culture-makers and shapers in this country. What we know is that a populace that is able to interrogate art, culture, and language critically — a populace that is able to think for itself — is a populace that is dangerous to the overseer class.

To the opposition of this knowledge, multimillion dollar corporations push the use of AI, which only serves to stifle curiosity and argument-refinement skills in a system that values somewhat arbitrary measures of success over the real work and effort, however imperfect, of critical engagement . The state continues to ban books in schools that help open the minds of our young people. It bans funding to research that aims to understand and improve the lives of those historically marginalized in this nation. The state is attempting even to ban language that would suggest solidarity with the people it profits off the genocide of.

I am getting away from myself, but all this is to say, there’s a lot to language. And thinking about this, my mind ended up in two places. One of those places was thinking about babies. I promise I will circle back to that in a moment, but I would like to first touch on the other place my mind went to, which was Solmaz Sharif’s4 poem “Social Skills Training.” To those who may not be completely familiar with Sharif and her work, she is an Iranian poet and the author two poetry collections, Look (2016) and Customs (2022), both of which I highly recommend as reading for those interested in this panel’s topic.

In both of these collections, Sharif is thinking extensively about the violence of language, particularly the English language. Look repurposes language from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associate Terms, highlighting the euphemisms this country employs in service of downplaying the horror of its imposition in other countries. Customs, the book the poem I’m about to read comes from, turns from the language used to justify inconceivable violences abroad to the language employed within the state itself in an effort maintain its own tumultuous existence, meant to exhaust and exempt those trapped in its belly. “Social Skills Training” by Solmaz Sharif reads as follows:

I will not be catching a case from the copyright/first publisher’s rights people. You can read “Social Skills Training” here

This is a poem I appreciate and return to often. I believe one of the many things it highlights for me is the precarity of language in a country that feels perpetually threatened by it. The nation-state is a victim of its own mind, and thus projects that fear unto those who are actually at its mercy. Too often, we are the ones who must be careful with our language for fear of being victimized when all the power rests with those who wield language with the least regard for their common man.

The frustration of this dilemma, a occasional sense of helplessness without a way to properly express it, brings me back to babies. Last week, I was in this space for the spring workshop showcase (very very good work from those students, might I add), and during one of the intermissions, my husband’s friend brought her baby in for a second before she had to head home to take care of said baby5.

Sidebar — Seeing the baby in this space was a real joy and we don’t see nearly enough babies/children at poetry events, and I think that should change! We are too stuffy as a group of people and I think that we could benefit from the natural restlessness/energy/noise that children provide.

The baby obviously agreed with me, because as soon she was handed to a friend to hold for a second, she cried as loud as her little lungs could muster. I know people are generally very put-off by babies crying, all of us forgetting that we were too at some point the delicate screaming thing in someone’s nervous arms, but in that moment I really emphasized with the kind of daily horror babies are faced with.

Just imagine, if you will, that every moment of your very new existence is dictated by powers outside of your control. Some of these powers have faces you will learn to recognize, but everyday you are thrust into a world that is bright, and loud, and noisy, and generally not suited for babyhood. All the while, you have to deal with indigestion, and straps that too tight, and diapers that need changing , and teeth fighting their way out of your gums, and to top it all off, you have no language to properly communicate all of this discomfort to anyone. So all you can do is scream and hope someone will interpret that discomfort correctly and take the proper steps to relieve you.

That feeling, that simmering frustration with a lack of language for what is happening to us, is what I feel many days in this country. I feel like a child trapped with every feeling I know I feel but do not know how to express in a way that will not bring me harm. Every morning, I read a headline that makes me go Oh my God, what is it now? What can I do but scream? When my government doesn’t hear me and when “well-meaning” neighbors have no desire to see the violence against innocent people end and it feels like I am trapped in a maze of semantics, technicalities, and absurdities?

It is for this reason that I am grateful for artists. I am grateful for poets, and playwrights, and occasionally, I am even grateful for the fiction writers. Particularly if they are also poets. As we grow past toddlerdom, we are given the language that helps us to process and approach the world we encounter new every day. In the gut of a nation hellbent on using language to divide us, to distract us, to steer us from the work we hope to do, it is the role of the poet to show us what language can do to combat empire.

It is the poet’s job to bear witness to our stories so that no one can say that our histories did not happen. It is the poet’s job to provide language and images that force us to stop and think, to slow down and consider the work the language of empire is doing in making us forget. It is the poet’s job to remember what has happened to us and to make sure the knowledge is passed down so we know how to handle what is thrown at us. It is the poet’s job to help us imagine new and better worlds for ourselves, to language us to a reality better than one we find ourselves in. Our language should challenge us. It should push towards new ways of languaging ourselves. And as long as language is used in service of power, we should make sure we are doing what we can to expose the failings of the state’s limited imagination and take that power back.

