Luisa Muradyan, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

 

Don’t Write Mom Poems

The best writing advice I’ve ever been given
is to avoid poems about motherhood.
Too sappy. Too sentimental. I agree.
Which is why I only write poems about
myself bare-chested on a hunt,
dragging my latest kill
back to my cabin
and feasting
on what I can
only describe
as truth. No room in this cabin
for a nursery or
a metaphorical child
who sleeps when I
sleep and on waking
looks at me not as creator
but as created, singing some ancient
song in the moonlight.

Oh, I am very taken with Luisa Muradyan’s incredible second collection, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated (Dallas TX: Bridwell Press, 2025). According to the author biography on her website (as this is the first I’ve heard of her and her work), Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Texas, has a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston, currently lives in the United States and is also the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska press, 2018) and the forthcoming When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027). The poems in I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated are funny and odd and sad and sharp, offering lines that bend into surreal and twisted shapes, writing on parents, family, children, the scope of war and multi-generational trauma (all of which make me completely understand how she has a collection forthcoming with YesYes Books, as her work fits perfectly with their aesthetic). “Friends,” she writes, to open the absolutely delightful “Woman Posting in Parenting Forum,” “I have come to the end of my rope. / My child has decided that he is the moon / and I cannot convince him otherwise. His entire / face a moon, not a man in the moon, but a toddler / that is the moon, and yes he does give off light / in the darkness and yes some days he pulls the ocean / current toward his body and yes I’ve noticed / that when I take him to poetry readings / or art museums everyone cannot help but stop what / they are doing and begin to draw pictures of him […].” This slim and sharp poetry collection is an assemblage of poems around the narrator’s mother, but is also so much more than that. “[…] my mother somehow knowing how to pilot,” she writes, as part of the wonderfully-propulsive and evocative “My Mother as Tom Cruise,” writing her mother’s strength through the visage of a Hollywood Blockbuster action hero, “a helicopter my mother pulling her abusive / father out of a bathtub my mother slamming / her fist down on the table during an arm / wrestling tournament […].” This collection is an assemblage of poems around the trauma of war in Ukraine, connecting to memory and trauma comparable to other recent works such as Anna Veprinska’s Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] and Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), but is also so much more than that. “The missiles that fell on the village / did not directly hit my grandmother’s / childhood home,” she writes, to close the title poem, “but they were close enough. / The Russian invaders claimed they did not mean / to bomb Babyn Yar, but their shells were close enough. / My great-grandmother wasn’t that Jewish, / but she was close enough. When you ask me for / another response to tragedy, I tend to begin with a joke. Which isn’t / exactly the shape of sorrow, but I assure you, / it is close enough.” These are high-wire poems, perfectly executed with an enormous amount of risk with everything gained, and poems such as “When I Say I Am Not the Speaker of My Poems,” “I Just Need You to Understand that / Chickens Are Basically Dinosaurs,” “The Aushcwitz Exhibit Asks Me / to Rate My Experience,” and “My Mother Insists that I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” really need to be read to be believed, for all of their sharp, even devastating, possibilities. As “My Mother Insists that I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” begins: “You see she would only pay a guy to take some stuff / to a place. It could have been nothing but mostly / it was diamonds and furs, whatever she could get her / hands on. One time it was endless yards of tent material / and what could you even do with that?” There is such an articulation of the human and emotional cost of war throughout these poems, referencing the war in Ukraine and the Holocaust, a backdrop to almost every word she places on each page, one against the other. Muradyan offers a sense of beauty and curiosity layered in surreality underneath a layer of humour, all of which covers, even collides with, an underlay of multi-generational grief, each and all wrapped into and around and through. These poems are smart and savage and subtle, even outlandish, as the end of the poem “Everything is Sexy” writes:

or maybe it’s just you tending to the garden
that I promised I would water and never
do and yet here you are in your gray
gym shorts and this is the summer
of cucumbers as big as my want
and I’m holding an empty salad bowl
waiting for you to come inside.

 

Kyo Lee, i cut my tongue on a broken country

My review of Waterloo, Ontario-based Kyo Lee’s full-length poetry debut, i cut my tongue on a broken country (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun

Adam Haiun is a writer from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for fiction. His work can be found in filling Station, Carte Blanche, and The Headlight Anthology.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I feel I’m still midway through the change and lack the ability to fully describe it… I just recently held the book in my hands for the first time, that was a trip. I’m so happy with it. I’m happy!

I’ve always had my fascinations. Dreams and the feeling of dreams, architecture, sickness, masculinity, mourning. I’ve been playing with different levels of abstraction, or obfuscation, depending on how you want to look at it. This book is more abstract (or obfuscated) as part of its premise, or thanks to the conceit of the speaker. The things I’ve been working on most recently feel a bit more forthcoming. I’m also enjoying introducing some more humour, though I think there’s parts of this book that are funny, to me anyhow.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I definitely intended to be a fiction writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good stuff of language as it were.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

The start comes quickly for me, and then the trial begins. It needs to prove itself as having legs. If it doesn’t, I cannibalize whatever I can from it and use that in the next thing, if applicable. I can handle only about two projects at a time.

