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 talks to K. Iver about the grip of loss, nostalgia, and gender, all set in the backdrop of rural Mississippi in the early ’80s in their debut collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, which won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2023). Read on for a conversation about gestures of mythmaking, grief, the book’s arc, and more.

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Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver: Memory and Mythmaking

 

 

I.S. Jones: First, congratulations on Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco being selected for Milkweed’s Ballard Spahr Poetry Prize by Tyehimba Jess. Walk me through the process of you sending out your manuscript. There is an extended period from when you write the book to when you find a home for the book. The turnaround seemed pretty fast. How many presses or prizes did you send Short Film out to for publication? Did you edit the book in between sending it out? How much time passed from when you finished the manuscript and felt ready to send it out to when Milkweed finally selected it? What was your journey like sending a manuscript out for a book prize instead of querying an editor or a specific press?

K. Iver: It was fast. I had submitted to three or four prizes the previous fall, and I don’t think the book was ready then. I reordered and edited some of the poems. I had workshops with Steven Espada Dawson, who also writes about grief, mental illness, and class. He helped me order the book differently.

I submitted to two more presses in the spring after a major reactivation of trauma in December, when every wound from Short Film had opened, every wound including denial of consent (informed, enthusiastic, immediate, and obvious) and abandonment. These events took place around the same time of year as Missy’s first disappearance in Short Film. I remember driving to Paige [Lewis] and Kaveh [Akbar’s] house the first week of December, thinking I’ll feel better around friends who’ve known me a long time, and then feeling worse every day. In the mornings, Paige was writing, Yael, their non-binary epic. I tried to write alongside them but had no room for poetry, not even for revising or editing. The thought of returning to “Short Film” and the themes of it and the vividness of it was unbearable. I thought, “I’ve gotta finish this, or at least make it decent enough to send out to contests.” When I submitted it to Milkweed in February, I was hoping never to have to work on it again. It felt like divine permission when I got the “Congratulations!” email from Milkweed, informing me it would just be another month of editing. I was so relieved to have that deadline and move on to my current projects.

 

IJ: I appreciate what you’re saying because so much of the book has lived in you, right? I mean, over the decades. Especially poems in which you moved through a different life before you transitioned. Now you’re alive in a new life where you are negotiating your gender in more complicated and immediate ways. All that manifests itself in the book, and by finally publishing the book, you’re allowed to let that go. So, thank you for that. How has your relationship with the editors over at Milkweed been? This professional relationship between you and the editors might be different if you had queried the press or engaged differently, right? Because Tyehimba Jess selected the book, and then after that, he, so to speak, passed on that relationship to the editors. How was working with the editors at Milkweed in general? Would you say it was an overall positive experience working with the press?

KI: Absolutely, yes. I mean, more than I could have dreamed of. Bailey Hutchinson held my hand through this process. I brought in a team of sensitivity readers who are trans and nonbinary that included KB Brookins, Jason B. Crawford, and Maya Carter. I got lucky with their generosity as well. Bailey was patient with my anxieties about how this book comes across. I’m an obsessive reviser and editor. In the middle of the night, I would email Bailey and ask, “How about ‘shake’ instead of ‘melt’?” She got so many emails like that, and her responses were affirming.

She wrote the description of the book as well. I shook when I first read it. For all the reasons I started writing—to see myself and my interior—that was its own affirming takeaway. 

 

IJ: The book’s cover is “Inside Sound. o2” by the visual artist Pace Taylor. You stated that the image best represents “A Short Film” because it looks like an old movie marquee. The relationship between the cover and the body of the book feels symbiotic for how you and the visual artist are both trans, but then also how the sharp pops of color, grainy lines, and the somber, protruding eyes effortlessly translate the book’s intention. Talk to me about choosing this piece specifically as opposed to some of Taylor’s other work. 

KI: I had a lot of dreams about how I thought the book would look. How it looks is very different than how I first envisioned it. A year and a half ago, when I submitted the book, I thought of Pace drawing an image of Missy or having some likeness. There wasn’t much time for that with this publication. I had other paintings in mind, but I had not communicated that to the design team, only design elements I liked: fonts from the 60s and 80s, minimalism, high contrast, easy-to-access geometry. 

And the designer, Mary Austin Speaker, took all of that into account. She chose a painting I wouldn’t have. When I first looked at it, I thought, “This is not what I expected.”

And then when I read over Tyehimba’s [Jess] blurb for the book, and he said something about the speaker wrestling with ideas of mortality and transgression, I thought, “The expression on that face is wrestling with a lot of something.” The book is about me and my grief, not necessarily another person, but how I built this memory of a person. And so, I’m very happy with the cover. It grew on me. I love the old sixties font, and I hope that readers can see a relationship between the visual rhetoric, you know, and the inside of the book. I’m thrilled that Pace is the artist for the book as well. They’re one of my favorite living artists. You and I have talked about tenderness a lot, and I think they’re good at capturing it in so many of their paintings.

 

IJ: Even if I didn’t know the book’s premise, a lot of that is captured in the cover, mainly because the eyes are the focal point of the cover itself, which I think is essential. The book begins with a self-creation myth, “Nostalgia,” but nostalgia is crossed out. Which I think is important for how the opening poem is meant to be read: “In the beginning, in a hospital in north Mississippi, a mother holds her new baby and calls this day her happiest. The baby is you. The mother is surprised you’re here with only a heart murmur. She says having lived through her bloodstream’s birth control and, later, tequila, you must be a fighter.”

Several very intentional choices are made in this opening, as, you know, an opening poem sets a precedent and tone for the entire book. The poems in this book seem to be ordered in a thematic way. I’m curious about the choice to use the second-person point of view. There’s a split between the person you were and the person you are coming into. There’s an active conversation between your past and future iterations. I’m curious about the choice to have “Nostalgia” open the book as opposed to some other poems such as “For Missy Who Never Got His New Name” or even “Short Film starring my Beloved’s Living Body.” Why did “Nostalgia” feel like the right choice when you were ordering the manuscript?

KI: I had ordered my other submissions that way. I had other submissions starting with “For Missy Who Never Got His New Name,” which is a request when I’m reading in front of people, and “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body.” This was my first submission where “Nostalgia” was the first poem. I think it came through after workshops with Steven [Espada Dawson]. Steven [Espada Dawson] got a good look at the manuscript and offered a thorough feedback letter with edits.

So much of what I’m trying to write about, then and now, is how our collective struggles for power can easily infiltrate our intimate and familial settings, and those seeds can germinate in our queer relationships.

In the so-called queer-chosen family, we often recreate the same family patterns in those early relationships—if we’re not careful and we’re not actively working on how we process early traumas. I think nostalgia, especially collective nostalgia, is such a dangerous space to inhabit, as it relies on fantasy. We’ve been inundated with so much nostalgic rhetoric in the last 10 years, especially in our public. And I was inundated with it growing up. This collective nostalgia was a great source of unnecessary pain that influenced how both Missy and I processed our desire and relationships. Because the book is so narrative, I did think it was necessary to begin here, to set up my queer origin story.

 

IJ: I’m curious about the intersection between what feels like more contemporary mythmaking. There is grief, desire, and the divine. All of this is situated in what feels very Southern, rural, and queer. The framework is meant to mirror quite literally a movie. In terms of how many of the poems are prosaic blocks or long streams of text, I don’t see different forms, but the poems stay very faithful to the movement of language as opposed to, maybe, other mediums. From the beginning, was there an intention to craft this origin story with the basis of a film as the foreground? Or did the book have different shapes or forms before it arrived where it’s at right now?

