Isabel Sobral Campos, The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation

Breaking the page the page
breaks in undue shattering
the bowl of its fragment is
a resonant beam the breaking
the physical well of internment
the page splitting a child’s con-
finement the blueprint of
mental death the age of a child
fluctuates with the punctuated
raptures of malignant expression
understanding foremost the bub-
bling of cruelty fizzes performs
page chew up internal breaching
point pulverized barkpaper leaf
chomping crushing page crack

The latest from American poet, publisher and translator Isabel Sobral Campos, is The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2025), a title that follows a handful of her prior chapbooks and various translations, as well as the full-length collections Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and How to Make Words of Rubble (Takoma Park MD: Blue Figure Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]. Set in a quartet of numbered sections, at first glance, The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation appears to be structured as an extended, continuous accumulation of phrases, piled and layered atop each other, working through language, recollection and footnotes, gathered along an edgeless lyric. “L’Oréal kids shampoo on growing // piles of books, E. Said, Mayan Letters,” the opening sequence begins, “& Clifford Geertz       I study // the past’s phosphorous signs [.]” Campos’ lyric assemblage responds to and is set between footnotes and quoted material around Portugal’s colonial history, a history that exists as the world’s longest-lived colonial empire, from (as Wikipedia offers) “the conquest of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415 to the handover of Macau to China in 1999.” Listen, as she quotes from the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, political organizer, engineer and anti-colonial leader, Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973), from “The Facts About Portugal’s African Colonies,” which appeared in Unity & Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral (New York NY: Monthly Review, 1979):

‘Twenty thousand workers from Angola, Mozambique and the Cape Verde Islands work twelve hours a day on the settlers’ farms of San Tomé, in the heart of the equatorial zone. There is forced labour for public works in Guiné, Angola, and Mozambique, but in the later two it extends as well the privately owned companies. Every year 250 000 Angolans are rented out to agricultural, mining and contruction concerns. Every year 400 000 people of Mozambique are subjected to forced labour, 100 000 of whom are exported to the mines of South Africa and the Rhodesias. This trade in forced labour provides one of Portugal’s most stable sources of foreign currency.’  

There is an interesting way that Campos offers the prose and the lyric almost as point and counterpoint, allowing each to bounce off the other, utilizing collage across multiple levels, from quoted material and her own prose and staggered sentences and phrases, offering a collage of response slightly reminiscent of the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my review of her latest here], but far more complex in terms of fragments and structural layerings. Whereas Howe might work prose on one side and then a poem on another, even another section or two as well, within the boundaries of a single collection, Campos provides for dozens of smaller, more compact interactions and responses, providing a deeper conversation between sections, between footnotes, quoted material and her own explorations in response. Through the four extended stretches that connect to form The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation, Campos works to almost move in multiple directions simultaneously, providing less a linearity than an expansiveness across a large narrative and critical surface.

OPTOGRAM 6

A slave ship never docks the empty rips through its sails. It moans without a voice falling into a void it disappears the rogue salience of blood swelling in the rhythm of a disembodied breath inhaling exhaling a whirlpool of wrath but who sees you who gazes on to your gash of form your festered eruptions

A classroom in that space without light
Remnants of hidden truths
A blueprint designed for concealment 

Ensure the children do not learn, do not see it or hear it

 

Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress

 

pinky laundry

their dirty custard ranks
present a row of grooved tongues crooked
for a six-quarter shakedown
with a thin rinse 

pregnant, trembling, spinning
boxing bloodied socks and jeans
punishing the textile transgressions
of poor days dodged 

into the side-gyre
mesh drum tumbling
but chaos rising in five-minute increments 

here, we’re our own hunchbacked bellmen
wheeling out low-slung carts
below entombed fluorescent bars
Charons ferrying terrycloth,
folding the rabbled souls.

I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Writing origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]”

dear Rudyard

Well, the twain met—
not at the gates of Vienna
nor on a date at the Prater,
but in an artificial city
by Trudeaumanic accident. 

I learned to make killer Vanillekipferln—
blond almost dust and cultured butter,
gorgeous orchid’s wizened finger buried
in bright sand to dispense
migration’s black grains. 

