Spotlight series #124 : Gregory Crosby

The one hundred and twenty-fourth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Brooklyn poet and editor Gregory Crosby.

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, Vancouver poet Scott Inniss, Lethbridge-based Brazil-born poet Carlos A. Pittella, Toronto-based Palestinian and Iraqi writer Hajer Mirwali, Calgary artist, poet and musician Kevin Stebner and Canadian-American writer, editor, and educator Suzanne Zelazo!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Moustapha Mohamed Chein

Moustapha Mohamed Chein was born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and grew up in Nouakchott, Mauritania, carrying within him the dual memory of two contrasting lands. His trajectory is a long pilgrimage across continents—a poetic march where he gathers the shards and fragments of distant cultures to weave them at the threshold of his identity. A citizen of the world, he remains at his core an eternal nomad, guided by the scansion of memory, the intensity of desire, and the sacred quest for the Word.

The loss of his father—a tutelary figure, poet, writer, lawyer, and senator—left an indelible imprint upon his soul. From that moment on, poetry imposed itself as a bridge between absence and presence, a sanctuary where the dialogue continues with the one who inspired him. His first poem, Sur les Rails du bonheur (2010), was both an absolute commencement and a spiritual act of remembrance.

Moustapha’s love for poetry was nourished by his exiles and crossings. His voice finds a deep echo in the verses of Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Khalil Gibran, whose songs of earth, identity, and love he prolongs. To this Oriental sap responds the nomadism of Habib Ould Mahfoudh, whose circular march and memory of the sands accompany his pilgrim steps. This heritage blends with that of Africa and the fathers of Négritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, whose fleshly lyricism and quest for universal dignity he extends.

At this crossroads of cultures sits the musicality of Paul Verlaine, whose profound audacity taught his pen the art of liberating his inner song. Driven by this momentum, his voice opens to the freedom of Guillaume Apollinaire and invents its own new geometry: a punctuation liberated from scholastic rules, becoming organic, deploying breaths offered to the music of the text or erecting memorial locks to seal the instant. From this multiple filiation is born an intimate yet universal poetry, rooted in the sand but resolutely open to the winds of the world.

Parallel to his poetry, he embraced the rigor of law, walking with fervor in his father’s footsteps. His studies led him from the Mauritanian dunes to the universities of France, and onwards to Istanbul, where Ottoman memories anchored themselves to his journey. His path finally brought him to Montreal, Canada, where he completed his training for the Québec Bar in 2023.

Now established in Montreal, Moustapha unpacks his nomadic baggage. There, amidst the familiar fragrance of his Moorish tea, he writes poetry inhabited by the shadows of his father and his literary masters, while allowing his own voice to emerge — a voice shaped by grief, love, and the infinite quest for a place to belong. Through his verses, he pitches tents within the landscapes of heritage, love, hope, and desire, inviting the reader to enter and share the journey.

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

My first book was a spiritual threshold, an existential act of memory that anchored my nomadic breath into the eternity of the printed page. It taught me that poetry is not a mere luxury, but a biological necessity — a vital mechanism to inhabit my own displacement and map the fissures of the heart. Comparing my recent work to the previous is like watching an estuary meet the open sea. While my early poems sought the initial tracks of an elusive horizon, my current writing has entered the fire of the forge. The style has stripped itself of academic ornaments to embrace what I call the poetics of the hybrid—an organic movement where syntax bends on the anvil of raw rhythm, and silence itself becomes a structural pillar. It feels profoundly different because it no longer searches for a destination; it has accepted the trance of the journey. I am no longer just gathering the shards of my history; I am transmuting the very debris of exile into a sacred sanctuary where the soul can live and relive.

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

Poetry came to me as an absolute dictation, an internal Fado that left no room for the linear constraints of fiction or the rigid logic of non-fiction. When you are born with sand in your eyes, reality does not present itself as a structured narrative, but as a series of flashes, of mirages, and of intense vertical bursts. The tragic loss of my father—who was a poet, writer, lawyer, and senator—shattered any illusion of a quiet, prose-driven world. Fiction requires the patience of constructing castles; poetry demands the immediate release of the Cri (the Cry). It is the only space where absence and presence can fuse, where the wound can be instantly transmuted into a melody. I did not choose poetry; I surrendered to its biological imperative because Du kannst, denn du sollst.

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?

A project does not begin with an outline; it undergoes a long, invisible gestation within the subconscious before rising like a sudden wave. The actual act of writing happens in a state of high-velocity trance—it is a rapid, incandescent rush where the poem spills onto the white page all at once. Therefore, my first drafts appear remarkably close to their final shape, almost pristine in their raw rhythm. I do not keep copious notes or sketches. However, this lightning-fast birth is immediately followed by a conscious, almost surgical craft on the anvil. I return to the text to strip away the rhetorical fat, ensuring that every word becomes a monument and every line finds its asymmetric, untamed truth.

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?

