Search results: “star in the East”

Legacy Suite #4

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The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this interview, I.S. Jones spoke with poet Kemi Alabi about the communal work that is foundational to a poetry collection’s emergence, and challenging inflexible boundaries of the divine, of pleasure, and of love, all while crafting a new and invigorating lexicon which makes the Black queer body come alive. 

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In Kemi Alabi’s Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), heaven is already here and anywhere that black, queer folks can commune. In this stunning and other-worldly debut, Alabi’s vast entry to language is both enriched and underscored by the sonic registers that govern every poem. While the poems take on many forms, the true meat of the work is in its lyrical delight. Stretching the very boundaries of language itself, Against Heaven confronts a fraught relationship to the oracular in proximity to the sensual. At the center of all this is a remarkable journey of transformation, and frankly, a book I wish existed when I was much younger and still navigating what felt like an unreachable lexicon for my own body. Alabi’s work reminds me the writer is also one who envisions what was not possible before and gives us new eyes to see. 

 

Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi: Practice-based Poetics 

 

I. S. Jones: When you first held the final version of Against Heaven in your hands, how did you feel? I’m asking this question specifically because, least for me, when I held my chapbook, I felt very, I guess disillusioned might be the word though, but there was a way in which like now that it was a physical book, I felt very emotionally divorced from it now. Did holding the final product change experience for you? 

Kemi Alabi: I opened it with some friends, and I immediately burst into tears. Then I became terrified of the book object. Its static nature is terrifying to me. Just the sense of finality. I understood that it wouldn’t be mine anymore, but holding the physical object, I realized, “Okay, this is actually not only not mine, but these poems aren’t even the poem in the air to me. A poem transforms to me, and these don’t do that.” This process split my distinction between the poet and the poem, but also the distinction between the poet, the Poem, and the poem on the page. Of course, my poems have been printed before. I’ve seen them as objects, but the long poem of the book being its own static object—yeah, that terrified me. And I talked to other first-book poets about it, including Xan Phillips, Jennifer Huang, and Chekwube Danladi, who told me she threw her book at the wall [laughs].

So, I was in good company with my shame [laughs]. But because I’m a person of many minds always, it was also kind of like a sacred object to me. As much as I thought I was estranged from it, I loved it still, but I couldn’t really look at it, so honestly what I did was I took the copy and I wrapped it in some cloth, and I put it on my altar so that I can’t see it. I have reverence for the work that went into it and for the poet I was when I wrote it. But sometimes I don’t want to see it.

So yeah, that was my complex relationship to it as an object, but I’m grateful for it as a vehicle. And then I guess lastly, I’ll say my kinky black queer friends have helped me use BDSM to infuse this relationship with a dom/sub dynamic. What if the book object is the sub, and the poem as it exists in the air is the Dom? You know, I’m not even really in that equation and the book object is serving its purpose as being objectified, it’s being abused, and it’s doing whatever it needs to. 

IJ: How fitting of you to have done that ritual, that gesture of wrapping the book in cloth, but then also place it on an altar. It quite literally feels like the title itself, right? Spiritual heaven, but against the idea of a specific, Christian heaven, which is you putting it in a cloth and self-containing it. It feels like the cloth itself is the language that you have created within the book. Your unique lexicon that makes the book so decadent with language. 

Often poets find themselves engulfed by an idea or several governing ideas that become the foundation for the collection of poems that becomes the book. I’m curious to know how your process led you to what would become the final product. Did you actively set out to put together this book, or did you just write poems over the years, and then realize, “Oh wait! These poems are actually in conversation. There’s a clear sense of connective tissue that binds them together.”

KA: The latter, definitely. And I resisted the idea that I even had a first full-length manuscript for a while because I was so fixated on the idea of a project book—that I needed to begin with an understanding of what the long poem of the book might be. That’s not what I’d been writing toward. My practice wasn’t project-based; it was really one loosie at a time. I love the individual poem and all of the worlds that it contains. It’s a practice-based poetics. I’m always just kind of experimenting. But at one point, I had a few realizations: one, I felt myself taking a turn with my poetic obsessions and craft concerns. And I felt like I had all of this work and I needed it away from me so that I could move on.

And then two, I did discover the Poem of the book, all the ways in which my poems were talking to each other. I went back to my old journals, and I saw a note from maybe a decade ago, that was just a shaming note to myself: “stop writing about God and sex.” I looked at all my poems and went, huh, well, that’s clearly been my obsession for a very long time. I wanted to understand how and why, and then I just wanted to get out of these poems’ way. I did some work, of course, to strengthen that connective tissue between the poems, but I also really did appreciate the range of the collection. It’s really sprawling, something I can continue to write into for a long time. But I found myself in this era of my practice where I needed to let the work loose.

I feel like Against Heaven is very much a collection in which all the poems are in conversation with each other, but they’re also contradicting each other. It’s such a grappling, and there are so many different throughlines. Honestly, it’s not what I expected for a first book. I almost didn’t send it out because I was like, “you know what? I actually want my first book to read like a different type of project.” I really landed on the dilemma of what it means to get in your poems’ way. And I didn’t want to be that poet who was like, “No, I need to be this perfectionist. All of my intentions needs to be mapped onto whatever this is before I feel comfortable stepping aside and letting the poems do their work in the world.” Through practice, I found the poems. Through practice, I found that throughline. And then I was like, “okay, let me give this a shot.”

IJ: I love what you said about getting out of the poem was way. I needed to hear that because I’m guilty of that, too. I also appreciate the fact that you resist this perhaps contemporary trend of needing to write a book governed by a specific project. Nicole Sealey talked about this in passing, how when she put together Ordinary Beast, she wasn’t interested in a clear, narrative structure. Rather, she had these poems that felt like they wanted to build a house together. So, she sought to build the house. She resisted other people’s vision of what they thought her books should be and followed her own heart about that. I really love that you two are of the same mind in that way. 

In 2016, the Bajan visual artist Llanor Alleyne had their exhibit “WRITTEN IN THE BODY” in Barbados. All of their artwork is gorgeous and brightly colored, like your work, and you chose their piece “Seraphina” as cover art for Against Heaven. How does this piece speak to what Against Heaven seeks to translate to its audience as opposed to their other pieces such as “Lisha” or “Abbey + Saran” or “Kimba”?

KA: I so appreciate that question. And to begin to answer it, I’ll explain how it was chosen, because that was not the first piece I selected. It was a very quick process. It was the first thing I needed to do once I started: I connected with Graywolf, and they were like, “great, what’s your cover art?” I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t know! You just told me about a week ago that my book is being published, and I’m still dumbfounded.” I went on this hunt, and I first found this amazing piece by local Black queer artist Brittney Leeanne Williams, “Blood Baptism 2.”

I was obsessed with it. It’s of a very different intensity, this black figure engulfed in red tongue-like flames, which is different from “Seraphina,” a softer, livelier image of a more ambiguous figure entwined with floral arrangements. You know, one was giving hell, right? I’m still very obsessed with that image because it does capture a valence of Against Heaven, which is this underworld journey. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the rights for that artwork. Of course, that broke my heart, but it was crunch time. Graywolf tells me, “okay, you have two weeks. Can you find something else?” I don’t know anything about visual art, how am I supposed to do this?

Another shoutout to Xan Phillips because it was through one of their recommendations that I stumbled on Alleyne’s work. Shoutout to Chantz Erolin at Graywolf, my editor, who gave me the opportunity to make the collection more molten again—that’s when I understood it wasn’t all an underworld journey. A lot of the feedback I’ve gotten about my own poetry is that the blood is there, right? But through other folks’ lens and my re-entry into the work, I understood that it was as much about rapture, an impassioned aliveness, as it was about the ways that we are obstructed and destroyed by systems. All the elements are present in Against Heaven, but I was too focused on the flames and not the water and not the earth.

I began to understand that there is a lushness here. There is a sensual embrace that I’m curious about, not just the underworld journey, which had become my laser focus. I loved the oppositional idea of Against Heaven and I still do. Half of the collection is also this idea of against, as in, “right up against,” a cheek-to-cheek tenderness. The redirection allowed me to explore that more, and then I stumbled on Alleyne’s “Written On The Body” collection. My mind didn’t make the decision, my body did. It was recognition of that tender valence that through my too-cerebral understanding of my own work, I had discarded. I’m like, no, the blood, the blood! [laughs].

I needed that visual art to ground the work. The long poem of this book is taking us through these different worlds and then turning us [the readers] towards something else. And “Seraphina” is that something else. I gravitated towards that piece in particular because of the embrace. There’s this figure without some of the gendered characteristics of the other bodies in the collection—which was important to me as this enby person who is trying to think about gender more expansively—in this embrace of a wild, colorful explosion that could be coming from within, that could be exploding from the figure’s body. It’s not super clear, the origin. Because of the intimacy and interiority of Against Heaven, that felt really resonant. And then there is this white background, this intense contrast, and it reminded me of Zora Neale Hurston: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” That contrast felt really crucial to the heaven the speakers are against and the heaven they are seeking and trying to embrace: this kind of blank whiteness that will swallow them versus this rewilding earth that’s embracing them and that they’re embracing back in all of its chaos and bounty and pleasure.

IJ: I’m fascinated by the word “against,” because of course, there are a lot of ways in which the book is against heteronormativity, against a rigid binary of what romantic love looks like. Your Polyamory Defense poem is against empire, but it’s also in praise of community and love. I’m thinking here of your poem, “We Would Hex The President but.”

I’m also thinking of “Love poem -1: Chicago (CST) to Bangalore (GMT +5:30)” with the understanding that it was written in praise of a dear person in your life, fellow poet Sanam Sheriff, who was influential, not only to that poem, but to the collection as a whole. I’m curious about how much of the book you wrote within community, in close proximity to your people, and how much of the book you wrote by yourself, so to speak. I think there’s this pervasive myth that as poets, we work in silos. There’s some truth to that, but at the same time, we need community—to refresh us, to replenish us, and for us to pour back into. Community expands the range of our internal landscape and shows us what’s possible. I feel in part that that’s what Against Heaven is doing.

KA: I love that question. It’s making me think of Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer, who says, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” I find that my poetry practice is so much richer because of community. I can access more pleasure when informed by other people’s work. Right now, I find myself in a state of poetic isolation, which I hate. I’m like, these are horrible working conditions. Most of my poetic practice has been in spaces where I can generate with other people, even when I’m thinking about when I was back in college with my poetry group, Speak for Yourself; on Tuesday evenings, we would have workshop. We would write toward each other.