Five or so years ago I started writing all my first drafts by hand. I have trouble permitting myself to be messy or to use placeholders when typing things up, and I don’t have that trouble in a notebook. And so when I go about transcribing that piece, the act of transcription becomes the first round of editing, and the document once typed up ends up looking surprisingly clean and good. Very useful practice for me psychologically.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m often drawn to write book-length concepts, or section-length concepts, or long poems, more than shorter, disconnected pieces. I do write shorter pieces, and they’re useful to have, as an arsenal to bring to readings or to send out to mags. They can demonstrate range. But for whatever reason they’re never the ones I’m most proud of. I respond well to the exercise of cultivating a particular voice and maintaining it or orbiting a particular subject matter and attacking it from various angles. When you isolate a part of a conceptual project like that, I feel that you can sense all the weight of the work around it, if that makes sense.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I wish I had either more reading commitments, or less. I feel like just enough time goes by between my readings for me to forget that I do enjoy them, and I get the jitters all over again. I wouldn’t say they are part of my creative process necessarily, though I often get lovely feedback, and I really value the social component, seeing and supporting writers I care about. I like readings, but aspects of them frustrate me. I always want to approach the readers and ask: “What does your poem look like? What’s its shape on the page?” Maybe that demonstrates a lack of due respect for the oral tradition… Nobody’s perfect.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’ve read my fair share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.

I think the question I’m asking is: “Is everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in my experience of reality.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

My partner is an editor, and she describes writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour. Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be a good person.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

This book was my first time working with an outside editor, and it was incredible. Ian Williams is a fantastic writer obviously, and he was the perfect fit to edit this project. We edited together over video calls, just talking over the poems, reading them aloud, discussing whether the formal moves were working, whether the voice was consistent, whether the persona of the speaker was present enough. His suggestions were so natural, so clearly aligned with the spirit of the piece, that they barely felt like changes, and often I found myself answering him with: “Oh, of course!”

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Salt at every stage of cooking. For writers I think that means trying to be consistently surprising.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m trying my very best to have one. When I work on fiction writing, that requires sitting down, in an uninterrupted way, with goals set and a block of time reserved. When I write poetry I find I can be looser. My aforementioned notebook is with me at all times when I read, as so much of my note-taking involves cribbing from or responding to things I’ve read, and any kind of reading too, from theory to poetry to interviews to the news. I often transcribe my dreams in the morning.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I find it’s important to turn to the right thing for the kind of block I’m experiencing. If I’m feeling like I lack permission, for instance, I read a scene from Gravity’s Rainbow, not because I love it necessarily, but to remind myself that, oh, right, there are very many things that can be gotten away with, in form, content, and style.

But often a block is a symptom, usually that I haven’t been social enough, or haven’t spent enough time in nature lately, or haven’t seen a good film in a while. Or tried out a new recipe.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

Gomez Addams. I don’t have a pinstripe suit so I wore a silk robe and I was very comfortable the whole night.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I grew up in the suburbs, and so I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence being driven into and around the city of Montreal as a passenger. Looking at the city through a car or bus window was my unspoken favourite pastime, and the feeling and moods it produced in me are foundational to my desire to make art. I love concrete and overpasses and old factories. I love the character of the different neighbourhoods. I didn’t internalize the geography of the city itself until I was a full adult, because anytime we drove anywhere, I was so absorbed by the act of looking at it.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Guy Davenport, Cormac McCarthy. Anne Carson is absolutely undefeated. I love Tolstoy. Tolkien was my first.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Either learn to sail or learn to properly ride a horse. I’ve been in boats and I’ve been on horseback, but in both circumstances I wasn’t really in control… These feel like skills that will make me whole.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

As a kid I loved to draw and paint and wasn’t bad at it either. I could certainly imagine a version of myself who became some kind of visual artist instead. Maybe that’s a copout. Lately I’ve been thinking of doing a course in tiling, maybe mosaic. I want my someday dream kitchen to have some kind of unique mosaic backsplash that I’ll have made myself. My point is I’d likely have done work involving my hands in some way.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

A lot of people told me to, and I tried to ignore them, and was sad for that whole time, and when I decided to listen I became happier. Really, haha. I tried to be an architect, then an engineer, neither went very far. I struggled to conceive of myself as somebody who could write something worth reading, and it was people who loved me who showed me that I did have that in me, that I had a deep curiosity, an observational eye, a passion and talent for language, et cetera. These are things I’ve only recently felt able to say about myself.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I read and loved Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, which is a book of short, slice-of-life vignettes featuring the same pair of characters. I feel like it taught me a lot about how to make the most of the episodic, how the characterful microconflicts and sweet microresolutions between people who love one another can be interesting enough to carry a book.

