THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
The book’s title is a double entendre. Some of the poems, like the title poem, are similar to acrostic poems. Except instead of spelling out words, if you read them down vertically, the first word of every line forms a 17-syllable American Sentence, Allen Ginsberg’s answer to the haiku. The second meaning of the title refers to the range of invisible, chronic illnesses that many Americans, especially women, suffer from, and the lack of alleviation that Western medicine can do, or Western physicians seem to care, about it. I say this with a grain of smelling salts, of course, given that my husband is one of those physicians. So the cover features a portrait of a woman with a snake around her neck. A lot of people think she's Eve, and she can be thought of that way if you like—Eve was one strong woman. But it’s more meant to be a living symbol of the caduceus, a staff with two snakes wound around it, which is the representation of medicine.
 
What were you trying to achieve with your book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
These 70-plus poems are about invisible, chronic illness, especially ME/CFS, autoimmune disease and bipolar disorder; the female body; and medicine from the points of view of patients, caretakers, spouses of physicians, and physicians themselves. One can be all of these things at the same time. For instance, I have both ME/CFS and autoimmune disease, while my husband also has autoimmune disease and my daughter has bipolar disorder. So we're caretakers and healers at the same time that we ourselves are often ill. But mostly I’m simply trying to raise awareness of how invisible illness works—that you can feel absolutely terrible, and be physically and mentally disabled, all while appearing perfectly fine to others.

Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
This collection spans more than 20 years of writing. Invisible illnesses don’t go away, and I realized after a while that many of these poems weren’t going away either, so I collected them together and wrote new ones to fill in the blanks.
 
How did you order the poems? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
I ordered the poems so that they tell the story of what it’s like to be sick from when I was a young woman just beginning to start a family to now, when my daughter has left for college and my son is in high school. One thing seeing these poems all together has taught me is that in the last two decades, many things have changed in the world of medicine, in my symptoms and treatments, in how I feel and view my illnesses, in how I’m willing to share knowledge about them without shame. Yet other elements have stayed exactly the same. For instance, many physicians now believe ME/CFS is a serious and often life-threatening disease that affects the neuro-endocrine-immune systems, and there are definitive ways to prove it by measuring cytokines, natural killer cells, viral loads and other functions. But there’s still no overall test for it and certainly nothing resembling a cure or even effective treatments, let alone the hope of them, simply because it has gone underfunded and unrecognized for so long.
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I love the surprise of a perfectly crafted image, and an insight I never would have expected or thought of myself. When I envy a poem’s language and want its syntax and diction for myself, I know I have found what Shelley referred to as that “first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.”
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read--did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
The title poem probably encapsulates the book, because it picks up all the frustration I’ve had getting diagnosed as a woman with nebulous diseases; even when my test results were positive, male doctors would tell me to go to the psychiatrist. It was a combination of my husband, who had watched me decline for years, and female physicians—a pair of lovely GPs, the high-risk OB for my son’s pregnancy and my immunologist, without whom I probably wouldn’t be writing, because I'd still be too ill—who finally put it all together. So this poem, about remembering there’s an art to medicine and not just science, and which I wrote towards the end of the process, is the nut of the book:
 
American Sentencing
 
Between you and me, there is no
doubt in your mind. I have been here before
and will be again for "pseudo-
gout," "reversible lupus," diseases ephemeral as
the skeptical blink. Unimpressive, you say. It is no
difference to you. Once again, a test outcome
is negative, as if I am less than the sum of zero,
a body that registers nothing, not even the pretzel
knot of all its parts. Look down my throat. Peer
in my ears. Allow your instruments to dictate
the truth as you have learned it --
joint connecting symptoms to diagnosis,
not the tissue of intuition, not
the fatty imagination, not the instinct of the
gut that is flexible and in no way demonstrable.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
I’m a terrible salesperson, so I doubt I’d be able to convince anybody to do anything except call 911 by passing out on their feet.
 
I’ve heard poets say that they’re writing the same story over and over in their poems. Is that true for you?
I constantly write about mangoes, because I have 14 trees, and they give me way too much fruit to handle every season. They sneak into everything, even poems about illness. They’ve almost become a meme for me. And I suppose I will always write abut health issues, because I will always be sick, and my husband will always be sick, and so will my daughter. By the same token, we'll also be more well on some days than others, and we have no intention of feeling sorry for ourselves. So while I think poems about illness will creep up here and there, I hope there’s not another whole book of them forthcoming. My next three books are about completely different subjects (though the mangoes, I confess, appear here and there).
 
Do you think poets have a responsibility as artists to respond to what’s happening in the world, and put that message out there? Does your work address social issues?
I do, and my most recent work does attempt to address the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, which I find heartbreaking. The chapbook manuscript that I just finished is written from the point of view of the boat that takes the migrants on their journeys.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
I enjoy writing found poetry, and I’ll use anything to do it—menus, lab reports, lesson plans, cookbooks. I also have been incorporating a lot of STEM theories into my work lately. I find myself really into knot theory, for example, even if I don’t quite understand it completely. Or even halfway.
 
