12 or 20 (second series) questions with Monica Ong

Monica Ong [image © 2020 by Maler Photography] is the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. A Kundiman poetry fellow and MFA graduate in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong has been awarded residencies most recently at the Studios at MassMoCA, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. You can find her work featured in Petrichor: A Journal of Image+Text, Redivider, ctrl+v, Waxwing Magazine, and anthologized in Poesia Visual 5. Based in Connecticut, she currently serves as the User Experience Designer at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry, was a debut collection that came from a series of art installations I’d been making for several years. It was really rewarding to open up my creative practice to both visual and literary audiences. I also got to meet writers interested in multi-modal practices and experimentation. I learned that while genre is a tool to place and market work to specific audiences, it does not have to restrict how we shape our practice. My recent work is even more playful and experimental, but still remains deeply informed by the beautiful intensity of science and the power struggles that ensue in the stories of astronomy. While the first book focused on the microcosm of the body and personal lineage, I’ve shifted to considering cosmic bodies and stories we might leave for the future.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? I came to poetry through painting, as poetry is the closest literary form to painting. While I was in art school studying Digital Media at RISD, I had the immense fortune of encountering the poet Wendy S. Walters who happened to be my seminar professor at the time. She gave me permission to embrace the poet in me who just happened to have a visual and multi-modal practice, and not get too caught up in what certain disciplines are supposed to look like. Embracing hybridity allowed me to consider my art installations that followed as potentially being a book, which is how Silent Anatomies came to be.

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 often create a series of work towards small periodic exhibitions. This allows me to focus on a set of ideas and to work iteratively with attention to time and finding interesting forms for these ideas. It allows me to try a set of poems as a series of small objects, letterpress broadsides, or immersive audio. (See https://www.monicaong.com/gallery) By now, I have a sense of how long it takes to complete certain types of work so I try to keep 2 projects moving simultaneously. My recent constellation poems for letterpress have required massive amounts of time to draw, design, write, do pre-press preparation, and oversee production for. One broadside took me over a year to complete because I also had to raise the money to afford printing it in gold and silver foil. So sometimes in order to stay sane, I work on smaller poetry pieces in between production phases to keep a sense of play and possibility in my writing.

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? (See #3)

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I try to think of readings a opportunities to bring communities together across culture and discipline. When Silent Anatomies came out, I enjoyed doing panels with writers AND medical humanities folks, as well as doctors who work on culture competence in health care. I did readings in academic libraries, but also in local Chinese and Latino cultural centers, at public health classes, and in art galleries. My book used poetry as a vehicle to create dialogue about cultural silences that make it socially difficult for communities to address taboo subjects like mental health and domestic violence. Likewise in my new work, I hope the astronomy-inspired collection will be welcomed not only in literary but also science and visual art venues as well. I'd love to participate in readings where I can amplify non-western star stories and women in science, while also conversing with other astronomers and other scientists. Generally, I am an introverted person, but as long as I make enough time between events to recharge, I do enjoy being able to connect with readers and fellow creatives alike.

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 make work with a few questions in mind: What hidden stories need to be told?  What new narratives or paradigms can I model? What is the creative risk I am taking? What am I contributing to the conversation that can create value for those I’m in dialogue with?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? For Silent Anatomies, I really saw poetry as one way to create a safe space to generate dialogue in local communities about cultural silences and to address stigma and trauma. I can’t tell you how many times people come up to me after a reading and tell me their web of family secrets woven around illness, and how literature made it ok to finally talk about these issues. When it comes to cultural gaps of understanding in community healthcare, poetry is one compass and resource that I also think healthcare workers can turn to in order to better understand and familiarize themselves with communities they want to reach out to but maybe have little exposure to. If the publishing industry is willing to invest more money and resources in amplifying voices that don’t get to be heard, I think there is an opportunity to bring people closer to each other. But I say this with the huge grain of salt that literature is just a starting point and in no way a substitute for cultivating a substantive relationships with people across boundaries. To me great writing creates empathy in both the writer and the reader, which I see as a currency of hope.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? (I don’t usually work with one so I don’t have a useful answer for this question.)