I learned to consume my mezzaluna origins
in time for Midnight Mass—
marveled at the old man’s Sunday absences;
the porcine avoidance
of his distant past.

Through the poems that assemble into if: prey, then: huntress, the poems still seem to feel out their coherence into a larger structure, providing a looseness I’m curious to see evolve into whatever she attempts next. Ultimately, through if: prey, then: huntress, concerns and descriptions of labour are set as foundation, or as perpetual backdrop, but it is through the flourish of sound and rhythm that the poems sparkle, find their ultimate magic across the grounding of the concrete floor. As she writes as part of a statement, posted recently as part of the “Spotlight series”:

There’s a surprising amount of colour and sensory detail in some of these industrial environments– at least that’s what I try to highlight in my work. Buff yellow, UV-faded hunter green, and blazes of colour from the tugboats or safety gates and stairs. I like to explore the contrast between the built and the natural environment while enjoying the view and the people along the way– one of the perks of what can be complex and dangerous work.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cedar Sigo

Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.

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

My first chapbook Good Night Nurse (2001) changed my life because I was called upon to design it with a friend of mine, Noel Black. We had to settle on an arresting cover and figure out the dimensions of the paper and get it printed, and we didn't trim the edges so then it also became an example of what not to do. A reminder to trim down the edges from then on. Most importantly it taught me that I could make books with friends that looked way better than the books that you were offered in a library for instance or books that placed a premium on having a spine.

My most recent book Siren of Atlantis relates to my earlier work because it's still my pile of poems asking to be collected and printed but I had a stroke almost 3 years ago and so a lot of the poetry is reflective of getting back up onto the horse and learning to organize my existence into poetry once again.

It feels different because now I seem to write long notebook poems of individual numbered parts, and they can be fairly different stylistically from section to section but all still contained under one open air roof.  I think Philip Whalen's longer poems like Minor Moralia and Monday in the Evening space made this space possible for my voice. A poem that 'covers' the space of several days as opposed to the expected sort of tightly fitted box of poetry.

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

I was always more taken with the stories of the poets’ lives. When I was  younger, I thought of writing prose as having a financial advantage certainly and it was obviously a more popular form of writing. It felt similar to being jealous of friends that were in bands, and they could express themselves in an atmosphere that was fun. Nonfiction is something every poet should try in order to pass down their own highly specific takes on which writers will last and why and how invested they can get you in tracking the particulars of composition. I also think engaging in essay writing helps open the possibility of writing a poem with material others might designate for expository prose. So maybe we learn these different forms of address in order to mix them all up in the end or to use them differently. 

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?

Books of poems tend to take 3 to 4 years. I just let them pile up and then I'm very ruthless in terms of what actually goes into the manuscript.  After the first draft of a poem, I tend to savor it and write a few more drafts in long hand in my notebook. I tend to allow myself to enjoy this initial period as I am more familiar with the way material becomes dictated, escaping my body. I do keep one notebook, so drafts of poems sit next to failed blurbs and new short stories and lists and fragmented outlines for classes.

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?

They usually begin by chuckling to myself for hearing someone say something that I admire or could even make sharper. Their thought then leads into the innermost chamber, and I fashion my own edition of what they're saying. 

Once I set out on a poem I am scribing beyond immediate knowing but then the mortars of syntax come lumbering in along to make the whole thing solid. I like to take things out to see how much I can cut the machine down and still allow it to run. 

My books mark definitive periods of my life. I don't have old manuscripts laying around gathering dust. 

If a poem arrives in fragments over time and somewhat consistently then I tend to draw it up as a numbered serial poem.

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 know that I look forward to it but I'm often excited about it on the day of the actual reading. I think because I don't necessarily need to read my work out loud that when I do read it feels like I'm somewhat pent-up emotionally. That energy can come off as revelatory sometimes. I think the public likes a poet who is not dying to read. It puts them at ease.

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 do have a lot of theoretical concerns, but these are played out more often in the manner of an essay, sometimes in a single poem but not often as that's not something I can make happen. 

Guard the Mysteries is a book full of theoretical concerns. But I hid this fact well by making it extremely readable. 

"It's not what you say as a poet, it's how you live as a poet."