What are you working on now?
I'm writing a spoken word play called SWAMP! that tackles many of the issues that the Everglades is facing: water quality, water quantity, habitat loss, nutrient and chemical pollution, light pollution, invasive species, and the threat of fracking.
 
What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)
Why do I teach teenagers to write? Because no one else will. Just kidding. Because they are absorbent sponges and more in touch with themselves and their subconscious minds than most adults. They just need to be shown the way and encouraged, and sometimes bribed with food.

***

Purchase American Sentencing.
​

Jen Karetnick is the author of three full-length books of poetry, including The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), and four poetry chapbooks. The winner of the 2016 Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize and the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize for Poetry, she has been nominated for “Best of the Net” and featured as a “Rock the Chair” poet of the week on Yellow Chair Review and as a Weekly Read for Red Bird Chapbooks. Her poetry, prose, articles and interviews have been published or are forthcoming in TheAtlantic.com, december, Guernica, Negative Capability, One, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Spillway and Verse Daily. She works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts Charter School and as a freelance dining critic, lifestyle journalist and cookbook author.

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
I spent about five years sending out this book manuscript before it was accepted for publication. In that time, the book went through several titles, including my MFA thesis title, Beautiful Ways to Die, as well as a weirder line from one of my poems, My Childhood Invention of the Rooftop Woman. After it was a finalist and semifinalist in several contests, I knew I was getting closer to publishing it and searched for a clearer way to organize the poems in the manuscript, which is when I came up with the three section dividers—three definitions of the phrase, “To Pluck.” The title, Plucking the Stinger, came fairly quickly after that. I especially like the way the title plays off my poems—the image of a violent sting coupled with the tender act of removing it. I think most of my poems tend to dwell in that juxtaposition.
 
Regarding the cover, I sought out the artist, Regan Rosburg, after seeing the cover of Yearling, a book of poems by Lo Kwa Mei-en that Regan had supplied the cover art for. When I visited Regan’s website and saw “The Nursery,” which would become my book cover, I immediately fell in love with the bright jellyfish and bird imagery next to the much darker wasp nest. Ultimately, I hope the beauty and violence in the artwork coincides with that similar back and forth in my poems.      
​
Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
Because the book was written over the course of 10 years, I often employed a variety of revision strategies while writing it. I wrote maybe five poems during that time that felt “complete” after only the first draft, and that’s extremely rare for me. (I know some poets who feel that lightning-strike quite often.) Usually, though, I tend to write almost a stream-of-consciousness draft, in one block (without any line breaks), and then mold that into an eventual poem by reorganizing, cutting and breaking lines. My poet friends who see draft after draft of my work tend to laugh at how each revision contains a new set of line breaks. I think I focus on those as a way to control what might otherwise seem unwieldy in my poems, which sometimes get surreal and lean toward the long. Focusing on craft helps me contain the poems within the peculiar worlds I’ve created.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read--did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
To sort of clarify my answer to the previous question, I’ll share a pantoum I wrote about obsession and the somewhat disordered place our minds (and bodies) go when experiencing loss, particularly as it pertains to turning inward and becoming self loathing. It’s the second poem in the book, and I chose to write it as a pantoum, with similar line lengths, in order to lock down the strangeness of the world without letting it veer too far in the direction of chaos, if that makes sense.
 
Operations on My Other, Lesser Self
 
Hello in there, ruined and inappropriate heart.
I’ve come bearing a toothbrush and a reason
not to return the surgical scissors, the joint, art
books, the spit-shined shoes, aim, everything.
 
I’ve come bearing a tooth, a brush, and a reason
for cradling your bird-egg cheek, for shredding
books, the spit, shined shoes, aim, everything
with a god or fingertips. When the sun’s red,
 
cradling a bird egg against her cheek, shredding
the day, I walk the hilltop with a stethoscope
and God. My fingertips listen to your sun-red
face like ten cast-off bones digging a scalpel
 
into the day. I walk the hilltop as a stethoscope
aiming to hear everything caged, everything’s
tin face, bones cast off by my digging scalpel.
Hello, I said, I never wanted this endlessness,
 
aiming to hear everything. Caged, everything’s
lonely, baring teeth, and like you, repeating
a hello I said I never wanted. That endlessness
thuds like a dirty shovel on a coffin, remember?
 
I’m lonely, baring teeth, and like you, repeating
my mistakes undercover, so only the eager hear
the shoveled dirt thudding the coffin. Remember,
I brought a reason to find you, brushes to clean
 
you, to uncover you here in my eager mistakes.
I’m haunted by what nests in you, what hole
I brought, brushing to find you a clean reason
to love. In the beginning, I saw, aimed to steal
 
what nests, what hole I’m haunted by. In you,
the stitches rip too often, fall out, don’t take
to love in the beginning. I saw, aimed to steal
another. Who are we? Cut up inside again,
 
the stitches rip too often, fall out, or don’t take
to surgery, the scissors I return for our joint art.
Who are we to cut up, our own insides again
ruined and inappropriate? Heart, hello in there?
 