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? I recently took a writing workshop with Rick Barot, whose writing is stunning and his kind intellectual generosity even more so. He encouraged me to make writing experiments without leaning on my usual strategies, even purposely avoiding them, as an exercise in seeing what one can come up with when one hand is tied behind one’s back. Embracing discomfort to see what reserves of ingenuity lie in such constraints is really valuable and something it’s good to be reminded of so that I can come back to my beginner’s spirit, which is more adventurous.

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 live in pandemic blur so, so I do planning on Mondays to prioritize time among my full-time job, my writing, and overseeing my kid’s camp and activities, as well as participating in creative and local communities. I make lots of lists but I’m also practicing self-acceptance when things go to mush because there’s no point in beating ourselves up when society is so up-ended as it is right now. To me it’s more about consistently taking small steps. I use The Most Dangerous Writing App to generate free writing several times a week and then when I’m composing a visual text, I print and put all the texts in front of me and pull the best fragments out of them to make the final piece. This gives me the flexibility to spread out little steps across time and not overwhelm myself. It’s also important to give oneself permission to say NO when needed in order to protect my time, and also to not romanticize what a writer’s life “should” look like because it’s so unique for each person. If writing is happening in the parking lot, the bathtub, or on the phone in the grocery line, then let’s create value from where we’re at.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? I watch modern dance because of the way choreographers take the syntax of movement to create brand new visual and visceral compositions that bewilder and astound me. Particularly, when this is brought together with cinematography, it allows reminds me to bring tactility and images together with syntactical strategy to make something that is intentional yet can also be improvisational and primal. Films like Pina on Pina Bausch and the newer film Cunningham about Merce Cunningham really delight me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home? The scent of sampaguitas, which is the tagalog word for jasmine flowers, which is the national flower of the Philippines. My mother grew these at home and she gave me one when I moved into my own so that we can keep our grandmother with us.

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? Books helped me to develop an ear for what resonates with me lyrically, but I am very much a maker with a visual art training, who leverages quite heavily from science, information design, and typography. Sonic arts and installations with found objects also figure into the way I strategize about constructing immersive poetry installations. For example, when I was writing about medicine, I made poems with x-ray light boxes and medicine bottles. Now that I’m creating work based on the aesthetics of astronomy, I’ve been collaborating with letterpress studios to make constellation poems, as well as building poems as light boxes in the spirit of Joseph Cornell and Betye Saar with found vintage objects.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? I look up to creatives who practice experimental and hybrid approaches that surprise me yet also lyrically invite readers somewhere deeply personal. They are often writers whose lives are also informed by an artistic practice such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Douglas Kearney, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Etel Adnan, Diana Khoi Nguyen. Poets like Rick Barot, Victoria Chang, Ada Limón, and Mary Ruefle inspire me just as much with particular attention to the magic of syntax, literary form and image.

I was an art school kid so the work of artists and designers who intersect with text have had an unquestionable impact in my making: Xu Bing, Shirin Neshat, Maya Lin, Betye Saar, Janet Cardiff, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer for sure. At the same time, I’ve been a graphic designer for two decades and nowadays spending more time in data visualization and data science spaces, so information design plays a big role in honing my sensibilities around the functional and aesthetic relationship between text and image. In terms of information design, often turn to books by Edward Tufte, Manuel Lima, Giorgia Lupi, and Stefanie Posavec.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? I want to make poetry that is more experiential and interactive. During the pandemic, I’ve been making more audio poems to explore poetry’s immersive possibilities. At some point, I’d like to design an interactive book that can exist on multiple platforms.

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 love being both a writer and visual designer. But if I were to try another occupation, I’d definitely love to be a modern dancer.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? I grew up creatively but with my parents’ pragmatism. I knew design and writing was quite portable and frankly, I wasn’t athletic enough to be a dancer.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? I’m currently reading All Heathens by Marianne Chan (http://www.sarabandebooks.org/titles-20192039/all-heathens-marianne-chan) and just finished watching Ad Astra as sci-fi movies are the only films my family and I can actually agree on watching together while we’re all at home.