I keep mulling over that statement lately. It is attributed to the poet Tom Clark and was shared with me by Joanne Kyger. Who had seemingly borne these words out over 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?

I think poetry is helpful for its scope of vision and its innately conceptual nature. I do think it helps to become adept in the syntax of prose. I am definitely attracted to the concept of having a large armory of voices and to be able to speak about politics from an almost untenable position. 

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

I think of it as an absolute privilege and usually end up taking their advice, having already subjected my voice to the settings of several arrangers. It helps when the editor is a poet as well. I always love farming out the arrangement of my work. Each separate piece having already been overly considered. I feel somewhat open about order of the individual poems at that point. It feels like surrendering your paintings to a gallerist/dealer. Some may end up getting cut from the show or some get held in the back room for the absolute addicts when everything else has been sold.

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

"Just write what's going on around you. Outside and inside."

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 usually head upstairs to my office around 930 and read something or listen to a reading or watch a short piece of a video or interview that sparks some level of speculation that then moves outward to music and I'm always trying to track or think back to when that impulse turns from listening to making the poem or story or blurb or that ever the form or raft may be.

I usually try and rid myself of the poem or the story or personal essay before I embark on the business of writing poetry meaning the blurbs, the contracts, the invoices and the true maintenance and drudgery of having a career. 

I am usually done for the day around 4 pm

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

Sometimes I turn to artists that seem to naturally contain a spiritual dimension. Anne Waldman, Margaret Randall, dg okpik. Or I turn to glamourous visual  artists until I am sufficiently jealous and ready to lash out in verse

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The scent of ripe blackberries in August

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 actually. I feel like moving into curation is (in part) the next step for me. 

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

Recently Sid Ghosh, Terrence Arjoon, Laura Da', Mohammed Zenia, Will Fesperman and Anelise Chen

Always Eileen Myles, Simone White, Prageeta Sharma, CAConrad and Barbara Guest

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

I would like to be a guest on a good podcast

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?

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

The fact that I didn't need any special equipment beyond a notebook and pen to write.  Once I read the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, I realized you could write about things that other people considered dark, and these poets just considered part of consciousness and that you could publish with smaller presses and were well designed. Blurring that line between editor and poet. I wanted to get involved with writing specifically at that level. The fact of having to self-publish the first chapbook was attractive. Finding the right cover artist is still a pleasure for me as is securing the right lettering. Secretly I'm a book collector and sometimes printer who lives to write poetry and now sometimes stories. Lately, I've been reserving the writing of stories for when I am away on a residency.

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

Book: Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

Film: American Promise by Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster

19 - What are you currently working on?

Fiddling with a memoirish essay titled Early History of a Writer. Pulling together a book of collaborations with a variety of writers and artists. Preparing for a talk about Joanne Kyger's house. Gathering up all of my fledgling essays and art writing to make a book. Continuing work on my  ever-expanding scroll of poetry.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

a poem, a story, an essay or two and a new review of the book of sentences;

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Ottawa launch of the book of sentences on Saturday! It was a very great event, and great to co-launch with Zane Koss [see my review of his new poetry book here]. Here's a pic that David O'Meara was good enough to capture of myself reading. 

Otherwise, I know these updates are important to you, dear reader: the first published poem in my current work-in-progress, "The Museum of Practical Things," has landed online: a poem I composed for Jennifer Baker and David Currie's recent nuptials, posted over there at minor literature[s]. You can catch a recent essay I wrote on the project via my substack. There's also a recent short story, "Easter Parade," that appeared at MicroLit, posted as both text and audio of myself reading such. As well, Chris Banks was good enough to post an essay I wrote on the book of sentences over at The Woodlot, along with a poem reprinted from same. And did you see this review Dawn Macdonald posted for the book of sentences yesterday on her own substack? Holy cats! Much thanks!

Marcella Durand, The Prospect

 

First and first because it was the first use of the word
that sparked my interest in it, 

 

via Raymond Williams:

 

“…the view, the ordered proprietory response, the prospect…” 

The prospect is the view
from manorial windows,
the visual declaration of the view is mine,
the sweep of green lawn, the formal gardens, the topiary,
and further on, forest, woods. A line
of wilderness on the horizon. From which
poachers have been evicted.