Even in high school, I moved from writing alone to my senior year creative writing class—suddenly, I found my people. At lunchtime, we would write and share with each other. We would go to the coffee shop on weekends and write with each other. Even from my very early poetry stages, I was moving from a very lonely poetic space to a more exciting, more experimental, exploratory, and generative practice with other people.

I think it’s always a toggle. Against Heaven emerged in so many different spaces. Some of those poems go back to the Boston Poetry Slam, they are poems I wrote for their open mics. Some of those poems go back to Tin House, Pink Door, Winter Tangerine, and Shira Erlichman’s In Surreal Life workshop. All of the work is in the shadow of my time with Echoing Ida, a group of Black women and non-binary writers who were writing primarily op-eds and other journalistic pieces rooted in reproductive justice. My role from 2014 to early 2021 was coordinating and leading this group through monthly trainings and annual retreats. I was so steeped in that work with them as organizers and writers who were trying to honor Ida B. Wells, who once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

I can point to a person who was integral to every poem, for the most part. But I also think that some of the most potent poems in this collection were written from a place of extreme isolation. Because that’s just how we end up living our lives. But there’s no poem that I haven’t first read to a person or a group of people—all of the poems lived in the air and were shared with others before they were printed in a journal or in this book.

To your question: I’m not a writer without community, even when I’m in short-term isolation or feeling estranged from an active writing community. Even if I’m solo, there are still the books that I’m always referring to and communing with to understand what it is I’m trying to do with this work. 

 

photo courtesy of ally almore

 

 

Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Their poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, Poetry, Boston Review, Catapult, Guernica, them., the BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. Selected by Chen Chen as winner of the 2020 Beacon Street Poetry Prize, Kemi has received Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Brittle Paper Award nominations along with support from MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri, Tin House and Pink Door.

Kemi believes in the world-shifting power of words and the radical imaginations of Black queer and trans people. As cultural strategy director of Forward Together, they built political power with cultural workers of color through programs like Echoing Ida, a home for Black women and nonbinary writers, and annual art campaigns like Trans Day of Resilience. The Echoing Ida Collection, coedited with Cynthia R. Greenlee and Janna Zinzi, is available now from Feminist Press.

Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, Kemi now lives in Chicago, IL.

I.S. Jones

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I.S. hosts a month-long, online poetry workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. She is the co-editor of The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, Transition, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. Her poem “Vanity” was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and is the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. She is the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, a community-driven contemporary arts center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound.

Theodicy

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“Theodicy” by Grace MacNair is the winning poem for the 2022 Emerging Poet Prize, selected by Safia Elhillo. We’re honored to share this urgent poem as well as an interview with Grace about her work both on the page and beyond it.

I’ve heard many times throughout my life that a good ending should feel both inevitable and truly surprising, and I maybe never fully understood that until reading this poem. It covers so much ground but with such stunning economy. I loved and trusted the unadorned language, which makes me think of Baldwin talking about writing a sentence “clean as a bone.” The vividness of the images was emphasized for me by the straightforwardness of the diction, and the effect was like having this poem injected directly into my heart.  —Safia Elhillo, guest judge

 

Yesterday I overheard a woman speak of Mary,
specifically her eyes, always cast up
toward the angel or down toward the baby,

how she never looks at you straight —
a posture I’ve assumed myself,
a posture I’m trained to watch for.

About our bodies, strangers in white
deliver the news; in some places, the only option
is the option Mary had.

And Eve? She didn’t ask for death,
only knowledge, but death is what god gave her
and what he gave his son.

Last week I stood in front of Alice Neel’s Well Baby Clinic.
Grotesque mothers juggle infants, metal beds askew.
Clad in white, a nurse towers over a woman with bloodied nipples.

A doctor holds what looks like a diaphragm in his skeletal hands.
On Neel’s lap, a ghostly alien. When people would mewl over little kids,
I just wanted to paint them. I should have had some birth control thing.

Neel had a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide by eating glass.
Once I wrote out the Lord’s prayer, added an r to father.
Farther. God as distance makes sense.

Distance can describe space, time,
disposition — realms in which violence lives
concrete, unseen, inextricable.

Years ago I watched a woman who’d impaled herself
with a sharpened stick collapse to the hospital floor.
Two days on an oxcart. Hysterectomy.

Blood poisoning. She lived but barely.
Years later, an American senator speaks on rape:

The female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.

 

Interview with Grace MacNair

by AT Hincapie 

 

AH: Part ekphrasis and part criticism, your winning poem “Theodicy” makes direct reference to Alice Neel’s Well Baby Clinic, where “grotesque mothers juggle infants, metal beds askew.” How do you see this homage to visual art informing the written word, or how might this kind of ekphrastic voice give context and clarity to your own observations?

GM: The materiality of visual art helps me discover language, clarify emotion, and explore my subconscious. “Theodicy” is my attempt to tell the truth about what Neel and so many others experienced, and what I’ve seen and experienced in both my personal and professional life in support of reproductive health. Lucille Clifton spoke to the importance of this when she wrote “…poetry teaches us that everything is connected…There is so much history that we have not validated.”

A therapist once theorized that the severe insomnia I suffered until about two years ago was a symptom of my inability to express anger. When I first stood in front of Well Baby Clinic I was overcome by a sense of rage and claustrophobia. In “Killing Plato,” the poet Chantal Maillard (translated by Yvette Siegert) said that she writes “because someone forgot to scream/and now a white space/exists inside of them.” This white space haunts me – it is an absence created by rage, and from what I know of Neel I think it haunted her too. Well Baby Clinic vehemently rejects its placid title and portrays a disturbing power dynamic. A white-clad nurse expertly holds the only calm baby in the room, a moment of quiet disquiet amidst the clinic’s chaos, while a doctor with well-defined features balances a cervical cap* on his skeletal fingers just out of reach of a woman with a vandalized face and bloody nipples.

This power imbalance is a recurring theme in my poetry and in reproductive and child health. Between 1927 and 1928 when Well Baby Clinic was painted, Neel was living in relative poverty and receiving healthcare from free/low-cost, desegregated clinics. These clinics disproportionately subjected Black women to invasive and humiliating STI tests before providing them with care. Neel herself was screened for syphilis via an excruciating and debilitating spinal tap. In 1927, Neel lost her first child to diphtheria, which by that time mostly affected people who lived in under-resourced conditions. Well Baby Clinic sharpens all this history to a point. To write successful ekphrasis, Mark Doty says that writers must “see beyond the art and say what it means to them…take us into the work in a way we don’t expect.” Neel’s work helped me to describe a white space inside me that was in need of language, especially in light of current events.

*correction: in my poem, I described the cervical cap as a “diaphragm.” This is a mistake and an anachronism. Diaphragms were not invented until the 1940s!

 

AH: Similar to descriptions of Alice Neel’s painting, this poem also emphasizes religious iconography through visuals of Mary and Eve, and even reworkings of language in the Lord’s Prayer, where “God as distance makes sense.” What relationship do you find between faith and healthcare, and how might these images and traditions influence the speaker’s mindset in this poem?

GM: Religious iconography and references make their way into the poem by way of my upbringing in a rural, evangelical Christian household with limited access to education. As a child, I was obsessed with how a perfectly good and omniscient God could coexist with evil. When I was nineteen and living on a commune in Switzerland, I began studying theodicies that attempt to explain this question. For example, Julian of Norwich, a medieval anchoress and mystic, proposed that the ecstasy of the second coming would be felt when God finally explained what the fuck he was thinking. The line “God as distance makes sense” is me time traveling back to my younger self who once agonized over Christianity’s gaps in logic. Prior to becoming an atheist, I’d begun to believe that God must only exist in absentia. 

At this particular moment in history, the relationship I see between faith and healthcare is highly fraught. Despite many notable exceptions, there’s no denying that Christianity used and still uses healthcare as a will to power and a form of biopolitical control. One needs to look no further than colonial medicine, missionaries, and government reliance on religious charity to supplement an inadequate health care system. America’s war on reproductive health is built on decades-long campaigns by Christian nationalists to gain legislative, judicial, and political power. This effort extends globally. In 2019, the Trump administration blocked Title X funds from reaching domestic and global clinics that provided abortion information. The woman in my poem who nearly died of a botched abortion lived in Malawi, which retains one of the most restrictive abortion laws in all of Africa: a 1930 penal code that criminalizes anyone who has an abortion, unless their life is at stake, with 7-14 years in prison. It’s worth noting that the British brought Christianity to Malawi in the 1880s, and that Malawi did not achieve independence until 1964. In 2021, Malawi’s parliament withdrew an abortion bill that would have legalized abortion in cases of rape and incest. A Catholic group that opposed the bill with donated funds from the US claimed victory. 

America’s pro-life movement continues to rely on bad science and specious theodicies (“God uses evil for good,” etc.) to force people to carry unwanted/unsafe/nonviable pregnancies to term. I recently learned that in 1994 Joe Biden wrote: “Please don’t force me to pay for abortions against my conscience.” By “conscience,” he meant Catholicism. I know my answer to your question must make me seem anti-religion, but I’m not. I find many aspects of religion to be edifying and profoundly consoling, but like anything powerful, it can be unpredictable and dangerous. 

 

AH: A recurring theme here comes from measuring and observing time across generations and across disciplines–from religious, artistic, medical, and even political perspectives when “Years later, an American senator speaks…” Can you speak to your perspective of the progress that humans have made over the thousands of years that are traced in this poem? Is it possible that our generation could hope to achieve what our mothers have worked toward?

GM: I wish the poem traced progress, but I’m not sure it does. If anything, it highlights centuries of various countries, powers, and cultures failing to provide people with bodily/reproductive autonomy. The comment that ends the poem was made in 2012 by former Senator Todd Akin. Prior to Akin, several Republican politicians made similar claims. James Leon Holmes, a former federal judge in Arkansas, claimed that “Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.” Stephen Freind, former Pennsylvania State Representative, said that “when a traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion which has a tendency to kill the sperm.” These arguments are reminiscent of the medieval theory that conception was only possible if orgasm was achieved, and since a physiological pleasure response was (incorrectly) assumed to be impossible during an assault, pregnancy invalidated rape. 

