Rennie Ament, Full-Time Mammal

 

Porcupine

I’m vulnerable with animals.
They are an interpersonal event.
When I offer the trundling rodent
a pocked crabapple
he gives me brain in the eyes.
Density of language
here would be a cloud of mosquitoes.
Wipe off the smear of language on the already.
What exists does not need a cowboy hat.
The slow unfolding of a thought does not sing true.
Blah blah blah blah blah
is what the porcupine takes off my hands.
O my little fleshy mace.
The porcupine turned its ass to me,
which meant it was time to chuck
archaic modes of processing.

The second full-length collection by Owls Head, Maine poet Rennie Ament, following Mechanical Bull (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2023) [see my review of such here] is the absolutely sleek, sharp and whip-smart book-length suite, Full-Time Mammal (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2026). Composed as an assemblage of first-person stray thoughts, the rich interiority of the short poems across Full-Time Mammal manages to contain both her animal impulses and pure thinking through compact lyric. To say these poems are odd, even quirky, would be an imperfect description, as her poems are composed in straight lines, albeit with the wild heat from her lines providing a kind of abstract shimmer across these long, lyric highways. “Once, unemployment left the fluffy / corpses of days at my door,” she writes, as part of “Now,” but nothing / killed me. Nice try, brain.”

There are poems composed while in motion, and, as with Ament, poems composed while standing completely still, as though her poems present a pause, and requiring the full attention of both author and reader. “So I can / go to work. Work for / peanuts. Get worked up. Work / on myself.” she writes, as part of the poem “Faster, Blood!” “The good work / is a work in progress.”

There’s an element of her expositional lyric, her thinking and examination, that suggest these are poems composed in real time, even as you might be reading them; lyrics held fast and almost disorienting, offering lines composed in fluid but held in ice. “Turn on the day: / dead vole in the grass / with blood on its rump.” begins the short poem “Impossible Task,” “Ban prepositions: they force / the interrelatedness of things.” Her declarative accumulations and modes of compositional thinking, her riffs and responses, offer such an abstract sheen of concrete truths, composed as short, self-contained musings, each of which offer a new beginning into an entirely different direction. “I’ll try to be a good baby / for poetry and brim,” she writes, to open the poem “Potatoes,” “with innocent questions / about potatoes. / Why are they humble?” Or, as the short poem “Tomaž Šalamun” ends:

Get over here, mouse.
Jump over my head.
Animals, animals
all thinking, too.
Comma, comma.
Sentence, sentence.
We take a long time to learn
to live with life.

Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties

 

I am preparing to write a book
about the death of the mother. To write
such a book requires a mother
who does something remarkable or real
in an apprehensible way, or 

a secretive mother
whose tics and tacs construct
an almanac, aphonic archive of
the inner life, rusting
with hushed facts, or 

a mother mammoth
and serene, gliding across your path,
so the shadows of her limbs scratch
out upon your face some blood
narrative. (“[I am preparing to write a book]”)

I’m immediately struck by the poems in Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s second full-length collection, For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first of her work I’ve seen, and an apparent follow-up to her debut, sur vie (Fathom Books, 2020). Across four sections of first-person lyrics—“DEATH OF THE MOTHER,” “LIKENESS,” “AS IF” and “SECOND LIFE”—the poems are dense and intense, graceful and substantive. “I am preparing to write a book,” begins the first stanza of the eleven-stanza opening poem, a piece that pushes, swirls and loops in a remarkably dense yet nimble pattern. As the two-page piece ends: “Or lacking all these / to write the book about the death / of the mother you simply need / a mother, who is dead.” The opening poem immediately sets the tone and tenor for the book as a whole, writing out a bursting, bubbling grief of graceful and substative gestures, offering a light touch of lyric through lines thick with emotional heft. “We all know Mother means / I was born from your body but I too / guaranteed your living. // In the mothering reign where / you are always alive,” opens the poem ‘PREULOGY,” “alone and evenly / breathing, a place // of exile where you remain / a figure leaning lazy on a rock, / black spot of ink bored into sand, [.]” Her poems are collaged and purposeful, direct and layered, writing out all the mess and contradictions of mothers, of family, of grief and sentences. Offering a marvellous and subtle fluidity, these poems are delicately crafted with such utter grace and punch. Or, as the second poem of the prose poem quartet “AND/OR” reads:

In the photograph she perches on a large, flat rock, barely lapped by a ripple of waves visible at the right edge of the frame. She appears to be leaning back on the rock for balance, but because she is lithe and long and the rock not very large, a small, bent awkwardness interrupts her pose, so that she appears not as if balancing gracefully on outstretched arms but rather as if pressing down uncomfortably, a palpable sense of cramping discomfort intriduing into the stillness of the seaside photograph of an object on the verge of collapse.

• • •

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Aaron McCollough

Aaron McCollough is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Salms (University of Iowa Press, 2024). He is also the co-publisher (with Karla Kelsey) of SplitLevel Texts.

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?
To say my first book changed my life would feel strained. At least in the most obvious practical terms, it had little to no impact on my life. I know I had hoped it would lead me to a more concrete professional footing and therefore translate into material change in the form of income. That did not happen. Subsequent books were no more life altering in this sense. That being said, it would be very hard to overstate how much publishing that first book (or second, third, etc.) has meant to me and has meant for keeping alive that part of my life that is "being a poet." So, the first book feels now like it represented a kind of culmination of a long phase of student writing and aspiration while at the same time opening the horizon on an equally long phase of establishing myself in my own mind as a "real" writer (rather than a hobbyist, I suppose). In short, it felt fundamentally validating even if it never served me as a professional credential in the way that publications do in the academic marketplace, and it also established an expectation within me for pursuing further such validation. Twenty-two years later, the need for validation has changed a good bit, but I won't pretend it has completely gone away. I do trust my own artistic inclinations much more deeply now then I did then, confirmed in part through two decades of further reading, writing, and testing of those inclinations in the actual experience of life. Where once I hoped to leverage a livelihood out of poetry (which even then struck me as a somewhat dubious pursuit), I have long been free to let poetry's work be a sufficient end in itself. I believe this translates into something more purely in keeping with my own idiosyncratic artistic vision, which in turn feels more validating than the early accomplishments, if in a slightly different, more wholly personal way.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The simple answer is that other forms seemed impossible to me whereas poetry did not and so I started doing it. I still don't know how people manage to write imaginative prose, even though I have many close friends who do so very well. Probing a little more deeply, I have always been drawn to the elliptical nature of even the most straightforward lyric writing. The compression and leaping of lyric figuration, as well as the blend of revealing and obscuring that serves as the lyric's engine has always made poetry feel like the most memetic of modes for experimenting with the materials of what it is to be alive. And this sort of experimentation is what I find most compelling about literature.
 
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 don't have a tidy answer for this question. Process and project for me have tended to be pretty organic and have developed at different speeds. Likewise, some poems have come quickly, some slowly, many more have foundered and been abandoned. On average, I guess I'd say most poems that have survived have appeared quickly and then been revised meaningfully but not radically over the course of a few years. As poems appear, they tend to influence the way I think about the ones that preceded them, which guides the way I revise.

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?
For the most part I think I am an example of the former. In a couple of cases I thought I had a project-level concept in mind from the outset (Little Ease and No Grave Can Hold My Body Down). But, in the end, even those books ended up dictating their own path to me as I went. At most, I think I have a vague idea from the outset of what a gathering of work is going to be interested in, but I tend to learn the real nature of the interest as I'm going and as I'm finishing up.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don't love giving readings. I'm too shy for that, which means that I have to push past my shyness to perform, and pressing in that way feels inauthentic. In some ways, it feels perverse to make public the product of poetry's very solitary and private work, but that of course is a kind of contradiction, given that the meaning of publication is literally "to make public," and I've pursued publication for years. In short, I don't think readings have much to do with my writing, but I do want (for reasons I can't completely justify) to share that writing with other people. Sometimes I give readings as a result, and sometimes it goes relatively well, although it never feels quite right to me.
 
