Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

 

as if an etymology my love

the word still means threshold.
I am standing at your—
I place my feet and body on—
the place where I can come
or I can go—threshold
meant a raised ledge to stop
the hay that covered a floor
from spilling out and scattering
each time someone opened
the door. hold the thresh inside,
my love. when we bed down,
let us bed down on this haysoft
floor. think of it—a syllable
is a threshold to a word—
just as a windowsill—just as
a door—love is one syllable—
sleep, hope, dream, death, no,
yes, all, one—words are openings.
every word—some with many
ledges. I place my mind and body
at your—sweep around the doorsill
carefully—my love

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. “I’d thought that this would be a reflective time,” she writes, to open the poem “The Ticket,” “but parenting is a now-centered endeavor. / I may have to think about tomorrow, / but then again, I have to think about assuring tomorrow / will happen right now. / Yesterday is over. Yesterday things happened / that impact us now. / This part of my life is running in the present tense.” In poems reflective, unflinching and meditative, purposeful and empathetic, Dungy has achieved a remarkable collection around a particular moment of time, in that immediate, impossible and perpetual now.

Nikki Wallschlaeger, Houses

 

Bronze House

Statues in the concession gardens until the beachmaster hippo signaled it was time to move. He needs to learn about his male privilege but I’m actually talking about real hippos here.

This is the most miserable of all the animal prisons because it’s the largest. The barometer of the modern zoo is based on the spike in penguin mass suicides, but these places suck anyway so fuck it.

My father, who left me w/ my mother’s collections. This exacerbates into a goat barnyard in the petting area of the park. Both of them are experts in mannerisms that prevent disclosure. 

She has about 30 cookie jars now, ranging from chicken little to baseball tart. Someday I will have to sort them. I will do something strange to pay homage to what we couldn’t bridge. I will bring the pieces of

ceramic cows and giraffes and rearrange them into a pentagram on the sidewalk. As a teenager I refused to come home one night and got drunk, had sex, and passed out. The next day I was sentenced to 2 days

in the county mental health facility. When you picked me up, you didn’t say a word. So the first shared, a piece of a bear nose, goes here

I haven’t seen most of Wisconsin-based poet Nikki Wallschlaeger’s published collections, having caught only her third full-length title, Waterbaby (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], so it is interesting to finally see a copy of her full-length debut, Houses (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2015). The author of four full-length collections—the other two being Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) and HOLD YOUR OWN (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)—the poems in Houses hint at a foundation as a nesting book, but is far more complex, complicated. Composed as forty-six prose poems, each piece is titled as a separate house—“Little House,” “Silver House,” “Linen White House,” “Cranberry House,” etcetera—that each shape around and through a particular idea, commentary or thought; a foundation from which to begin a larger conversation on home and privilege, culture and class. “As a westerner,” begins “Yellow House,” “I will only paint thinking about Matisse. As a westerner, your poverty is romantic. As a westerner, overpopulation is the cause and not the effect. As a westerner, legwork is a numb strut.”

Edited/published by Jen Tynes, I keep telling myself that I’ve hardly seen any books or chapbooks by Horse Less Press, but a quick search through my archives finds reviews of Stephanie Anderson’s Lands of Yield (2018) [see my review of such here], Anna Gurton-Wachter’s Blank Blank Blues (2016) [see my review of such here], Kate Schapira’s Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out (2016) [see my review of such here], Anne Cecelia Holmes’ The Jitters (2015) [see my review of such here], Pattie McCarthy’s Nulls (2014) [see my review of such here], Kate Schapira's The Soft Place (2012) [see my review of such here], Rebecca Loudon’s TRISM (2012) [see my review of such here], Norma Cole’s Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman (2012) [see my review of such here] and Richard Froude’s Fabric (2011) [see my review of such here], so I’ve clearly been catching more than I’d realized, although I had not caught this.

It is interesting, that if her third collection was self-described as a collection “about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion,” then the bones of such articulations clearly sit in the poems that make up Houses. Her lyric suite of houses, beautifully and sharply composed, accumulatively write on the promise and the failures of home and community, and how the past seeps in. “Our night sweats bring active listening to the community,” Wallschlaeger writes, as part of “Silver House,” “the community who sleeps so the city becomes what we don’t recollect so we call it death. This is poor dream autophony when everything is about rent // death is not everything. It’s not the moon.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tracy Zeman

Writing at the intersection of ecology and culture, habitat and habitation, Tracy Zeman’s work traverses environmental crises, documents disappearing species, and mediates the moral and ethical implications of this age of ecological unraveling. Her previous collection of poems, Empire (Parlor Press, 2020), received the New Measure Poetry Prize. In 2027, she will travel to the Arctic Circle with 30 other artists and scientists. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Interglacial is a continuation of what I began in my first book Empire. In Empire, I was figuring out where we were, environmentally, through reading about extinction stories, colonial destruction and displacement of peoples and animal-others, and the evolution of natural history. Interglacial is a continuation of that education. Though with Empire's underpinning, I was also interested in thinking about what it means to watch the world move further into these crises and how having a daughter changes what's at stake. Empire also helped me think about how to use form in tandem with subject. Because of that, the process of developing the form for Interglacial was more intentional from the beginning of the project.   