I’m grateful to be surrounded by people who are fighting the good fight, committed to recognizing and unlearning patterns of harm, and helping me recognize these patterns in my own life. But truthfully, I don’t know where our generation is headed. In healthcare, I regularly deal with men who are intent on exerting control over the bodies of their partners and their children. Many of these men identify as feminists. I think the power that reproductive bodies manifest—especially before, during, and after birth, and while nourishing another human through bodyfeeding or other acts of care—triggers many men to act in insidious ways even if they claim to know better. Meanwhile, our country is being run aground by people who blatantly oppose science, the environment, and basic human rights. It’s bleak. I hope we can achieve a future in which survival is possible. 

 

AH: Maybe the answer to this problem comes in service to others, which is something that has become an important part of your life and career. How has your work as a teacher and health care professional been influential to your writing?

GM: While I’m deeply passionate about healthcare and the opportunities for direct action it provides, writing poetry is how I cope with the world and find joy. Teaching inspires and deepens my work as both a poet and healthcare professional. Nothing is more fulfilling than learning alongside others, whether I’m teaching poetry, clinical skills, or mentoring practitioners in my field. Again and again, teachers have appeared in my life at just the right moment. Their wisdom, guidance, and kindness have sustained me. “Theodicy” belongs to a body of work that’s grounded in my study of women’s contemporary and historical experiences as medical practitioners and medical subjects. The poems are meant to teach, incite, and viscerally disturb the reader in the same ways my work in healthcare teaches, incites, and viscerally disturbs me. 

 

AH: In regard to sources of inspiration, how has your work in translation influenced your personal writing, perhaps from your time with the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference?

GM: Right now I’m working on two projects involving forms of translation. The first project draws on the lives and archives of midwives who lived between the 4th-century BCE and the 20th-century. Although I’m not literally translating their work, I am writing poems that draw on the records they left behind. I’m currently at work on a book-length poem called “I Tarried All Night.” The poem is an episodic, fictionalized retelling of the life of an 18th-century midwife named Martha Moore Ballard whose uncommon literacy allowed her to keep a consistent yet cryptic diary from 1785 to 1812. 

The second project is an unconventional translation of poems by the 20th-century Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. I’m not the least bit proficient in Russian, and the project strays very far from literary translation. I went to the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference with some trepidation about whether or not my project was permissible. To my relief and delight, many people were having rich and generous discussions about unconventional approaches to translation. I’m grateful to Madhu Kaza who introduced the term “transcreation” in her lecture. According to Madhu, “transcreation” is an Indian term that describes an approach to translation that “is not extremely concerned with accuracy and fidelity” to the original text. I now use this term to describe my translations of Tsvetaeva’s work. Tsvetaeva was openly queer, intensely passionate, and politically complex. My poems investigate her fraught relationship to caretaking and motherhood and her drive to prioritize poetry above everything else. Of translation, Tsvetaeva wrote: “I tried to translate, but decided—why should I get in my own way? …The result was I rewrote it.”

The Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference was everything I hoped it would be and more. I love reading work in translation—it’s how I’ve discovered many of my favorite authors, and I find it to be one of the best ways to jump-start my own writing. Spending time with and learning from professional literary translators was a dream come true. 

 

Grace MacNair

Grace MacNair is a poet and healthcare professional living in Brooklyn, NY. She has received a Monson Arts Residency and Fellowship and support from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, Brooklyn Poets, and Hunter College. Grace was selected by Yona Harvey as the winner of Radar Poetry's 2021 Coniston Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Radar Poetry, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.

If These Covers Could Talk #5

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In If These Covers Could Talk, poets interview the visual artists whose works grace their book covers. The result is an engaging discussion of process, vision, and projects. This series is a celebration of collaboration—here, we champion the fruitful conversations taking place both on and behind the cover.

This month, poet Anthony Cody talked to artist Josué Rojas about the cover of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020).

A Conversation Between Anthony Cody and Josue Rojas 

Anthony Cody: Hi Josué, I know you’re running around and hustling, so I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. Ultimately, while I want to talk about Borderland Apocrypha’s book cover, I am almost more interested in highlighting you, what you’re doing right now, what you’ve been thinking through, the importance of community, and even the abstract and concrete of what’s swirling around for you at this time. Is this too much? 

Josué Rojas: This sounds like my comfort zone. 

AC: In preparing for our conversation and because of our own twelve-year-old old friendship, I wanted to dig around and think through what people had already said about you. A way to see you in another light. But instead, I read what I knew since we first met in 2010– you’re a good dude and soul. It was great to read other folks recognizing your big heart, your generosity, and your willingness to give back to others. In this sense, where do community and collaboration begin for you?

JR: I think you and I are similar kinds of artists in that we can kind of give a lot to others because we’ve received a lot and feel blessed. I feel very blessed. I think life has given me a lot. 

Firstly, with my family. Secondly, with my community, and thirdly, I think you might be able to relate to this—I hit the lottery with my mentors. I had the opportunity to spend time with some of the world’s best mentors, and I take that pretty seriously. You know, I think mentorship is pretty serious. It was kind of sewn into me and I feel like it is its own kind of impromptu education. It’s as valuable—in many cases more valuable—than a degree to have known established artists or people who I admire, creatives, that have really given me some direction in life. My mom always told me growing up, don’t be afraid to ask for help. And so I had to follow people who are where I want to be, and I really followed both those pieces of advice. 

Some of the best advice that I’ve received was from one of my mentors, John Walker, an amazing painter who I studied with at Boston University. He said, “If you’re not generous, you’re not going to be a very good artist.” I took that to heart, and it’s true. You know, I think in many ways, we’re giving away stuff away. We’re giving away our thoughts, we are trusting people with our most intimate actions, with our most intimate ways of looking at the world, and there’s a level of courage in kind of giving it all away. And that’s what makes for some of the greatest artists. I think he was right about that.

AC: I love that! I think that’s true. I think that is definitely an area where you and I kind of overlap, our experiences being blessed with a bounty of mentors. And, also, having wonderful moms. Moms that are down, that offer insight, that go to the events, that paint and imagine alongside us. I love the fact that right now during this interview you are in your car and driving with your mom. I think that’s important. Now, in this stage of your career, do you feel like you’re at a place where you’re mentoring others? Or, how do you feel about that process now, about paying it forward to others?

JR: Yeah, I absolutely feel like I’m a mentor, which feels wild to say. The act of passing down or helping people access their creative DNA. I think to be in our spaces, the sacred spaces within a community, spaces where art heals, spaces where we’re intimate enough to really touch on any kind of art making, that’s a very special thing. People are really craving that these days. It doesn’t happen by accident. I think we have to be very intentional about creating. Creating is truly a way of passing on our most intimate values.

I was sharing this idea with a group of kids today. It’s like, you can’t really build with other people until you’ve actually built with yourself. Knowledge itself is really what’s going to help build community. You can’t really have a culturally relevant potluck until you get your own culture’s recipe right. You get that recipe right, then you can share your dish with other people. I feel that it’s important for us to know ourselves and know our stuff, and then be able to share that with other people in a relevant and meaningful way.

AC: That’s such a great moment, sharing that knowledge with youth, with students. Do you feel like there was that kind of moment for you, if we circle all the way back to young Josue? A moment in your development when and/or where you felt like art could be a possibility for you? Because I know for me, that’s something I have always struggled with. I don’t know if I ever had the thought “I’m going to be a writer.” all of a sudden one day. I was doing it, and doing it, until at some point I realized I wasn’t going to stop.

JR: Yeah, I think I think I was always inclined to do it. I was always very hungry for it. And for me, a career as an artist ended up being kind of an easy decision in one way. I’d decided I’d much rather go to college than not go to college, and it ended up being very, very enriching for me. It was not until later that I realized that I was good at other things. I just had a different approach to them.

At one point in my life, I thought there was only one certain way to be. You know, I was about 15 years old when my dad passed away, and I became the man of the house. I was very angry, very sad. I had a lot of emotion. And that combined with regular teenage angst made for a volatile little cocktail. I was leaning towards what I saw in my community, and what I saw was toxic masculinity. The examples that I had in the community were in many cases violent, or at least just not positive. But when I stepped into a community space that had artists, positive male artists, I found a different vision of masculinity and that really led to a different version of me. It helped me to imagine a different outcome for myself. It truly was a moment where in community with others it clicked: I could be an artist.

It was a real moment of clarity and it was a real moment of being able to give myself to something that I could really dive into, that I could use to push myself.

AC: YES! All of this is so important. Especially in the face of working through or against anger. An anger that is inside and could lead someone in a completely different way. This came up in a separate conversation with me recently. Someone said to me and a group of Fresno poets and artists, “You are so happy and funny.” My response was, “That’s because I’m angry on the inside.” Now that I reflect on that moment, what you said, and your art, I see that very much in your work. There is vibrancy, there is difficulty, there is cause for both celebrating and organizing. This is a very long way of asking, do you feel like there is anger in your art, or within you? And how is that expressed?

JR: I totally apply aggression into my artwork. I think from the early days I used art as a way to channel my competitiveness. I think from the graffiti days it always had that element in there. There was a competitive drive to being a creator and I think that really always afforded me a way to harness that anger.

While I was at Boston University, a well-known woman artist, Ophrah Shemesh, came to me and said something like: You know, you’re here, you’re making art, and this is still very much a man’s man world. There is a way that people have historically perceived male artists, artists like Jackson Pollock or Pablo Picasso. He is seen as the womanizer, the tough guy that is smoking a cigar while painting. But that’s not aggression. This isn’t that aggression. She told me to tap into my feminine energy when I’m making art because that is the nourishing power, that’s where you give birth. And that is where, in her words, “the true aggression lies.” 

I never forgot that and I try to be genuine, assertive, and true when I’m sort of “giving birth.” I try to tap into my tenderness and to my feminine side. As a man, yeah, I am pretty secure in my own way. So for me, a key component of my creative process is trying to tap into that tenderness in a way that expands beyond gender.

AC: I definitely see that tenderness when I see you work. I have witnessed you make murals, like the one I loosely assisted you with in Fresno, California. You invite others, you collaborate with others, and if people show up, you make space for them. So there is definitely that tenderness, but also an openness, right?

JR: Absolutely, absolutely. No lies, life is short. The moment of clarity that I had was great, and I love witnessing that in other people, particularly young people. Though you’d be surprised, I’ve witnessed that moment in older people too who have lived full lives, who have lived creative lives. To be there and to witness that moment with older folks is so great. 