KI: It wasn’t the original intention. I had just decided to go with the way my brain works. Once I accepted it, after many years of workshopping with high-lyric poets and trying to use some of their techniques, my writing improved. I was in poetry workshops with Paige Lewis for five or six years. I was inspired by the surreal and constant experimentation of syntax in their poetry, but I couldn’t successfully use it myself, at first. When starting the book, I decided to go with the style in which my brain naturally processes memory and language, the way it’s constantly playing films. My memories have been tested as accurate and reliable. It’s tough to lie to me and I always figure out if I’m being lied about because I remember almost every conversation and personal experience I’ve had. Lying happened a lot in my childhood, and I understood very early on that when people were telling me this didn’t happen and you didn’t feel this way, I needed to start writing stuff down and making the archive of my brain visible. That’s what I’m still doing with this book: so many people told Missy and me that these things didn’t happen, and we didn’t feel this way. Writing poems for me was a way after being a journalist of my own life, and asking myself the questions I was asking politicians when I was a young reporter: who, what, where, when, and why, and what are you getting from it?

I had to ask myself: What am I getting from this grief? What am I getting from reliving this stuff so much?

When I understood, you know, when I started seeing professionals who’ve pioneered research in my mental diagnosis, I understood that I need to work with what’s going on in my brain and understand that while I’m actively not trying to relive my past, there is a part of my brain that thinks a lot of the stuff that’s still happening. And the only way that I can reframe that is to watch the movie, understanding that I’m no longer in the film anymore, right? When I was writing some of the most mournful poems, however, I felt I was an actor. And, again, in December, when I had finished writing these poems, I was no longer in the theatre watching from a safe distance. I was back inside, and all the actors seemed living and breathing. There were mornings I’d wake up literally thinking I was 15 again, and Missy was alive, had disappeared, and I needed to figure out what I’d done, could have done differently. Now that almost a year has passed since the reopening of those wounds, I’m glad I can literally close the book, and other people can open it if they want to bear witness. It’s been healing for me to share it and have just a few other people watch the film alongside me and confirm that this happened, and I did feel this way.

 

IJ: There were two poems specifically I want to focus our attention on: “[Boy] Meets Girl” and then “Boy Meets Them.” When the book begins, we know that Missy is no longer with us because of the poems “Who is This Grief For?” and “For Missy Who Never Got His New Name.” I think with a book like this, what I find so satisfying is how, as a reader, I get to experience Missy as a living person.

For me, at least, that second title indicates that Missy did not live long enough to know their new name, to be able to grow into their second life, the life that they crafted in their image, right? It reminds me of something I read online a long time ago about what it means to move through a trans body and go through what some people often refer to as a “second puberty,” To be trans is to have a piece of Divine. To be trans is to be able to reimagine and recreate yourself in your image, which is why biblical references can feel so apt.

Going back to my original point, I love how the readers move backward and forward in this nonlinear timeline. In some poems, Missy is gone; in others, Missy is as alive as you and I are in this moment. Especially in the poem “[Boy] Meets Girl, ” the speaker and the beloved are literally talking back and forth with each other. I’m curious about the stylistic choices in “[Boy] Meets Girl” versus in “Boy Meets Them” and how the speaker is changed between the two of them, right? In “[Boy] Meets Girl, it feels as though K. and Missy are both the speaker, but in “Boy meets Them,” that is not the case. Can you talk about the choice between those two narrative styles? As a reader, they feel like sibling poems to each other in many ways.

KI: I wanted “[Boy] Meets Girl” to mirror the style of how we talked. Missy had this very quiet confidence about him, and I was hoping that poem could mirror that. He didn’t say much, but when he talked, it felt important, it felt significant, you know? And the way he spoke to me made me feel significant. I’m hoping the poem expresses that. We would often replay these memories to one another because both of us were in the closet. So we were doing what I’m doing right now with my poetry, saying, yes, this happened: we fell in love even though everyone around us said we weren’t in love. Because he is no longer here and can’t confirm how he would feel today about me or anything, I want it to be clear that it was my imagining of how he would feel and what he might want. And I’m doing similar things like in “Anti-Elegy.” I’m trying to establish that this is my logic, not his. So much of my grief now is filtered through my gender, my experience with gender right now. Today, I celebrated a month on testosterone, and I think about him every day when I put it on— the gel on my shoulders.

I had a long FaceTime with Haolun [Xu] the other night, and realized he was my only friend who asked me what it was like being on testosterone after grieving someone transmasc. He asked me, “Do you think about Missy?” It felt so good to hear that question. That poem “[Boy] Meets Them” was the start of that kind of grief, what it’s like to have my first teacher of another way to be, the first trans person in my life who, a trailblazer in the time and place he lived, not be here to witness my transition. I’ve been meditating on that particular grief lately.

 

IJ: The way “Boy Meets Them” begins: “You wouldn’t want me now. Not like that. / If you made it to 2020 instead of 2007, / we’d compare jowl lines & we don’t feel / almost 40, but the young somehow look younger.” There’s a way in which the speaker doesn’t self-aggrandize them in Missy’s eye. They come out and say: “Obviously if you were still alive, we would be in love and be together.” The speaker admits, “I don’t know what would happen, but I’m very confident that this is probably true: you probably would not want me as I am now.”

KI: Based on the Missy I knew in the early aughts, in the 1990s, he had a type, and it was not how I present now. I was in a very exaggerated costume of femininity, and I say ‘exaggerated’ because, for me, it felt like a performance that didn’t feel empowering. The mother that I had who is depicted in these poems had the traditional expression of hyper-femininity. I didn’t know how else to be, having watched my mother figure out her place in the world. I watched her get attention and power from her beauty. I grew up thinking beauty was unnatural because of the work she put in. Missy liked those markers of high femininity. He liked the product of that work. I couldn’t assume how he would feel now. It’s important to note that I wasn’t in love with him before he died. We were friends, and in his last year, he wasn’t himself. I was concerned about him. He had tried time and time again, even in his last year, to start dating me again. Because of the events earlier in the book, I knew how it would turn out. I knew that this was a dance we couldn’t do anymore. I was there for him as a friend and would’ve done anything to make him happy and feel good, at least in my presence. I imagine that if he had stayed alive, that’s how we would be now; we would be sharing notes about our careers and romances. I would tell him about recent trans lovers and how experiences with them have been tender in ways I never dreamed possible, not even a year ago. I imagine he would be proud of what I’ve done. That’s what, I hope, this poem gets at. I think a lot about how Claire Schwartz talks about grief and how she once said, “When someone dies, our relationship with them doesn’t stop. It just changes.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this because I don’t have a lot of ancestors I can call on for comfort. Missy has become one of those higher powers for me, not only when I experience grief but also joy. “Boy Meets Them” was the first time I tried to engage in that prayer.

 

IJ: Thinking about the book’s trajectory and arc, it was a very sound and smart choice to have that poem appear so close to the end. We hear from Missy, but also, there is a construction of who Missy would’ve been had he lived to be 38, 39, going into his forties. Previously you talked about the mother, and there were two poems I wanted to discuss to that end: “Jane” and “A Mother’s Advice,” which may not exactly be sister poems. Still, they feel like continuations of each other in ways that allow us to understand the speaker’s relationship with the mother figure. For me, as a reader, it was very satisfying.

In “Jane,” the speaker says: “as I do most animals who are more deserving of poems / than this mother whom I can love only // when imagining her scuffed mary janes / her double braids undone after she’d jumped // on Carolyn’s back after Carolyn had stolen her / ballet costume […]”. In this depiction of the mother, specifically in “Jane,” were you mindful or worried of the ethical ramifications when speaking about the mother figure? This poem is so successful because we’re given a window to all her complexities.