19 - What are you currently working on? My current work explores the intersection of poetry and astronomy, considering the sky and its histories from the female gaze. I’ve been remixing vintage astronomy diagrams with prose poems, making letterpress broadsides based on non-western constellations, and also delighting about women in science. You can see some of these experiments here:
http://www.redividerjournal.com/2020/04/monica-ong-jupiters-family-of-comets/
https://petrichormag.com/15-monica-ong/
http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue14/27_Ong-Syzygy.php

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Amaranth Borsuk, Pomegranate Eater

DATE MUSIC

To be pitted: whistled through with wind enough to anchor every anther-fleck. The daily drama: keeping time. Do tell of the sharp note doubt makes in the lay, how gold-bronze turns tamarack or snuff, how heat’s details draw out your sweet debut. Be guileful, dauntless, slight, adroit. Regret orr, my jewel, translucent and unknown. Curated, handled, hand-picked: from the first, your bearing’s blown.

American poet Amaranth Borsuk’s second full-length collection is Pomegranate Eater (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2016), a volume of striking lyric poems that play off classical myth, lineages and classical artworks, from her opening poem “Self Portrait as Radiant Host” to pieces such as “Cubist Landscape with Immolation,” “Portrait of Death as Pine-Eater” and “Landscape with Openings.” Further on, by the third section, the focus leans toward elements of myth, from poems such as “Legend in Which a Diligent Clock Is Made to Speak,” “Fable Wherein Contra Band Encounters Boon,” “Parable in Which One Wrestles a Double,” “Allegory in Which a Gregarious Knife Is Buried” and “Apalogue with Substitutions in Which a Shift is Made.” What becomes intriguing about Borsuk’s poems is in how far she is willing and able to float across dreamy spaces, utilizing a series of voices, even as she holds one foot in the concrete, anchoring each poem before it falls into an impossible abstract. Pomegranate Eater contains poems held together with a precise and lyric language, somewhere between diamond precision and a kind of liquid permanence. Part of what appeals about this collection is in the musicality of her lines, the way the lyric flows and ebbs, shifting amid and between meaning and pure sound, as she writes in the poem “FORTIFIED INTERNAL NIGHT”: “Don’t porrect, I sum but a massive / simper, a lost-cause turnip voluptuary. / Suspend voluntary seeming solicitude. / All I want you magnify—sad suspect, / I’m present, a fringilly condensed / fugue-yahct. Noon cellar risky gravity / orchid tantrum. I negate risk; I’m / mum.” Her poems pop and sizzle, and sparkle across a range of fireworks and sun reflecting off of running water.

DEAR URGENCY

What takes us apart:

shadow-breath of a bulb kept close to the wall,

this trying to fingerprint each thing we touch.

I wait to write myself funder

your fingernails, to ring

through dark knuckle hair.

The trick is to see things as they are:

locked boxes, chain coils, a wealth

of hooks we anchor to.

This thing we’re building is a room, no more.

A small space to stem the hurt.

Yours,

Surge

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carolyn Ann Hembree

Carolyn Hembree was born in Bristol, Tennessee. Her debut poetry collection, Skinny, came out from Kore Press in 2012. In 2016, Trio House Books published her second collection, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, selected by Neil Shepard for the 2015 Trio Award and by Stephanie Strickland for the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Poetry Daily, and other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. An assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, Carolyn teaches writing and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
I sent my first poetry manuscript, Skinny, to contests and open reading periods for ten years before Kore Press made it a book in 2012. Cracks of lightning, too, lit that decade-long night of rejection; journals and anthologies printed the poems individually, and the manuscript was a bridesmaid in several contests. (Those modest gowns cost money though.) In sum, I felt gratitude for the book’s acceptance. Practically speaking, the book’s publication weighed in my University’s decision to promote me to a tenure-track position; the course release and raise have made life easier.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Both books evoke the South and a kind of isolation. The first book exists inside of a dream, not to be helped. No single voice is entirely drawn: all share a telephone party line, snatches of this and that mesh to form a psychology. The second book, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the 2015 Trio Award and the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, feels denser, I suppose. For one, the landscape becomes a character as much as any soul. Doctrine I absorbed in the Presbyterian Church my family attended shows in a fatalism, an inevitability, a finish of the second book. To my mind, the first remains more in the air. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
In an effort to check my juvenile delinquency, my parents sent me to an evangelical school for the ninth grade. Naturally, my nefarious activities increased in the authoritarian atmosphere, where I quickly found coconspirators with whom to share earbuds during morning prayer (Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” our go-to, obviously), to drink vodka during PE, to disrupt assemblies—whether by inciting a chant to call out the tuba player who masturbated under his band jacket during pep rallies or making infant cries during cautionary abortion films. Needless to say, I only attended the school one year. Aside from the fun, this Advanced English teacher, Mrs. Bolla, had us write poems. Mrs. Bolla, who only allowed herself a reading list befitting a conservative Christian woman, pulled my despairing rhymes from the bunch and showed them to her friend, a bona fide poet who sent a gentle and encouraging letter my way. That was all I needed.

