Anne F. Walker, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length

 

Settling In

Unbelievably small roomette and a lounge car full of light. Full of people, fields, the bay the delta. Just stepping off and stepping in. I have crossed this country with my father, with my mother and sister. With my son and his father. Driven across with furniture as I migrated, first one way, then back. No Wi-Fi on this train. Lifting from Rosedale passing homes with green kidney shaped pools. Dry grassland. A smell of croissant moving through the cars before lunch. Voices waft in snippets, talk about a small round house, internet, taking the train, walking to a sale.

I’ve been aware of Anne F. Walker and her work for some time, aware that she was in Toronto during her early publishing career, having relocated to Berkeley, California for her doctoral work at UC Berkeley, and currently living and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her latest collection is the prose poem suite Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length (Eyewear Publishing Ltd./The Black Spring Press Group, 2025), a collection that self-describes on the back cover thusly: “These 100-word prose poems are contained. They spread between sections. They break out into themselves. They repeat. They reflect on landscapes, bodies, travel, time, and rooted memories, concentrating on precision of image, narrative, and language.” Prior poetry titles by Walker, for those keeping track, include the full-length collections Six Months’ Rent (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1991), Pregnant Poems (Black Moss Press, 1994), Into the Peculiar Dark (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998) and The Exit Show (Kingsville ON: Palimpsest Press, 2003), as well as the chapbook when the light of any action ceases (Georgetown KY: Finishing Line Press, 2016).

The structure of a suite of “100-word prose poems” are an intriguing constraint, sixty-four poems grouped together into four sections: “The Train to Water,” “Hometown Return,” “Kaleidoscope Box,” and “Demeter’s Country.” Set as a loose travelogue through and between Toronto and San Francisco, the book exists geographically, even culturally, between these two distinct poles, set not as a linear straight line between the two, but almost offering the two locations where the author had lived to where she currently lived as a kind of counterpoint. “Knowing it has something to do with me,” she writes, to open the second of a run of nine self-contained poems, each titled “Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street),” “locked in the narrative. When he turns to me a sun shines. Dusk falls when he turns away. I disappear into a Pavlovian dark: a mouth of childhood swallowing me whole.” This is a book of memory, perhaps, across a suite of prose poems, offering points along the grid of her life. She writes experiences within each period, each place, with sidebar considerations in a cluster of “@Fifteen” poems that write of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, or working as a hostess “at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff,” for example. As that particular poem writes:

Just then leaving the hostess gig at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff after I’d been fired. On those mountain roads, the clarity of sunlight and clear mountain air. That breath where I just felt somehow a fleetly neurtral truth that I was still a child, and that I should not be out on the highway. With my thumb stuck out. that all my bravado was false. There isn’t as much narrative to that memory. A moment like the morning light on a truck and the crisp shadow it casts. The moment moved by me, and I kept hurtling forward.

The poems sit curiously between a narrative of unseen beginnings and overt conclusion, writing stealth and wisdom across quiet narratives of movement. The narrative impulse is somewhere in the realm of Lydia Davis fictions or the prose poems of Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected here], presenting a prose lyric rich in layerings and imagery, straightforward paths and hints of what may exist beyond the boundaries of each page. “An unease of ocean, large waves,” begins “Red Rock Beach,” “and of undertow pulling out to sea. Close to our towel the young slender couple dances half-dressed to invisible music. The wide ocean opens its wide mouth and waits.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dawn Tefft

Once Upon a Riot, Dawn Tefft’s first full-length poetry book, came out through Match Factory Editions in June 2025.  Dawn’s chapbooks include Gosling (Anhinga Press), Fist (Dancing Girl Press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark).  Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, and Fence.  She earned a PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review, and works as a union representative in Chicago.

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

My first chapbook, Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations, consisted of very short, lyrical poems that played a lot with language, sound, and repetition.  It was a project book focused on interrogating how my mother had come to live in poverty.  The length and style of the poems in my first full-length book of poems, Once Upon a Riot, varies a great deal, though it’s another project book, this one focused on the importance of resisting forms of oppression such as fascism and economic exploitation while also examining what it’s like to raise a child in our political moment.