AC: I think this is a good place to segue toward what you are working on right now, because I know you’ve been busy.

JR: At the moment, I am running around a lot. I feel like I’m doing three or four million things. This has never happened in my entire career. There’s this one project with 22 other graffiti writers and we’ve got two lifts operating at the same time. That was last week, and we worked on it five days straight. And there’s another that I’m working on that is about ten stories tall. Some days, I’ve been doing both. All of these are in the Mission district of San Francisco. Then one more at a high school that is about 300ft long and two stories tall.

AC: This is a perfect place to keep our conversation going. I say this because I feel the same way. Right now, I am working on 100 things, and those things have an additional 100 small things that need to happen. Every day I wake up, I have to figure out which things I am juggling and which of those things are about to hit the floor.

JR: It’s fun. 

AC: Yeah, it’s fun.

JR: But then you realize you haven’t seen your mom in almost two weeks.

AC: That was me yesterday! I went and got coffee with my mom before a virtual event. I think it was almost a month since I’d seen her last. Then when she goes to start her car, it won’t start, because the battery is dead. And there is like a brief moment where we are in the car, waiting for my dad to come give us a jump, where I was just completely stressed out with the idea that I was going to miss the event. Which is to say, being so busy is great, but how do you take care of yourself?

JR: Right now, I’m in a very different space just because I am having to abuse myself a little bit, just to get it all done. But generally, I really do try to treat myself. I try to be good to myself. I try to, you know, make sure I have all the equipment that I need to have and just enjoy that aspect of it. I enjoy having the stuff that’s part of doing the hard work to make art, and smelling the roses as I go. For me, I have no qualms with treating myself, or spending quality time with people that I love.

That’s really it: spending quality time with my wife, you know, time with my family. Really, really. You know, it’s important to soak up that time with the ones you love, because you have to be full in order to give with your art. Sometimes, you forget that you can’t be spent to make art. And, it helps to know what zaps you of your energy and what gives you energy. There are two kinds of work: work that gives you energy and toxic work that takes from you.

AC: I think that’s true. I think about Borderland Apocrypha and how that book was filled with heaviness. Yet, when I was trying to exit the book, I wanted to make sure to save something for myself and the reader, because tomorrow there is going to be something else to grapple with and address. And you have to know there is energy within so you’re not burnt out, so you can imagine and make your work.

On the subject of my book, it feels like it has been so long since you and I talked about the book and the book cover. I tell people a story about the book cover because it’s very meaningful for me, not only because it’s made by you, but because there is so much to unpack. You intuitively made a piece that still moves and haunts me. What was that process like? Me sending you a bunch of my new poems, and then you went through them with your gut response and process?

JR: Something very special happens with me and my relationship to poetry. I had a kind of visceral response to your work. We’ve collaborated before so luckily, we are able to easily collaborate, and we don’t have any issues or disconnect with each other. We know each other. I mean, my whole graduate thesis was really inspired by your piece “llegando al toldería.” Your voice and mine are kin in that way, and we are doing parallel work. I think it also comes from the fact that I really appreciate hanging out with and speaking with writers in very different ways than I do with visual artists. I’d say you’re one of my chief collaborators as a poet. Also, another writer, who probably doesn’t consider himself a poet, Russell Morse. 

But you, your work spoke to me in a moment of solitude and a moment of separation from my community when I was away for graduate school on the East Coast. Your work was able to take me out of that space into a different space. When you sent me the poems from your book, all our prior conversations led to that moment, led to seeing what you were doing in the book. How you’re experimenting with the way that you write and sequence information, that reading isn’t always left to right. How can you remix that? You took some very bold and creative steps. I think you truly changed the way people read. And those poems brought it back to something very modern, but also concrete and sort of ancient and intuitive. 

I was just playing with these concepts for the book cover. I looked at the words, but also looked at their placement on the page, their layout and their design, which is one of the first things that I noticed. Graphic design is about the hierarchy of information, and usually, you have important things on top in a bigger size and bigger font. But you broke it up into a wave and completely upended things, you changed that whole concept. I was actually just trying to keep up with you. The work was your own. 

Your work had me thinking of my own most intimate moments, particularly within my sketchbook. I took some of the imagery and paint textures from some of my favorite pages of my personal journal, and then I juxtaposed that with the way that you’d laid the words out on the page, your layout. And then I added the third element, with symmetrical takes, like, clouds and sky. And then creating the mixture of all that digitally. I think I sent you I sent you at least four options.

AC: It was more like eight or nine.

JR: Yeah. And then you and Omnidawn made the selection and I was at peace with that because I really want the artists that I collaborate with to have agency in the process. Then you get to express yourself by deciding which of them was going to be the final cover.

AC: I will say that one of the things for me, just about that image that ended up speaking to you and being utilized for the cover, is that you didn’t know what was underneath the box that I had blacked out. And when you opened that black box and placed the sky there instead, I remember being in this sublime space between awe and sadness. The reality is that underneath was a photo of children in an ICE detention facility. In some ways, it feels like the tone of the poem, the visceral elements of the page, and our friendship helped you intuit that you had to put the clouds there. That you had to open up the space for what was being held back. 

I remember sitting and looking at my screen, feeling as if we had been swimming around in one another’s subconscious. And, ultimately I was feeling grateful that you had applied a tenderness to people who were being detained. And that’s an act that I am forever thankful to you for having done. And really, this entire interview is me wanting to answer your gift in creating such beautiful art and being such a caring and open human in this world.

We’ve talked so much, and covered so much ground, I do want to close this time together, as I know you have places to go and meals to eat. So I want to ask you two small questions.

The first one is what do you want to make next?

JR: Oh, that’s a very easy one. Yeah. I actually have a list of what I want to make happen. I have been thinking about this book by Robert Greene called Mastery. In it, he talks about how the final stage of being that you enter is this moment called the creative act. And entering that is the only way you can make your mark and leave your legacy. So, if look at all of this ‘overworking’ that I am doing in the next few weeks, that is what I am doing: I am feeding my creative activity. 

I’m putting some goalposts on my journey of where I wanted to go. I’m really happy to be doing things that I’ve never done. And that’s what I always want to do when I’m making bigger things or more ambitious things. I think it’s my moment to do that right now. And I have to say this, I’ve never really been in this place before where I’ve lived off of my art, entirely as an artist. 

I remember living as a teacher and an artist, a journalist and an artist, an administrator and an artist, and a cameraman and an artist. On and on and on. But right now, I love being able to just make art. I like having the ability to teach myself to do these things, but really, just being an artist is a dream come true. 

At first, I told myself that I’m going to do this for a year and see if I make a living off of it, and now I am midway through my second year, and I’m making a solid living. I’m a happy person. And I’m really feeding and nurturing myself again, this moment of this creative activity, so I just want to be here and do that. 

AC: I feel close to that same place. Because in reality, I am doing 100 things, and they are all tied to the primary reality of poetry and writing. And it’s frightening. It is completely frightening and I’ve never, not once, thought to myself, “Oh, I’m doing this!” It’s more akin to an out-of-body experience watching myself do it. And that can be a bit of a shock. It’s a shock, but also at the same time, it’s definitely a privilege and a blessing that is the result of the grind and belligerence of diving into things and helping create more space and more opportunities for others.

JR: It’s huge.

AC: My final question, because we will definitely do this all night if I don’t say it’s the final question: Where does the beginning of an idea come from for you, what inspires your creative ideas? What’s the genesis of it for you?

JR: More and more these days it’s journaling. I like to write down what I want and what I’m thinking through. To think about what I’m doing right now, to have a feeling and communicate it on the page.

Also, have you seen the show The Queen’s Gambit?

AC: Yeah.

JR: There is a moment in there where the main character is staring at her ceiling and playing chess, like a full-blown visual and mental chess game. It’s very visual for her throughout that show. I really identified with that scene in the show, because in my mind, I see painting in a very similar way. I was really taken aback because that’s kind of how I make my art. I’ll stare off into space and really start to compose a piece in my mind. So before it becomes a drawing or a painting or composition, I see it in my mind first and I kind of compose that way. A feeling transfers to that vision, and then that vision drives the realization of the piece. And this is also where you have to be a good communicator, where you have to try and explain that the thing you thought of makes sense, and this is how we can make this cool idea come to life.

AC: To be honest, that’s kind of how my brain works on poems. Sometimes I see a shape and I sketch it out and hold it for a line or poem to enter into that shape. The entire time, I am thinking through that and assembling things in my mind. Your process and that scene in The Queen’s Gambit are hyper-relatable to me.

JR: This has me thinking about something Albert Einstein once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our imagination is a political space. It is a spiritual space for you to create.

I always tell my students, “If you show up to class without your imagination, what are you doing?” If you show up to any project, even if it’s just working on your yard or baking a cake, or driving somewhere, if you show up to anything with a little bit of imagination, the world will be better for it. 

Imagination is to showing up what love is to a relationship. Imagination is to showing up what faith is to religion. It is the mover and shaker within me. Showing up with some imagination means that what you are doing has your intention. How many people have said to me that painting is dead? How many people have told you everything has been said and written already, or that poetry is dead? Where would our paths lead if we accepted what we were told? 

When you apply some imagination and think about things in a different way, with a new perspective, it will take you somewhere entirely new. Your imagination says painting isn’t dead, that poetry isn’t dead. And that’s exciting. I love painting, I love words. And when you love something in that way, you’re going to want to see it push forward and toward the next generation. I think it’s courageous. It is courageous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artist Josué Rojas is a practicing visual creator and an educator who relishes in learning and teaching the articulation of a potent human language – by using art as a response and celebration, not simply to life’s inequities but to its bounty as well. He is a Salvadoran-born American Citizen, a Californian, and a teacher. His work is informed by his bicultural and bilingual experience. Part of a continuum, his work and personal creative vision contribute to a visual heritage of creative critical consciousness. You can find more of his creative work on Instagram @josue.rojas.art or visit his website http://www.josuerojasart.com/.