KI: So many people assigned female at birth have this relationship with their mother where they feel like they’re constantly being chiseled, right? Like a slab. We’re marble—perfectly beautiful in whatever shape we come in, but our mothers need to cut away at us because of the way they’ve been traumatized by how the world sees them, and they want to protect their children from that experience. 

So often the damage from that is a hard-to-shake inner critic. There were so many times when I saw my mother while I was performing high femininity, she would ask me, “Where’s your lipstick?” I would be looking plenty feminine in a t-shirt and jeans, but she had a hard time accepting me in any way. My appearance was just one. But as far as her representation of femininity, she enjoyed it. She seemed less “herself” without it. She didn’t go to college. She married young to run away from home as you would from a house like the one she grew up in. These poems about her were me trying to find her humanity because she put the speaker, and I have been put, in harm’s way many times.

She, more than anyone, has had me contemplating what it means to forgive the unforgivable and how challenging it is: the idea that anything worth forgiving might have to be unforgivable. The greater the harm, the harder it is to forgive. I’ve just been reading some philosophy on that; those ideas are Derrida’s, not mine. One way I can love the mother is to imagine her as she was a child trying to make sense of the world, of what was being done to her. I’ve thought about how she might feel if she reads these poems. I understand that without a whole picture of the way someone (myself) comes to be in the world, I would just be talking about the harm she’s done to me, leaving out the harm done to her by a very fascist, patriarchal system of thinking and behaving in a household. I would feel ethically compromised about that. Even though I don’t speak to her, I want to love my mother, and this is one way I can write into that love.

 

IJ: There’s a profound amount of empathy in the way you seek to understand why the mother figure in the poem is the way she is. You hold that in one hand but then in the other hand, acknowledging that she carried her wounds into motherhood and then tried to force her children to inherit those wounds. I’m thinking about these lines from “A Mother’s Advice”: “when you were on / all fours / I’d let you // crawl over me / on // hungover mornings // if I hadn’t rolled up // a newspaper / to swat // your head as if / a fly.” I agree that empathy allows us access to a complicated mother figure. The speaker’s attachment to the mother figure is further complicated by this history that exists in memory, even if some people try to tell them that their memory is not valid. These ruptures indicate how memory is moving through the poem even though the memories are marred by intimate violence. The speaker holds both truths simultaneously: “I know what happened to me, I was there, I felt it, and I saw it.” These poems are memories that are governed by feeling. There are facts, but feelings are at the forefront.

KI: I want to give her a chance to speak in a way she would. She wouldn’t speak in hypotheticals, but she always had some advice, some improvement for how I should live and be. The advice came to me as if none of the other things had ever happened. As if I had grown up in Leave It To Beaver land, which was like fantasy-driven nostalgia for how families used to be or should have been, but it’s not the family she grew up in. It’s not the family I grew up in. It certainly wasn’t the family my grandfather, who hurt us both, grew up in. She had this advice as if she was talking to someone who wasn’t damaged, as if she herself wasn’t damaged. Many movies about mother-daughter relationships and coming-of-age narratives hit on this idea. I also wanted it to end with a phrase that she would actually say: “Get up now, Kelly, it’s high noon!” She would say it in a long-drawn-out southern accent [laughs]. Whenever she said that I would always feel a sense of foreboding: Here’s the day. Here’s another day in which I have to be present in this house where unspeakable pain has taken place, still takes place.

 

IJ: What is the speaker’s relationship to masculinity in their own body and the external world? I’m thinking specifically about the poem “Body Mark:” “Whenever a man follows me too close, / I think of the nights my mother unrolled the day / with her pantyhose, having been chased around a desk / and the afternoons she insisted on posing outside the car / so fifth-grade boys would gawk, glazed as her hair frost.” There are different moments throughout the book in which the speaker negotiates the performance of masculinity as well as the performance of femininity. The speaker makes language for their gender identity and relationship to gender in real-time. How does the speaker negotiate their relationship with masculinity both internally and externally?

KI: One of the reasons it took me so long to medically transition was the fear of being like my father and like these men who hurt my mother, my grandmother, and me for so much of our lives. I’m only in my first month of T, but in the last couple of days, I’ve been starting to understand some things about men that I didn’t before.

I don’t know if I have the language for that yet. However, healing my own Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine has been something I’ve been actively doing this year. I attend five or six meetings a week with queer addicts across the country on Zoom. One of them is themed “Healing Masculinity.” There, I hear many origin stories about how our relationship with our masculinity feels broken or severed, or we have ideas of what masculinity means, and they’re often limited. I’m not even sure what it means anymore. I know that in my origin, in my family, in the culture that I grew up in, the state I grew up in, and in this country that I grew up in, there’s been an abuse of power that I’ve still yet to heal from. So much of that has come from male anger and male aggression. More and more this year, when I try to use the language of healing from the ideas of masculinity, the term becomes increasingly amorphous, as do ideas of femininity.

 

IJ: In the second installment of The Legacy Suite, I’m looking forward to returning to this question and seeing how your answers may or may not change, as you’re still living through the answer to this question. I’m looking forward to seeing how you negotiate the answers again and where you arrive when we return to this again.

There are so many grounding artifacts that move through the manuscript, especially the red Bronco. The place where it becomes most apparent is in the titular poem “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco:” “Still, I need you to stay with it, / this wide frame of a salvage yard, / our Bronco’s new home of rust // eating red. Watch everything I love now // flattening.” Missy is moving through the manuscript as a pillar for the speaker to make language around their gender, grief, loss of time, etc… The red Bronco’s doing that too. Rust is a very apt way of measuring time in the poem. Did you always know that the Bronco would be a grounding artifact, or as you moved through the manuscript, did it just keep coming up naturally?

KI: I did not, Itiola. I think it’s partly because I decided to go with my obsessions and with my cognitive processing. That was one of the last pieces of advice I got from Kaveh [Akbar] in workshop at FSU, where he would underline the parts of my poems that registered as obsessive. He knew the way my brain worked. I’m grateful for that permission because I don’t think the things we obsess over are insignificant. I think they come up because there’s some energy; there’s something charged underneath them. So much of what we remember becomes our waking dreams trying to tell us something important. I think I figured out why this automobile is so important to so many of my poems because it kept coming up in them, naturally.

A thing about Missy is that he loved the uniform, and he often went through the world with so much discomfort and tension in his body. He came of age in a specific time, place, and cultural landscape that did not acknowledge his gender, but in uniform, he seemed different: in his ice truck uniform, in his army uniform (which I had a lot of grief about). I remember seeing him in so many places where he worked. From the outside, the work outfit became a way to modify something before the surgery that he wanted for so long. The car, the Bronco, was an extension of that. When he was driving, he seemed so comfortable, in both the ice truck and the Bronco. When he was around his car, leaning on it, his body just seemed more relaxed, centered, and protected in a way almost like another uniform. I also think about the Bronco as a horse and what we do to horses. What do we do to these wild, beautiful creatures who are just fine roaming the wilderness themselves, and how we break them.

One of the compulsions of writing these poems came from the need to build and preserve the memory of who he was in his wildness and his trueness, because it was erased from his funeral and his obituary. In the way people talked about him when I went back home, his funeral was about someone I didn’t know. There was no arguing with how he looked in his Bronco, how he leaned on it. There was no arguing with those images, but we didn’t see that at the funeral. His obituary is about someone I had no idea existed. I don’t want to project how they felt, but I know other people who loved him saw him for the self he wanted us to see. I mean, even strangers saw it. It’s just the people who needed him to be someone else—his mother and people at his church—who refused to see. Again, I think there’s just no arguing with these objects that he touched and that held him. One of them was the Bronco, which was one of the most significant for me.