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

 I suspect that I came to poetry first because I’m not a storyteller.  I prefer parataxis, ellipsis, juxtaposition, dreaminess, etc. over linear narrative.  I prefer suggestion over directness in writing.  I enjoy poetry because it’s a way of speaking that isn’t normally provided much space in life.  It’s a way of saying that is, when done well, always pushing at the borders of language, of what is sayable or knowable.  I think of it as being akin to theory in that it challenges the reader to co-author the piece by filling in the gaps.

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?

I used to spend a great deal of time revising poems, and I used to draw a lot on notes.  Now that I’ve been writing for so many years, it comes more quickly and requires less revision.  It always involves a certain amount of recursivity throughout the writing process, experimenting and changing things as I go, but the final revisions take less time now.  Having said that, I recently revisited a poem I wrote twenty-three years ago after moving to Seattle.  It’s stylistically different from what I write now, but I realized I still liked it.  I decided the end lines were in the way of the poem, so revised those, submitted it for publication and a few days later received word from LUNA LUNA Magazine, which publishes poems I love, that they were publishing it.  It’s up now in their December 2025 issue.  Sometimes you have to work on something for decades to get it just right.

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?

It depends.  Both/and.

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

I love public readings.  Although I prefer poems on the page over poems read aloud, I love the way that reading a poem out loud changes the poem and draws out different elements of it.  It’s kind of like how if you use light to examine a particle, it causes the particle to move, so you can’t ever know the original location of the particle exactly since looking at it makes it move.  Once you read a poem out loud, the original poem on the page has been transformed into a different poem.

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?

As I said in an earlier response, I think of poetry as being akin to theory in that it challenges the reader to co-author the piece by filling in the gaps.  So my concerns would be not to state anything too directly, because I want the reader to be challenged, I want them to find many different things in the poem, I want reading the poem to be generative of a reader’s own creative processes.  When I’m writing, I rarely have specific things in mind that I want to say; I know it’s a cliché, but I write to discover, to play, to unearth things from my own mind and from the possibilities inherent in language, rather than to say “X.”  However, when writing as well as when revising, I do have a sense of what’s emerging for me as a reader, and I will lean into that, clarify certain things, etc.  So it’s not that there aren’t things I’m aiming for at times, there definitely are, but those things become evident through writing.

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 writers bring beauty to a world in need of beauty.  Most of my favorite writing deals with painful or ugly subjects, but the writing itself sings.  It can also bring insight, foster empathy, and help us feel connected to each other and the larger world.  Art enriches the world, makes the world livable and even enjoyable at times for me.

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

I find working with an outside editor to be an easy process that strengthens my work.  Also, an editor is an audience, and it’s always helpful to know how an audience outside of yourself reacts to your work.

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

I don’t know if I’ve heard it as advice, but I think it’s important to write for both yourself and for an outside audience.  I always have my own pleasure and the pleasure of others in mind.  If I just focus on one or the other, I think the work tends to be less interesting.  I guess it’s important to balance your relationship with yourself, with others, with the larger world, with literary communities, and with language as a historical construct.  Not that you should constantly be aware of that balance, but you should resurface from time to time and dive back in with it in mind.

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?

My routine varies.  Sometimes I write when I feel compelled to write.  Other times, I make myself write.  I definitely don’t write creatively every day, though, and am pretty strongly opposed to the notion that one needs to write every day, which seems like it was probably more doable for more people back when the middle class was more robust. 

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

Other people’s writing, visual art, film, TV, the world around me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Incense, candles made with essential oils, my child’s sweat.

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?