Subscribe now

I’m gonna be honest: if you’re looking for a Substack with something insightful to say, I promise this isn’t it. I have much smarter and better-written friends you can follow if that’s your speed. Instead, I hope to keep y’all updated with what’s going on in my professional life (which you’re welcome to skip), what’s happening with my friends’ lives (which I hope you’ll check out), and the work going into my brain (that will hopefully inspire something better to come out). More than anything, I want to be in conversation with y’all. I just wanna talk.

It is likely I will try to send this out monthly, but it could also be less frequent than that (you’re welcome). If that isn’t enough me for you, find me on the social apps, or ask me out for coffee. I’d like that.

First Things First: I’m Married!

This is something that seems to throw people off every time I post about it, but the rumors (several Instagram story posts I’ve made) are true: I am married now! We got married on the first day of Spring, when the weather in New York decided it would cooperate with us. I’ll admit, it still feels very new to say that I have a husband at the ripe age of 26, but I couldn’t be more glad to be on this journey with him. For those of you that don’t have the pleasure (yet) of knowing him, he really is everything you can ask for in a partner: he’s kind, he’s funny, he’s smart, he writes, he can cook, he is handy around the house, and he’s started me on a skin care routine that keeps me from drying out, as I am prone to do. Also, he’s gorgeous. You could say I’ve won, and I wouldn’t disagree. For those of you astrologically inclined, he’s a Taurus. I’m an Aquarius. You can tell me our odds later. Unless they are bad, in which case, I rebuke it. Please keep any negative energy to yourself.

I wish I had something wise to say about the whole business of marriage, but the truth is, we’re both really young. We are still figuring out what we’re doing with our lives and what that will mean for our futures, but we’re committed to doing those things together. What I can’t emphasize enough is the joy and blessing of having a strong community to surround ourselves with and bring into our love. Time and again, our friends and loved ones have shown up for us, and it’s made all the difference in our personal relationship. It takes a village!

In other news, if you’ve perused the rest of this Substack publication (pubstack?) website, you’ll notice there is a ~podcast~ section. Right now, this means absolutely nothing, and I’m not sure if it ever will, but I’ve always wanted to do a podcast with this title that focuses on poets thinking through different craft elements, processes, and the work that keeps them writing. Who knows if I’ll ever do it, but hey, if no one stops me, maybe you’ll get an episode or two.

Have any craft elements or themes you’d want me to start with? Guest ideas? Want to collaborate with me on actually making this thing a, well, thing? Hit my line. Until then, check out We Killed the Moon, a podcast produced from some poet friends of mine featuring some pretty sick guests.1 The first episode has both Sharon Olds & Tariq Thompson, two great poets at the low low cost of your regular music streaming service subscription.

What’s Going On? (with me)

Generally, this is where I’ll be updating y’all on the stuff going with me, which recently is quite a few things! If you already know this info: Sorry! I’m bringing folks up to speed 🙏🏾

• Most exciting news is that my debut collection, The Laughing Barrel,2 finalist for both the Alice James Award and the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, was picked up for publication by Alice James Books and is slated to release April 2027. If you pre-order from the website, there’s a 20% discount :)

• I was awarded an NEA fellowship! Career-wise, this is pretty big pretty early, so I’m super humbled and hope that the work lives up to the weight of the honor. They couldn’t share our statements on the website like in previous years (we were told they didn’t have time to add them with the office’s current staff), but I wanted to share again what I provided:

  This honor comes at an interesting point in my poetry “career.” Last Spring, I was blessed to graduate from an MFA program that aided immensely in my development as a writer and, more importantly, as a member of a literary community. Two short months following, I lost my dear stepmother, one of the biggest supporters of my work, all the way back to the silly little sonnets I scribbled in middle school. Though I’ve been writing for a bit now, I am still emerging and figuring out where my work fits into the larger scheme of literature. As I contend with that, I also contend with the daily realities of the ongoing genocide in the Levant and Africa, personal grief, and the ever-present loom of capitalism. And all I can do is laugh. I hover mostly around a poetics of disbelief, which is to say, most of my poetry starts at the point of looking at something and saying, “What the hell?” Though my work is tinted by my experience as a Black person and is often concerned with the realities of Black people, I am interested in the ways we all manage the absurdities of being alive in the present, absurdities like racism and capitalism and state-sanctioned genocide. On some level, we are asked to normalize these absurdities, and I hope my work will make people scoff at the idea of normalizing these things. I want people to question what they’re asked to condone and what they’re personally willing to condone for their comfort. I want people to laugh and then ask what the hell is so funny, really? I am grateful for this gift from the National Endowment of the Arts and hope it will help my work find the people that resonate with it.

• I am a 2025 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Writing Fellow!3 This conference historically leans towards prose/non-fiction folks in its programming and focus, so I’m looking forward as a ~poet~ to engage with work that’s different from how I’m usually writing.

• My poem “Thermal Imaging” won the 2025 MQR Laurence Goldstein Prize. This a poem that came to me while me and my former roommates were watching Planet Earth and David Attenborough was talking about the equipment being military-grade. I think it would benefit more of us to stop and consider why the military might need certain technologies (like cameras that can zoom in from miles away) and who that technology might be used against.