For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, as a lower-middle class kid who didn’t really expect to go to college. No one in my family had gotten anything past a high school education. In grad school, especially, I spent a ton of energy just trying to pretend I belonged there with the other poets and that I deserved to be there even if my family didn’t value, at the time, a liberal arts education. I also needed to acknowledge that, as someone who “straddled” the worlds of poverty and drug addiction growing up, and who then inhabited the world of upward mobility that graduate school represented for me at the time, I faced a kind of identity crisis, asking myself, “Who am I if I’m no longer just this welfare kid who grew up kinda poor and almost flunked out of high school?”
 
This is a long-winded way of expressing that what scares me most about being a writer—a poet, in particular—is feeling like I don’t have the right, the luxury, that what I have to say isn’t important enough. Publishing a book of poems shouldn’t necessarily be accompanied by feelings of embarrassment and shame, but I think people who grew up in abusive homes, in poverty, with people who didn’t value education, could reasonably identify with these emotions. But there’s pleasure there, too, in knowing that I’ve been able to work through those voices from my upbringing.
 
Some of the themes in the book deal with childhood trauma, addiction, depression and recovery—the stuff I grew up with. And it gives me pleasure to have found a way into that world, through language, and in turn, to have found my way out of it, too. For me, being a poet means being able to look closely at yourself, to interrogate your own insecurities, as well as whatever privileges and disadvantages you carry with you, and to put your individual, bizarre world into words.  
 
Do you think poets have a responsibility as artists to respond to what’s happening in the world, and put that message out there? Does your work address social issues?
I do think poets should address social issues, but I also strongly believe in the important feminist message that the personal is political. It’s absolutely a political act to write about one’s personal experiences with depression, with suicide loss, with addiction, with childhood trauma—all themes in my book—because those experiences are part of a larger cultural narrative that undervalues or devalues those issues. Our mental healthcare system in this country, for instance, needs a major overhaul, and that includes making sure people get the help they need. Writing a poem about struggling with addiction, or with the loss of a loved one to suicide, definitely speaks to the larger social issues of the day, and I think, unfortunately, there’s sometimes a tendency to dismiss “personal poetry,” especially when women write it, as nothing more than fulfilling some sentimental urge to whine about our lives.    
 
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on what seems to be an endless string of poems about my father’s sudden death. I call it “sudden” because it was unexpected, although he dealt with mental health and addiction issues his whole life, which greatly informs the kind of poetry I read and write. I’m also working toward engaging more with fat acceptance in my poetry. I always find myself wanting to read poems about how fat women deal with the incessant barrage of discrimination and insults directed at us, and I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time I write about my own personal experiences and traumas in that regard.

***
Purchase Plucking the Stinger. You can also find the title on Amazon.

From the publisher: A girl rides on an outgrown tricycle, biting a necklace of candy hearts. A woman sleeps with a bullet under her tongue. In these vivid and crushing poems, despair has a scent and it’s “half perfume, half something rotten.” Wild with loss and obsession, the poems of Plucking the Stinger throb like medication in the throat, a ballet interrupted by a couple breaking up, a false positive test, the terrible death of someone dear. This book is a love letter to grief with no return address.

Stephanie Rogers grew up in Middletown, Ohio and now lives in New York City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Southern Review and Pleiades, as well as the Best New Poets anthology. Her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in October. Find her online at 
www.stephaniemrogers.com.

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
The title comes from a poem that picks apart the sentence “Once upon a time, there was a mother,” and it sounds out the last word (mmm-other = tasty other).
 
I looked at potential cover art for months. One night, my husband found this image, and I loved it immediately. My book contains many poems that are based on bizarre dreams that I had during pregnancy, and there is one poem, “The Fall,” in which a baby’s leg pops off.
 
Three word summary: motherhood, transition, strange.
 
What were you trying to achieve with your book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
I was trying to capture the experience of my first pregnancy and birth in all of its wonder, strangeness, and terror. I’m really fascinated by the identity shift that takes place and by all of the baggage that goes along with the mother label. The world of my book includes my experiences—real and dreamed—alongside mother figures from fairy tales, biblical narratives, and history.
 
Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
For this collection, I decided to work with my pregnant body and all of the preoccupations that came with a first pregnancy. I immersed myself in everything pregnancy related—poetry, self-help books, fairy tales, and more.

My most-used revision strategy is to chop off lines at the beginning or end. I hate it actually, but I often have a better start or finish buried within the poem, so I do it.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
I went through so many different arrangements! The final order was influenced by feedback I received from editors at Sundress and ELJ Publications. I’m so grateful that they took the time to suggest more interesting ways that I might arrange the poems. The biggest change was taking the title poem and chopping it into nine parts to serve as section breaks throughout the book. I was resistant to trying it at first, but then it helped everything click into place.
  