 

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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 speaks with poet Luther Hughes about the governing principles of his debut, A Shiver In The Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022). Read on for a conversation (before the book came out!) about process, tenderness and violence, the domestic setting, and literary lineage. 

 

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A Shiver in the Leaves by Luther Hughes: Tenderness and Violence

 

I.S. Jones: I wanted to begin with your initial feelings toward the book. I’ve noticed this trend where a lot of debut poets will often have mixed reactions towards physically holding it as an object. How did it feel holding your book for the first time?  

Luther Hughes: Yeah, I actually have the galley here with me. To sum it up, it’s weird. It’s a desire I’ve had since wanting to be a writer, right? To say, “I have a book out.” So to have a galley of it, before the book is actually out, is wild. Flipping through it is wild. Seeing how the poems talk to each other in a book form is something that nobody talks about, I think. People are often just like, “A book! Celebrate! Yeah! Da, da, da.” But no, this shit is weird. 

It’s in the world now. From writing to publication there are years in between, so when the book is finally out it doesn’t belong to me anymore. Despite that, it’s also pretty exciting to think about having something that you put together in the world people are excited about, and to see a dream come to fruition. It’s a weird feeling that I think I will never get over.

IJ: I think a lot of poets share the same sentiment regarding the weirdness that comes with publishing a first book and how it’s not really talked about enough. Publishing and writing are two different beasts. I think that some of us fear being made to feel like we are ungrateful for feeling this way, or for feeling anything other than gratitude. 

As a result, we shy away from these frank moments of realization: “I feel strange having this book in my hand that once lived in my head, in my heart, that I stayed up with at 2:00 AM crafting.” You lived with this collection, forming it for years, and then one day, it’s over. How do you reconcile with what is a very abrupt loss—with what is a loss and a celebration at the same time? I imagine it’s a complex emotional space to be in.

LH: There is such a phenomenon as the “First Book Blues,” where, you’re right, you’ve been working so long for this object to be in the world. Now with it in the world, you have to ask yourself, what’s next? Do you write another book? Do you do something else? What do you do after that? It does feel like a death in a sense. One might see it as a death, but also a celebration because now others can enjoy the fruits of your labor. You accomplished this milestone, and it was recognized as such. Being where I am now, I do wonder, “Can I even do this again?” Do I want to do this again? 

I do feel very honored and grateful that BOA wanted to publish it, a press I’ve been calling my dream press. I feel very humbled that BOA liked the book and wanted to publish it when you consider the manner that I went about even contacting them to do it [laughs]. It is a dream come true to be a part of this press’s legacy.

IJ: That’s a great segue to my next question. My understanding is that you queried an editor at BOA Editions asking if they would be interested in picking up Shiver. Was this before or after you won the Ruth Lilly? Given how much you’ve accomplished already, you are, in my opinion, an impressive, prominent poet. You care very deeply about community, and you do amazing work to show up for other poets, and that’s one of the many things I love about you. Apart from the fact that the writing speaks for itself, would you say that getting the Ruth Lilly made it easier for you to query a press, or was this exchange already underway by the time you won this fellowship? Are those two things separate from the trajectory of your career?

LH: Actually, separate. Honestly, that was the craziest week in my life because both of these things happened in the same week. That’s why it seemed like they are so closely related. I remember joking with Gabrielle [Bates] and Dujie [Tahat] saying, “I’m gonna email so and so because I’m tired of waiting!” They both were like, “Yeah. Email them. Do it.” I was like, “You know what? Okay.” I was feeling ballsy.

So I emailed another press at the same time that I emailed BOA. I contacted both of their PR persons because they both had previously emailed me, “Do you have a book?”

To be honest, I only emailed BOA because Gabrielle [Bates] was talking to one of my now pressmates. She was telling BOA, “Luther’s talking to other people!” I wasn’t—I emailed one other press [laughs].  She was pushing the press to snatch up my book. So I email Peter at BOA and he responded, “I’m currently on vacation with my kids. I’ll get back to you when I’m back.”

I was thinking, it’s going to be so long before they get back to me. But then he emailed me a couple of days after I found out I got the Ruth Lilly, and he was like, “Hey, let’s talk about your book!”

He says, “Can you call me?” I give him a call. And he said, “Yeah, I love it. Let’s publish it. It’ll be a couple of years before we publish it, but you know, if you’re down with that, I’m down with that.” I had somebody in my corner saying, “If you don’t pick up his book, at least hear him out, or you will miss out.” I informed the other press that the book had been accepted elsewhere and they asked, “Who picked it up?” and I was like, “BOA got it” and they just said, “Oh, okay.” I mean, they were late. Not my fault.

IJ: Wow, what a story. I love that you created hype around yourself. Granted, the hype was already there, but you made it very apparent that you won’t be waiting on someone else. So were you just tired and didn’t feel like going through the gambit of the contest model? And a related question: for folks who maybe would prefer to query a press, what advice would you have for building that professional relationship? 

LH: I think the answer might be two-fold. For me, it felt a bit easier because I think presses that know who I am know that I really love their books. Not just because I want to be published by them, not just because I’m seeking professional growth or development or some kind of forward movement, but because I really do love their books. I think the best way to start building that relationship is to express how much you love their books.

Say how much you admire their poets, who they’re publishing, say how much you love the work they’re doing, and genuinely mean it, right? I feel like there’s a way to be genuine about the level of care you show to people and to presses, that when you do reach out to them, they’ll respond in a positive way. By that time, they’re already going to know you care for their press beyond just the idea of wanting to publish with them. That was how I was able to gain the confidence and momentum to even be audacious enough to say, “hey, publish my book” because I was genuine, I really did love the work they were putting out. When presses send me books, I tweet about them. I talk about them. I say, “Yeah, everyone should read this book!” Because it’s an earnest admiration for the press’s labor.

Being genuine goes a long way. And I don’t know if people who are fresher to poetry understand that, in a sense. Right now, a lot of the industry is based around the hype of publishing and putting out a thousand poems a year.  I love the increase in publishing that’s occurred over the last several years. But just one side of the poetry business, right? The industry. But the other side of it is for us to be genuine people and to foster community and show love to the folks that you admire and adore. This includes presses, magazines, journals, and bookstores. It’s a whole ecosystem at work.

IJ: I appreciate what you’re saying because I was a huge, huge fan of Frontier Poetry before I joined as editor. In that regard, I really agree with you that so much is about being a literary citizen. Yes, publish your own work. Yes, get your own work out there. Do all these other things for your own career growth, but how are you showing up for your community? Who are you in service of? That is so important, and I really appreciate you for highlighting that. 

Before we get into the book itself, I really want to ask about this gorgeous cover. Luther—you did well. It’s very haunting, which pairs well with the book’s overall tone. The cover is this image titled “Oh, What A Tangled Web We Weave” by Robert Marks, which also sounds like it could be a title for many of your poems. It feels, from the outside, like it was a very serendipitous union.

LH: The image which would become the cover came from a database of other art that BOA offered for me to peruse. For a while, I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted my cover to be. I didn’t know what the cover needed to portray to be the first entrance into the book. I knew I wanted something that expressed a duality in some sense. But I didn’t know what that would look like. I picked this image alongside another by the same artist. That kind of, in and of itself, expressed a duality. It really is just so haunting, as you aptly stated. It really does the work to create a visual expression of the book itself.