A poem always begins with a single motif — a fragment of a landscape, a sensory vibration, or a rhythmic stuttering of the soul. I do not write isolated, standalone pieces, nor do I plan a book with a rigid, cold architecture. Instead, I work on a continuous, flowing tapestry where each poem acts as an autonomous echo of a larger, collective consciousness. My writing is a series of obsessive variations. I throw these fragments into the fire to extract only the rebellious, unyielding lines, allowing the book to organically compile itself around recurring leitmotivs that resist time and absence.

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 the physical consummation of my creative process. Because my poetry is deeply rooted in the oral traditions of the desert and the rhythmic cadences of the drum, the text is never truly complete until it is breathed into the air. I deeply enjoy readings because they strip the poem of its silent, paper armor and return it to its primal nature: a shared ritual, a communal trance. The stage becomes a collective space where my enjambments and horizontal tabulations act as musical cues, allowing the audience to feel the exact weight of my breaths and silences.

6.  Do 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?

My writing operates at the intersection of phenomenology and clinical art-therapy — what I term a phenopoetry. I am deeply concerned with the deconstruction of academic grammar to uncover a more primal, authentic tongue. Through my work, I am not trying to answer questions with intellectual formulas; rather, I am investigating how a fragmented identity can heal itself through the loop of musical repetition. The current question of our time is the crisis of displacement and spiritual nudity. In a world filled with digital noise and synthetic connections, the ultimate question is: How do we reclaim the sacredness of the Je (the Self) and transform the scars of exile into a habitable territory?

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?

The current culture often tries to reduce the writer to a mere producer of content or a decorator of phrases. But the true writer holds a sacred, almost terrifying office. Our role is to be the memory-keepers and the subverters of the cynical realism that paralyzes the modern soul. The writer must be an artisan of the forge who plunges a blade into the dead silence of the night to awaken the conscience of the world. We must refuse the temptation of polished, safe language. The role of the poet should be that of a Chérubin émissaire—a messenger who stands in the ruins, accepts the vulnerability of the human condition, and defiantly shouts an unyielding hymn to Life.

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

It is both a fierce battle and an essential blessing. Working with an editor who understands the temperature of your text is like having a companion in the forge. It can be difficult because my poetry relies on an unconventional geometry — a deliberate suppression of academic punctuation and a defense of the asymmetric line. A rigid editor might mistake a calculated rupture for a mistake. But an enlightened editor acts as a mirror; they help you ensure that your omissions are sharp, your majuscules steles (monumental capitals) are powerful, and that the text is entirely stripped of any decorative dross.

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

The most profound advice I carry with me comes from Paul Verlaine’s poetic decree: “De la musique avant toute chose / Et pour cela préfère l'Impair” (Music before all else / And for that, prefer the Asymmetric). This single line unlocked my entire relationship with the language. It gave my pen the courage to reject academic straightness, to embrace the beauty of the hesitation, and to understand that the truest rhythm always lies within the broken, uneven spaces of the line.

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 do not keep a clockwork, conventional writing routine, as the trance cannot be scheduled. My typical day begins in the crisp morning of Montreal, balancing the strict, intellectual rigor of my legal profession with the nomadic currents of my soul. The day opens with a sensory anchor: the slow, methodical preparation of my traditional thé Maure (Moorish tea). As the scent of the tea fills the room, it conjures the shadows of my father and my ancestors. I sit in that quiet space, staring at the white page or the screen, letting the immediate presence of the morning caress the mind until the words begin to flow.

11. When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for inspiration?

When the flow dries up, I return to the masters who first taught me how to breathe. I immerse myself in the deep, melancholic sands of Habib Ould Mahfoudh, the majestic elegies of Mahmoud Darwish, the incandescent prose of Arthur Rimbaud, or the intoxicating, unpunctuated freedom of Guillaume Apollinaire. If the page remains stubborn, I step away from literature entirely and listen to the rain, or I let the cyclical, mathematical perfection of Vivaldi install itself within me. I turn back to the Rien (the Nothingness)—that sacred, full vacuum of the subconscious—and wait patiently for the accident that will spark the next fire.

12.  What fragrance reminds you of home?

The sharp, smoky aroma of loose green tea leaves caramelizing over hot coals, mingled with the fresh scent of wild mint—the unforgettable fragrance of the thé Maure (Moorish tea). It is a scent that carries the immense weight of the Mauritanian dunes, the dry breath of the Harmattan, and the gentle laughter of my childhood. No matter how far my peregrinations take me, that smoke instantly reconstructs my home within my chest.

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?

Music is the absolute twin sister of my poetry. My lines are heavily structured by musical forms— whether it is the raw, percussive power of metallic cymbals, the traditional strings of the West African kora, or the sophisticated architecture of European classical music, like a mass or a Wagner concerto. Nature also exerts a powerful physical influence: the vast, silent geometry of the desert dunes, the profound solitude found while hiking in the mountains, and the erratic, unpredictable movement of migratory bird flights are shapes that directly dictate the movement of my verses on the page.