Yes, I love film, especially slow cinema.  Think Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.  And now that there is finally a lot of what I consider literary-quality TV, I love that, too.  I think Severance is top notch.  I can’t fully grasp what’s going on in the surreal world of that show, and I love its elusive nature, though there is so much in the show that is of course familiar and grounds me in the world that they’ve created and which is, to an extent, a commentary on our working lives.  I love visual art and art that defies genres or is cross-genre.  I recently saw the Yoko Ono exhibit at the MCA in Chicago.  I’ve written some ekphrastic poems or poems just generally influenced by, or referencing, art.  It’s all part of the swirl that I’m moving through that is the context for my own writing.  And I think that both “high” art and pop culture make for great conversation partners.

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

Some works that I consider important: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Snow Part by Paul Celan, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. The Neapolitan Series by Elena Ferrante (starting with My Brilliant Friend) is hands-down the best work of literature I’ve encountered; it’s brilliant on both the micro- and macro-levels.  It’s just as attentive to nuances of emotional exchanges between friends and the inner workings of the mind as it is to global and regional politics and socio-economic systems.  And I’m loving the work put out by Match Factory Editions, the press that published my new book of poems. 

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

There are so many different project books that I’d work on if I had time enough.  I wish I could have hyper focuses for each book and work on them simultaneously.

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?

Well, I work as a union representative, and I used to be a college instructor.  I enjoy both of those occupations.  I’ve found that being a writer made me better at each of them.

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

I write because I’m compelled to write.  Because it’s both a need and a desire.  I like the intellectual and creative challenges it offers.  I like it as a form of expression, of exploration, of cognition.  I like how it problematizes the world as much as, or more than, it clarifies it.

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

I recently read the following books, all of which I enjoyed: Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis, All Fours by Miranda July, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Hood Witch by Faylita Hicks, Domestic Corpse by Paul Paul Martínez Pompa, and Concrete is More Beautiful Disfigured and Stained by Snežana Žabić.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Individual poems that come to me as they do.  Not sure what shape the larger projects will take yet, but I have a couple things in mind.  Currently considering writing a book of some very boxy prose poems and a book of some very airy lyric poems with lots of gaps to be filled in by the reader.  I want them to be very different projects.  I think most poets find a style and stick to it.  But I like to play around a lot.  I want to do all the things.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Parc Oméga : outside you are three wolves,

Last week we spent an evening, night and part of a day at Parc Omega, a Safari-like park just outside of Montebello, Quebec. There's often so much activity, from music lessons to Guides to birthday parties to other things, we'd barely been able to catch our breath, or do something as a quiet unit for a while, it seemed. We'd been to the Parc prior, driving through to see the wolves, boar, bears, deer (which you can feed carrots to, from your car), silver foxes, moose, bison, etcetera. We'd only driven through (roughly an hour to ninety minutes to drive through), Christine suggesting there were cottages one could rent, with options of a panoramic view, or into a space where wolves might congregate. We picked the wolves, the whole one side of the building set as window, watching what was most likely three wolves wandering, moving, strolling. White wolf who walks by the window, in one direction. White wolf who walks by the window again, in the same direction, again. A third, a fourth time. As though this wolf, these wolves, a pattern, a path, worn into snow. One who spent much of the evening on a small mound, sleeping. The same (presumably) white wolf that would wander by and prod it, move a bit, before returning to their spot. All their movements, set upon a pattern.

We suspected that their food was delivered somewhere in this space, which is what would bring them by. 

It was a lovely, meditative space, with the option for a small fire in the woodstove, as well; although the hour drive there took two, given traffic and snow (and near white-out driving conditions, along highway 50), after the hour-plus I spent collecting the children from each of their schools, collecting Christine from work (the first forty minutes of our drive out of town purely on King Edward in Lowertown, which was irritating). While (finally) there, nestled into our cottage, we attempted best to keep off machines or phones while there, and Christine could hear them howling throughout the night. I don't think the young ladies did. Aoife and I played Uno, our game lasting around an hour or so, until I finally won (by a hair's breadth, to be sure).