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?
It takes years with stops and starts for research, drafts, rewrites, and final edits across the manuscript to unify motifs and excise overused language. All in all, the second book, a modest 72 pages, took thirteen years, thereabouts.

For any given poem, I start with 100 pages of words: research notes, model syntax, observations, snatches of overheard conversation, images, and so on; this mother document, as it shrinks and expands, serves me for the whole book. I reduce the words the way I imagine a sculptor reduces a block of stone. By the time one emerges, the poem usually knows its shape.

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?
With a few exceptions, I work on books even if the “project” later becomes a single poem.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
My acting training informs my natural yet dramatic presentation of the poems. Because I want listeners to have a different experience than they would reading my work, I try to create various narrative, lyric, and rhetorical trajectories through my selection and arrangement of pieces; this preparation requires creative thinking. Yes, the readings serve as part of my creative process, and they run counter to my process. Readings allow me to meet my real audience, which colors the intended audience (the dead, a former self, other poets mainly the dead for me) when I return to the page. So, meeting people who read my work enriches my understanding of audience, a good thing. When I was younger, I could get paralyzed for days after a reading if, say, an older gentleman felt called upon to tell me how valueless he found my work. Now, I’ve learned to better avoid such interactions.

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 asking what’s my stake in a thing. A narcissistic creature, I know to be savage with myself, my perceptions, my values. As default practice now, I write the opposite of all direct statements. When I studied under Jane Miller at the University of Arizona, she emphasized the paradox inherent in much poetry, an idea central to my poetics. Yes, I occasionally try to answer questions with the work; Chevy closes with a series of poems titled with questions Stephen Hawking has posed about the nature of time. These questions prompted me to explore Appalachian folklore that addresses the progress of existence, as well as collective and personal memory.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Do our roles now differ from back when? Artists are the true historians. Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” comes to mind: “And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.” I believe in the longevity of our art, in the contribution of folks of all stripes, public poets and private ones. I give thanks for this golden age. Yet I can only dictate my role, and “my business is Circumference,” as Dickinson wrote.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. By the time an editor lays hands on my work, I have so excoriated it that I welcome outside input. I also have incisive readers who work me over before an editor enters the picture.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Well, I’m not going to offer one “best” (Circumference, you know):

“Stay upset.” –Brenda Hillman

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."—Samuel Beckett

“You are a poet all of the time.” –Jane Miller

 “... nothing could be ruined in one stroke.” –Elizabeth Alexander

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I do not move between genres, not to say that I will not.

11 - 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 get my kid ready in the morning, alternate transporting her to school/camp with my spouse, practice yoga, meditate, then read and write for two hours. Usually, I have to get on with teaching or lesson preparation at that point. However, during the summer months, I’ll take a walking break after two hours then write for another one or two. As I have zero impulse control, I keep all distractions at bay during my writing time by blocking the Internet and silencing my phone.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Since my process accommodates alternating periods of research and periods of writing, I tend not to get too stalled. When I was younger, blocks occurred more, but now I better understand, for good and ill, how my imagination works, that my mind has to wander, to meander, to steep.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Blue Grass dusting powder, Halls cough drops, Granny’s beef stew, damp books, honeysuckle, elms. There was an apple tree, so a cooking-apple tree in bloom. I’ve had many homes though. New Orleans now. And what does New Orleans not smell like?