Anthony Cody

Anthony Cody is from Fresno, CA with lineage in both the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. His debut collection, Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020) won the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, a 2022 Whiting Award, a 2021 American Book Award, a 2020 Southwest Book Award, and was recognized as a 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet and a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN America / Jean Stein Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, among others. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Magma (UK), The Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, among others. He co-edited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), as well as co-edited and co-translated Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrílica (Noemi Press, 2022). Anthony has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Desert Nights, Rising Stars, as well as the 2020 CantoMundo Guzmán Mendoza / Paredez Fellowship. He currently serves as poetry editor for Noemi Press and Omnidawn, as well as collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. His next book, The Rendering is forthcoming from Omnidawn in Spring of 2023. Anthony lives with his partner, poet Mai Der Vang, in Fresno, California.

If These Covers Could Talk #4

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In If These Covers Could Talk, poets interview the visual artists whose works grace their book covers. The result is an engaging discussion of process, vision, and projects. This series is a celebration of collaboration—here, we champion the fruitful conversations taking place both on and behind the cover.

This month, poet Jenny Qi spoke to graphic designer Hilary Steinberg about the cover of Focal Point (Steel Toe Books, 2021).

A Conversation Between Jenny Qi and Hilary Steinberg 

Jenny Qi: Can you talk about how you decided to go into the arts and then visual art in particular?

Hilary Steinberg: Growing up, I always enjoyed the arts as hobbies, especially drawing. After playing cello in my middle school orchestra, I enrolled in the local performing and visual arts high school as a music major. During my sophomore year, I took an art class as an elective and was sold. I switched to art as my major starting junior year. I ended up getting accepted to an art college for illustration, but made the decision to attend my local university as a graphic design major. I originally made this pivot for familial and financial reasons, but I’m so glad I did. I feel that my abilities became more well-rounded by studying graphic design.

Now that I’m ten years into my professional career, the answer to why I’m in this field is pretty simple… I enjoy it. Despite all the frustrations I’ve had with different jobs, managers, and work environments, I still enjoy designing. I can’t really see myself wanting to do anything else!

 

JQ: We have a rather unique relationship in that we’ve been friends since middle school. Because we’ve been friends for a long time, you knew so much about me and this book before I even approached you to design this cover (which I absolutely love, thank you!) I think this book cover process is also unique in that you were working with a photo that I’d taken. Can you walk me through your design process and what you were thinking about?

HS: Well, first off, it’s a really cool photo. There’s a lot of interesting detail and movement in the clouds. So having this strong imagery to work from was a great advantage.

courtesy of Jenny Qi

When I read Focal Point, I feel like a lot of the poems relate to memory, time, and grief. And then, looking at the photo again, I was visualizing the clouds as this stream of memories, thoughts, and feelings that originate from a person’s birth and flow outward across time. Maybe the older memories are further away, more spread out, and harder to distinguish. And then there are little spots in the clouds that are so sharp and detailed—like when we remember certain things people say, certain smells and textures are so strong in our memories years and years later.

I didn’t do much editing to the photo itself aside from increasing the contrast a bit. But I added these blurred light textures which created some interesting shifts in color and I especially wanted this to be visible around the edges. I was thinking about these old family photos my grandparents had in their house, many of which are now in my dad’s house. At one point I scanned some of them for my aunt and uncle’s anniversary and had to do a lot of editing because of the light and color degradation over the years. So by adding the textures to your photo I was trying to make the cover feel like these old photos—where the memory is still there but there is a bit of age, fading, and change. But these changes in the photos wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t on display in frames and exposed to light, looked at, and well-loved. 

 

JQ: Let’s hone in on the text on the cover. I love how you wove it into and mirrored the image. How did you decide to incorporate the text in this way? How did you choose the font?

HS: There is so much rich imagery in the poems that feel like a detail in a memory that can be mentally revisited and still feel so tactile and present. So when I thought about the text I wanted there to be a physicality about it, like it was holding real space in the composition and not just floating on top. The idea of the perspective came naturally when I was thinking of the clouds as this stream of memories because I wanted to emphasize the distance in the image and how it relates to the passage of time.

For me, choosing typefaces is a pretty intuitive process. Depending on the project I can usually have an idea of what will work. I know I wanted the letterforms to be on the simpler side because I didn’t want the text to fight with the image, but I also wanted to make sure that everything remained very readable. I ended up using Bebas Neue, which is popular for good reason because it’s attractive, modern, and clean.

 

JQ: I’m also curious about how you might have approached this project if I didn’t already have a photo in mind?

HS: That’s a really tough question to answer. I think I would’ve read through the book slowly while doing some stream of consciousness sketching just to see what comes to mind. Then, I probably would’ve refined several ideas and presented them to you for feedback. My first instinct is that I would create imagery through drawing or painting, but it could’ve also been fun to play with some photos of cells under a microscope. There are a multitude of directions this could’ve gone! 

 

JQ: Going back to the subject of fonts, I’m going to adapt Dorothy Chan’s very fun question and ask what are your favorite and/or least favorite fonts and why?

HS: Y’know, everyone likes to shame Comic Sans but I find it to be very inoffensive. It can work well for things designed for kids, and there are so many worse options out there, like Curlz MT. Curlz MT is like the PT Cruiser of typefaces, and by that I mean it’s an abomination and shouldn’t exist. It’s incredibly ugly, it’s unreadable and it’s obnoxious, and frankly, I don’t care if my Curlz MT opinion offends anybody. I don’t know if I have any favorite typefaces off the top of my head, but lately, I’ve been enjoying working with and lettering slab serifs.

 

JQ: You do a lot of different kinds of visual art and design work, and this was actually your first book cover, which is amazing. Can you talk a bit more about your other work and how designing a book cover was like or not like those other projects?

HS: I took Publication Design twice in college because it was one of my favorite focuses, so I have actually designed a few “fake” covers! I think the main similarity between designing a book cover and something else, like a postcard or a social media graphic, is that you have to grab the viewer’s attention in literally one second. It’s such a tiny window of opportunity, and it can be frustrating because you could spend hours on a project for it only to get scrolled past because it’s missing that special ingredient that makes someone stop and digest the piece. That’s also the biggest difficulty with design, whether it’s a book cover or something else, even a painting or drawing. The trick is to accept it as a challenge or a puzzle to solve, because when you nail that element that makes people stop and look, it’s exciting.

As far as what makes designing book covers different from other projects, it’s definitely the content of the book itself. It gives you a wealth of inspiration to draw from, which is a refreshing difference compared to a lot of other design projects. When I finish a book, it’s always fun to reexamine the cover because then you can understand why the cover looks how it does, and what elements from the text inspired the design.

 

JQ: What have been some of your favorite projects? And/or what are you excited about working on next?

HS: Since most of my professional career has been in working for various companies, my favorite projects are ones where I really get to stretch my design legs and have more freedom. One of my favorite projects that is more recent is working on a show at my station, Vegas PBS, called STEAM Camp. It’s a science show for kids that combines easy experiments and interviews with local experts. I worked with the producer/director and education specialist to develop the branding for the show as well as graphics for social media and lesson plans for teachers. Designing for kids is a really fun change of pace because you can really have fun with it, especially for a program that is so interesting, exciting, and optimistic.

 

JQ: In addition to your professional design work, I know you do a lot of illustration challenges and things like that. Can you tell me more about your motivations for those and what that adds to your creative life?

HS: I retained my love of drawing and illustration over the years but after college, I started struggling with that side of my creativity. I think having to use my creative brain in my day job makes it hard to want to be creative for fun in my off time. I also started wrestling with imposter syndrome which made me doubt my own ideas in my personal art-making. Prompt lists and ‘draw this in your style’ challenges are a great way to get yourself drawing with less pressure. Plus, it’s a great way to connect with other artists online and see how other people approached the same challenge. The more I do these challenges and work on my self-confidence, the more I want to create my own drawings and illustrations. Hopefully, with time and practice, I will be able to regain balance between both sides of my creative passions. 

 

JQ: I love that and totally relate to a lot of what you’ve said. Where can people reach you if they want to follow your work or work with you?

HS: You can follow my work on Behance, Twitter, and Instagram @hildosaur. If you’d like to work with me, shoot me an email at hildosaur@gmail.com.

 

JQ: P.S. We just learned that Focal Point was a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award for cover design, so yay Hilary!

 

 

 

 

Hilary Steinberg is a graphic designer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Outside of work she enjoys drawing, movies, video games and exploring new places. She received her bachelor’s degree from UNLV and has worked in entertainment, gaming, stationery, e-cigarettes, and currently public media. She goes by the moniker “Hildosaur” in online spaces as she equally loves dinosaurs and wordplay.

Jenny Qi

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, the Brown Handler Residency, and the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S.

Poetry We Admire: Asian and Pacific Voices in America

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Recently, I set foot in a movie theater for the first time in three years (thanks to the encouragement of my MFA cohort). The lure: Everything Everywhere All at Once. I won’t even try to describe the film, other than it is unlike anything I’ve seen before, and it made me laugh, flinch, cry, breathe. I will say that there is nothing like encountering a cinematic representation of the multiverse to make you think about every tiny decision you make at any given moment. 

Just its title, however, does feel like an apt gesture toward the current state of affairs—or, so as to not generalize, at least to my own headspace. Even inside my little grad school bubble, I’ve been finding it difficult in the face of, well, everything, to do things like grade student assignments. Walk to the store for eggs. Sit down and finish a letter I started two months ago. 

But something I have chosen and managed to execute this month is to spend time with Asian and Pacific American poetries. This is actually something I try to choose every month, and every month I find myself unlearning any ideas I might have held about what, exactly, it means to identify as or have other people identify you as an Asian or Pacific American writer. 

Back when I was in high school, I remember encountering a New Yorker article on Ocean Vuong that compared reading his poetry to watching a fish move. It’s such a vivid, almost dizzying way to talk about writing. Slippery. Hard to pin down. I hope that the poems I’ve chosen to include here, out of so many poems I might have chosen, feel something like that. Not in the sense that they align with a prescribed sensibility, or resemble Vuong’s in any way. But rather that they reveal the endless movement and possibility within these voices and more importantly, that each poem leaves its own particular ripples, heading places we may not expect, both on the page and beyond. 

 

 

Death is the same in both directions.
It wants to go somewhere. It wants to come back.

from "Everything Lies in All Directions"

by Hua Xi in New Republic

This poem by Hua Xi captivated me in part by the way it seems to hover outside of linear time, its speaker locating themself in a specific moment (“once, I…”) only on occasion, then fading in and out of the poem’s center. It is a dexterous poem, turning over and over on itself, and yet the element that struck me first is what feels to me like a stillness to its voice. I leave feeling in some way transformed, and quietly.