This is far different than those childhood family trips I recall going to Parc Safari with my parents and wee sister, back in the 1970s (a space I somehow thought was north, but a map now tells me it sits south of Montreal, just by the American border). Seeing giraffes and lions in a Canadian setting always seemed confusing to me (especially an outdoor setting), but Parc Omega was rather nice. And the horrible cold was so cold, the next morning one of the workers wandered by removing snow with a leaf-blower, if you can imagine. Terrible.

We woke to wolves wandering, attending food, it looked like. We woke to wolves and to the crows, which might have been ravens, who also wished for some of whatever the wolves were having. Good morning, wolves. Good morning, crows.

And then, close to lunchtime, leaving our cabin to attend the rest of the parc, strolling through with the car, our young ladies feeding carrots to deer through the windows, Rose catching videos of her feeding (we were told we weren't allowed to talk when she was recording), and an eventual lunch at the chip truck. Curious to be in a space off-season, mid-week, nearly empty of anyone else but the occasional worker, attending repairs on the roads or elsewhere. The quiet of minus twenty, minus twenty-three. This solace of wolves.

above/ground press author spotlights : substack,

Since building my above/ground press substack last spring, I've started posting a series of interviews with above/ground press authors (new platform, new project, after all), focusing on authors published through the press with a new/recent chapbook, as well as multiple publications with the press, to give each interview a bit more heft. Since May of last year, I've posted nineteen interviews, the full list including Amish Trivedi, Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid, Lydia Unsworth, Micah Ballard, Nathanael O’Reilly, Ben Ladouceur, Michael Sikkema, Kate Siklosi, Ken Norris, Lillian Nećakov, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Cary Fagan, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, russell carisse and Pearl Pirie with forthcoming interviews still to post with poets including Guy Birchard, Jill Stengel, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, N.W. Lea, Travis Sharp, Rose Maloukis and Gary Barwin, among others. Otherwise, I do post a round-up of new publications every two months or so, as well as a round-up of the weekly "author activity" posts, also every two months or so (but I didn't want the substack to simply be a replication of the blog, right?) Free to sign up! And lands as an email, direct to your in-box. Huzzah! And can you believe the press turns thirty-three years old this summer? Gadzooks!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jake Rose

Jake Rose is the author of JOAN, winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poets Book Prize, forthcoming in March, 2026. A poet, artist, and educator living in California’s Central Valley, Rose teaches at the University of California, Davis, and has work published or forthcoming in West Branch, The Seventh Wave, Foglifter, Coach House Books, and elsewhere. Other literary works include The Art of the Death, a book-length erasure poem; The Month Books, a collection of handmade chapbooks exploring chronic illness and hybrid form; and Spectropoetics, a location-based series of interspecies writing.

1. How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
JOAN will be my first published book! Honestly, it has changed my life in a way that still feels a little surreal because I never thought I would enter the world of traditional publishing. Before this, I had been in the practice of writing zines and chapbooks and circulating them amongst friends myself, or creating poetry projects and making them freely accessible online.

2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to fiction or non-fiction?
I never set out to write poetry. In college, a close friend of mine, the poet Jamie Thomson, said the craziest thing I had ever heard, which was that he wanted to be a poet. I really wanted to be his friend, and so writing my own poetry became a part of that.  So...I became a poet because I wanted to make friends! 

3. How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing come quickly, or is it a slow process?
I think copious notes is more my style. First there is a ritual, observation, interaction, or attention to the body or environment. Then notes, accumulation or accretion, then editing, which is like sculpture and collage. I'm trying hard to use as many words as possible to make writing not sound like writing, because the act of writing is hard for me, so I use every method possible to trick myself into thinking what I do isn't writing.

4. Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you working on individual poems or a book from the beginning?
Always a book or a project from the beginning as a container for the poem writing process. I like to start by outlining a structure, choosing a title, creating a piece of art, and assembling what I think of as a little shrine of objects, images, and texts. I usually make a ritual or constraint for generative writing before I begin drafting, and then the poems arrive inside that container.