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?
There definitely are. Most broadly speaking, I'd say my poetry is concerned with the place where metaphysics, ethics, memory, and psychology come together in the present moment. In practice, this has always been a kind of soteriological inquiry: of kairos and eschaton and an accounting of a new heaven and a new earth fitfully breaking into lived history, specifically history as lived out through the dot, in the great network of being, represented by my own mind-body-soul.

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 have always trusted the idea that artists (including writers) should pursue their own weird paths with as little distraction as possible. They belong in the wilderness, and so their role is outside of typical systems we tend to associate with ideas like "role." First, their role is to be marginal by virtue of their devotion. Secondarily, the products of that devotion may serve the culture, but that's the culture's business, not the artist's.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It has been helpful to me to have another, trusted person challenge my decisions. It hasn't always been a formal editor who has done this most helpfully, but once the wilderness work is over, I find it very valuable to get feedback from people who know my work and can see with fresh eyes.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Cut the longest swath you can for as long as you can.

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 start every day early with an hour of coffee, reading, and contemplation. It sounds a little precious, but I find it makes my life much more manageable. I don't write every day, but often this beginning does lead naturally into writing, and when it does I'm always grateful.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I tend to be in agreement with David W. McFadden, as cited in question 13 below. I tend to go back to reading, always. I guess I'm less inclined than I used to be to think in terms of writing being stalled or not. I want to say that at this point I see living and writing being close enough to one another that I'm writing as long as I'm living, even if there isn't ocular proof left behind. Sooner or later there tends to be some kind of receipt, and that's gratifying, but often I feel like the work that needs to be done first needs to be done in silence. So, I don't do as much conscious looking for inspiration as I once did.  

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Junipers. Honeysuckle. 'Lectricshave.

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 the above.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The 17th-Century English poets continue to be very important to me in both my work and my life. Dante has continued to figure more prominently in my imagination over the years than I expected. Rilke, Kierkegaard, Bergson, the Black Mountain poets, Ortega-y-Gasset, Deleuze, Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann.

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

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?
Priest. Were I not a writer it's hard to imagine being at all, but writing is not my occupation. I've had many jobs, and being a writer has rarely gotten in the way.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wasn't very good at much else. Or, I seemed to have a talent for writing and less talent for other things.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book was Septology by Jon Fosse. Last great film was Vesper by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I've been writing quite a bit the year since I finished the Salms manuscript. I'm not sure what all this writing might amount to, but formally these are short lyrics. They seem very quiet to me, and I'm not sure how many of them are really even really poems. I've been thinking of them of "figures," so eventually I will have to figure out what that really means.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Aaron McCollough, Salms

 

Good morning, shadows
who love us, how we look,
the ripple
around the actual coast of our day

Without knowing our true place,
I pull at my face
Antenna feels the distance
in an open door

Pure tension. Under gravity.
All of what we do is small,
demoralizing.

I organized my day around
nothing, conjuring nothing,
and you actually appeared (“FIRST FORM”)

Tennessee poet and publisher Aaron McCollough’s latest is Salms (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2024), published as part of University of Iowa Press’ Kuhl House Poets series. I seem to be quite behind on McCollough’s work, having only sketched out a few notes on his third collection, Little Ease (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2006) [see my review of such here], having completely missed out, it would seem, on his Welkin (Ahsahta Press, 2002), Double Venus (Salt Publishing, 2033), No Grave Can Hold My Body Down (Ahsahta Press, 2011), Underlight (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) and Rank (University of Iowa Press, 2015). Where have I been, one might ask? Composed across four section-clusters of short lyrics—“A MIRROR,” “SALM,” “THE SURVIVAL OF IMAGES” and “MERE”—with opening sequence “FIRST FORM,” the poems assembled across Salms suggest themselves as a blending of poems, song and prayer. As Sally Keith offers as part of her back cover blurb, Salms “[…] is as attentive to the merging of poems and psalms as it is to the nearly indistinguishable sound of salms and songs.” Just listen to the music of the narrative in the centre of the poem “The Wonderful Wood: A Mirror,” the opening of a series of poems with “A Mirror” suffixing or subtitling their titles:

One lived with her grandmother who was not well. In a lonely
cottage she can’t go, nowhere to go and no one to send her.
Every space between people and things her hazard. The world
we find is not reassuring, certainly. Qualities, bodies, and time.
They were too poor, so they hide in the cottage where they
earned their bread through piecework and spinning. The only
world. They worked with their hands in the cottage near a
wonderful wood no one dares go into.
      Light reflected in the open stream

I’m intrigued by the heft of his prose poems, even across poems with line breaks or look akin to more traditionally-set lyrics. These are poems of beginnings, each allowing the unfolding unto anything and everything across a structure of heartfelt singing, a musical lyric through the details of memory, childhood recollection, travel stories, ordinary moments and contemporary truths. “Visiting a friend of my mother’s in Atlanta,” the cool lyrics of “salm 12.13 resurrection, imperfect.” begins, “it was a boy I never / met again who showed me an illustration from one of his / father’s books depicting rear entry, saying that’s what your / parents do, leaving me dismayed and lonely in my universe. // And then Bucky and I saw two dogs in a bend in the road, / and I thought so that’s it, and was calm.” Through McCollough’s lyrics, there is the depiction and the reflection, and how things are recollected, rooted and turned; how stories get told, one might say. How moments are held, or displayed. “In a place famous for great wind / it turns on.” opens the short lyric “Wind,” a poem, nearly a dozen lines further, ends with the precise moment of this: “Until the fervor passes, and what’s left / is everyday still.” What is everyday, as he writes. Still.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kirsten Allio

Kirstin Allio received the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her 2024 story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press, LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction finalist), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa Press), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition). Recent stories, essays, and poems are out or forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Annulet, Bennington Review, Black Sun Lit, Changes Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Guernica, Guesthouse, Harp & Altar, The Hopkins Review, Interim, New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, Plume, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, Subtropics and elsewhere. Her honors and awards include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the American Short(er) Fiction Prize from American Short Fiction, chosen by Danielle Dutton, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She holds an MFA from Brown, and lives in Providence, RI.

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

My first book, Garner, is a morality tale set in 1920s New Hampshire that chronicles an individuated, city sensibility encroaching on tradition and communal repression in a small rural town. A mystified layer or two deeper, it’s a rape novel. I learned, by writing, that I write in search of moral clarity. If there’s a moral formulation for being an artist it’s shaky, but the sense of calling is true. Becoming a writer with my first book stuck me in the moral crosshairs between service and self-fulfillment, where I remain.

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

That feeling of being both enchanted and overwhelmed by reality, and wanting to grasp it, understand, metabolize, reproduce it… An analogy for realist fiction for me is the still life. A vase. Just a vase—that leaps off the table, rolls, shatters, recombines—that’s a novel.

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 am slow. Time itself is a key player, a creative agent. I mean that time actually does the work of composition and editing for me. I’ll typically take a flurry of fragmentary notes, impressionistic, outside the habitat of my office. Many stories start on trains, or sitting in somebody else’s park, somebody else’s city. Layer by layer, over years, I build up a story.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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 usually know whether any given material—and it could be as small as a single image, or an exchange, or a glob of language—is a poem or short story or a novel. The seed material is sensitive to genre, as if it had a DNA. I have never turned a poem or a story into a novel. A novel has never turned out to be a story. I don’t know why this is so unerring for me.