 

 

the one that’s always there when people talk about the war
the one that wants to disappear when people don’t talk about the war at all
the one that plugs itself into your lungs when you leave a country for good 

from "Naming the Silences in the Mouth"

by Ina Cariño in Poetry Society of America

I have not stopped thinking about Cariño’s catalog of silences since I first read it. The poem paradoxically resists silence by giving each particular silence a description, a name. They range from tender to devastating, from comfortable to violent. One silence the speaker names is “the one you’ve gotten too used to,” and I feel like this is a silence that is overturned here, where we are asked to be acquainted with them particularly and slowly, line by line. 

 

 

my girls and i talk about most things & yes
my girls and i don’t talk about some things

from "My Girls & I"

by Ananya Kanai Shah in The Offing

Yes, this happened, the speaker tells us again and again, insistent. Or no, this didn’t. This poem is a powerful deployment of parataxis, like an answer being revised or extended over and over. &, &, &  generates a lack of hierarchy within the poem’s many pieces. Sometimes, the assertions are on behalf of the “we” and sometimes they are reserved for the “I.”  I admire this poem for the way it generates such a nuanced tone while never straying from its simple formula. 

 

 

I said it, “i forgive you” slipping
like a key beneath a door, where never was a house attached.  

from "june 8, the smiley barista remembers my name"

by Wo Chan in Poetry

Wo Chan’s blooming sonnet is ripe with sensory wonders and opens up into something solid, something generous. It has the structural bones of a Petrarchan sonnet, broken into an octave and a sestet, but with the chatty directness of O’hara, or a friend you might sit across from in a cafe. This is a poem that has stayed with me since I first encountered it in Poetry, and I hope it will stay with you. 

 

 

 

 

Megan Kim

Megan Kim is a poet, educator, & editor raised in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains and currently enjoying Midwestern lakes. She is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and serves as an Associate Editor for Palette Poetry. She is the 2021 winner of Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in poetry, judged by Joy Priest, and a 92Y Discovery Contest semifinalist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Narrative Magazine, Lantern Review, Tinderbox, and Ninth Letter, among others, and she has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Legacy Suite #3

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The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this interview, I.S. Jones spoke with poet Aricka Foreman about leaping from her chapbook to her debut full-length collection, Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books, 2020), the uses of water and land throughout, and her decision to go with YesYes Books. 

*

In Salt Body Shimmer, Foreman’s work concerns itself with multiple, inherited violences through the lens of women in a generation. Rich in its lyrical tenor, the book is intimately political for the way in which it is deeply rooted in the geography of the South as well as the geography of the body. Memory is often a slippery beast throughout Foreman’s work, as readers are pulled back and forth through time and its deeply private moments. Negotiating gender, class, race, divinity, and history, Salt Body Shimmer is a debut that never flinches from saying out loud what is often unutterable. When I think about an American experience, I look to this book for its elegant ability to blend many spiritual practices. This is a world crafted through the lens of women who have had to learn spells older than themselves, who have had to create a path for their survival.

 

Salt Body Shimmer by Aricka Foreman: A Sea-like Sensemaking 

 

I. S. Jones: Before Salt Body Shimmer, you had a limited-edition chapbook also with YesYes Books called Dream with A Glass Chamber. Your chapbook was described as “a response to grief and its complicated rituals.” With your debut collection, there is grief, but what seems more prominent is ritual. Here, in the landscape you have crafted, there is an inextricable binding thread between ritual, spirituality, and Black girlhood. How did your chapbook prepare you to craft a full-length collection and how does the lens of orishas, of Yoruba spirituality, give you language to confront some of the more fraught aspects of black girlhood?

Aricka Foreman: This is a great question, thank you. I think Dream allowed me some grace. I could embrace the process. It’s a book that deals very intentionally with grief, but I think part of what I gained from that work was honing it on paying intention/attention to the questions that rose from it. And that the point is not to answer the question(s) but live with the discomfort of wrestling with inquiry as its own creative mode. There’s an entire tradition of poets who write toward Western ideologies and their figures: Greek and Roman influences still have such a stronghold given we produce work in English. We’ve made these mythologies their own canon. Yoruba, Candomble, Lacumi: these traditions are their own canons, too. I was interested in picking up the threads I’d find in my research, imagining the possible figures who might help the speaker navigate through Black girlhood. Even in Greek mythology, the gods guide the protagonists through epic trials and journeys, attempting to save beloveds from the underworld. As we’re learning more intensely these days, we’re living in and sharing Hades. Recognizing a Black, Brown, Indigenous ecosystem often keeps me from being swallowed up by violence, I hoped to focus on how to break and paint language to live through the happening of those traumas. Girlhood is not easy. And Black girlhood has its own interwoven adoptions we often don’t fully apprehend while we’re busy trying to ride through it. There’s a resistance to that old knowing. I wanted to make room to ask and accept. To keep what informs us as a touchstone if we want it. 

IJ: You made the choice to publish both your chapbook and full-length with the same press, which is something that does happen but not often. Can you speak further about your choice to stay with YesYes Books? When deciding on a press for Salt Body Shimmer, what were things you wanted, things you expected, and how did YesYes show you they were the right press for your book and how you hoped it would be presented to the world?

AF: KMA Sullivan asked me for a book years before Dream was even a thing. And not to necessarily publish it, but she was just interested in what I was working on. And she was persistent without being pushy. Over the years, we’d stay in contact sometimes never talking about a book at all. I knew I wasn’t ready yet, but that I would be. And then I lost three people in one year to various circumstances, the hardest was a close friend Blair who the book is dedicated to. She reached out to offer her condolences and offered support in whatever I needed. Just, you know, very human. And that cemented my trust, that she’d care enough about me to care about the work. And that she’d tell me the truth.

I wanted my chapbook and my debut to be held with care— to not be just a catalog number. And I knew I had a very specific vision for how I wanted it to operate in the world as an object. YesYes makes gorgeous art objects that work hand-in-hand with the language inside its pages. And as far as small presses go, the entire staff hustles with excitement about getting your book into as many folks’ hands as possible. I think all of that was critical to these emerging projects. I knew that my work found a home.

IJ: I want to talk about how the poems are ordered in the book, which seems to be governed by a thematic structure. For example, the poem “Hydrocephalus As a Misnomer For Water God”, a poem that does an elegant job of straddling the space between the divine and sickness, ends with the lines: “What is Atlantis to a child born in The Wake /  but iridescent, sharp as shells, ready to / open the flesh” which then segues us into “Blue Magic”, a poem with a title that is double and triple jointed for how it evokes the might of the sea while also the unruly beauty of Black hair. Even if poems were written years apart, how did you decide on the ordering?

AF: I have to thank Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake for pressing that poem. I read the work of many Black women critical-creative historians while forming Salt Body Shimmer. But I also want to honor the intuitive power of allowing poems to find their roots. While the ocean was a large metaphor, it functions so specifically for those of us on this side of a diaspora. And I wanted to key into a language, rich and dexterous, that could tie all that history.  I was invited to my first hair show in Detroit very early; and the pageantry, contemporary art display, born from migration, music, and performance: I found it exquisite. That technology goes where you go. The violence of industry, commerce, imperialism, and conquest…it all marks our relationships to the sea. And we’ve managed to adopt some beauty from it. I’d be complicit in that violence if I didn’t name its origins. And: who else could name a care product Blue Magic?

The order was sea-like. Those poems, particularly, had to move as you noticed. There needed to be that thread. It was irresistible, and that is its own sense-making.

IJ: Can you speak more to the physical geography of where these poems take place? There seem to be two worlds: the South (as an epicenter of tradition, generational pain, but also lush fields and space) and the Body (as an epicenter of sexual violence and betrayal, but also memory which seems to pull the narrator back and forth through time).

AF: We’re all descendants of migration, and that’s hard to move away from. I feel lucky, having been communally raised by Mississippi grandparents who found one another at the tail-end of the Southern Migration in Chicago, before moving to Inkster, MI. I find the links in subtle ways. How I’m raised and still say lightning bugs. If Blackness is a technology, then why wouldn’t our bodies be data centers? We record the narratives, what we witness, and cross-reference. We’re informed by those reports. But I have a strong reaction to the pastoral. Even landscapes that aren’t every day accessible to me feel like home.

It’s the only way I can travel and find rooting, or encounter memories I’ve never had. In Cuba, a friend and I had a running joke, that nobody liked cainito but me. And I can’t articulate what about it feels like to know it with my two hands. There’s something about that bodily kinship that I can’t ignore.

On America’s South: it’s more global than we remember to give credit. The ports, plantations; degradation and horror; the resistance of our songs and dances, cuisines and faith…there’s no way to separate any of that. I think I’m trying to branch out of American imperialism as a centered experience while recognizing what I can salvage from its violence. America is so young. America’s got a lot to answer for how we had to make a way. So I try to make room for and tend to the somatic. My body: an archive. It must be preserved in the names of all who left something behind, and they left a ledger.

IJ: What did the process of completing a manuscript and publishing it teach you about yourself? On the professional and marketing side of the process, what did you find yourself learning along the way? For example, there is a long, exhaustive marketing questionnaire authors often must fill out, which will include questions such as, “Do you have poems translated into other languages?” “Do you have a Wikipedia page?” “What demographic is your book targeted towards?”

AF: Publishing a book is weird, and not the same as writing a book. In the writing, you insist, and you want a healthy-enough ego to risk but not to get swallowed up by the biz of it. But I know what my publisher imparted, and how I clap for vital works: the author is the book’s best chance for triumph.

I had a crash course because of the pandemic. But I’ve also been in a community with generous, brilliant folks from before the book was even a thought. I had to lean on my people, and I’m so grateful I did. They are sharp, critical, and generous. Because YesYes Books is intuitive about the ecosystem of the work and how it lives in the world, there are some questions that are more industry-driven and less about process. YYB did the sales part great. The details of that weight were kept from me as much as possible. I’d already done my job in making, everything after was author-driven to support the book’s reach. I dreamt of a world where my book could thrive and YYB lifted me up in that. 

I’ve said how much I abhor capitalism, but also, the point is to get the work in front of as many people who can vibe with it as possible. That felt really important with my debut. I had to have a space not to be an editor, a Board member, or an educator. I needed to have my work diligently be held in the way it deserved.