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?
To return to Jane’s advice on being a poet “all the time,” I try to stay alert to everything: when visiting a museum, walking my neighborhood, eavesdropping in the grocery line, listening to traffic, watching trash television, reading an anthropology article. ... Aside from reading, I get a tremendous lot from interviews of survivors of violent crimes. What interests me – how we attempt to verbalize the unutterable: idioms get mixed, banal phrases repeated, and dialogue recalled precisely.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Dickinson, Donne, KJV Bible, early anonymous ballads, Shakespeare, Etheridge Knight, John Berryman, C.D. Wright, Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine, Beckett, Kafka, Faulkner, Chekhov. I don’t have a reading life outside of my work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Quit.

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’ll go with the latter question: prosecuting attorney, missionary, literary agent, improvisational actor, or circus contortionist. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It stuck around.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: The Descent of Alette. Movie: The Act of Killing.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Two books of poetry: one a book-length project, one in loose pages. As my middle-aged great-grandmother –women from my line, we’re small-framed with prodigious stomachs – when asked by a neighbor if she was pregnant (she was not) responded, “Only time will tell, only time will tell.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sarah Mangold, Giraffes of Devotion

I had a terrible time because I was not taking

the liquor in those days and they’d say Now

what will you drink Of course naturally my

dear husband would drink whatever they

offered him like most naval officers And I

said Nothing thank you And they would have

a fit and say You must have something I’d say

no no I’m not thirsty It doesn’t make any

difference you must have something This got

to be terrible you know Then they started

saying What will we give Mary to drink Can

you feature (“Yes but not—”)

Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold’s third full-length poetry collection is Giraffes of Devotion (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2016), a collection described as an experiment “to present a rebelliously voiced witness and investigator into U.S. history, its families and war. Framed within the domestic sphere of military service, facts and speech are misheard, whispered, indexed and reassembled to reveal the word make spirit.” As Kore Press editor Ann Dernier writes in the press release:

In the mid-1920s, Sarah’s great grandmother Mrs. Roy Smith followed her husband Lt Commander Roy Smith with their four children to Shanghai where he was stationed with the US Navy in the years following the Boxer Rebellion. In the tradition of family stories, Giraffes of Devotion is the patient work of collage created from oral history archives and a lifetime of letters, and in that tradition, this narrative incorporates lapses of time. It sputters, pauses, rushes ahead, but all of the gaps fade with each new letter, each new poem and each plunges the wealth of memory of a lifetime of service, of military service and in service to husbands and fathers in land both occupied and occupying.

Giraffes of Devotion follows Mangold’s previous collections, Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Household Mechanics (New Issues, 2002) (a chapbook was recently released through above/ground press); an earlier section of the new collection appeared as a chapbook under the project’s working-title, Boxer Rebellion (Bainbridge Island WA: g o n g, 2004). The “Boxer rebellion,” for those who don’t know (including myself), Wikipedia describes it thusly: “The Boxer Rebellion, Boxer Uprising or Yihequan Movement was a violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising which took place in China towards the end of the Qing dynasty between 1899 and 1901. It was initiated by the Militia United in Righteousness (Yihetuan), known in English as the ‘Boxers,’ and was motivated by proto-nationalist sentiments and opposition to imperialist expansion and associated Christian missionary activity. An Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China to defeat the Boxers and took retribution.” In an interview conducted in 2013, posted at seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Mangold specifically discusses the chapbook, and more generally, the work-in-progress that ended up being Giraffes of Devotion:

SM: Rukeyser’s US 1 and Reznikoff's Testimony were very present as I started working with historical documents and an oral history transcript for my long poem Boxer Rebellion. They both use historical source texts with many voices and they both use documents that could have been filed away as bureaucratic documentation. George & Mary Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Beverly Dahlen, Susan Howe, and of course John Ashbery were also instrumental in how I go about writing and thinking about writing.

[…]

rm: What was the process of composition for your chapbook, Boxer Rebellion? You mention a love for documentary poetics, and this short work is strongly influenced by very specific historical fact, yet I’m intrigued at how the work isn’t written out as straight documentary. It’s almost as though the facts themselves are broken down into language, and reshaped into the poem on that level. How do you manage to use real information without composing poems (like so many others have done) simply regurgitating story?

