12 or 20 (second series) questions with Yamini Pathak

Yamini Pathak is the author of poetry collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025). She has published poetry chapbooks Atlas of Lost Places (Milk & Cake Press, 2020) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press, 2021). Yamini is a member of the 2025 Poets & Writers' Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort and serves as the editor of Inch with Bull City Press. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, and VONA. She was nominated for Best New Poets and was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize (South Asia). She holds an MFA in poetry from Antioch University, LA and her poems appear in West Branch, Poetry Northwest, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. Born in India, she lives with her family in New Jersey.

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, Atlas of Lost Places, was published in 2020 during the pandemic. I would say the publication did not outwardly change my life. At the time I had also started a low-residency MFA at Antioch University, LA so I was very much focused on that. However, I did register it as a private win. Having a small book of poems in print, one that I could hold physically, felt like the accomplishment of a dream.

My most recent work, Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps, which is my debut full-length poetry collection feels like a more complete expression of the work I had begun with my chapbook. I have learned a lot with the publication of this book — arranging a full-length collection is no easy task and it required multiple iterations until I was satisfied. I attended a publicity incubator in 2025 for debut authors, conducted by Poets & Writers. The program taught me that book publicity is a necessary step of publication — as important as proofing or cover design. Also, I learned that the publication and publicity paths can be very different for each poet depending on their preferences and circumstances and that there is no one way for a book to live in the world.

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

I first started by writing short, flash personal essays and wrote a couple of short stories but realized very soon that my stories lacked plot and I was more interested in capturing moments and emotion, especially the negative space occupied by the unsaid. Imagery felt important to me as a means to convey deep emotion. I was drawn to the compressed nature of poems. A poem puts language under pressure, and I felt I could say more in very few words.

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’m a slow thinker and writer. It takes me time to find the shape of poems and projects. This can be frustrating and scary, because not knowing where I’m going with the work is difficult. I am learning to be patient and to follow the different threads that may be pulling on me at any given time. I am learning to have faith that the threads will weave together eventually, and I will have clarity. I don’t make copious notes, but I tinker with the poems for months on and off until I’m satisfied. I tend to write over my poems when I revise and keep very few versions.

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 usually begins for me in a state of uneasiness or curiosity, and I start with a question in my mind. I circle around the question, and sometimes research and dig deeper. It’s not necessary that the question is answered by the end of the poem but unless I feel that I have made a discovery of some sort in the writing of it, the poem is not a keeper. I write about whatever’s on my mind on a particular day. By some magic, the poems coalesce towards some common themes.

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

Poems come alive when read aloud, especially by their authors. I love reading in community with other poets and enjoy the shared energy of readers and audience. Being in community and sharing space with poets and artists makes me feel that I am part of something bigger than myself and brings me so much joy!

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’m always concerned by craft aspects of poetry, in particular, formal aspects of the poem. I feel I have a lot to learn about the subtle aspects of form, meter, and grammar that undergirds the poem. At present, my thematic concerns are about aging, the failures of the body and spirit, the beauty contained in those very failures, and the compassion they deserve. I feel that much of society undervalues older people and sees them as irrelevant to society and I am concerned with creating a framework of living and viewing myself as a relevant, contributing member of my communities no matter what age I am. The biggest current question that I see around me is how to live in relationships of mutual care with oneself, the people around us, the earth and all its living creatures.

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 see the role of the writer as an agent who offers and/or analyzes ideas that are important to the culture or society in which they live. A writer is an observer or witness but also one who dares to express an opinion, which might lead to desired changes in the ways we think and live. I think the role of the writer should be one of influencer or at the very least, a source of ideas and productive discussion.

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

An outside editor was essential for me in putting together my collections. Being more removed from the details and less emotionally vested in it, they gave me a better sense of the overall shape of the collection. They identified which poems did not fit and where gaps existed in the arc of the narrative. They also offered feedback at the line level. Sometimes the feedback can be difficult to hear, but I am grateful to editors. They almost always make my collections better.

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

Pay attention, be slow, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

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?