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I love when a poem surprises me (when I’m reading or writing), and I love when a poem continues to haunt me long after I’ve read it.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
I’ll share “Sleeping Beauty’s Mother” because it’s one of my very favorite poems and it has not yet appeared online. This poem was published in print when it earned me The Nassau Review’s Author Award for Poetry. I was and still am so grateful for that affirmation of my work when I was in the midst of this project.
    
Sleeping Beauty’s Mother
 
A king and a queen wanted to have children.
They tried everything--
            travel to drink the waters of the world
            vows of silence, solitude, and celibacy
            pilgrimages to trendy shrines
            prayers to various gods and goddesses
—and nothing worked.
 
Finally, they tried sex.
 
The queen became pregnant.
The king chased after fairies.
 
Seven fairy godmothers came to give the baby gifts,
though the king didn’t bring the oldest fairy in the land,
so she brought herself and a curse to the shower:
The girl will prick her finger with a spindle. And die.
 
No, said the last young fairy,
the girl will only sleep for 100 years,
and she’ll wake to a prince’s kiss.
 
Everyone loved the lovely young fairy.
And everyone felt sorry for the little baby doll.
The king passed anti-spindle laws.
And the queen, tired of
            swollen breasts
            sleepless nights
            a king who was too friendly with fairies
thought of a century of sleep
and a new young prince
 
and wished she had her daughter’s good luck.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
“Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my new book. Read poems maybe?”
 
For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
I’ve been a poet since I was 4 and started creating poems. I’m most pleased when I’m in the midst of working on a poem. I’m most scared when I’ve finished a poem and feel like I might never be able to write another poem.
 
I’ve heard poets say that they’re writing the same story over and over in their poems. Is that true for you?
I don’t think so. I always write from my identities, interests, and current preoccupations, but those are complex and shifty. I sometimes look back at poems I wrote several years ago and think, “I wouldn’t write those now, but I’m glad that I wrote them then.”
 
Do you think poets have a responsibility as artists to respond to what’s happening in the world, and put that message out there? Does your work address social issues?
I don’t think poets have to respond directly to current events, but then I don’t think poems have to have a clear message. Some poems show us an image like a painting. Some play with sound. I do think that creating poems—and any act of artistic creation—is a way of responding to what’s happening in the world regardless of the content of those poems. To say that beauty and art matter in the face of violence and fear is radical.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
Yes. I made use of other poems, fairy tales, novels, the Bible, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Wikipedia, and many more texts while writing this book. I was also influenced by my research on women writers of the Romantic period—Joanna Baillie, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Felicia Hemans—who wrote poems in the voices of mothers addressing infants.
 
What are you working on now?
I’m revising a full-length Bible word banking manuscript (the chapbook version of this project is available from Agape Editions as A Door with a Voice). I’m also working on a series of prose poems to/about my dead Granny and a series of poems that use my overflowing game closet as a starting place for exploring relationships and memory.
 
What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
Luci Shaw’s Sea Glass: New and Selected Poems. It’s good to be reminded that there’s beauty in this broken world.
  
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you would tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.

1. Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. Gwendolyn Brooks
3. Adrienne Rich
4. Emily Dickinson

 
*Stops to think despite the directions: Just one more? How to choose? Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath (no, perhaps not the best choice for a tattoo…), Carolyn Forche, Rita Dove, Mina Loy, or...*

1. Katie Manning

 
***

Purchase Tasty Other.

Katie Manning is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and A Door with a Voice (Agape Editions, 2016). She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Verse Daily, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.
 

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW… 
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
The title refers to a central poem about relationships and daily life of two working class artists trying to cope while keeping alive the extraordinary and rare love they have found together. The title also symbolizes an archetypal aspect of gay love, or queer “being and becoming” – that existential process we all go through – in what is also elevated , elegant, and paramount about same-sex love and relationships. The drawing on the cover is one of my artist/writing companion/partner/husband’s (37 years together, two years married) that he drew especially for this collection. Both the pumpkin and the prince/toad images used in the poem symbolize transformation and the mythic aspect of LGBTQ life also symbolized in the traditional, pagan meaning of Halloween/Samhain as the time of the year when the “veils between the worlds” of the living and the dead, between male and female, between order and disorder, collide and intertwine.
 
Three words: Share hidden stories/truths – this is actually a quote from RuPaul (the Black drag queen artist and performer), often shocking, but full of wisdom. He said that to become one’s most authentic self, one must “Take clues from the universe, but remain true to yourself.”
 
What were you trying to achieve with your book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
Not ignoring the shadows, I wanted to acknowledge the joys achieved and suffering inflicted by those men and women who have experienced and condemned Queer identity and practices, such as the parenting of our daughter Mariah in the 1980s when that was not common or popular as now. By means of a revolutionary spirituality, I am determined to transform this oppression and suffering into liberation and enlightenment. So while the book describes a kind of intimacy in my life, using universal mythic symbols and images that relate especially to the LGBTQ community, it also tells a story of shared truths of anyone who has been rejected by or exiled from family, friends, and loves due to who they are or what they do. So while the immediate characters who live in these poems are myself, my family, and my community, I believe many will relate to the stories told, or will come to a greater understanding of Queer life.
 