SM: Yes! That’s exactly what I tried to do—happy that comes through. Boxer Rebellion is a long poem about my great-grandmother’s life as a Navy wife in China during the early 1920s with her four children.  I had heard stories about moments in China from my grandmother and my mom throughout my childhood but I hadn’t heard the story laid out from start to finish within an historical context. The source text is an interview my great-grandmother gave to the US Naval Institute as part of their Navy wives oral history project, complete with index. The facts had such an emotional connection for me I decided the only way to start working with it was to break everything back into language, not a story, not history, not a family biography.  That’s how the alphabetical sections started—I retyped the index and did an alphabetic sort just to free up the language and it read like a condensed oral history, complete with stutters and repetitions. With the rest of the transcript I wrote down the phrases that caught my attention and used those as the building material for the poems. My first experiments started in 1998 and a few years later I had a chapbook together but I've also recently spent more time with the transcript to make the poem book-length so hopefully a new book will be in my future.

Mangold has engaged in the poem suite for some time, constructing chapbook-length, and now, book-length, manuscripts out of lyric fragments, and her Giraffes of Devotion follows this path, shaping and reshaping threads of family history and story into a documentary collage that opens into a series of foreign and long-forgotten histories. Her poems are wonderfully playful, utilizing the materials of language and story to create a series of delightful sound-fragments and poem-shapes, re-telling a series of seemingly-random stories in the voices (pauses, repetitions, warts and all) that once told her. There are moments I think the poems in this collection might serve as a series of monologues, for the sake of a staged performance of the entire text.

the missionairies kept pointing out that if we weren’t there

things would be peaceful and lovely

it was our fault

and Roy was terribly upset

they were going to the Shanghai American School

but his father said Now if you like you can take two friends

down aboard ship I’ll be home for the weekend You can go

down and stay in my cabin You can have movies and be aboard

ship

to Roy age twelve a weekend on the ship was just heavenly

he asked two friends first one and the other to his horror

carried on as if he’d asked them to visit hell (“But we were not any more popular than nothing”)

Rachel Moritz, Borrowed Wave

Your Nana was ironing sheets

      in her Lemon Joy kitchen.

Wings without body, linen snagged on the lip

      of her board. Was she a bird?

‘I can smell the rubbers in the front entry

      as I sat on the hall-tree seat and hunted

      for my galoshes,’ she wrote,

remembering how an object locates –

You were drinking milk from her blue Delft tea-

      cup. By the slice of window you lifted up

      her teacup, left a rim of white on blue flowers.

Little moths or butterflies, parting waves. (“BORROWED WAVE”)

After five poetry chapbooks under her belt (published through New Michigan Press, Albion Books, above/ground press and MIEL Press), Minneapolis poet Rachel Moritz’s long-awaited first full-length poetry collection is Borrowed Wave (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2015). Constructed out of three sections and an opening poem, the meditative precisions and flow of Borrowed Wave are grounded in a narration of place, self and body, attempting a cohesion and clarity against constant distraction, and the possibility of being swept away. Her poems are deeply felt, concerned with the important questions, and inherent paradoxes, of intimacy, human interaction and the landscapes of memory. In the poem “ASSEMBLY NOTES,” she writes: “I peered within the body of our house // where a simple blue ornament, // nailed below the eaves, /// made recognition of our lives / a little easier.”

A SUITABLE DURATION OF EXPOSURE

The face of the child, or how I said my motherhood was only metaphoric. How it rose against our unmade hill, kept turning to look where you said there was no one where sumac wizened on standing branches, we were pulled, you said, or how we found phrasing. Two paths traveling parallel, media of air following like an absent man. And what is a nearness like ours if we each remain, in our own way, concealed?

The narrative of her poems present an enormous density of information, allusion and reference in small spaces, built with such a remarkable pacing. “I’d believe the past is fragment,” she writes, to open “ANIMATE SONG,” “but for its narrow intimation of a door, // and the house waiting, all stucco and wet // where hummingbirds catch still // inside our kitchen tiles, and time // has no shape, in stasis; [.]” The narrative of her lyrics are built as sketches placed in open space, writing out short, accumulative bursts across a wide canvas, something evident in both her longer and shorter pieces, such as the opening poem “EMPATHIC OUTLINE,” a piece that suggests so much, as it opens: “Branches of the pine trees sway in this other season // like our apartment in the seventies, back and forth, typhoon – // Grapevines wearing cardboard shields, diagonal across a field [.]”