When I landed on the cover, something about it was just wrenching. I couldn’t look away. I felt very… ‘possessed’ is the wrong word but it works in this context. Possessed by the cover, by the artwork. The more I looked at it, the more I played around with how the title of the work and the book were in conversation, the more I fell in love with it. I showed my boyfriend two of the different options. I showed him one picture of the other art I was considering. He said, “I don’t know.” Once I showed him the now-cover, he said, “That’s the one.” 

And you know, I don’t really write poetry, I told myself, for people. But the more I started crafting the book, the more I wanted people who aren’t poets to understand the book. It was really important for me that my boyfriend liked the cover because I wanted him to be able to enter the book without being a poet. I felt more comfortable and confident this was the actual cover. Learning who Robert Marks was and about his relationship to BOA made it even more important for me. It made a lot of sense then to be like, “Okay, this is the right cover for this book.”

IJ: Can you speak more to that, to, Robert Mark’s relationship with the press itself?

LH: If I remember correctly, his gallery is close to BOA’s building [laughs]. They have a close relationship actually. Mark and BOA have a tightly-knit professional connection. Learning that after I had picked the cover, I thought, “Ah, this is great.” On top of that, the designer of the cover is the creator of BOA’s daughter. It all just came together in a nice way. 

ID: I want to hear more about the process of putting together A Shiver In The Leaves. Is this book the remnants of your MFA thesis project, or might this be a whole other project together? Did you find yourself writing a bunch of poems and then discovering they are in conversation with each other, or something else?

LH: The idea of the book came during undergrad. I knew I wanted to write a book of poems about a black boy in the city. I didn’t know it would be this. I just figured I wanted to do something like that someday, and I began writing poems toward that. In undergrad, I was writing a lot of father poems, to be honest, and thought the book was trending in that direction. I was solid on that for many years. However, that did not become the case, even though he is in the book, obviously in various ways. 

Then came grad school. My thesis is in Shiver in a sense, but a lot of those poems are no longer a part of the book. I will say my thesis was called, You’ll Never Love Me, which is now a title of a poem in the book. I had Carl Phillips and francine j. harris on my thesis committee and they both were like, I don’t know about that title. I just don’t see it happening. And I was like, “Ah, what do you mean?” I don’t know if Carl remembers this, but he actually said the title should be called A Shiver in the Leaves. I was thinking that that was too close to Carl’s own work and that I wouldn’t do it.

The title poem came in and out through many different versions of the book over so many years. This told me that it needed to be the title. It became what held the book together. I’ve been writing toward this book since undergrad. I knew it was going to be a book; I just didn’t know it was going to be this book—this manifestation as it is now.

IJ: For me, as someone who previously hadn’t yet published anything, the question I always had for poets who would eventually publish their first full-length collection was “How did you know what to edit in between rejections or querying? I was always tickled by the fact that the answer was always, “Oh, I have no idea.”

But then it happened. And now having been on the other side of that, yes, that is how it often comes together. One day, you are in a state of unknowing and then something clicks into place.

LH: [Laughs]. Yes. Literally.

IJ: It sounds like a ridiculous answer, but unfortunately it is correct. I want to talk to you about the title poem of the book. People have different philosophies about the function of the title poem, and how it’s meant to speak to the book as a whole. In Shiver, you have these series of lines that really stick out to me: 

I rest my head against the tree, sleep 
and walk in his call.

Like legs of a spider, his nature extends, 
saying,
         Like you, I once harbored beauty 
saying, 
        Like you my beauty takes the kingdom of blackness. 

It is dawn in the man’s eyes. 
A cavern, a slow thaw to memory. 

The poems often negotiate death, but the book as a whole situates the speaker in proximity to beauty, intimacy, and tenderness. What do you feel is the function of the title poem? And do you feel like Shiver does that?

LH: My answer will likely change in two days if you ask me again, but I do believe title poems are, in a sense, the thesis of the book. The word thesis can be taken however you want to take it, but I believe that if you were to sum up the book in one act, the title poem can kind of act as that summation. Which could be a good or bad thing depending on the book’s function. For A Shiver In The Leaves, the poem itself, is the thesis of the book in that it does reckon and wrestle with this idea of wanting to hold somebody who was dead, to be a comfort to them, to be tender with them while also talking about the beauty of multiple ideas. It also uses the framework of hanging, of what that means for blackness, the black community, and the black body. And also, using a song to enter that realm. All of that is what A Shiver In The Leaves is about. Using the outside, using the beauty of something to reckon with tenderness while reckoning with death, that’s the duality of the book and the duality of the title poem itself. The lines you reference specifically, leaning my head against the tree sleeping, awake in this call, the idea of wanting to be so close to nature while also so close to a dead body. Even the title, A Shiver In The Leaves, thinking, what does a shiver mean, right? What does that sound mean? What is in the leaves? Of course, it’s the hanged man, but it could be so many other things. It is a place of beauty and also a place of death for black people. The title lends itself to multiple interpretations. The title poem reckons with so many dualities because the book itself reckons with the tension between beauty and violence.

IJ: Even the idea of “shiver” also seems to come from a source of tenderness. Which is something that this book, but also all of your work negotiates. I’m also thinking back to Touched, your chapbook.

LH: My baby.

IJ: Yes! So much of your work negotiates that proximity of intimacy and sex—What it means to physically connect to another person, how that transforms the body, and how the body continues to transform even after. I want to ask about crows and how they return in this collection book. I love how they emerge in your individual poems and how they made their way in Touched. I’m curious though, between the chapbook to the full-length, has the reoccurrence of crows, of this motif transformed in meaning? 

LH: I just know I will be asked about crows all my life from now on [laughs]. In the chapbook, crows present themselves as a manifestation of trauma. In “Self-Portrait As Crows,” the idea of crows, black bodies, and death is there. And then there’s the poem “Tenderness” which talks about a crow watching the speaker have sex, and that’s a manifestation of child abuse and molestation. So, in Touched, crows represent trauma, history, and memory.

My adoration for crows has grown between the chapbook and the full-length [collection of poems] in ways that are more than just trauma. Now they reflect home because Seattle is the city of crows. Now they reflect beauty, reflect intelligence, reflect omens. I think that those are mini manifestations of what comes out in the book through beauty, through the idea of why am I not living like a crow to a crow dragging me for living how I’m living. They have mini faces in Shiver that I’m surprised by, to be honest. I didn’t really realize that was going to be the case until I started crafting the book together. Actually, the poem in the book, “Leave the Crows Out Of It” was actually a nod to myself to like, “Leave the crows out of the poem, girl. Let it go.”

I just couldn’t let it go, obviously. But that was me dragging myself. By saying, leave crows out of it, I then invite crows into it, right? Crows are a big part of my life, and it’s honestly because of Seattle. Seattle has a lot of crows. It is ridiculous. You see crows literally everywhere. They do follow you around. They do remember faces, they recognize you, and they will attack you. Because of that, I think my obsession with crows heightened upon moving back to Seattle. I was living in St. Louis at the time for graduate school, and wasn’t seeing a lot of crows anymore, so I was missing home, too. It’s kind of how this crow obsession began. I told myself (and am still telling myself) there will be no more crow poems from Luther Hughes, but they have nested.

IH: I understand how obsession can be both a delight and maybe a slight source of embarrassment for poets to find themselves gripped by. Safia Elhillo talked about this in an interview, how she felt embarrassed for being obsessed with Abdel Halim Hafiz, and how all of her poems during her MFA were about him. But I imagine when she looked at her work holistically, she realized she was negotiating a wide spectrum of governing themes.