The poems are organized into three sections. Those of the first section, "Prequel," are drawn from the pre-Stonewall, bohemian, struggling life of a married "hippie" that culminates in the birth of a magical child. The second section, "Personas," delves into the complexities of what I call "gay being and becoming" that includes the construction, dismantling, and reconstruction of the many masks and identities gay/Queer men have worn and inhabit: sissy, artist, monk, trickster, rebel. This theme continues in the third section, "Parables," but here I delve into language and images from deeper psychic levels in a profound spiritual exploration, mirroring Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck," that confronts and reinvents religious Queer-relevant symbols and myths in the forms of elegies, dirges, ritual dramas and chants.
 
Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
I am also a composer and musician, so many poems start with a line that has both meaning and a rhythm that strikes me, or mystifies me, and the writing of the poem is my way of digging to find that meaning. Sometimes poems start as ideas I want to express, but these are harder to develop. As a musician I am also obsessed by the rhythm and length of lines (I hear them like melodic phrases). I usually go through dozens of revisions.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
The poems are ordered to be a spiritual journey of self awakening and discovery (a Jungian take on the “coming out” process and this effect on those around me (daughter, ex-wife, lovers, husband). In other words following the proverbial  “yellow brick road” of my life. I also asked my “in-house” editor (husband) and other readers to see if this order worked for them.
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
A perspective that surprises me, that gives me an inspired inner-notion about the poet and life, or that exposes a nerve, whether  mine or the poets, that makes me a better, more aware person.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
I took this poem as the title as it embodies all those ideas and goals as a writer that I’ve been talking about: myth/archetypes, spirituality, socio-political analysis of working class art makers, and therefore drives, and is at the heart the writing of the others poems written over periods of time and numerous migrations. Halloween is also a huge holiday in the LGBT community. I also took a line out of this poem and used for a personal essay, “Hecklers and Christians,” that appeared in the Canadian anthology, First Person Queer: Who we are (so far) (Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver; Labonté and Schimel, eds., 2007), honest and revealing first-person accounts of queer experience in daily life. Mine includes stories of homophobic violence and familial rejection.
 
PRINCES & PUMPKINS 
8 o'clock, Friday Morning, Halloween
 
You say,  I feel like Cinderella turning into a pumpkin.
And I, your warted toad, companion of the hours of day
which are desert and death, sold to the highest bidder.
 
Stealing a kiss in public, I stiffen slightly
and check the four directions for hecklers and Christians.
For in the middle of this passage, saviors come
pandering guilt and hate in pamphlet form.
 
In this mean and trivial place, do old enemies sense
Prospero's art in our gestures, evil sister’s spell in our touch ?
Brought before their preachers and judges will they cast us out like hallelujahs,
like scarlet women refusing conversion?  Pastured in suburbia, we become
skittish, dull-witted, but never comforted by their troubled theologies
 
Now we are released, after eight hour’s labor
to begin our wyrd-like ways, be there moonlight or not,
dark princes of the night, uninvited guests,
giggling with kisses and curses, tossing blessings and sequins,
fertile seeds sown to fallow fields,
wreaking havoc on sobriety and convention.
 
We tramp littered streets searching
for omens to decipher this carnal parade.
Anticipating fairy godmothers, finding only nihilists
we discover charmed messages, encoded
in our deliberate, magnetic, yet threatening embrace.
 
No longer stallions in the heat of pursuit, we squabble
like mice over moldy cheese, desperate commoners hoping
the glass slippers might fit, wondering who is prince, who princess,
questioning what happily-ever-afters were promised and by whom?
 
It is eight o'clock Monday morning
you have tried three times to get me out of bed.
The birds are singing certain, but I'm confused.
Is this our rainbow’s end, or waking unto death?
 
For this night I have turned old and hairy,
I stink of sweat and semen.
A mild panic rises in my breast.
My soul grows prickly as a toad.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
Challenge yourself to see what’s hidden behind Door #3! (an image borrowed from my husband drawn from an old T.V. game show).
 
For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
Going with your intuition to understand this existence, exposing what’s hidden, but needs the open air to heal. That’s scary too, of course, if done right. Like when a poem is truly “finished” as in a musical cadence, all the harmonies and rhythms fall into proper place and express the song behind what I’m trying to say. If it sings to me, then I know it’s done.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
Dictionaries and thesauruses, for sure. A lot of materials, images and idea have come from the research on gay/queer spirituality and world religions that my husband, Randy Conner, and I have done over the course of thirty years. The results have been several books and essays including The Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit (Cassell, 1997) and Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions (Hayworth/Routledge,  2004). The latter is about Afro-Caribbean religious traditions that really interested us since these traditions, like that of the ancient Greeks, include deities that express same-sex love.
 