IJ: The book pulls its title from the final line in “Consent Is A Labyrinth Of Yes:” “Nothing stands still Starkness and light Her salt body, shadow and shimmer Her afraid but not yet done not yet.” Salt and Body seem to coincide with one another; salt comes from the human body: “I’ve learned the salt of the earth art of settling, / my body fatigued, progeny of two small Mississippi towns, / their lightning bugs fat like dream songs trapped in a mason jar” and bodies of oceans: “I learned two things: I was not the first / of our line to hold a fraction of the sea’s language, / salt degrading the world’s fragile questions.” I can physically see the bodies opened and closed across the book: “[…] and its orange corona was the tree and scaled skin pressed into there or was a boy between my body the tree speaking nothing of consequence was time buffering […].” Yet the word ‘shimmer’ only appears on page 41. What was the choice behind ‘shimmer’ being in the title if it is not as pronounced in the book? 

AF: The book is shimmer too, in that it’s the iridescent-vital that hums all over the landscape, apprehended amongst the noise if you pay attention. We talk a lot about the Black lives as site, as anchor, as transactional. And through insistence, we demand: Imagine! Dream!

If we give ourselves space and quietude, we recognize ourselves as crystals turning in the light. Perhaps that’s the healing you notice. Perhaps that’s the salve we always knew was there. We just didn’t have a name for it. Not yet, but I’m writing to find out. 

 

 

 

Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit MI. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, IL engaging poetry with photography & video.

I.S. Jones

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I.S. hosts a month-long, online poetry workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. She is the co-editor of The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, Transition, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. Her poem “Vanity” was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and is the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. She is the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, a community-driven contemporary arts center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound.

Partition Homes

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“Partition Homes” by Sneha Subramanian Kanta received third place in the 2022 Previously Published Poem Prize, selected by Palette editors. We’re honored to share this moving poem.

“Partition Homes” was first published in The West Review.

Partition Homes

                                                             (i)

Exile begins in the throat.
A lost body.

                   A forgotten horizon
                   or the shield of stars.

Ventricular. A harpsichord
with ocean, sand, and salt.

                   The checkpoint of fog—
                   mossgreen scapula.

A winter of absence
trucks lined in Rawalpindi

                   boats set off the shore
                   beside a dawning Jhelum. 

                                                             (ii)                       

Exile begins in the throat.
An arrival.

                   How many words do I
                   know for hunger?

What is the nestling space
between two countries

                   of conflict called?
                   What is the name for basil

or the hinterland hills
or the city where my

                   grandmother first embraced
                   tenderness without speaking

of it? Again the roaring
winds across a tarpaulin.

                   Again another river
                   charcoaling at night.

You dream in three languages,
at least one of them despair.

                                                             (iii)

                   Exile begins in the throat.
                   A departure.

The call of a cliff
or a gutter-stream.

                   Filament flourish, a violet
                   pattern synecdoche.

My grandmother left
a home

                   sailing across two countries.
                   A silent floating accompanies

the whirr of a ship. These
may be fangs, or a dagger.

                   Hinge. The soft gauze.
                   A day of massacre.

                                                             (iv)

Exile begins in the throat.
A lost body.

                   Famished sky of vapor
                   clouds. An assembly

vortex. The trees fraction
into half. Where will you

                   grow thickness
                   if not into the landscape?

Remember. A family.
One daughter.

                   Two sons. Partition.
                   Welt. Ship. Rising tides.

 

                         —originally published in The West Review

 

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Sneha Subramanian is a recipient of The 2022 Digital Residency from The Seventh Wave, the 2021 Robert Hayden Scholarship at Stockton University, and the inaugural Vijay Nambisan Fellowship 2019. She was the Charles Wallace Fellow writer-in-residence (2019-20) at The University of Stirling. An awardee of the GREAT scholarship, she has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from The University of Plymouth (2017). Her dissertation concentrated on a comparative literature study exploring postcolonial ecocriticism in the fiction and non-fiction of Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh. She is the author of the chapbook Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020). Her poems are forthcoming in UBC's PRISM International, Room Magazine, Pleaides, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Most recently, her poem "Witness" is an honorable mention in The 2022 Foster Poetry Prize at Contemporary Verse 2. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal. Website: www.snehasubramaniankanta.com.

If These Covers Could Talk #3

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In If These Covers Could Talk, poets interview the visual artists whose works grace their book covers. The result is an engaging discussion of process, vision, and projects. This series is a celebration of collaboration—here, we champion the fruitful conversations taking place both on and behind the cover.

This month, poet Antonio de Jesús López spoke to artist Anthony Solorzano about the cover of Gentefication (Four Way Books, 2021).

A Conversation Between Antonio López and Anthony Solorzano 

Antonio López: Que hubo, Anthony! Let me preface our discussion by stating something I feel you and I both share. Mas que nada, I think it’s hella important that we as fellow artists, especially us being both Latino creatives, help build each other up. So, as we share this platform, could you take a moment to tell the virtual world who Anthony Solorzano is? Fsho mention all the good shit on a C.V., but also what are your passions, your reasons for doing what you do. Your ethic, politic, favorite pair of shoes, lo que sea.

Anthony Solorzano: Well, I guess primarily I’m a filmmaker, but like with many independent artists, storytelling can definitely take many shapes and forms. Sometimes I’m called upon to direct a music video, or create promo for social media, and recently, I worked on a short documentary for some local history professors. At the end of the day, I’m merging images with a story to make a bigger statement. Visual storyteller would be an accurate title, haha.

 

AL: Yeah I like that way you phrased it, and this idea of being “called upon.” I figure that on a given day, Anthony, you have a whole Rolodex worth of requests. And you, being just one man, have to decide who to support. Makes me think about how so much of our work isn’t even really about us, but about meeting the moment. It’s like a duty, an obligation. Would you say that?

AS: I just mean that as an artist you have to be flexible, be able to adapt. We don’t take jobs in a traditional sense and apply the same techniques every time. Each project is unique and requires me to tap into different sensibilities.

 

AL: People still ask me this, and la neta I still be blanking on what answer(s) to give. But to you, what the heck does “Gentefication” mean?

AS:  For me, it’s a slang version of gentrification, a G’d up version, tu sabes? I feel like gentrification is a word that has been so overused in political, academic, and woke circles, that it feels good to have a new spin on it. To change up the convo, you know?

 

AL: Absolutely, I feel like so much of art is about taking the structures and concepts we inherited and transforming them to our advantage. Have you found that in your work?

AS: Oh yeah, that’s the fun in creating anything. That you can put your personal touch on it – give ‘em a taste of your experiences, culture, style.

 

AL: Couldn’t agree more. And speaking of taste, I just gotta say, the cover is insane! I am so grateful our paths crossed and you were able and willing to distill my poems into an image that’s provocative, violent, unapologetically Latino. I know we spent mad conversations going back and forth about your initial impressions of Gentefication, but for the good readers of Palette Poetry, could you remind us what was going through your head as you popped open that photoshop and started to ‘gentefy’ a poetry collection’s cover? 

AS: Dude, I’m so happy you like it! Thank you for trusting me with this project. So, right from the start, I approached this task like I do other art or video projects: I try to find a very personal connection to it. It’s the only way I’m gonna give you the best version of myself and create something authentic. As I read your poems, I let the body of work really sink in, the words, your style, the tone, the visuals, so as to awaken certain emotions and memories. I do the same thing as a fiction writer when searching for inspiration.

So, the things that initially stuck with me were the warm family memories and the details about your parents’ immigrant struggles, but more importantly, I was inspired by the bravado by which you shared very personal and intimate experiences and presented them in a way that forces the reader to learn about your culture. It’s unapologetically “hood” although meant for academia, and I dig that.

As for the design, I couldn’t get the image of a tongue out of my mind. You do mention it a lot, by the way—tongue, mouth, words, language. I came to realize that as a poet, your words are your weapons; in this case, words are also your peace offering. So I ran with this symbolic idea to highlight the emotional connection between author and reader.

 

AL:  Digging a bit deeper into the aspects of the cover itself, in my humble poeta view, man, there’s definitely a cartoonish feel to the cover. And that’s not a diss by any means. In fact, it’s honoring and reflecting the speaker and his experience, attitudes viz. going to college as his city’s struggling. You got this fist holding a pencil-turned-shank that’s impaled a tongue. I wanna call it a sketch artist aesthetic. How would you describe it?

AS: You’re right, that was the goal. I was hoping to capture a sense of brutality, but without making it too graphic or realistic; that would have been off-putting. I think it needed to be friendly enough to engage people to open the book. I was hoping the fun details (pencil shank, hand tattoos, notebook aesthetic) would give it some youthful scholarly flavor.

 

AL: Believe me, those fun details animate and give life to the book in ways even the poems can’t do, so again, gracias!

Tocayo, you’re a foo who, like me, wears a lotta hats, and I certainly want to take a moment to highlight them. You’ve made films that range from music videos for artists on both sides of the border, to full-length features–including your very own movie Varsity Punks (2019). You’re also a tax preparer, a woefully underappreciated profession in our community. So in a way, your day job is just like mine, helping the government get its money (puras bromas of course).  How would you say that your eclectic background informs your art and art-making, as shown in this cover?

AS: Haha, more like helping the people get their money. La gente that I serve is more likely to get refunds than to owe. But I tell you what, even in jobs like that I get to meet and socialize with people of so many different backgrounds and professions– it’s sociology research. Learning what makes people tick and what they value is important in creating engaging characters and stories.

 

AL: As you can tell from reading my book bro, I place a lotta emphasis on place (and race, and the relationship between the two). In particular, Gentefication thinks about how, and under what terms, we decide to make a place home. Now, you grew up in El Monte, a.k.a., Big Bad Monte. My padrinos live out there, as well as some uncles on my mom’s side, so I definitely have some sense of the ‘vibe,’ but not as a born and bred boy. For those who aren’t as familiar with the San Gabriel Valley area, how would you describe being a Mexican-American kid there? How would you say the environment shaped you and in part informed your decisions in terms of your career as an artist?

AS: I’m very fond of my hometown and try to represent that culture as much as I can in my stories because the mainstream media needs more perspective. You see LA stories, and even East LA stories, but almost nothing else of the region east of there. The culture is different from places like Boyle Heights, and I just like to showcase it when I can. After all, it’s the place where most of my best memories live.

 

AL: What is some shit you’re working on that we should know about? 