I’m only just now getting to New York poet Marcella Durand’s The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020), a book-length ecopoetic around landscape and the common, writing the edge of the prospect, the edge of landscape and its depictions. “the region was drained by a river,” she writes, “and takes on the name of that river // a sign of a fish appears and now it is watershed // the entire region draiing // into the sea // every creak, every stream // goes joining together [.]” I’m curious how she writes in tandem, in response and in conversation, with the work and thinking of English poet John Clare (1793-1864), a poet known for his celebrations of the English countryside. She offers poems to John Clare, to herself from John Clare, to herself from herself, riffing off an extension of Clare’s own lines as an investigation around the conversation of ecopoetic. “In John Clare’s day,” she writes, “the commons was laid claim to. / The common land of the people was enclosed. / The commons was claimed and closed. /// John Clare wrote to himself as a child as a witness to enclosure. / His was the first recorded case of ‘ecodepression.’” There is something interesting in how she works in conversation with the pastoral with a contemporary, ecopoetic eye, assembling a book-length suite of poems, fragments and sketch-notes set within a particular and contemporary landscape (and a particular and contemporary anxiety around climate change), one that includes elements of the past, as a landscape can’t help but absorb. She places contemporary concerns upon that old landscape, seeing Clare’s depictions of his immediate through an updated lens, one that includes her own self, placed set in the centre of this updated portrait. Further on, offering: “It’s difficult to write to oneself. // As far as I get today.”

But most photographs of façades do contain an angle

being not stitched together from thousands of digital photographs,
instead, they are viewed from one place—
the viewer is the point of perspective, singular 

when flatness is indication that the point of perspective
begins from what is being viewed—the image is the
spot of origin

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sophia Dahlin

Sophia Dahlin is a poet in the East Bay. Her first collection, Natch, was released in 2020 by City Lights Books, and her second book, Glove Money, is forthcoming from Nightboat. She leads generative poetry workshops and teaches youth creative writing. With Jacob Kahn, she edits a small chapbook press called Eyelet, and with seven other poets, she curates a weekly reading series at Tamarack, Oakland.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When my first book, Natch came out, in 2020, it liberated me from the tremendous overwhelming exhausting desire to see my first book published. It liberated me from assembling new versions of Natch.

My second collection, Glove Money, is talkier than Natch—more narrative and gossipy and argumentative. Just as my first book liberated me, so too is Glove Money liberated of the carbon crusher pressure of the first book. Instead, it came together in a fleshier plantlike form. We’re good friends.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I like making sounds, which one does in poetry. That might have given it the leg up.

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’s the eruption of new work that hooks me—the poem breaking out of the quagmire. At this stage in my writing, the first drafts of poems usually look quite similar to the final drafts, but manuscripts change a lot draft to draft. I never take notes! Even as a student, I didn’t. I don’t know what notes are for. Just write the poem!

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 write fairly short and unrelated poems, doing my best not to think about what I am doing, and later I try to assemble them and think them through. The poems come quickly and the bulk of them get thrown away as the manuscript slowly asserts itself.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I freaking love giving readings, and I always learn about the work in the process. Readings help me cut the bullshit—even when it plays well (bullshit often does), if I feel unconvinced while reading it, chop. 

I love hosting readings, and I love attending readings. My girlfriend once said to me, witheringly, “You’re just happy people are in a room.”

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?
If there are questions behind Glove Money, they are probably “What is a transamorous sapphic poetics?” and “Wow is it wild that love is charging down the avenue to destroy me and I have no desire to run or what?”

The current question for most of us right now is probably, you know, what constitutes a human poetics, and what constitutes a machine poetics. And I’d say poets were working on those questions way before Language Learning Models were on the market. 