Going back to how much of the book speaks towards blackness and death, I appreciate that yes, the book situates itself between both of these heavy subjects, but you as the speaker of the poems, and you the author, hyper-resist a particular narrative of expectation. That because you are a Black poet, you have to write about death. More importantly, you hyper-resist making black death something enjoyable, right? The poem that I love which I think does is so exquisitely is “(Black) Boy, Revisited:”

The hole in your head is like any old hole, you tell yourself,
a man slides in. Any old hole, you remember, you watch
the news, you tweet. Your cell phone dies before you send
the picture. You’re not like them other niggas you
whisper in his ear. You’re alive. You’re not Tamir or John
or Michael or Jamal, or Oscar or Fred. Look how God shows
his grace when you breathe, heave when being run through.
You count to three before clicking: 

In the process of writing poems like this one where you directly confront Black death, how did you take care of yourself? Also, did you have any internal conflict in confronting these subject matters such as “Am I contributing to this narrative? Or am I rather trying to illuminate the unique ways that affect me?”

LH: I did have a lot of conversations with myself about how to write poems that talk about Black people dying. When reading poems of this nature that did what I was trying not to do, which was to rehash violence for the sake of rehashing violence, I felt uncomfortable. I felt I was being made to witness something cruel. I wanted to write poems that did two things: one, make the speaker vulnerable in the process of talking about Black death. It was important to have myself beyond the page—laid bare and naked. This is probably also why I also tend to couple black death and sexual activity. I need the body, my body, to be naked while I’m talking about this. It seems unfair for me to rehash somebody’s death as I don’t know them personally.

Two, I had to think about how someone’s death has been rehashed by the media over and over and over. Writing these poems was about making sure I’m being careful and tender, and not making the reader feel uncomfortable or, you know, be made a witness to the death. Because ultimately, the poem’s about me. The poem is about myself and the poem “(Black) Boy, Revisited” is really about me thinking I’m going to die. I’m using my body to talk about these other people who have actually died to get back to me again. I will say, there are times in the book where I feel like I don’t do it as successfully as say the poem you just were talking about. I do hope that when people encounter those poems in the book, they feel closer to the speaker and not closer to the dead bodies, if that makes sense.

IK: That does make sense. I appreciate you doing what I love to see in a good poem, which is implicating yourself. I want to talk about one of the strongest poems for me in the book, “Making the Bed.” Looking to stanza five: 

What god gave him sovereignty 
over ordinary things of my life? 
I have endured much this tenure. 
I stomach a panther of pills 

and was relieved. You know 
what else persuades me? Rain 
fingering the open window, 
my mother’s voice singing 

In the morning, we’ll be alright. 
In the morning, the sun’s gonna shine. 

Did you have fun writing this poem? How did you strike that balance between the tender and the soft and what is often jagged and violent? I don’t know if this was on purpose, but it feels like the violent world is left outside of the bedroom scene or outside of the world, and the intimate spaces are inside the bedroom, which feels like an alcove away from the world. The domestic setting in the book is the space where the Black boy can reimagine tenderness without having to justify or explain to folks who are outside, in the world, if that makes sense.

LH: I never thought of it like that, but I think you’re spot on. A lot of the tenderness is inside the home, inside with the beloved, or even with themselves. I never thought about it like that but let me circle back to that thought. I had a lot of fun writing this poem. I wrote it at ComicCon, my second year attending. That was before this book became what it is now. I just knew I was gonna write a new poem for a new book. This was part of a new set of poems. My thinking was that the second book was gonna be about this. As it turned out, the first book was about this. Initially, I felt there was not enough happening—as though there were not enough stakes in the poem. 

I’m watching my beloved make the bed and then I realized those are the stakes. That’s pretty much it. Because it’s a queer relationship, because it’s a black body, the stakes are already there. I had to reassess, “What do I want from this poem?” So to answer your question, yes, I had fun writing it because I felt like it was one of the first poems that really allowed me to just be my little Cancer self, just be tender, just be kind of sweet.

I also challenged myself to distill what was maybe a five-minute moment into a poem of 10+ stanzas. And to your question about balancing tenderness, intimacy, and violence: I will be very frank that I don’t know how I’m able to do that. All I can say is I pretty sure I picked up the skill from Lucille Clifton. She is a mastermind at doing that, specifically in her book Mercy. I was able to glean how to do that because of that book. However, when it comes to my own poems, one thing I was reckoning with is that I’ve always had to couple the two growing up; there was always violence and tenderness in my home setting. The tension was always there. Someone was always arguing. Somebody was always fighting. And at the same time, there was always food on the table.

I’ve always had a coupled mentality when it comes to tenderness and violence because of my own upbringing. So it makes sense then that my poems express themselves with that same coupling. Do I think my poems from now on will do that? Probably not. But I am obsessed with beauty, and because of that, I’m probably going to always have inklings of that coupling.

When it comes to taking care of myself, I’m always mindful that the poems are autobiographical. I think that’s also why I’m able to write about these certain things—because they happened in my life, and I did those things to get over other things. Tenderness and violence, I think, are things that I just can’t escape. I think it’s important to say that violence isn’t just physical violence. Violence can also be emotional. It can be mental or spiritual. And so even though the violences in the book are no longer happening to me, I still encounter other types of violences in the world.

IJ: I wanted to do a deep dive into the poem “Passed Down.” When I read this poem, it reminded me of the most perfect poem ever written, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Specifically, I imagine that if the speaker got older and wrote a poem, that poem would be “Passed Down.”

To that end, who is in your literary lineage? And also, who are artists in your lineage? I’m thinking of the visual artist Shikeith. A lot of his visual work reminds me of what Shiver is doing as well. 

Hughes: Yes, Robert Hayden. I love Bob, as he calls himself. I will never get over that: Bob Hayden. But yes, Hayden, for sure. Carl Phillips, of course, and Lucille Clifton. Natasha Trethewey is in my family tree. I’m being very particular about naming only Black poets. I just need to say that. Then, my siblings: Philip B. Williams, Justin Phillip Reed, Camonghne Felix. As far as artists outside of the literary scene, I’ve never thought about this. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say Jean-Michel Basquiat. Solange, specifically her EP. SZA, given one of the poems is named after her music. I will also say gospel artists like Mary Mary.

IJ: I want to look at the final line in the last poem: 

The rain is clearing. 
I hold out my hand 

I’m of the opinion the final line is just as important, if not more so, than the opening. In Kaveh Akbar’s debut Calling a Wolf a Wolf: “This boat I’m building will never be done.” How important are last lines to you?

LH: I think last lines of books are very important. It tells your reader where to go next. Should your reader go back to the very beginning? I know with Phillip B. William’s first book Thief in the Interior, he was intentional that the book means for you to go back to the beginning again. Same, I think, for the second book too. I think it’s a hint, like, this is what you’re supposed to walk away with.”

For A Shiver in the Leaves, the hint is that there’s nothing to walk away with because there’s nothing resolved. There are a thousand questions in the book being asked by the speaker, being asked by their environment, and what happens at the very end. The rain is clearing and then the speaker is holding out their hand. And you would think it’s like, “Oh, it’s stopped raining. I can go out and about.” That’s not the case. It’s more like, Okay, well if the rain has stopped, if this is the end of the season, what do I do next? Gabrielle [Bates] asked me a question when she read a version of it. Her question helped me realize when the book was finished. She asked, “Luther, many of the speakers in the poems in the book reckon with suicide, and we don’t know if the speakers ever actually commit suicide. Are they dead?” And I was like, That’s it. The book is finished because that’s the question I want the reader to be asking. In a way, they are dead because the book is finished. It’s complete, and I’m moving along with my life. 