• On May 23, I’ll be part of a panel for the Brooklyn Poets Poetry Festival, talking with a few other poets about the responsibilities of language production under empire. Far be it from me to ask you to pay to see me talk, but if the rest of the festival’s programming interests you, consider coming through!

  ---

What’s Happening? (for my friends)

I’ll be using this section to put y’all on to the things happening with my friends in the poetry world (and other genres too if I’m paying attention). Lucky for us, there’s a lot of good stuff on the way!

• Jonny Teklit has launched a new pubstack, Writers & Their Hobbies, “a series that seeks to interview your favorite writers while donating to important causes.” Check it out!

• Summer Farah’s4 full-length, THE HUNGERING YEARS, “a collection exploring friendship, deep longing, and the complexities of place,” is forthcoming from Host Publications in Spring 2026. Summer is also the author of I Could Die Today and Live Again (Game Over Books), which uses The Legend of Zelda as a vehicle to explore themes of empire and cycles of death and rebirth. An all-around great work for those interested in ekphrasis or good writing.

• Maya Salameh’s sophomore collection, MERMAID THEORY, which examines “the interconnectedness of science and myth, tracing the memory of water…, and interogatting the politics of witnessing,” is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2026. Maya is a phenomenal young writer who also wrote How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, a formally experimental and syntactically rich book that won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.5 She is also, transparently, a good friend, and I couldn’t be more excited for this book.

• Karisma Price was recently named a 2025 Whiting Award winner in Poetry for her collection, I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books). If you haven’t already read it, I love this collection, and it was one of my north stars as I wrote TLB. The first time I came across Karisma’s work was reading her poem “My Phone Autocorrects Nigga to Night” in Poetry Magazine, which struck me so much that I pasted it to my wall and wrote her a DM telling her how much I loved it, to which she very graciously replied. A terrific book and well deserved award!

  ---

What I’m Reading (and how I’m reading it)

If you’ve been following me on social media, you’ll know I’ve been posting my tiny book reviews in an effort to keep myself accountable to regular reading. This will serve as an extension/continuation of that effort, and will hopefully put y’all on to some new books (or let you hype up collections you already love.) Something you’ll notice in these reviews is the “collection” archetype tag.

This tag comes from a craft talk given by Franny Choi at the Watering Hole (which you should apply to if you are a poet of color). If you want to look into it more, you can check out this Google Doc where I tried to synthesize each archetype, but basically Franny presented us with four kinds of collections poetry books can fall under, which has been helpful in my consideration of how different books relate to each other. Not every book will fall under one of these categories, and some might overlap, but it was a helpful start for me to think about books in comparison to other books. I hope it will be for you, too.

1) Birthright by George Abraham

Genre: Poetry (Debut)

Archetype: Speaker’s Journey/Essay

“Yacoub calls it a genetic anomaly. A miracle of God.” - pg. 42, “in which you do not ask the state of israel to commit suicide”

Whenever I finish reading a non-fiction book, as I did before starting Abraham’s collection, I hope for the next thing I read to jumpstart my brain back into wonder about what language can achieve. How lucky I was, then, for this book to be next on my list. Birthright is a collection that is rich with invention. I appreciate the way Abraham’s work resists and works outside of linearity, prompting us toward an evaluation of history that operates outside a simple cause & effect, a history that trips over itself and the many attempts to erase it. This collection, however, does not shy away from naming the violence and its actors that make poems within possible. Much of the work here asks us to re-examine the violences that happen daily and uphold the regimes that perpetuate them. What, if anything, can language do to combat empire? The work in this collection is strong, varied, and formally expansive. It reminds us that history did not start yesterday or with the state’s account, and history’s memory is often short and incomplete. It is up to us to interrogate the spaces “official” histories have left unfilled.

2) More Salt Than Diamond by Aline Mello

Genre: Poetry (Debut)

Archetype: Speaker’s Journey

“I translate the oath to Portuguese…/ she asks if it’s a prayer/ I say yes.” - pg. 36, “Studying for the Citizenship Test with my Mother”

A great collection full of strong & accessible verse. Mello’s collection is a great look into the thoughts & worries of one of our most vulnerable populations in this country, our immigrant neighbors. The dream this country peddles is built on promises it often fails to keep & security it reserves for few. Mello’s poetry shows us the struggle with being away from one’s home, and the sacrifice made to make a life for one’s self. A good collection to share and discuss with students and to start conversations about immigration and immigrant narratives.

New Poems in the Catalog

Now, on the off-chance that I’m keeping up with my self-imposed projects, I have a catalog I created to try and organize poems I come across and enjoy. I want to use this as a tool to gather poems to talk about and review for different craft or thematic concerns, and I think it helps me to consider how I might theoretical approach different poems or put them in conversation with each other.

See a poem on there that you think can be added to more themes or that has a craft element I didn’t notice? Let me know :)

• “The Mare of Money” by Roger Reeves

• “American Sonnet: 91” by Wanda Coleman

That’s all for this first entry! Thanks for rocking with me, looking forward to seeing where this thing leads.

Visit My Website

Leave a comment