1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Certainly, Boy with Thorn changed my life. It suddenly thrust me onto a kind of national stage and lead to pivotal moments in my life, such as traveling to Palestine in 2016 for the Palestine Festival of Literature. When I leaf back thru that book, I notice an orderly, “tight,” well-workshopped book that explores the pain of not “fitting” with one’s body, if they did fit a queer & black identity, and the possibility of yet claiming that body in future. This diverges from Death of the First Idea—a bigger, and in some ways messier project about embarking on that reclamation. In some ways, I feel as if I’ve been on a Dantean trilogy: where I was “lost in a wood,” traveled thru a hellscape, banked in Purgatory—and am now contemplating what Paradise means for a black, trans woman. I italicized that word only to call attention to the fact that, prior to transitioning, I had no word: neither “man” nor even “non-binary” much made sense to me and the communities I interact with. And it does seem important to remind us all that Gender isn’t only a personal revelation, but a social contract of sorts: otherwise, the desires for correct pronoun-usage by others wouldn’t have as much significance or sting. My second book explores this terrain, along a backdrop of the archaic and the future. I have new questions for the lyric like—“Why be tight?” “What is being held back, potentially, or denied a voice given such conscription?”
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I take handsomely from anywhere, and am constantly anticipating my next dive thru a Wiki rabbit-hole. I collect a lot of scraps of language. Sometimes for how a thing’s been said, after which I perform a sort of autopsy on that language to figure out, grammatically, how it works & succeeds; sometimes other times for what’s been said. I don’t have a conscious—or at least haven’t yet—had a fully aware idea that I was preparing a book thru most of both my first two books, but I assume this might less and less be the reality. As you write & publish more books, one grows ever more conscious she is publishing books. That’s also to say, one grows aware that a readership for their work exists and a readership who will arrive with some degree of expectation. For a long time, doubt courses thru my body at this acknowledgment; but now—now that I’ve written the messy book—I feel more courageous. I feel permitted to explore the lengths of my poetics.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Sure, public readings matter to me and the work. It wasn’t always this way. A naturally shy, bookish kid, I remember dreading the arrival of readings while at the same time recognizing its value. The value is community. And I recognize an early lesson: that to place ourselves in deliberately uncomfortable situations can encourage eventual ease, even familiarity. It’s been a while now since I was fully in the swing of readings, but I am looking forward to them. It’s important to me my work succeeds on the page & in the air—I even say so directly in one poem. Our art is to, first, to make, then to share.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve longed for an editor, a real editorial relationship, since I discovered they exist. And I feel lucky now to have found one in my editor at Knopf. I personally believe more editors, at the level of journals, should engage revisionally with poems. It’s often that we can’t see our own brilliance, and that should make sense as to state directly in any light hurts the eye. An outside reader, but one with authority, offers that glimpse at the traveling photon; it may even see, before the light is exactly perceivable, the genius yet to come. I find myself particularly good at reading the work of others for a critical revision; it’s one of my happy services.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Toni Morrison is famous for saying, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” She was a genius who understood the seduction of what I’ll just call the social world & all its ills, and how it drives the writer into unnecessary apologia, uncritical explanations. “It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being,” she continued. “Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.” Bu
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to art writing)? What do you see as the appeal?
Years ago, a poetry professor, Suzanne Gardinier, assigned us to an essay with the instructions “not to forget we are poets.” I took that directive, like a liquor, physically, in. Because for me the lyric balances an expression of beauty (thru line, sound, collision) with a rigorous analytic (thru idea, question, contradiction), it’s been relatively easy for me to move between the genres while recalling I’m a poet. In any genre, writing asks you to press on the sentence until that sentence exposes its fresh concept and in a voice that meets it. If I can recall to do this, whether across liberation or captured in a paragraph, I find I can be permitted to write into and thru any genre, where language matters.
typical day (for you) begin?
14 - 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?
Recently, science & its interactions with the esoteric has played a more crucial role in my poetics. I’m just as fascinated with the old myths—the previous thought that, say, rays of light be emitted from the eye, which accomplishes sight—-as I am the new scientific theories & laws. Now we know rays react with our eye, coming from outside it, to drive the images of the world up into our neurological perception. Quantum physics, in particular, to my mind, feels like the meeting of all these disciplines, and my next thoughts consider how the lyric might comb its ideas. For centuries, the light fascinated poets. Can it again?
17 - 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
fantasize about being a psychologist or psychoanalyst, if you would believe it.
I went to Sarah Lawrence College & received a pretty great education across
the many disciplines, but none in the hard sciences. It was deliberate although
today I find myself wishing it had been otherwise. I’m curious, being
neurodivergent, specifically schizoaffective myself, about how the brain works
and not only on its own, usual terms but at times of crisis and times of
pleasure. Years ago, I corralled a group of writers around the question “What
occurs to you during penetration?” It was a provocative question that lead to
much insight. Today I still wonder the question, if it’s less sexual as
intellectual. What penetrates, or is allowed to, our very minds?
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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