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 think writers have a lot of roles in larger culture! We (I’m speaking for the larger culture here) need to constantly relearn how to listen to language, and we need our experiences and our values and our strategies worded. Not all poets are good at all of those things. Not everyone is June Jordan, though if you are, you probably should be. But we need writers who can take apart a sentence, and writers who look out the window and describe the miscarriages of the breeze, and writers who can say Free Palestine and Don’t talk to cops. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For books, essential. For poems, generally unproductive. I’ve had the luck of working with excellent editors on both my books (Garrett Caples from City Lights and Lindsey Boldt from Nightboat) who focused on shaping the manuscripts rather than, say, line-editing. That’s what I personally need editors for the most: help me see the forest. My eyes are full of tree. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The best pieces of advice I have heard are: when you think the poem is done, keep writing, and: when you think the poem is done, end it immediately. 

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?
For about five years I wrote a poem every day, and I didn’t allow myself to go to sleep until I had a draft. I slept poorly, but that’s how I learned how to write poems.

Nowadays, I work on new drafts, manuscripts, and writing-related tasks (this, for instance) Monday through Friday from about 2-4pm, on the high of post-lunch coffee, and before my evening teaching begins. 

Of course, I often end up writing alongside my students in the evenings, so we can tack that onto the routine too. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I really want to write poetry in the moment and can’t, I translate a poem from the Spanish.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Southern California tap water! Smells like tap, tastes like home.

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?
Folk music, poetry translation (it’s a separate form!), theater, comic strips—comedy in general.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My girlfriend Violet Spurlock is very important to my work. I like to praise her beauty and win our arguments in my poems. 

The Bay Area poets are kind of everything to me, by whom I mean the disorganized collective of leftist writers influenced by New Narrative, the New York School, Language Poetry, and Feminist Poetics here in the Bay who were already here hanging out when I moved to town a little before Occupy. 

I learned how to be a poet in the world from them—which is, and this is my real advice for young writers: do it yourself, together. Make chapbooks, start a press, run a reading series, reading group, writing group. Forget the gods and dads and prizes that so rarely materialize, or ask too much of you when they do. Find comrades.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to grow old and join an all-retiree Shakespeare in the Park community theater collective. I would like to play Viola from Twelfth Night and Jacques from As You Like It.

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?
Besides retired community-theater participant? Novelist, teacher. And I do teach and I do write novels, in fact. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When I was deciding whether to devote my life to writing or acting, I was in high school, and looking around at my peers screaming for attention in the high school theater where we all hung out every lunch period, I became convinced that acting was bad for one’s character. That’s why I’m waiting till retirement to learn how to act. I’ll finally be ready for corruption.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just fed Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event through the book-return slot of my local library this morning. I thought it was gorgeous.

I recently saw Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev for the first time, at the Pacific Film Archive. It was undeniably great, but I was kind of devastated that you never see him painting. Violet says that’s the point. If so, I wish it weren’t.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Should I be honest, or gnomic?

I’m editing a collection of love poetry written during the pandemic, when my at the time brand new girlfriend and I moved in together “temporarily” ahaha.

I’m editing a collection of post-pandemic poetry about community art heaven, state-mandated hell (my brother is incarcerated), and dreams of anarchist maternity. Lots of Bernadette Mayer inspired forms in that one.

I’m not so much editing as re-reading and weighing the merits and humiliations of a book-length poem I wrote in a day. You know, like Bernadette Mayer.

I’m looking for a children’s literature agent who might be willing to sell some gay novels I wrote.

I’m being gnomic about another project that will, I imagine, fuck up everything else. 

I’m writing new poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kate Colby, PARADOXX

 

To lie by omission is to leave out the truth. To tell truth by omission is to leave out the lies, but the lie of my continuity constitutes my continuity, without which there’s nothing to tell. And if truth by omission is also to leave out misapprehensions, then I am not equal to the work.