5. Are public readings part of your creative process? Do you enjoy them?
Reading out loud to anyone, or even by myself is central to my creative process! It creates an easy way for me to find the parts of a poem that aren't working.

6. Do you have theoretical concerns behind your writing? What questions are you trying to answer?
My life is full of questions, so my poems are full of questions, too. Maybe whose language is considered legible or illegible, and what does it mean to inhabit illegibility? How can you maintain ambiguity or plurality and resist authority (of the narrator or of grammar or even text itself) in narrative forms?

7. What do you see as the role of the writer in larger culture?
Writers have many roles, or at least we should imagine that we do. One is to transform and renew language, taking it back from systems of empire and capital that instrumentalize it for their purposes. Another is to simply document, record, witness, testify. Another is to listen deeply. And another is to find the limits of language, what is communicable, use language as a mode of exploration.

8. Do you find working with an outside editor difficult or essential?
I love the times that I have been able to collaborate with an editor. It is so fun! I love talking about poems, trying new things, and experimenting with work.

9. What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard?
Honestly the best advice I ever got was "keep going", which doesn't sound like a lot, but it changed my practice. I had, I thought, finished an observational drawing, and a friend of mine who was an artist came over to look at it and just said, calmly, "keep going". I had resolved the image too soon, without taking any risks in the composition. It took me a long time to understand that, and apply it to my writing, and it's still something I think about every time I work, when I am trying to ask if I have committed myself to the page, have I said the truth yet, have I found what was at stake.

10. What kind of writing routine do you keep?
I don’t have a daily routine. Because my work is project-based, I may not write at all for months, and then design a project and write every day for a sustained period until a draft exists. So I have no daily writing practice.

11. When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn?
Reading, and being outside. I try to take pressure off myself, remove any self-imposed deadlines, and return to the world for perspective. I used to feel really bad about these times, but then I read, I think in The Importance of Being Iceland, the idea that periods of time when you aren't writing can be conceptualized as a fallow field. So you might look at it and say, why isn't anything growing here, when really, what's happening is nutrients are returning to the soil so new growth can occur. It's just harder to see.

13. Are there other forms that influence your work besides books?
All of them. I came to poetry after years of thinking of myself as a musician and visual artist, so writing feels like an expansion from those earlier practices. Nature and ecology are especially influential for me, I grew up in a small rural town, where your constant interlocutor was the outdoors, and I don't think that ever really leaves you.

14. What other writers are important for your work or your life?
Writers who have had an outsized impact on how I think about poetics are Bhanu Kapil, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, Jack Spicer, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nikky Finney, Eduardo C.Corral, Tiana Clark, and CAConrad to name just a few, but I think constant companions for me are my friends, people like Catherine Niu, Jamie Thomson, Lena Tsykynovska, Saba Keramati, whose work I am always in direct conversation with.

15. What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
I just started a literary magazine, and I would love to see it flourish.  Reading the work of new poets has been one of the most inspiring things that's happened to me lately.

16. If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
I'm a teacher now, but I've had a lot of random jobs before this: delivery driver, barista, stablehand, construction worker, volunteer organizer. I think I would have a job that involved meeting new people. A waiter? If I got to wear something fancy.

17. What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Honestly, what made me stick with writing was practicality. Music and visual art weren’t as sustainable for me at the time when I turned to poetry more deeply, and poetry was something I could do by myself for free!

18. What was the last great book you read? The last great film?
I recently read Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones and loved it.

19. What are you currently working on?
Thanks for asking! I’m working on a second poetry book. It's a strange kind of memoir/anti-memoir about a time in my twenties, when I was moving around the country frequently, doing part-time sex work and manual labor. The poems are written in prose, lyric, and experimental forms, and are structured to reflect the nonlinear experiences of queer time, grief, and intimacy. It's much more directly autobiographical than my first book, and I'm trying to let that vulnerability guide the writing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death

 

better my pain, my body
to swindle me than whatever is numb and fancy
who is responsible for these hacky people? 

