Lisa Low, Replica: Poems

 

Forty Years

My mother calls to tell me she’s comfortable with white people now after all these years in America. I put her on speakerphone like she wants me to for my health. At her bible study, she says, she tells them she doesn’t see color, can talk to anyone now. Around the circle, all seven white women, to Black women, and an Asian—she describes—laugh and clap for her. I get carried away adding red curtains and a judges’ panel. The phone muffles her. Louder, I say. I can talk to anyone now, she repeats. I replace anyone with white people, as if a white person had taught me to.

From Chicago poet Lisa Low comes the full-length debut, Replica: Poems (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2026), a title that follows on the heels of the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2023), winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Offering first-person declarations on cultural and familial space, “observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia,” Low articulates layers of inside, outside, around and through with smart and sly lyrics. “Although you yourself chose to be with a tall white man,” she writes, as part of the extended prose poem sequence, “People Who Look Like You,” “you don’t like the idea that some of your power comes from him. You want your own power to be enough. You want to call this love, not power. But the world doesn’t always agree. Is it so much to ask the world to see your world the way you do?” An assemblage of sharp, subtle and self-aware lines, the poems of Replica hold intriguing rhythms; lines that thrust and parry, dodge; a lightness that neither denies nor refuses their weight. She explores form, yet manages to not be constrained by those forms, each new exploration an opening into further possibility. “One day when I didn’t want to hurt / myself,” begins the poem “Aubade,” a sonnet subtitled “with a visit to Krohn Conservatory,” “just not be here for a while, we left / ourphones at home to look at flowers. / In the car, I wanted to press my eyelids / to the frosted window but instead I looked / ahead like I’d been trying to.”

Held in four numbered cluster-sections of poems, what intrigues, as well, are the occasional poems that play with old standards, offering her own “Aubade,” “Palinode” and an “Ode to Armpit Hair,” as well as two separate “Ars Poetica,” playing her own fresh takes on familiar modes. The array of formal invention is slyly done, far more engaged with classical structure than the poems might first let on, allowing the poems to speak for themselves, over how they may have been built. “My younger self dreams of a potato-chip-flavored kiss in a poem I no longer like,” she writes, to open the first stanza of the first of this pair of “Ars Poetica” pieces, “now several years old. All-American kisses occurred in lives where sleeping with your hair wet was also permitted, where the attention of American mothers cast a soft glow through the house and clicked off at night. I filled the poem with slippery ponytails.”

 

Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Rich Wife

 

*

At night on a beach nearby

A woman was walking

All around her the inhalation and the exhalation of the surf

The ocean heaving in a continuous soothing respiration

In this version of the story

I have altered the shape of society

At night on a beach nearby

A woman was walking

All around her the inhalation and the exhalation of the surf

The ocean heaving in a continuous soothing respiration

In this version of the story

A woman is walking at night on a beach nearby

And nothing happens to her

She’s fine (“Rich Wife”)

The third full-length collection by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, a poet simultaneously based in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia and Houston, Texas, is Rich Wife (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), following Splendor (H_NGM_N Books, 2015) and Shopping, or The End of Time (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The book is self-described as “a collection of long poems whose structure echo the cluttered charm of a dresser adorned with hats and hairpins, vials and scarves. Traversing the interlaced landscapes of motherhood, marriage, wealth, and the unspoken contracts of domestic life, Emily Bludworth de Barrios folds personal experience into far-ranging meditations on beauty, nostalgia, power, and privilege.” Set as a quintet of five extended poem-sections—“Grandmother Worship,” “Collecting Sticks,” “Rich Wife,” “The Pelvic Bone” and “Hera”—the poems in Bludworth de Barrios’ latest offer a slow unfold and unfurl, as her narrative lyrics accumulate, surrounding and encompassing her subject matter through direct sentences held by the heart. “Of course,” she writes, as part of the title poem-sequence, “The rich wife writes a book everyone will hate // Everyone will hate // Hatred seethes in oozing glossy pools // Sweep your hatred into little piles // And what will you do with your hatred?”

There is something interesting in the elasticity of these extended poem-sections, offering a stretch and fragment, a back-and-forth of pulled-apart lines and small moments, all set across an extensive and accumulated canvas. “Of the woman I know,” she writes, further on, “something bad has happened to each // It isn’t my place to say what [.]” I find the physical scope of her poems, and her canvas, quite fascinating, structured down to the detail of the line, of the phrase. “I was born into a time when women were almost liberated,” she writes, “I was born into a time // We put chemicals on our hair to make it curl // Chemicals on our hair to make it straight // With metal clamps or tongs we made it crimp, or roll, or flat // Imagine a doll that has a person inside it // Imagine a human who wakes curled in the head of a doll / I open her eyelids like this // Like this I move her arm [.]” Through sentences that pull apart and re-stitch, Bludworth de Barrios writes of the rich wife, writes of women, writes of domestic help and domestic power; of excess, possibility and cultural, social and societal worth; of domestic power with a powerlessness and vise versa; with all the latent and blatant contradictions and presumptions and collisions brought to bear.