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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 Saddiq Dzukogi about his new collection, Your Crib, My Qibla. Read on for a conversation about loss, hope, & the page as a place of possibility.

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There are some griefs that move through the body, there are some griefs that live inside of it. Grief that one must make space for, a commuter train swelling with passengers. In a sonically lush debut, a father mythologizes the sudden loss of his daughter, Baha, twenty-one days after her first birthday. What could have been a site of anguish and despair becomes paired with hope. Baha lives and she gets to live a thousand lives, she is the “girl who looks like her father.” Grief in Your Crib, My Qibla by Saddiq Dzukogi is a passageway toward more intentional living. Here, Dzukogi fully understands how finite our time on this earth is and in that understanding has nothing to hold back. This book is no small undertaking. Some people live and die with their sorrow songs still inside them. In his singing, Dzukogi fosters safe passage for us to grieve our own intimate losses.

 

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Your Grief, My Qibla by Saddiq Dzukogi: The Page as Possibility

 

I.S. Jones: Saddiq, what a book you’ve written. I only have a few questions, and I’m not trying to keep you here all night. First, I want to acknowledge that it takes a lot of skill to write a book as brutal and as marred with loss as My Crib, Your Qibla. But I also want to recognize the hope and the courage involved in undertaking such a project. 

I’m curious to hear about how writing a book like this has become a way to keep her alive, possibly over and over? Because I think what is a great miracle about this book is that she gets to live a thousand different lives, instead of just one. In the process of writing, what did this book teach you about grief?

Saddiq Dzukogi: When the whole thing started, it was right after I heard the news of her passing. I had a pen and I just started scribbling in a notebook that I stole from my brother-in-law, because I wanted to just write. I prefer writing long-hand, and unfortunately I had to write this book in a new world where my daughter and I would have conversations on blank pages. Losing her, of course, was something that I wasn’t prepared for. You never think about losing your child. You hope that your own life will be a legacy that you hand over to them when you are moving out of the world. And before that time, I’d always thought about grief in a very weird way.

I asked myself once if I had ever lost anyone close to me in terms of familial ties. My parents are alive; my siblings are alive. Right after I’d asked that question, the very next year, I lost my aunt who, incidentally, Baha is named after. Her name is actually Hauwa. So, when I lost them both, I start thinking what it really means to lose someone. And not just anyone, because what that loss taught me was to see other people more. To acknowledge what’s happening out there in the world. Once, somebody who had read some of the poems I had published in journals was making a comparison between them losing something and my loss. And they said something like, “Oh, I don’t know what losing a child is like.”

After losing Baja, I gained a kind of insight into loss that is immaterial, because loss itself is just an experience. I’m not in the habit of comparing griefs and all of that, but it gave me a insight into what loss itself might mean, regardless of what kind of loss one faces. The book has built a fellowship between myself and people who have lost something in the world, and the world is a constant loop of losses. We are always losing things. 

I mean, we are even losing ourselves as we move through the world. When it was all happening, the loss I mean, it was like a lot of chaos, a lot of noise in my head, a lot of regret because I hadn’t even spent a lot of time with her. I was working in another city. But in writing the book, it gave me perspective about life and trying to see people more, trying to understand more, trying to listen more. It might seem weird to describe grief as a gift, but in a way, it has been a gift to me. Despite the hurt, despite the chaos. It continues to teach me to be a better person in the world. A person that at least attempts to really see others, both their joy and in their sadness.

IJ: What you said before about life being loops and loops of grief—it reminded me of the end of Toni Morrison’s Sula where the final line is, “No top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” As I was going through your book, there were a lot of Morrison parallels that I noticed. I don’t know if that was intentional, but I’ll return to that thought.

What I was struck by throughout the book was the narrative style. I’m thinking here of “Song To A Birdwoman,” in which the speaker reflects: “He hungers for her cry, / her first-time voice, but she opens her eyes / instead, eyes like she has taken from mother’s sockets.”

I’m also thinking of “So Much Memory”: “He opens his mind 

and lets the leaves be his skin and lets the song fall inside another song. / It mimics his daughter’s voice.” This is also reflected in “Marshmallow”: “His image of love pronounced in a way / she holds onto his big toe rubbing her finger / across its nail. Grandmother says wherever he willed, would become.” This choice of narrative style is a very distinct third-person voice and it feels emblematic of the speaker’s persistent grief. As though the only way the speaker is able to confront the grief is through distance as well as memory. When we get to the second half of the book, Baha opens My Qibla, the second section, with “Don’t despair. It reflects on me. / I am anchored to your feelings. / Inside your body, it spikes when you despair. I think of you in the household and quiet down like a seed in an ovule, / quiet, like a ghost armed with knowledge of death / for the first time.”

For me, reading this poem held the same anguish I felt reading the second half of Tony Morrison’s Beloved where Beloved speaks for the first time. I’m curious about that exchange that happens in the second half of the book, but I’m also curious about how you were able to capture Baha’s voice. Because she was so young when she died, I’m sure she had a personality, but she probably didn’t yet have a voice. And yet the way you captured her, it feels like she got to live the full spectrum of her life through this exchange, which was really apt.

SD: A lot of the writing itself wasn’t by design because I wasn’t really trying to be a poet. I was just trying to find a voice, to scream sometimes. I was looking for a voice to sing, a voice to tells tales that obviously I didn’t get to experience with my child. I take imagination to be an act of rebellion against death. Because even though she is dead, the act of imagining allows for her to persist and to create experiences with me that we otherwise don’t have access to. We just exist in in different existences, for lack of a better word, but even the act of memory, which sometimes is heightened by imagination, is a rebellion against death. The mind shapes the most important part of our existence, which is the ability to create stories. The book is full of yearning for stories. One lost, one that would have been created, and one that’s been created by way of imagination. It wasn’t by design. I am thinking about the parallels that you’re talking about with Beloved and Tony Morrison, which is a huge honor, but I am ashamed to even tell you that I’ve never read anything by Tony Morrison. [laughs]

IJ: [Laughs] You have to remedy this immediately! Goodness. 

SD: I should, yeah. This actually reminds me of a conversation I was having with Philip [B. Williams] the other day and he was like, “Yeah, you have to read everything by Tony Morrison.”

IJ: As usual, Phillip is correct. You cannot leave this earth without having read everything she’s written. Sir, you got a PhD, what are you doing? [laughs]

SD: Honestly, I was busy reading a lot of Lucille Clifton. So, I’m doing a lot of catching up which is an exciting journey. Through the PhD, I was exposed to Baldwin and goodness, there is just a lot of catching up to do! But yeah, it’s really good to know that the work is already generating conversation with important voices in the writing community. 

And that’s one thing that I am learning about the book, that it’s able to speak to different people, you know, to converse with voices that I didn’t intend to be in the book. The other day I was thinking about what a poem should be. Perhaps, the poem is just a universe that continues to stretch beyond the point of itself, and also stretch in meaning, you know, depending on who it is interacting with.

IJ: So in addition to the parallels between your work and Morrison’s, I’m also struck by the parallels between your work and the poet Douglas Kearney, notably his book Patter. The obvious parallel I see is that you’re both men who are negotiating the sudden loss of a child. The difference is that in Patter, the child was stillborn. In My Crib, Your Qibla, Baha lived to see some part of her life exist in the world.