I am absolutely struck by the thoughtful and interconnected ongoingness of Providence, Rhode Island writer Kate Colby’s PARADOXX (Essay Press, 2025) [a book I took with me to read in Ireland, as you well know], a first-person non-fiction portioned across a wide stretch of exploratory, present prose. Each of her sections begins with a moment, thought or quote that expands exponentially out, as she reacts and explores, furthering to see how far it might go. “Neither my experiences nor my memories are exceptional,” she offers, as part of the fifteenth section of her opening monologue, “HOW IT ENDS,” “but the relationship between them interests me now that I have children making memories of their own. I do my best to ensure that they will have positive memories of their childhoods, but the question of which will prove most important to them preoccupies me. When they are away from me at school and other activities, they are making memories we’ll never share, which makes me feel that my kids are being ripped from me slowly like the wrong way to take off a Band-Aid.” Colby writes through the coordinates and considerations of women writers, artists and thinkers, swirling around her own writing and thinking through her own parenting, and her own writing, and of those distances that might seem impossible but also seem impossibly interconnected.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Did she mean every little truth or one overarching one? Would all of the former add up to the latter? Either way, Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal feels like what spills from the gash, evincing exhaustion and interruption—a mishmash of memories, sex, scatology, and mundane notes-to-self punctuated by shouty all-capped imperatives from the inside of her forehead. But unconventional as it is, Clairvoyant Journal is thoroughly of its moment—the real-time transcription of the mind was a project common to many of Weiner’s peers, including Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian. Where is the line between her diagnosed schizophrenia and a literary movement?

Through one hundred numbered sections, Colby writes her thinking and experience through and across an array of forebears, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, C.D. Wright, Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and Lyn Hejinian. One hundred sections, across one hundred days, reminiscent of the one hundred days I composed my own one hundred pages across the onset of the Covid-era. She offers the footnote: “One hundred days ago (on paper) I was spontaneously induced to begin this writing by Jean Rhys’s unfinished autobiography. I’ve since spent years replacing nearly every word and sentence, letting the whole thing gather and shed like a thousand skins of its snake. I wish my life in the world was the same—that I could freeze it and work with what’s already here till I knew it was fruitless and/or finished.” Her exploratory, accumulative self-contained sections almost give the sense of writing from the foundation of Hejinian’s classic My Life (1980), utilizing biographical moments as the building blocks of structure, but through a more exploratory prose style, as a book-length essay, attempting to navigate, as she suggests on one point, her life on paper. Referencing Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978), she writes of memory and how it impacts being: “Writing Is an Aid to Memory is an experiment in omissionless self-depiction, where the sum of a life is an endless journey toward a shifting image of what it already is. Great, but I’d rather see my memory in a display case. (It would have to include the display case.)” She writes of collectivity and individuality; she writes of establishment and anti-establishment, negative capability and global culture, folk songs and the Spice Girls. “Reflecting and reacting to the narrative conventions of social media,” she writes, “the current literary approach to reality is self-reportage that represents representation within the exigencies of late capitalism. I want to take a hard look at my role, but can I see it from inside the eddy?” She writes of forebears, as this moment near the end offers: “I have a lot of obvious predecessors—Stein, Rhys, Wright, Hejinian. I don’t begrudge their sexiness. I do resent my first wives, though, and all of them are men.” Her writing, her thinking, is remarkable, and this is a book worth sitting within for as long as possible. Or, as she writes near the end:

Mallarmé said, “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” What baloney, but I’ll own it. I process the world by considering how I’d render it on paper, and then my conclusions are the product of having been written. At times I hide from news media, but am still beset by ambient information—birds and weather and a glimpse of a headline about a journalist’s beheading.

There should be a word for a word that should be its own opposite. Why does “behead” not mean to gain a head, in the manner of “bejewel,” “betroth” and “befriend”>

There’s a certain episode I can’t write about because I would lie. 

Willie wants to know why all my writing rhymes.

 

Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia

My review of Ottawa poet Manahil Bandukwala's Heliotropia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025) [which won the 2025 Archibald Lampman Award, by the by], following her full-length debut MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of trans experience. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the Premio Nuevas Voces, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. Among his six poetry books are lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title for no existe un mundo poshuracán at the Whitney Museum. In September 2025, Graywolf Press will publish his epic poem Algarabía. Roque currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, is the Creative Editor for sx salon: a small axe literary platform, and serves the needs of a fierce cat named Pietri.

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

I published my first book when I was 25. I had been obsessed with poetry since I was 12 and had been participating in readings in San Juan along poets such as José Raúl "Gallego" González, Hermes Ayala, Mara Pastor, and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro as a teenager. My style changed a lot after I want to SWP's Summer Writing Program when I was 18. There I studied under the mentorship of Daisy Zamora and Akilah Oliver and got to hear Amiri Baraka, Chip Delany, and Robin Blaser.