She lives in a neighborhood with a gate

In her front living room she is closing the curtains now

Or a woman who works for her is closing the curtains now

She herself remains missing from view

 

Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Shopping, or The End of Time

 

80 to 90 percent of my awareness
Is a delicate ear turned gently toward my son

Which means I ignore
What would have previously torn me asunder

You may imagine motherhood as a funnel of sand
Into which one is pulled

You may imagine a wrecked ship pulling the inhabitants down with her
Into the water

Except for this metaphor
You are willingly rinsing yourself in sand or heavy water

It is an ecstasy of familial love
Among the sand and water (“80 TO 90 PERCENT OF MY AWARENESS”)

The latest from poet Emily Bludworth de Barrios is the poetry collection Shopping, or The End of Time (Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), a collection that works through the lyric of narrative monologue to examine personal space and interpersonal being, including new motherhood and ongoing parenting, as well as simply living as a human being in the world, with all the messy nonsense and possible beauty that goes along with existence. “With pleasure the young men,” she writes, to open the poem “WITH PLEASURE THE YOUNG MEN,” “dismantle the young women // With pleasure their sick slick grins drip over the wet idea // of humiliated flesh [.]” Raised in Houston, Cairo and Caracas and currently based in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Bludworth de Barrios is the author of the full-length debut Splendor (H_NGM_N Books, 2015), as well as the chapbooks Extraordinary Power (Factory Hollow Press, 2014) and Women, Money, Children, Ghosts (Sixth Finch, 2016). Shopping, or The End of Time, her second full-length collection, is set, within an opening as well as closing poem, into four sections of narrative lyrics—“WOMEN,” “MONEY,” “CHILDREN” and “GHOSTS”—all of which are individually constructed as assemblages of short phrases and bursts; her narratives are less built as accumulations than as a cadence of narrative waves, rolling through rise and fall to either a final crescent, or a sweep up to the shore of the space beyond that final word.

My new blue kitchen cabinets painted blue
Black countertops, black granite flecked with dirty starlight
And Saltillo tile from Saltillo, Mexico, baked, glazed earth and still some little
imprints from the foot of a dog who passed probably 50 years ago
When the Earth had fewer dogs probably but more species, fewer people, but
more thick forest, more dark trees and the webs strung between the trees,
clumps of sticks pushed into nests with the vulnerable blue, white, or cream
eggs inside, speckled, warm, the squirrels’ nests that contain two entrances
that are also two exists, a burrow in the sky, warm and dry
A bird singing with its narrow throat, its voice a slender stem
The legs of the insects slander as stems
The stems numerous and dense moving in quick ticks
My thoughts numerous and dense
Thickly sprouting, dumb (“MY NEW BLUE KITCHEN CABINETS PAINTED BLUE”)

Throughout her poems, Bludworth de Barrios seems fond of the direct statement, whether set as a point from which her narrative can expand further, a counterpoint or even a side-step, depending, of course, on where the statement is set in those narrative waves of rise and fall, rise and fall. “To be a mother,” she writes, as part of the two-page poem “80 TO 90 PERCENT OF MY AWARENESS,” “Is to be a figure in a painting // Wrapped in a sacred blanket [.]” Later on in the collection, the poem “STATUES OR KNOTTED ROPES OR SCORED STONE” offers a slight variation, or even a continuation: “A person is a device / For storing information across time // The parent melts or dissolves / And up springs the child // A person // Is a phenomenal device / That assembles itself from dirt and air [.]”

In certain ways, this is very much a collection writing and exploring the trauma and beauty both large scale and small of parenting, children and interacting with and through the culture, the present, each other and the universe. It would be interesting to examine the ways through which her direct statements on self and being connect, and even conflict, to each other; evolving in the normal ways of human complication: we are never simply one thing, in one way or direction; often working multiple simultaneously. Note the poem, for example, “MY PREGNANCY WAS A LONG AND HAPPY NIGHTMARE,” a three-page extended lyric that opens: “My pregnancy / Was a long and happy nightmare // During which I ate / Pint-sized tubs of ice cream and walked around the block // Becoming more tubby and unwieldly / As if living in the skin of a drum // Wielding and propelling my belly / Feeling dreamy and druggy in the suburbs under the sun [.]” There is a swell and swoop of her narrative, but also a subtle music across that same lyric that itself fills and diminishes across such a lovely spectrum of her lines. One is nearly required to close one’s eyes to truly listen.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Joshua Nguyen

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in The Offing, Wildness, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He has also been featured on both the VS podcast and The Slowdown. He is a bubble tea connoisseur and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.

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?
There are more things to think about and to juggle. A lot more emails. A lot more things to schedule. It’s a lot of extra work when your first book comes out when you don’t have a booking agent or literary agent. I had to create my own promotional materials, I had to schedule all my readings, I had to make sure bookstores hold my books, and I also had to edit proofs.

Because I am still in school, in a creative writing PhD program, the book stuff feels like a reprieve from the stress of school. I am glad that my book tour is all during the winter break— I was able to focus on my schoolwork during the fall semester, and then during the winter break, I can stay present with my book and the people I am reading with.