You both negotiate grief from a perspective that’s not nearly explored enough: how do men negotiate the loss of a child? Especially when you also have to carry both your grief and also Baha’s mother’s grief as well. In the process of writing this collection, I’m curious to know who the other writers are in your lineage that you turn to? If there were other writers, or other kind of artists such as visual artists, musicians, or maybe movies that you watched during the writing process. I’m curious to know how all those influences found their way into My Crib, Your Qibla.

SD: There’s a particular poem [from the book], I think it’s “Wineglass,” that speaks to your question. The process of writing the book…well, at first, it was just one poem every single day for seven months. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted a quiet space to engage with my own memory, my own grief, and the loss of this child and what it meant to me.

Every day, for ten minutes, I would scribble down words about the subject, about her. And I remember when writing “Wineglass,” I had written down three pages of just words earlier in the day. Later that night, I was reading a poem by Sam Roxas-Chua, and I came upon this particular line: “If he had known the sky would inhale you out of him so quickly.” And I was like, “Oh, this speaks to my feeling about this child.” It seemed like something that could go into the poem that I was writing. So I took that line and started from there in the middle of the poem.

I had lines by Phillip B. Williams in the book. I had lines by Jean Valentine, and a couple of other writers but it was the same, it was all in the same spirit. It wasn’t as though I was in the moment thinking about influences or even, writers that I could borrow from, could borrow lines from. In most cases, it’s that when I’m writing the poems or even after drafting, I’ll chance upon a line. When this happens, when I  feel like a line speaks to my experience in a weird way, I’ll plug some of those lines into the poems, which is an interesting kind of conversation to be having. I also have a poem after Paul Celan. It was actually a poem that almost didn’t survive the book. The poem is “Elegy,”  and it almost didn’t survive because it was driven more by music than meaning, in the literal sense. But then mimicking “Death Fugue,” a famous poem by Celan, gave it meaning in the way that it’s interacting with a different kind of grief, right, one that I haven’t experienced, but the language ultimately is the same. 

And so those moments were really exciting for me, to be in conversation with other people who are grieving other things. 

IJ: One thing that really surprised me while reading the book is for all the poems  underscoring the anguish, what’s also running through them is hope, right? I’m thinking about nostalgia and hope. Going back to what you said about the imagination being a radical act, I’m thinking of the poem, “Measurable Weight”: “In your hands, Baha, your father stands / watching the world. Each cop crows the path / until it blossoms”. And then also in what is probably my favorite poem in the book, “Learning About Constellations”:  “Today, Baha is not dead; she is twelve years old, sits beside her flower vase, pressing her thumbs to / the clay, her heart buds into a magnificent sun / waterfalls its warmth all over her satin face.”

What is the function of hope for this collection, and also in your life? I imagine in a way, you have to reimagine your access to hope or what hope looks like for you now in your life.

SD: Each time that I read any of the poems, say in readings or before the book came out in literary journals, there was often a devastating state of fear for me, because I would always be overcome with this great sadness that wounded me. But after a while, especially when the book itself came out, I realized that each time that I read any of the poems, it’s a way of manifesting her presence in the world. And I’m immensely grateful to have that, to be able to hold the book as a kind of extended part of her body that still exists in this world. 

What does it mean for a loved one to leave this messed up world? The grief is because I miss her. I miss what we were able to share when she was still present here. But given that I learned so much from that loss, I think of it as a light, and I am keeping her light present in my body. In a book that speaks of great sadness, that light is something to be celebrated. It’s my hope that the mere presence of these poems in the world, even though they speak often of pain, retains that memory is an act of celebration itself.

IJ: Book covers do a lot of work to translate the complexity of a book before it’s opened. I’m curious about the decision behind the cover image of what looks like a brown kaleidoscope, or maybe a prayer mat. What were some of the choices and decisions behind the cover art?

SD: The cover is something that I cannot take credit for [laughs]. It was all Kwame Dawes. I recall that before the book came out, I was concerned about the cover because I’ve seen a lot of covers by Muslim poets in America. Often the covers are something that evoke maybe a minaret, maybe a crescent moon, maybe a picture of a mosque.

And I said, “I don’t want any of that [laughs]. I don’t want anything on the cover that would scream, “He’s a Muslim!” I made sure to communicate that. So, Kwame showed me what he chose for the cover. I saw it and he asked, “Do you like it?” I was like, “Absolutely, I love it.”

Sometimes, you pick up a book and, you know, it’s a great book of poems, but it has a cover that is disharmonious with the poems or the design choices just aren’t working. From then on, I understood, “Oh, it starts from the cover.” You don’t write a great book and then not pay attention to the cover or the book’s font. All of it matters, all of it. Because it’s also a visual artifact. I know that we read them, but you know, it has to speak to the whole work and the book starts from the cover.

IJ: I want to ask you about the choices made in the poem “Observations,” which appears in the second half of the book. There are a series of subheadings that I found really interesting. I’ll be honest that I did my best with Google Translate, which is probably why I was confused about biyu which titles the second section,:“From past, Ba / dying is like moving into a future, / past the street bursting with voices / of people you know, /  I am the girl who looks / like her father…”

That moment is very soft, very visual, but I’m curious: what does biyu mean, and what are the other subheadings in this part of the poem doing?

SD: So, this is a place where I was trying to create a form for the poem. I wrote it in bits and pieces. At first they weren’t all part of the same poem, but when I was revising, I looked at this set of small poems, which seemed to be speaking to one another. How could I unite them? I decided to present them as a sequence, as opposed to having them scattered throughout the book. The subheadings are just sections. “Daya” means “one” in Hausa. “Biyu” is “two,” and it continues for 3, 4, 5. I wanted to introduce another language.

IJ: The last poem where Baha speaks in the book is “December.” I’m fascinated with this idea of the speaker creating another life where she could be older. She could be old enough to be lost in a crowd, looking for her father, and something about that is just so beautiful. It goes back to what I said about hope underscoring the grief. “Every weekend, mother washes my clothes and / spreads them on a washing line as if I had worn them / and would do so again.” That’s the last thing she says before we get to the last three poems in the book: “One Year After,” Waterlog,” and “Inner Song.”

I’m curious about the choice you made for those to be her last words, but also why she doesn’t end the book. Instead, the father figure, Aba, returns.  I’d love to hear about both of these choices.

SD: So again, there’s just a lot of things that I wish I could take credit for, but [laughs] ultimately, I cannot. Honestly, it just happened, and I wasn’t intending to have the father figure be the one to close the book. I think the book wasn’t finished, right. I wasn’t finished writing it, but I realized that it was finished the day after her death anniversary. I woke up one morning like, “Okay, I’m not going to write any poem again in this sequence.” All of it happened chronologically, by design. There are a lot of things I want to take credit for, but, ultimately, I can’t. I don’t want to say when I was writing some of the poems, it was as if I was possessed by something, but it’s similar, right? Possessed by wanting, possessed by grief, possessed by the chaos of losing someone. 

All of the poems, or at least a majority of the poems are a response to those emotions that I was feeling. The only poems that were intentional are the poems where she’s alive. I think they’re about five of those, if I’m not mistaken, that start “Today Baha is not dead.” So those are the only poems that I went into with the intention of writing poems and to specifically try to achieve a certain objective before actually beginning to write.

I wish I could take credit, but, alas, I, can’t, because until you said it, I didn’t even realize that was the last time that she spoke [laughs].

 

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Saddiq Dzukogi was born in Minna, Nigeria, and is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). His poetry is featured in various magazines including Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner. He lives and writes from Lincoln, Nebraska.

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. 

 

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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. 

 

 

 

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.