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

Outside of the great Arabic and African icons like Nizar Qabbani, Kahlil Gibran, Senghor, and Césaire, French avant-garde poetry is fundamental to my existence. The works of Guillaume Apollinaire, particularly his masterpiece Alcools, alongside the structural precision of René Char or Stéphane Mallarmé, are central to my life. His revolutionary decision to remove punctuation to let the pure, naked rhythm of the language emerge completely altered my vision of what a modern poem can do. He taught me that a poem can hold the entire modern world—its bars, its streets, its heartbreaks—while remaining deeply mystical.

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

I would love to collaborate directly with contemporary musicians and dancers to translate my poetry into a multi-sensory performance piece. I want to see my horizontal tabulations and my unpunctuated rhythms physically interpreted by the movement of a body or the vibration of an instrument in real-time, creating an environment where the audience doesn't just read the poem, but walks inside its trance.

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 am in the unique position of already living that alternate life. Had I not been a poet, I would be—and I am—a jurist. I completed my Québec Bar training in 2023. Walking in the footsteps of my late father, who was a brilliant lawyer, allows me to honor his memory everyday. There is a fascinating, secret symmetry between law and poetry: both require an absolute respect for the power of the Word, a surgical precision in language, and a deep desire to bring justice and order to the chaos of human relationships.

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

The realization that writing was my only chance at survival, my only true art-cure. When you carry the heavy weight of dual origins, of multiple exiles, and the overwhelming absence of a monumental father, you cannot simply exist in the world passively. You must build a sanctuary. I write because the spoken word fades, but the engraved line fixes the soul. I write because it is the only way to catch the insubordinate threads of my life, throw them into the fire, and extract something unique and eternal.

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

The last great book that shook me to my core was Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire, which I recently revisited. Its fluid modernity, its lack of punctuation, and its ability to blend the ancient mythologies of the Rhine with the raw energy of the twentieth century remain an endless source of artistic wonder. The last great film that deeply moved me was Timbuktu by Abderrahmane Sissako. Its visual poetry, its dignity in the face of oppression, and its profound rendering of the sacred silence of the desert dunes mirrored the deepest landscapes of my own soul.

19.  What are you currently working on?

I am currently putting the absolute final touches on my upcoming poetry manuscript, titled Leitmotive. It is an intense, deeply woven architecture spanning 108 pages, designed as a symphonic suite of obsessive variations and emotional transmutations. What has been shared of it so far is merely a glimpse into a much larger, continuous canvas. After exploring the deep sands of memory and displacement, Leitmotive stands as a definitive, avant-garde manifesto where syntax is deliberately broken on the anvil to extract a raw, healing chant, completely liberated from punctuation. It is a book that fully assumes its repetitions and its cries, treating the entire poetic experience as an ultimate, sovereign Therapy.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Serena Chopra, A Catalog of Future Mercies: Poems

 

Dowry death is often the murder of a wife by suicide—

hanging, drowned, self-poisoned and sleeping
in railroad tracks, her eyes slice 

blade of night train blaring
moon glazing everything 

suddenly delayed. (“In Afterimage”)

The third full-length poetry title by Seattle, Washington-based teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker, visual and performance artist Serena Chopra, following This Human (Coconut Books, 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017), is A Catalog of Future Mercies: Poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a uniquely and stunningly powerful book-length lyric exploring generational violence and abuse through the fragments of lyric journal and an assemblage of note-taking. “A fault is a lineage of catastrophe—” she writes, early on in the collection. “Tectonic rage, erosive surrender. / Rain shadows depriving land of water. / Fractured jaw of knuckled quartz. / Magma’s insidious brain. Stone / exhausted soft. // On the vulnerable plain, lightning / enrages drought. But we / can only imagine / a healthy need / for fire.” Chopra writes of her father and of mercy, of generations of family story, violence and memory, composing an emotionally vulnerable work of witness, structurally reminiscent of certain works by American poet Eleni Sikelianos, such as her hybrid/memoir You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. The accumulated string of lyric fragment in Chopra’s poems I would also compare to the late Canadian poet Barry McKinnon’s infamous long poem of the Canadian prairie, I wanted to say something (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1976), for their shared use of lyric fragment, archival photographs and prairie landscape. “In our only photograph,” she writes in the opening section of “The Prairie Hands Me a Love for Time-Under-Vacancy,” “we wear white. // Behind us, an empty riverbed runs into the road / breathless // between us // the riverbed traces a signal. What is depletion— / A prairie, a prayer, an edge spreading.”

Chopra’s expansive, book-length lyric is one that ripples, composed as accumulations, fragment across fragment, writing a vulnerable articulation across witness and mercy; of memory, document and archaeology. Composed as a remarkable way to document for the sake of seeing through the worst to perhaps allow the possibility comprehension and forgiveness, and moving eventually beyond. “Guilt is a knot inside a knot—inside her fist,” she writes, mid-way through the book, “mine. // How to weigh a hand for its mercy. // Let them make shoes of your leather. // The rope used for balancing buckets or heaving feed or tying cattle or / of rupture ringing— // A saying, a saying, // One good ear kneading the other’s silence.”