A typical day begins for me, at 6 am. I pack lunch for my son, and when he leaves for school, I briefly look at my emails and try very hard (not always successfully) to stay away from my phone and social media. Depending on my mood, I either practice meditative breathing for about 20 minutes or I read —usually poetry or non-fiction. After reading, I turn to my current work. It could be a poem I’m writing or one I’m translating, or editing, or simply a journal entry. During the day, I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to writing because I take care of the home and my 85-year-old mother who lives with us. I try to fit in a walk or go to the gym. Writing takes place in the early part of the day or late in the evening.

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

When I feel stalled, I usually call a poet friend and try to talk through the difficulties. I also turn to reading poems or prose that inspires and makes me want to write. I copy phrases and passages that speak to me into my notebooks and explore those concerns in my own writing. Sometimes I take a break from my desk and visit a local museum for inspiration. I’m lucky that I live close to Princeton University, with a newly opened art museum and plenty of pop-up art. Another favorite escape is the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, an outdoor sculpture museum and gardens.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The scents of cooking— dal and spices remind me of India and the home where I grew up.

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?

All of these are influences for my work. When I’m feeling out of inspiration, I take myself on an artist date to a nearby art museum. Ekphrasis or responding in writing to art is the easiest way to break out of a writing block. Walking outdoors is an important part of my daily rituals. I especially love walking to a marsh behind my neighborhood and listening for birds and frogs there. Even though I walk the same paths every day, there is always something new to observe and feel astonished by. I feel that science and poetry are closely related in that they investigate the mysteries of the world--- both are fueled by curiosity and wonder, both are capable of invoking awe. The writings of Carl Sagan, Robert Macfarlane, and Diane Ackerman are a few popular science writers who have inspired me.

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

I read widely, wherever my curiosity takes me. While I’m constantly reading poetry written by friends and contemporaries, these days I’m leaning more towards non-fiction. At present, I’m reading Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane that studies three river systems in different parts of the world to seek an answer to that question. I’m also reading The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker.

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

I would like to travel more, especially exploring history, art, and artists in my home country of India. I would also like to learn visual art, astronomy, and singing Indian classical music.

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?

Before I was a writer, I designed and developed software for investment banking. I was very good at that work but it’s not something I want to go back to. If I could do anything, I would love to study astrophysics and research the origins of the universe.

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

I’ve always enjoyed the way books and stories have the power to transport me to extraordinary places. I suppose I wanted to create stories that could do the same for myself and others. I love playing with language and its subtle arrangements. I grew up in India surrounded by multiple languages and regional accents. The sounds and movements of language in play are fascinating to me.   

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

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May. I loved this book about anxiety, gathering attention, and hierophany in a world where our attention is increasingly fragmented. The last great film I saw is a Bollywood film from 1975 called “Mausam” (which translates to “Season”). A musical with poetry for song lyrics, it is an inter-generational story of the way shame can be a barrier to giving and receiving romantic, filial, and platonic love.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am translating poems by award-winning poet Kirti Kesar from the Hindi language into English. Her poems have a strong bend towards social justice and draw on Indian epics to comment on the Indian political situation of the 1990s to early 2000s, which I find fascinating and challenging to translate.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me

 

Under Russian’s boot,
under England’s boot, 

they sailed off
to become the boot 

of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees— 

investment companies
bulldozing the windbreaks, 

filling in the sloughs, flattening
hills and houses, seeding the ditches, 

every arable, pilfered inch— 

the settlement story going sour
in the heat and the haze. (“Toward an Origin Story”)

Edmonton-born Peterborough, Ontario-based poet and editor Laurie D. Graham’s latest, following Rove (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2013), Settler Education (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2016) and Fast Commute (McClelland and Stewart, 2022) [see my review of such here], is the poetry title Calling It Back to Me (McClelland and Stewart, 2026). Composed as a book-length and quartered suite—with extended sequence-sections “Calling It Back to Me,” “The Great-Grandmothers,” “Toward an Origin Story” and “A Good Closing”—Graham writes specifically of maternal lines, “her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent,” tracing and trailing the stories of women who traded one homeland for another, exploring broken memory, history, geography and genealogy, and the inherent colonial impulse they carried. “Still the urge is for / story. She wants to give.” Graham writes, on the opening page. “A bright yellow moon / rises in her mind. // A small pink curl / of cloud. // No language / for any of it.”