What are you working on now?
A chapbook, tentatively entitled Archways about return and the entrances/exits we take in life. A major theme is family and land from which we spring and to which we must reclaim as queer exiles. The prodigal son’s escape in 1976 and return in 2014 – here to the Midwest where I was raised in east central Indiana. I’m currently living in Chicago due to work-related possibilities and the city’s vital LGBTQ community.

What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
I’m currently reading two books (one of poetry and one of very poetic short stories) by award winning Texas Chicana writer, Ire’ne Lara Silva. Her new book of poems, Blood Sugar Canto, (Saddle Road Press, Hawai’i, 2015) is a tour de force about her battles, traumas, and triumphs in her struggle with diabetes and daily life as a working class Chicana artist/writer/teacher.  In this, and especially in her book of short stories, Flesh to Bone (Aunt Lute,  S.F., 2013), she uses indigenous images and folktales to lead us into another world to face the truths of her/our contemporary lives on the “borderlands” – be they on the Rio Grande, South Chicago, dreams, or the gay ghetto.
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you would tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Judy Grahn, H.D., Robert Duncan
 
What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)
Great questions, but want to say also a great blog. I find that poets and poetry is not a big part of the national conversation about American culture and every public venue like this helps bring attention to the many,  many writers and poets who have so much to say!

*** 

Purchase Princes and Pumpkins here.

Learn more about David Hatfield Sparks and read reviews of his book.

David Hatfield Sparks is a writer, musician, and gay father who has written and performed from the Midwest and Manhattan to Austin, Texas and San Francisco, where he has been active in queer artists and writers communities. His work focuses on music/performance/research/politics of gender, religion, the arts, and myth in LGBTQI multicultural contexts. His poetry collection, Princes and Pumpkins, won 1st Prize in the 2016 Writer’s Digest Poetry eBook Contest. His poem “The Birth of Xochiquetzal” appeared the anthology She Is Everywhere (2012). His personal essay, “Parallel Lives,” devoted to the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, will be published in the upcoming anthology, El Mundo Surdo V. His poem, “Blood Lillies in Summer,” was published in the 2015 Fall issue of Witches and Pagans magazine, and his prose poem “Un Grito for GEA,” will be published in the anthology, IMANIMAN: Poets Reflect on Transformative & Transgressive Borders Through Gloria Anzaldúa’s Work, co-edited by Ire’ne Silva and Dan Vera, Aunt Lute Books in 2017.

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
I love birds.  I always have.  I like their very essence.  In this collection I used the bird or flocks of birds to represent those who leave their country for greener pastures, specifically Sicilian immigrants.  The birds are a metaphor, and for me, at least, worked quite well.
 
I really had a difficult time conceptualizing the image I wanted. It took me a relatively long time.  I’d been concentrating on birds, exclusively, and not looking at the collection holistically: religion, devotion, deviance from that devotion and Sicily as the “motherland.”  I found this image online and tracked down the artist, a very talented guy working out of Texas. The title of the image is the Galveston Blessed Mother and it's a mural in the city of Galveston.  It resonated with me so much---it stopped me in my tracks.  When I told him what it was for, he agreed.  He didn’t charge me anything but only asked for attribution, which of course I gave him.  I sent him a check to further the art that he does to beautify his city.
 
What were you trying to achieve with your book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
These poems were a long, long time in the making--in my head that is.  They’d been in process long before I ever set a single word to the page.   The world I live and write in is an interesting one--to me , that is, so that means I follow whatever it is that makes me happy, that preoccupies me. My paternal grandfather was a Sicilian immigrant, who came to the United States, rather, shall we say, “unwillingly.” He loved his country, was a supporter of Mussolini (yeah, I know, but we must tell the truth about these things) and hated to leave.  He was unhappy in his new country and lived uneasily, fearing vendetta for things he did in Sicily.  There are mysteries in our family, secrets that my grandfather hid--and that I, the assiduous librarian and all around curious person, found out. His children, my father, uncles and my aunt, are the loves of my life. They told me so many stories, often at the expense of their own painful and conflicted feelings.  But they were always honest and for my whole life I will be grateful to them. While my grandfather was not capable of love, his children are. They are all in their 70s and 80s and love family to a fault in that very characteristic Italian way, that is stereotypical, perhaps, but very, very real.
 
I wrote the poems as an homage of sorts to family, to truth-telling, to the scope of what lives can become so far from home, how our landscape shapes and forms us and how a new landscape, a new place can be our undoing. I imagine my grandfather from his birth onward.  It's supposed to be kaleidoscopic in nature.  It's difficult to distill a life, which made writing the poems extremely difficult, but I persisted.  It gave me a joy that I have never experienced before.  If I wrote for the rest of my life about my father’s family, I'd never finish. I continue to peel off layers. Birds of Sicily gives a glimpse into what one reviewer called a “dark aviary.”   I felt that it was an apt description!

Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
Like my idol Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, I have no personal , professional or poetic boundaries in my life. That means that if I am not writing,  I mean the physical act of writing, I am writing in my head. Everything is poetry to me. 
 
Before I began the process of writing these poems, I met with my father and his siblings for breakfast at my cousin’s house one Sunday morning.  My father and his siblings were nervous. They knew that for my entire life I was attempting to pry open all of the shut doors and discover things they’d buried inside.  I knew I was taking a risk. I will never forget the things they told me that day. The trust they had in me.  I was stunned by their courage despite great, great pain for lives they lived with their father. At one point, my Aunt Theresa, a petite and extremely pretty woman, my father’s only sister, noted that I was not writing anything down. This was poignant to me: she wanted me to record things, to get the details right.  I went home that day and wrote the first poem,  “Vendetta.” It's not the first poem in the collection, but a few things that were told to me that day formed images in my head I could not get rid of.
 
I write every single day, without fail.   I write in a little study I have in my house, on the front porch when the weather is beautiful and just about anywhere else. I revise constantly.  I will rarely write a whole collection and go back and revise. The poems are always in constant revision. I read the poems out loud to hear rhythm, tone and assonance.  I no longer workshop my poems. I recently received my MFA and had an incredible cohort who I trusted immensely.  I still lean on them, but I have learned to trust my own voice.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
I think all poets lay the pages on the floor!  That is exactly what I did.  I was interested in telling a story, so it was important to me that there was an arc with some tension.  Hopefully, I succeeded.
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I love to be touched deeply.  I'm not a cynical person and sarcasm, in poems, as in life,  offends me.  So I look for something that is going to touch bedrock of truth within me. 
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
 
Mussolini a Cavallo (Mussolini on a Horse)
 
Revolutions can be sparked by insults.  Can you tell the difference between the vulture and the buzzard?  The imperial eagle and the peregrine falcon? Tell a man that he needs no more protection than the one man standing in front of him and it would be prudent to prepare yourself for what might happen next. Keep in line ragazzi!  March with the upturned chin. They will say, with pride, that you could be Il Duce’s very own son. That jaw years hence would be said to be your only admirable feature until it, too, would fall.  Your revolver lay in a drawer wrapped in your mother’s satin bridal apron, just in case.
 
I would say that one of the things I have always thought about was my grandfather’s love of Mussolini. He died when I was in my 30s so I knew him a long time and this is one of the things he told me long ago. It stayed with me.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
I would say that each individual life is a story, that humans are essentially unknowable, but sometimes we can scratch the surface.  I would say, “read my poems and understand one man’s life.”  Salman Rushdie said, “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”  How true that is.  We can only attempt to understand.  People interested me endlessly.
 
For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
Nothing, not a single thing scares me about being a writer.  It is who I am. It is pretty much who I have been my whole life and it has saved my life many times.  I am an assiduous and inveterate notebook keeper, since I was very, very young.   The ability to be able to write and create is just a feeling I can’t even describe.  To be a poet is to be a miniaturist, a distiller of language.  It is not easy, but very worth it.
 
I’ve heard poets say that they’re writing the same story over and over in their poems. Is that true for you?
To an extent.  I have themes: sadness, alienation,  family history.  We write who we are I suppose. I am not merely a brain putting words on the page, I am responding to my environment, to the clash between my inner and outer worlds . I have an ideology, a view of life, and  that comes out in my poems. Hopefully thing things I write don’t all sound the same!
 
Do you think poets have a responsibility as artists to respond to what’s happening in the world, and put that message out there? Does your work address social issues?
I do, but I do not think that the writing has to be so blatant or specific.  We can respond to things going on in the world, for instance war, by writing about fear and alienation. We can, but we don’t have to name countries, demagogues.  People who live in the world will know.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
Everything is input. EVERYTHING.  I can’t put too fine a point on that.
 
What are you working on now?
I just finished a cycle of poems on Marie Curie, which was really different for me.  Right now I am compiling all of the research poems that I've written and published in academic journals about the refugees that I work with in Sicily. I've had so many published but the audience is academic. I would like the people I wrote them about to have access to them. But I am having trouble ordering the collection to form an arc, but it will happen.
 
I am also working on a new collection of poems about the Italian immigrants in the town in which I grew up.  
 
What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
I have been reading a lot of Melissa Kwasny lately. I am squeamish about this question because I read so voraciously and so widely, it is hard to pin anything down. 
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you'd tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich.
 
That is not a typo.
 
What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)
You asked the most amazing questions, and I am so grateful! 
 
 ***

Purchase Birds of Sicily.

Michelle Reale is an Associate Professor at Arcadia University.  She is the author of several books of poetry and prose poems.  A proud Italian-American, her work often explicates  her culture. She conducts ethnography among African refugees in Sicily and blogs about her experiences at www.sempresicilia.wordpress.com. You can also visit her online at  www.michellemessinareale.com.