I worked intensively on the poems in my first book for about five or six years after that. While I was in the Comparative Literature Program at Mayagüez—the same program where I now teach—I met Lissette Rolón Collazo. She is an incredible editor and intellectual who ran the queer colloquium, El Coloquio ¿Del Otro Lao? and the press Editora Educación Emergente. She was also my professor and when she found out I had a manuscript, she invited me to submit to the press.

After I submitted the manuscript, there was a process where it was reviewed by three different readers who decided if it should be published. They decided on publication. I'm still so impressed because it was a long poetry book and the accumulation of many years of working on an early style. Publishing it gave me a great deal of confidence in my work. Sometimes I go back and reread those poems and have such mixed feelings. I can see a lot of how my style and work has changed, but the seeds are there. Thematically, questions of labor, coloniality, and gender were already present, as well and a formal interest in baroque metaphors rooted in daily life here.

I am incredibly grateful I published my first two books in Puerto Rico. This is my home. My forthcoming book la bella crisis will also be published here with Semipermeable.

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

I don't think I could answer that simply. We'd have to have a shared definition of what makes poetry and fiction different. I can definitely say I am a poet, not a prose writer. There is always a moment when I am reading a great novel that I think, "Wow. Impressive. That is why I'm not a novelist." Algarabía is an epic poem, a narrative poem. It was incredibly fun to write, and the narrative was challenging, but it is a poem. It reads like an epic, not 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 usually take a break after a big project. By break I don't mean a long time, but a time when I don't write at all. I need to disconnect from poetry after a book. A reset. I need to hang out and share and celebrate the work I just made. It's not about a specific amount of time, but about enjoying the work! About being alive.

Editing and rewriting is part of the writing process. Each poem requires different edits, some more than others.

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 don't know. I just write. Poems come. Some are short pieces. Some don't belong anywhere. Others are long. Some are part of collections. Others end up being the beginning of larger projects. Books tend to be projects for me, but sometimes it takes time for a project to take shape and make itself known to 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 doing readings. I love it when people respond to my work. I love sharing my work.

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?

Each book answers a different question and concern.

My third poetry book lo terciario/the tertiary (1^st ed. Timeless, Infinite Light, 2^nd ed. Noemi Press), a poetic response to the Puerto Rican debt crisis and a decolonial reconsideration of Marx's Capital.

My fourth poetry book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), a text written in dialogic fragments and interspersed with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of the trauma experienced after Hurricane María. It is centered con questions of coloniality, power, trauma, aesthetics and linguistic colonialism. 

My fifth poetry book, x/ex/exis, offers poems that meet at the intersection of gender, nation, and language. 

My sixth poetry book, antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano (Beacon Press, 2022), imagines a multiverse of decolonial futures for Puerto Rico. 

My newest collection, Algarabía, which will be out on September 2, is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf. It inscribes an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from both colonial and anti-colonial literary canons.

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?

Debates about the roles of writers in society are as old as writing. I can't talk about the role of "the writer" because I do not have a lot in common with some writers. Being a writer doesn't automatically make me anti-colonial or even socially aware. I think writers should spend less time debating the role they should have and more time either writing or acting. I go to protests as a person, not as a writer. I write as a writer. I say "Free Palestine" because I believe in a world without genocide, colonialism, and profit margins. There are many writers who are comfortable investing in Lockheed Martin. I am not one of them and I don't think I share anything with them except a general interest in literature.

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

I request specific editors for most of my projects because the Spanish side of my books is written in a Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish and I am trans and my language reflects that, which means I need someone comfortable with inclusive language and respectful of my work. I am not going to spend hours teaching an Argentinian copyeditor that in Puerto Rico we say "cristal" when referring to a car window. It's not my job. I have Puerto Rican editors.

As for editors in English, I also tend to request people who are aware of linguistic colonialism and won't ask me to translate "múcaro" as "screech owl" when those are literally different birds. After many years of bad experiences, I've become demanding and learned to say "no." It isn't my responsibility to decolonize the editorial world. All I can do is ask for editors that understand the gift that is Puerto Rican literature. It is the bare minimum. I am doing all the work of translating myself and my life, the least I can ask for is that the translation be treated with respect.