One can argue the length and breadth of Graham’s explorations through poetry, and the book-length poem, have their solid foundations in the prairie long poems of the 1970s—think of Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski, Monty Reid, et al—blending with the archaeological precision and craft of Tim Lilburn or Don McKay, as well as contending with the more contemporary lens of the legacies of colonialism. “Northern Ireland    in the 1920s // and not a word,” she writes, across the expansive second section, a long poem stretched across fragments of visual space. Further along the same thread, offering: “Her eldest daughter teaches her children      her grandchildren // that they came from a place      it appears    they never lived in /// All  her brothers   already here // and cousins    and uncles        then husbands   then her // a siphoning [.]” Through Graham, each subseuqnet collection provides new ways for her to think through histories both intriguing and deeply complicated, rooted in those prairie stretches. Given the length and breadth, the distances, of her work so far, it would be intriguing to catch a selected and new volume of her work, for the sake of articulating a wider overview of her work-to-date. But for now, through Calling It Back to Me, Graham attempts to articulate a people seeking stability amid the upheavals of history, and the benefits of the author’s hindsight; and seeking a language to match with their experiences, too fresh and unfamiliar to quickly do anything but come up short. As the opening section continues:

Edges of the photographs
disintegrating. Names 

on the census misspelled.
Creases erasing the facts 

from the birth certificate.
The town history’s broken spine. 

The story as he told it
in his last years 

from a distance. All this
is coming into my hands. 

A one-word answer
on an immigration form 

becomes our imagined

founding, what we say
about our being here.

Lisa Fishman, Write Back Now! : A Novel

The time of year that I’ve arrived is not the time of year when anyone arrives. This storm is an example of why no one comes here at this time of year. Tomorrow the neighbour, an uncle of the woman whose house this is, will say: “That was the biggest weather event in twenty years.” I know what the neighbour will say because it’s already tomorrow, after the storm.

I was intrigued to see Write Back Now! : A Novel (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2026), not only the latest title by American-Canadian writer Lisa Fishman, but the latest in 1366Books, the prose imprint edited and curated by writer, editor and small press impresario Stuart Ross. Write Back Now! follows other Fishman titles such as the compact and Covid-era poetry title One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) and her debut short story collection, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of prior poetry titles including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. I’m fascinated by the long, narrative thread that Fishman composes across this novel, one that harkens back to the most recent prior title in the same imprint, Northern Ontario writer sophie anne edwards’ A Mouth of Vowels (Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There is such fluidity to Fishman’s prose, a very different stretch and tone and even music to that of her short story collection, a book that seems much more straightforward in comparison (and I wouldn’t call that collection of stories straightforward, certainly).

Composed as a sequence of moments within immediate and intimate space, Write Back Now! unfolds into a story of a narrator with a husband, living on a remote shoreline with an ocean, and living in a house owned by a woman “I met once and whose mother and father, aunt and uncle, and other aunt and uncle live in the three surrounding houses. I am the one not related, the one who clips clothes to the line when it’s -17 Celsius and they simply freeze. Well, then they thaw.”

There’s a fluidity and an intimacy in Fishman’s accumulated, occasionally disjointed, prose sections, and an attention to detail to this novel, akin to edwards’ own, that stretches back through Canadian writing (through early Michael Ondaatje novels, perhaps) to Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), offering accumulations of lyric passages that require attention, otherwise one might simply slip between the music of the lines, and miss something important. “On the landlocked farm where my husband and I planted an orchard,” Fishman writes, later on in the book, “all four seasons come and go in turn. Its calendar, if calendars were site-specific and varied in scope accordingly, would be the longest.”

Part of the delight in catching books such as these is in knowing that, for the longest time, such lyric novels, such narratives of lyric prose haven’t been easily published in Canada (our publishing leaning more conservative than the scope of our writing)—and this book, so clearly crafted and precise and lush, offers some of the best of what the small press can provide. Seeing that Ross, through Guernica, is providing an ongoing home for such works is hopeful, indeed.