It does bring me a lot of happiness when I see people holding my book. For a while, it didn’t feel real. Now, it feels as real as ever with the physical object of the book in the world. I’m not nervous about what people will say about it, I am more nervous about what they don’t say. I want to know the poems that people like and don't like! That’s probably because I cringe at positive reinforcement— ask all my friends, they know it’s hard for me to take a compliment.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually fell in love with short stories first. It was Flannery O’ Connor and Poe. But I came to love poetry when I tried out for the Houston Youth Poetry Team called Meta-Four Houston. Writing workshops and practices were held at the Houston Downtown Library and I had to compete to get on the team— they were taking the top 6 of the competition. I actually got 8th place first, but then someone actually got a time penalty, and another person couldn’t do the time commitment, so I got the final 6th spot! This was when I was 14 years old— and I have been writing poetry ever since.

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?
Because of being in consistent writing workshops, three - four days a week, during my high school summer years— I can churn out a poem (though it’s a bad draft) in 5 minutes or less. The editing process takes me a while. Editing and revising can take me like 2 weeks.

Typically, I come up with loads of ideas for poems for a particular project, and put them in one note on my phone. I spend half of the year coming up with ideas and projects. Then I’ll usually spend two months (the summer or winter break) writing first drafts of these poems. Then I spend any free time I have editing the project up until it gets picked up somewhere.

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 like starting with the project first because it funnels my pen. I work best with constraint— which is why I tend to turn to form. The idea of the project works as a form so that I can stay focused and not go everywhere.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings! Open mics are instant editing workshops. If you read your poem allowed, you’ll hear things you don’t like. You can also gauge the audience and see which parts of the poem they respond to.

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 invested in caesura. In my book, Come Clean, I use the enclosed bracket throughout the book as a caesura, as acrots (acot?), and as place-markers. I’m fascinated by it because it can be seen as something as an aside, but what if the aside is what’s trying to be unhidden? I also think you can show breath with your caesuras and enjambments, but what happens if you enclose the breath?

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?
The writer, if they choose so, can be a voice in trying to express the inexpressible. At best, they can unlock something in a reader— that something can be emotional, mental, or physical.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s essential— as long as you find an editor that you mesh with.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My dad always taught me to be content yet always be ambitious. He taught me to be grateful for where I am at and what I have in the present, but to not be afraid to want more.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (text to more performance-driven work)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think I went the opposite route. I went from performance-driven work to text. But either way, I think it shouldn’t matter. A good poem should be good while read on the page. And that same poem should be good if read on a stage.

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 don’t have a particular routine. Which is why I got an MFA and why I am in a creative writing PhD program. The fact that I have to write poems for workshop, and eventually for a dissertation, requires me to learn to create a writing routine. I have a writing pattern for the year (refer to question #3).

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read read read. Sometimes I’ll pick up a book, and then not be able to finish it, because something in the book inspires me to write. I also like watching movie analysis videos on YouTube.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Probably the smell of white rice and coffee.

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?
Music and music videos help me get weird in my writing. If you open up Come Clean, you’ll see that Mitski is a huge influence on that book. When I was writing a lot of these poems, Mitski was the soundtrack for a lot of the sadness I was feeling. I am such a huge fan. When I first saw her in concert, I teared up when she slowly walked out onto the stage. I bought the rights to use lyrics from one of her songs (“Last Words of a Shooting Star”) for Come Clean.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I am indebted to all the writers who are, or have been, a mentor to me. I think Patricia Smith is always in the top 5 for me. Blood Dazzler is a big one I turn to often when I want to study how to put together an entire book. I also look to that book when thinking about persona. I turn to Duy Doan’s We Play a Game because it delightfully plays with both the English language and the Vietnamese language.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to visit Austria. I would also love to work in a writers room. I would be good for a sitcom or animated series where wordplay is part of the humor.

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 could’ve been a dentist. I was on track to be a dentist up until 2016. I did a biochemistry degree in undergrad, I studied for the DAT (Dental Admissions Test), submitted to multiple dental schools, and then got one dental school interview.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I guess this could continue on from question 17. After I got that first dental school interview, I had a gut feeling that it wasn’t the right path. I didn’t feel joy. I went to Waffle House with my best friend, Tony, and I asked him what he learned in undergrad. He said, “Do not lie to yourself.” At the same time, I was listening to Mitski’s song, “Because Dreaming Costs Money, My Dear”, which has this idea of following your dreams even though it might hurt.

And the third thing that happened all within the same time, was that my friend, Julian Randall, posted on Facebook about the University of Mississippi MFA program. I reached out to ask him questions about it and then I applied. I had two weeks. I drove to Dallas to hunker down at my friend's apartment, worked on my personal statement and my writing sample, and then I got in.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book — Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward blew me away, made me tear up.

Last great film — Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was gorgeous. I also loved Jojo Rabbit.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I have two poetry projects that I am working on. One incorporates asexuality studies and the other is a love letter to Houston’s perseverance.

I have a short story collection that I am editing and submitting to contests soon.

I have a novel that I want to publish in the future and a collection of essays about the Asian-American experience.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;