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Growing up, I loved reading, though I didn't really start reading poetry until high school. In high school and college, in the 90's, friends and I would seek out book stores and record stores to hunt for new books and albums, in our own town and nearby towns too. We would swap the good stuff we discovered. Emily Dickinson was foundational for me then and still is. Also, I just don't think in terms of character or plot. I'm more drawn to images and moments. I have been experimenting with nonfiction. I have some unfinished essays that I need to return to eventually.  
 
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?
My process is both fast and slow! It can take me a year or more to figure out a project's subject and form. That process involves lots of reading and notetaking and experimenting. Once I have those pieces sorted out, the remainder of the work often comes more quickly, like over the course of a year. First drafts of early poems often do not look like their final shapes, but once I sort out those early poems, then I can write with fewer major revisions. 

My work does come from copious notes! I read many books and articles before and during the writing of both Empire and Interglacial. Nonfiction, criticism, poetry, natural histories. I also spend time in the field--hiking, walking, birding, driving. I probably filled about 4-5 notebooks during each of those projects.  

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?
Similar to my answer above, at the beginning, I'm experimenting, but then once I have the form and subject I write into it. I have a hard time writing short poems--I love sequences because you can stay in the subject and keep working it from different places, repeating images and language in different contexts. The poems in Interglacial are mostly divided by specific places. 

After that initial period of searching and experimenting, I am working on a book. And it's usually based on something I want to know more about--like the prairie in my first book and the Great Lakes in my second.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are not part of my process. I do enjoy people though so I like giving readings and attending readings and then chatting with other creative people at those kinds of events. I think community is really important to creative work.  
 
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 have many theoretical concerns: What are the origins of our current environmental crises, and how are they entangled with power and empire? What does it mean for us and for other species that humans are disappearing so many other forms of life, ethically, morally, for our survival and the survival of other lifeways? Why can't we address any of our current problems, environmental or otherwise? What does it mean for my daughter? What comes after, what remains, and what will it mean? How does language shape our perception of all of this?  

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?
I think one role for writers is to notice and make connections. Notice events and phenomena and connect them across time and history and communicate those observations and entanglements to others so we are aware or will remember and more people will notice too and think about those events and phenomena. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I usually think working with others who are reading your work is exciting. But I think you have to know when suggestions are being made that improve the work of the writer rather than shape the work into something else.  

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Hmm, to believe people when they tell you things, to be realistic when setting goals, to let yourself feel joy even when things feel bleak. Those are kind of self-helpy, but they are things I think of regularly! 
 
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 tend to write in bursts over a few months or a year, and then for periods of time I'm just reading and taking notes towards something new. When I'm in the middle of a project I tend to start by reading either NF or poetry, then I write for an hour or two and then maybe edit some previous work.  
 
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to other writers, like many writers do, and I always have my notebook to fall back on.  

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Hmm, I don't think I have one. Flat fields and rural roads sort of remind me of my childhood home. I live in a pretty urban neighborhood now, but I have some native plants in my yard and bird feeders and those things make my house feel like home. 
 
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?
Nature and science both influence my work, also experiences out in the field, walking, birding, driving--the visuals and bodily experiences of all those. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, Lorine Niedecker, but also science writers and essayists like EO Wilson and Barry Lopez, and theorists and critics like Donna Haraway, Lynn Keller, and Joan Retallack. I try to read a lot of poetry and am mainly interested in poetics that are experimenting at least a little. I read fiction for fun--where I'm not thinking as much about my own work but getting lost in a story. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Regarding writing, I've mostly participated in experiential residencies. I'd like to try one that is just for working where they feed you! In May 2027, I will be visiting the Arctic Circle with the Arctic Circle Artist and Science Residency Program. I've wanted to visit the far north for a while since working on subjects related to climate change for the last 20 years--I'm very excited to do that. I'm looking forward to traveling more with my daughter now that she's gotten a little older. I'm going to Glacier National Park this summer with my family and my brother's family. 

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?
I was interested in international studies as a student or publishing. Strangely I've also thought about nursing because of the interpersonal dimension, field biologist, maybe?

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I've always had to do "something else" as most writers do and those other things have alternated between teaching and nonprofit programming and fundraising, and I've just kept writing on the side--I've had some windows of time where writing became a bigger part of my time and times where it really was relegated to the sidelines. I imagine maybe that will continue to be the case in future!
 
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Instead of last great book, I'll mention two interesting books I've recently read: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano--it's wild. And then Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore which is a kind of eco-suspense book, a real-page turner. Re: film, late to the game, I recently watched Sinners with my husband. A great film, many intersecting themes and genre-mixing, working on all sorts of levels!

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a book-length series of roadkill poems based on notes I accumulated while commuting over the last four years. It approaches some of my writing themes from a different angle. The first half of the project is sort of singular and composed of many firsthand observations. I'm thinking more about the commons and the collective in the second half. I'm also reading texts about the Arctic for my trip next year, starting with A Woman in the Polar Night, a memior by Christaine Ritter from the 1930s and Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I've been studying some pelagic birding field guides too. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Spotlight series #120 : Carlos A. Pittella

The one hundred and twentieth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Lethbridge-based Brazil-born poet Carlos A. Pittella.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah, poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young, Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, American expat poet in London Katie Ebbit, Brooklyn poet Nada Gordon, Kingston poet Jason Heroux and Vancouver poet Scott Inniss!
 
The whole series can be found online here.