AS: After directing a movie and some music videos, and producing other video projects, I’m going back to writing. Back to my roots. I feel like I have to re-learn it again, haha. I’m currently writing a TV series about some friends who form a ranchera band in high school. They’re 2nd gen Mex-American teens and this is a band origin story about trying to reconnect to your roots through music. I also have some other feature film stories in the works, but we’ll save that pitch for later.

 

AL: Love it, love it! Can’t wait to see what you’ll create man!

Before we sign off I just want to take a moment to thank ‘our sponsors,’ Gustavo Barahona Lopez, Sarah Ali, and everyone over at Palette Poetry who gave this conversation a home. Otra vez mil gracias for your sharing your vision and gracing mi poesia with it.

AL:  Gracias a ti, homie!

 

 

 

Anthony Solorzano is an independent filmmaker whose debut film Varsity Punks was a homegrown project shot in El Monte, CA. Recently, he has expanded his visual storytelling skills by directing music videos, commercials, and short documentaries. His style likes to push on cultural boundaries by celebrating the underrepresented subcultures of society, especially of those where he grew up—the San Gabriel Valley.

Antonio de Jesús López

Antonio López is a poetician working at the intersection of poetry, politics, and social change. He has received literary scholarships to attend the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf. He is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and a CantoMundo Fellow. He holds degrees from Duke University, Rutgers-Newark, and the University of Oxford. He is pursuing a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. His debut poetry collection, Gentefication, was selected by Gregory Pardlo as the winner of the 2019 Levis Prize in Poetry. Antonio is currently fighting gentrification in his hometown as the newest and youngest councilmember for the City of East Palo Alto.  www.barrioscribe.com 

Who Is This Grief For?

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“Who Is This Grief For?” by K. Iver is the winning poem for the 2022 Previously Published Poem Prize, selected by Palette editors. We’re honored to share this moving poem as well as an interview with K. about their work and process.

“Who Is This Grief For?” was first published in Salt Hill Journal, issue 46.

Who Is This Grief For?

1.

My acupuncturist says
why so hungry these days
knowing I’m alone
too much.

I say my tongue wants
forkfuls of warm, white
cake, then, more forkfuls.

She says, what it needs
is another tongue.

Her needle tries to release
a decade-old phone call
stuck in the tight meat
between my index finger
and thumb.

I pretend my body’s
ready. Picture the old phone
receiver’s words Missy
and suicide pressuring
into steam. I pretend
the needle doesn’t hurt.

She says, how does that anger
work for you. I say, it works
because it’s mine.

2.

I keep thinking how my grief
makes you small. How
you didn’t want to be a god
I’ve asked everyone to love.
Didn’t want me holding

strangers, so many strangers,
responsible. You had 9,566 
days before your last. You
held many more objects
than a chair and a rope. Faces
have softened in your hands.
Steering wheels have lived
there a long time. But I can’t
celebrate that. Not yet.
I can’t praise the smooth
contours of your nose
without wishing it were still
a nose. Without asking
Mississippi where it was
that night. My grief is precious.
My grief thinks it’s you.
If I wake tomorrow, content
with the sheets and square
bedroom, where are you.
Where am I.

3.

My acupuncturist warms
my feet with an infrared lamp.
Turns off the fluorescent
overhead. Before she leaves

the room she says, I know
you won’t stop thinking but 
try to think happy thoughts. 

In ten minutes I’m asleep.
Some of my muscles relax.
Some twitch on the loud
crinkled paper.

4.

Because my grief is asleep,
then, the news. Years ago
I quit a job reporting
government affairs.
I no longer have to visit
the desks of suits who say 
I don’t exist.

But headlines now wait
from our phones. Last week
upon waking–SUPREME
COURT ALLOWS TRANS
MILITARY BAN TO GO
INTO EFFECT–you died
again. I walked, again,
through forests and streets
and the stale air of my
bedroom. Again, the brain-
bound ritual of holding photos
of you—a sergeant, backdropped
by an Iraqi desert, my neurons
careful to keep each muscle’s
geometry in place. When you
were alive and your photos
lit up Myspace, I mourned
such need for soldiering.
Later, I mourned how quickly
the internet lost them all.

5.

My acupuncturist says
you enjoy this, don’t you.
She’s talking about my grief.
I say who else will. I tried
returning to Mississippi
where everyone remembers 
only what they want.
There, I said your name as if
to no one. Visited your buried
bones, alone. They would not
be blessed by this. I should not
want to hold one the way
we hold relics. There are
so many gods wanting
my soreness. I can bruise
my forehead bowing
before so many statues.
I don’t drink
anymore. Don’t binge
on fresh-baked softness
if it’s out of sight.
Still my grief habit says
what’s wrong with a little
pain? Who else does it pain?
I think again of your face
that’s no longer
a face. I don’t argue back.

 

—originally published in Salt Hill Journal

 

 

Interview with K. IVER

by AT Hincapie 

 

AH: Just as grief can appear in many forms, so too can the many therapies and treatments used to help ease the burden of suffering. In the case of your winning poem, “Who Is This Grief For?” – acupuncture does not necessarily resolve the speaker’s pain, but perhaps there is momentary relief during the meditative ritual that “her needle tries to release…” Does the physical pain of acupuncture help to ease (or at least distract from) this grief in a way that traditional therapies might not? 

KI: Acupuncture is one of the few therapies that allows one to feel pain rather than stuff it. Recent studies are showing that our unlimited access to short-term pleasure is making us depressed. In and outside of grief, dopamine wants more dopamine. One way around the endless pleasure-pain cycle of modern life, I’m learning, is to reverse it. Seek out discomfort in the form of strenuous exercise, a cold shower, or acupuncture. In turn, the body responds with repair mechanisms that include endorphins. For me, seeking discomfort also releases pressure, surfacing any trauma that’s lodged in the body. I started indoor climbing a year ago and have found that it helps me cry. Missy, the subject of my elegies, died in 2007, and I didn’t cry for him or talk about him for another decade, when I began acupuncture. 

 

AH: This narrative sequence uses dialogue in alternating sections to help organize the intimate spaces of the poem. Why show this kind of spoken interaction? Does this form allow the speaker to reflect on both the immediate healing process before them as well as past experiences that may have brought them to the acupuncturist in the first place?

KI: The acupuncturist in real life exhibited an all-knowing quality that I’d seen in my favorite call and response poems. She could tell by looking at my tongue and skin that I was in a lonely marriage, wasn’t sleeping well, was eating my feelings. Nothing got by her. Her communication style was abrupt, the opposite of coddling. I came there just to get needles, but she was interested in overhauling my lifestyle and, at the time, I found her nosy. She often asked me why my feet didn’t hit the floor at sunrise. I had a therapist who was helping me uncover and heal childhood trauma. When I used that language with the acupuncturist to explain my sleep patterns she said, “You’re not five years old anymore.” Her voice is vastly different than any of the conflicting ones in my head. She knew that I had the type of mind that loops in the past, trying to make some logic out of it. I love contrast as a craft tool, and her voice served as a stark contrast to my own obsessiveness in the poem.

 

AH: Direct address in this poem creates an epistolary tone that extends beyond one physical scene and carries far across Mississippi “backdropped by an Iraqi desert…” Can you talk about these reflective moments where the speaker speaks to rather than about the one they’ve loved? How might second-person address help communicate with a now-unreachable audience?

KI: When I speak of Missy in the second person, it’s often from an irrational impulse to get the reader to look at him directly, to love what I loved. Or, I want the reader to understand their complicity in transphobia, if they are complicit. I wish I believed in an afterlife. My rational mind knows I’m talking to a void when using the “you.” At the same time, speaking to the memory of someone you’re grieving or to someone who’s hurt you is a classic therapy tool. Rebuilding Missy’s memory and saying things I wish I had when he was alive—even confronting his need to go to war—has lifted the grief in ways I didn’t expect. 

 

AH: At times personal and at times political, this poem seems to suggest that suffering can become a shared experience, and can unite opposing ideologies in times of crisis and especially in times of war. Do you see writing as a political act, and if so, how might something intimate and immediate like this poem demonstrate these larger social and political frustrations?

KI: Writing is absolutely a political act. Anything I ask an audience to look at has political implications. Every time I write, there’s an opportunity to challenge the status quo of ideas, syntax, and poetic form. My grief was very personal and very political. Losing someone to the mere fact of their marginalization can be maddening. That kind of grief implicates strangers. Many of them. These elegies were born out of the compulsion to ensure Missy’s personhood and transness were not erased as they were from his obituary and his funeral. I wanted to rebuild that memory while also confronting the landscape that he found uninhabitable. I also wanted to portray him as more complex than a martyr for trans liberation. He went to war. He was a sergeant in the military police. He was a beautiful and loveable working-class trans person and he actively participated in violence.

I believe relationships are also political. Missy was a monolithic influence on my queer identity and he could be misogynistic. When Jack Halberstam said there’s no queer “community,” one of the implications is the cruelty that one queer person can inflict on another. I did want this poem to highlight that intimacy—as you put it—as relationships, like the families we grow up in, can so often mimic our collective struggles for power. I’m writing about this idea in my new manuscript about desire and the power it gives the desired. I’m continually surprised that queer relationships are not an automatic escape from patriarchal harm. 

 

AH: For our readers who are considering academia: You have a Ph.D. from Florida State University and are the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. How have these professional opportunities contributed to your creative work, or even provided you with the resources and opportunities to focus on your craft?

KI: I’m preoccupied with the realities of who gets to make art. Before I moved to Florida, married, and got my Ph.D., I didn’t have the time, energy, or recourses to write. I worked thirteen-hour days, couch-surfed, and was hungry. I’m no longer married, but I’m much luckier now than then. If you’d have told me eleven years ago that a ten-page writing sample would have gotten me a fellowship with the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, I might have tried to do what Lucille Clifton did and carve out ten or twenty minutes where I could. But I didn’t know about Lucille Clifton. I didn’t know nearly enough. My education has provided me the access to time, knowledge, and community that I used to dream about. The older I get, the more I think of time as our most precious resource. This fellowship has made me wealthy with time. I teach one class a week. I walk around the many lakes, hang out with other writers, mentor queer youth, and write a new book. I’m more excited about the work I’ve done here than any of the previous work. Time has a lot to do with that. I wish every writer could have this. 

 

 

K. Iver

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, The Adroit, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. They are the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the recipient of the 2022 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Grant. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University.