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

I love to read out loud, and every single time, I’m shocked by how effective an editing tool it is, a truth serum. When I read from published work, I always edit at the last minute, and then again in real time, and it kind of kills me, because of course it’s too late to change on the page, and then I vow to read out loud at all stages of writing…

So in that sense, public readings are essential to my writing process, and I’m grateful to friends and strangers who attend.

I shrink, however, from explaining my work, from claims of aboutness. Of course meaning isn’t finite, can’t be depleted, but I have a fear of foreclosing, cauterizing infinite meaning if I suggest one meaning or another. I’m also just not very fluent in summary. I could never write a book report in grade school. I feel there’s a risk of betraying the fiction if I talk about it in the language of nonfiction, or conversation, or explication—if I translate it into that unholy aboutness. Or maybe I’m the actor who has a really tinny, tiny voice, who’s just kind of a bimbo outside the film. I don’t want to disappointment readers.

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?

Theories of the human condition! Theories of feminism—the koan-like question that opens The Second Sex, “Are there women, really?” Injustice, technology, nature, time.

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?

When a writer or a philosopher comes up with some gem of a justification, I’m the first to scribble it down on my napkin. Hannah Arendt, in Men in Dark Times: “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” Art saves lives, and that kind of thing. I am always, always trying to justify my place on the planet. I can justify a calling—I feel I have one—but I cannot justify art-making as separate, isolated from, or even above service to humanity. So there I dwell, unjustified, called, uncomfortable, writing.

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

It’s a rare pleasure. 

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

Surely something that hit in the moment and then evaporated…

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to novels)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s easy and necessary.

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 write as much as I can, every day. I’m always fighting to write, and I’m endlessly greedy.

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

In recent years I’ve been experimenting with collage. It’s an admission of defeat, and a real-time commitment, to kick writing out of my office and take over the floor, the desk, every surface cluttered with cuttings. Detritus. I keep all kinds of old pictures and papers. I have a 3-D collage on an old fencing mask I’ve been working on for 10 years with beads and feathers, odd jewelry and Lenin lapel pins from a summer in the USSR when I was 14. I’m awed by how much time it takes to make decisions in visual art. Part of the process is watching time dilate and get sucked into the void.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

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?

Gertrude Stein: “And then there is using everything.”

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

No fixed work—what’s important is the slowly, tectonically shifting stacks of books that fill my office.

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

That’s a wolf of a question hiding in sheep’s clothing! I realize I’ve been fixated on returning to things I’ve let lapse, picking up threads and weaving old time into the present. I have never grown a garden. I would like to have the kind of time to try.

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 was a great waitress. I wanted to be a dancer. I could have taught high school and grown that garden in the summers.

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

I had early, obsessional love affairs with first, the cello, and then modern dance. So I recognized the feeling when writing swept me off my feet. That was 30 years ago this fall—1994, I had transferred to NYU from dancing—the institution at the time took “life experience” credits, the jackpot of financial aid—and I walked in to a creative writing workshop, having never heard of creative writing. That first class was all it took, thanks to Professor Chris Spain. I wanted to get those feelings into words in my bare hands.

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

I have just seen the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It’s called Look Into My Eyes, and it’s a new documentary by the painterly, underworldly, hauntingly brilliant filmmaker Lana Wilson, about psychics in New York City.

I hated Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos until I loved it, at the very end. It is a novel built for its ending, when an anti-love love story gives way to grief for the lost communist dream, for an East Germany that might have veered away and solidified against capitalism to become what seems like an oxymoron, a humane nation. In Erpenbeck’s telling, the pull of plentiful, cheap goods and the similarly cheap frisson of competition were too strong, and here we are.

20 - What are you currently working on?

An experimental, hybrid story constellation of tautly coded iterations, inter-referential lyrics, frame-grabs from a contemporary collective subconscious—working title Matter and Pattern. Theme and variation are the dangers of emotional rationality, the violence of common sense, feminist philosophy and aphorism, female experience as negative space. Pattern acts on matter, matter provides content for pattern, language is both analysis and synthesis, thinking and knowing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;