I heaped my body over frozen routes
domed rosette traps crackling under me 

I was made, like the mother deer, to survive by the first
chamber of my goods

I will not deplete the world for myself
I will not deplete myself for the world 

and by what name do you know your suffrage?

I’m a bit behind, it would seem, just now seeing Denver, Colorado poet and literary critic Jennifer Soong’s recent title, Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024), and she’s already a new collection out since then I should probably attempt to garner, My Earliest Person (The Last Books, 2025). Otherwise, Soong is the author of titles such as Near, At (New York NY: Futurepoem, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit, 2022) (another book I seem not to have caught), as well as the dos-a-dos chapbook title When I Ask My Friend, by Jennifer Soong/Points of Amperture, by Daniel Owen (Brooklyn NY: DoubleCross Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Comeback Death is a book-length lyric suite constructed via a triptych of extended sections of lyric fragments and self-contained moments—“I. Contempt” (“for Sappho”), “II. Entr’acts: Or, the Gist of Uneven Bars, Sirens, and the Gossip of Fish and Feather” (“for Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian”) and “III. Smoke” (“for Ingeborg Bachmann”)—all of which collaborate in a book of voices and responses, clarifications and . Working her texts as a blend of response and homage to the works of particular poets, each section’s lyrics and lyric fragments wrap around and move through and across as a kind of conversation between Soong and her particular subject/target. “to this day I do not understand / though it seems I could / this unhappiness which without / I could not solve,” she writes, as part of the opening section, “yet with it am lost to / cleverer colors, sorrier troubles / always unrelating me to other men— [.]” The poetry-collection-as-conversation as a form, working so overtly, is certainly not a new one, and Soong’s approach is very different than, say, Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of suchhere], and possibly might be closer to the approach of Philadelphia poet Laynie Browne’s array of book-length poet response collections [see my review of her latest here]. Soong responds, but she works through each particular author as a way through which to respond, as a means, perhaps, as opposed to an end. It is through her subjects, her dedications, that such responses might even be possible. As Soong’s third section, dedicated to Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) begins:

Why does this nothingness take me
            for one who cares for waking hours
drunklessness spent in shirts never touched by
                                                            the one I want.
I go to work and the nothingness
fills the insides of my fingers, my eyeballs
of nothingness, my heart.

To best understand another person, it is said, one needs to walk a mile (or kilometre, I suppose) in their shoes. For one writer to best understand another, subsequently, is to work this kind of literary response, one that can get far deeper into the bones and earth of a writer’s approach and thinking than writing a review or an essay. Or, as the second section, for Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010) and LynHejinian (1941-2024), two important (and even legendary) Bay Area poets, editors and mentors, begins:

was it always
that? my face
collapses in the sea
tender
splits
with which to slash
open requests. hmm.
the birds are becoming
watering vessels.
strangle me soon or I am
reluctant to have you over.
in the outer-space of your eyes
I’ve been thinking

“In Comeback Death,” Thom Donovan writes to open his note at the back of the collection, “Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others. This starts with direct address, with a you marked by a grammar of suffering different than I.” In her own note that precedes this, Soong writes of a shift of her work from sounding “mostly American and sometimes British” into a blend, after she relocated from New Jersey to Oxford, into elements of German, Russian and French. “Being Chinese,” she writes, “I didn’t have to worry as much about whether or not my poems, my feelings, or my tears would turn out Asian. They simply did. And being a Chinese-American in England meant that I could make my new pastoral surroundings, with its cows and swans, as Chinese as ever, since so many of the early Chinese poets had been landscape poets away from home. In any case, the opening section of what you’ve read was really an English thing, which means that I dedicated it, as I did, to Sappho.” As she writes to end her own two-page note:

None of this really matters too much when it comes to the reading of these poems, which are busy with dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity. It’s only because syntax is always related to feeling, and because feeling is always (in part) physical and therefore related to place, and because place is always (in part) imagined and felt, and because all of this allows us to be in multiple places at the same time that I have thought it may be of some interest to put this down.