For Algarabía I was quite luck. I worked with editors that helped a great deal and were very thorough.

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

A writer once reminded a group of us that we were getting so excited about being featured in a well-known publication that we were losing sight of the fact that it was an honor for the magazine to get to interview us. That has been my guiding light for a long time. Be true to your work. Read and work hard. Never let colonizers disrespect you by giving them your power.

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

Those aren't different for me. I used the same set of tools for both. If you've ever tried translating a sonnet, you know that you need to be a poet for that to be a great sonnet in the target language. Not all poets are translators, and not all translators are poets, but I am both and they don't exist separately in my life. Literary translators should be writers. It is not a popular opinion, but I am always surprised that people think they can render something extraordinary in another language without having a sense of how it sounds, of its literariness. If anything, I am simply focusing on a slightly different aspect of language when I am translating, but translating is a form of rewriting.

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? 

A typical day for me begins with class prep and coffee because I am teaching four literature courses. This week we discuss Vladimir Propp's functions, Philip K. Dick and the movie Total Recall, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, Longinus's On the Sublime, contemporary Puerto Rican poetry, Farid ud-din Attar's The Conference of the Birds, Cervantes, and whether Popeyes or Church's Chicken has the best biscuits. Reading is a huge part of my writing practice. I am not one of those writers that has a writing routine, but I am a rigorous and consistent reader.

When I am writing, I sometimes take long breaks from work and concentrate on writing. It is the only way I can work consistently.

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

I read literature. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I had to call my uncle for this question. Jajaja. When I was a kid, I would visit my grandparents place on the road leading to Añasco for the summers. My uncle had a room where he lived and kept his tools and mountain climbing equipment and I have a visceral smell of the mix of his perfume and the equipment. He says it was probably Curve.

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?

Of course. Music: reggaetón, salsa, música de tríos, nueva trova, hip-hop, have all influenced me deeply. I am obviously inspired by Villana (Villano Antillano), and I am inspired by everyday things: oil puddles, edibles, two changos fighting, going to the Walgreens. I love movies, from commercial films like Clueless or John Wick, to more independent productions like Andrea Arnold's films or Perfume de Gardenias. Lists feel pretty limiting, but in terms of visual artists, I love Cy Twombly, Natalia Bosques Chico, and Pepón Osorio and I am inspired by performance artists such as Awilda Sterling and André Po Rodil.

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

I am part of a community. Puerto Rican literature wouldn't exist without our incredible efforts to keep it alive despite colonialism. Other writers here are so important to me. My friendships with writers such as Xavier Valcárcel, Roberto Ncar, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Hakeem Torres, Cristina Pérez Díaz, Angelía Rivera Mar, Gaddiel Francisco Ruiz Rivera, Gamelyn Oduardo-Sierra, Mayra Santos-Febres, üatibirí, Urayoán Noel, Mara Pastor, Isamar Anzalotta, Alejandra Rosa, Francisco Félix Canales Dalmau, Luis Negrón, Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, Veronika Reca, Willie Perdomo, Denice Frohman, Yara Liceaga, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Carina del Valle Schorske, Yamil Maldonado, Jean Alberto Rodríguez, Nicole Cecilia Delgado.... I know I've left out so many people. I am sorry! My point is that my community is expansive and includes a bunch of people. Even if we don't see each other regularly, we count on each other for a lot.

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

Visit every place in the Caribbean I haven't visited yet.

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?

A filmmaker. I love movies so much. They take up a lot of space in my life.

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

Sincerely, I don't know if I could have done something else, but I fell in love with poetry at a very young age and decided I wanted to be a poet. I am now almost 40, so it has been about 28 years of obsessing over poetry. I love it still and it has kept me alive. 

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

I just reread The Descent of Alette and Altazar. They are still both great! I see too many movies, so I'm not sure what the latest is, but I recently saw The Ugly Stepsister, which was great, and I saw Sinners in theaters, which I also loved.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Touring with Algarabía and organizing a big launch on September 13 at Casa Aboy with a line-up that includes some amazing writers and performers, drinks, and a book signing with Casa Riel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;