I recently watched Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) as part of the endless journey my partner and I are on to find a film that will legitimately haunt us, in the way you’re haunted by things when you’re a child. This one got very close to that for me. The blend of the realism or groundedness in the domestic scenes with the horror or absurd, the frightening and traumatic injected with just enough humour, the performances, my God, Isabelle Adjani, the West Berlin setting. An instant favourite for me. Two very oppositional pieces of art, both about relationships.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a novel about a youngish person leaving the city to live with his aunt and uncle in rural Quebec. The conceit is that this character is endlessly forgetful (you can now probably guess who I pulled this from) and impossibly obliging, and his aunt and uncle are very strange and very demanding. And there will be some absurd and surreal stuff happening, which of course the character will have to be totally fine with.

I’ve also recently started a new poetry project, where I’ll be writing a kind of oblique response to each of Montaigne’s essays. Whether it’ll be a chapbook or a section of a book or a whole book is up in the air at this point. This idea came out of an exercise in Sarah Burgoyne’s most recent poetry studio, which I was very fortunate to participate in. So many of the best things I’ve written have come out of great prompts from other people.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Apt. 9 Press : Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi + Jo Ianni,

 

laid down to their building blocks
word and word and then brick-light

the attack and decay
of every action-sentence
made its own assembly line

like take the darkroom for example
and build an apiary

like take the gun chamber for example
and build an apiary

like take the steam engine for example
and build an apiary

like take the black page for example
and build an apiary (Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi)

It is always an exciting mail day when the latest titles from Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press land [see my notes on his prior titles, SOME SILENCE: Notes on Small Press and APT. 9 PRESS: 2009-2024: A Checklist, here], with the two latest being Toronto poet Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi’s Gavel  sound. Gravel sound. (February 2025), produced in a numbered first edition of eighty copies, and Toronto poet Jo Ianni’s FAT LUCK AND FUZZY SONG (April 2025), a title produced in a numbered first edition of one hundred copies. It is interesting in how both titles, hand-sewn and gracefully-produced, and with French flaps, hold extended poems that each offer a different sense of ongoingness, of chapbook-length structure, one short poem and section and fragment at a time.

There is such lovely detail to the moments, the fragments, of Khashayar’s Gavel sound. Gravel sound., offering poems and condensed fragments and short sketches, holding to the smallest possible utterance amid what might be an extended, single piece. “a poem / is just / what light / thinks about,” Khashayar writes, just near the end. There isn’t a wasted word throughout this entire sequence, taking the entirety of a single poem and dismantling it across such a length of thought. “I’m struggling to kich the poem / out of my neighborhood,” offers an earlier poem-fragment, “sea urchins / like riddles / or ruin // flicked by toe tip / into lake Ontario [.]”

There is something really interesting in the way that Khashayar’s work has progressed through and since the publication of their first two collections—Me, You,Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and the dos-a-dos WJD conjoined with The OceanDweller, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. from the Farsi by Mohammadi (Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—extending into projects of smaller moments that accumulate and stretch in really fascinating and quiet ways, such as their third full-length collection, Daffod*ls (Pamenar Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], or through the collaborative G (with Klara du Plessis; Palimpsest Press, 2023). There’s already a further full-length due this fall with Wolsak and Wynn, which I am very much looking forward to.

    under
       neath the
       patient
       spider
       golden
in its thereness
    I laid
  beside you
     weepy
  a landscape for ants
for grass to tickle
pushing up dandelion
        clocks and
         raising up dirt

Jo Ianni is one of only a handful of repeat authors through Apt. 9 Press, with inside inside inside appearing with the press in 2022 [see my review of such here]. Akin to Mohammadi, Ianni’s FAT LUCK AND FUZZY SONG (the opening part of the title I keep mis-reading as something much ruder, admittedly) is a beautifully-crafted long elegant thread of extended sequence, constructed out of condensed curves, bends and moments, lyric stretches and the weight of the occasional underlined passage or word. The underlined passages are curious, and there were moments I wondered if these were to highlight for the sake of a poem-title for these small, self-contained fragments, but the fact that other poems hold more traditionally-placed titles while still offering underlined passages contradicts that, making me wonder if these are simply points in each poem where the eye is to be drawn, slightly, and possibly held. The poems are quiet, thoughtful, odd, with gestures and utterances in the direction of Robert Duncan, here and there, which is curious, the poem “Itty bitty ditty,” “for Robert Duncan + his cat,” that includes “Where else will I go but here deeper still wish my knees bent and belly full of soup / There’s no more I can do for the moon than glory [.]” Oh, how I delight in the quiet, extended stretches of Jo Ianni’s lyric structures; more people should be reading the work of Jo Ianni.