​

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each?
The title Postcards from the Dead Letter Office came to me as I was writing dozens of short, image-centric poems, mostly place-based, that were just the right size to fit on a postcard. I’ve always been fascinated with dead letter offices—all those letters that never made it to their destination secreted away in dark back rooms. That image surfaced in my mind, so I made it the name of the file I stashed these poems in and it stuck.
 
The cover image was commissioned by my publishers at Burlesque Press and was designed by Malaysia-based artist Andrea Tan. I love the handwritten font and the dreamy pastels. I also love that the blurbs on the back were on postcards.

Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
This collection grew out of my search for resonate imagery. I was focused on honing what for me were the deep images of the places I’ve been and trying to make them fresh. I was asking myself how I could take stereotypical images like Incan ruins in Peru or the high rises of Hong Kong and make them new (I’m frequently haunted by Ezra Pound). And then I discovered the Japanese practice of tanka poetry and that became the scaffolding for this collection.
 
For revision I focused on clarifying these images and making them as concise as I could. At first I wasn’t sure how I could cut so much from poems that, at most, were often only 31 syllables long, but I was amazed at how often there were whole phrases—though lovely in themselves—that weren’t really contributing to the central image. So I whittled them down one word at a time until I was left with these distilled images and responses to images.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
I arranged the tanka in sets based on season and place. The sets I arranged from spring to winter, and the places are roughly in the order of the season they correspond with. I print up everything and physically move the poems around on the floor. It’s like trying to play the world’s most enigmatic game of Tetris. 
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I thrill at metaphors that startle me with their originality and yet are so precise that I’m left wondering how I never saw the connection before. I also adore well-used internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, and slant rhyme.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read.
 
we feel our way through
cathedral ribs arched along
canals like beached whales,
each one of us a Jonah
seeking out a second chance
 
I find it’s often hard to be an accurate judge of my own work. I chose this poem from the set of tanka set in Venice because it has resonated with a lot of people. I wrote it near the end of compiling the manuscript and I felt very vulnerable when I wrote it—as if I’d written piles of poem just to get to this place where I could say I’m still seeking in just this way.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
Most of these poems are only five lines long.
 
I’ve heard poets say that they’re writing the same story over and over in their poems. Is that true for you?
I’ve definitely caught myself gravitating to certain themes or topics. Some of my pets include death, socio-political issues of women and children, anthropology, travel, liminal spaces, myth, the role of belief in our lives (religious or otherwise), and the sacred-profane.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
I read a little of everything, but I go on long, winding word bunny trails through the dictionary or thesaurus when I’m trying to pick my way through a knot in a poem I’m working on.
 
What are you working on now?
Fixing my leaky basement. After that, I’ll work on writing some longer poems. Probably about a leaky basement.
 
What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you would tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Mizuta Masahide, Lisel Mueller, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forche, Sylvia Plath, and because poets never obey the rules, here’s the misquote of a fiction writer I’d ink: “Strangle your darlings” (Faulkner).

***

Purchase Postcards from the Dead Letter Office.

Dawn Manning is the author of Postcards from the Dead Letter Office, which The Philadelphia Inquirer describes as "exquisite… crystalline... Manning weaves an intricate tapestry out of the bits and pieces of human performance and the tension that so often marks it, putting precise images and phrases into concise but intricate counterpoint." Her awards for poetry include the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the Edith Garlow Poetry Prize, and the San Miguel Writing Award, among others. Her poems have been published through Crab Orchard Review, Silk Road Review, Smartish Pace, and other literary journals. When the stars align, she travels. Visit her online at  Dawnmanning.com.

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title, Postkarten aus Deutschland/Postcards from Germany, and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
I spent four months in Germany in Fall 2014 on sabbatical. I did not intend to work on poetry about that experience, but what poet can help herself? My fuzzy thoughts after a long plane ride and drive from Frankfurt to Mannheim was how traveling is liminal space. And this liminal space is a good topic for writing about. I noticed that even the light was different and gave another perspective on place. This collection is a feminist ethnography of place and embodiment in verse.
 
I did not choose the cover image until I was almost done with the project. I spent most of my time in Mannheim and southern Germany, but one long weekend I spent in Berlin. I found the Reichstag to be a fascinating space, and the image of it disorientating like jetlag.
 
This chapbook is like 1. Coffee hour (Kaffe Klatsch), 2. Disorderly Order, 3. A glass of Riesling
 
What were you trying to achieve with your book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
I am a feminist poet and academic who lives her life as an ethnographer. This means that I am always analyzing life as a cultural project.  I saw a call for work on cartographies near the end of my sabbatical, and I considered the journal I had been keeping with notes for poems. I had taken lots of photos. The idea for a chapbook of ethnographic poems sprang from the call for work on cartographies. I wanted to create a feminist ethnography of my experiences living in Germany with my spouse and child. I wanted to use images and sounds and play them off of text. So this world is that of an American woman who always wanted to live in Germany, but when she was able to check this off a list, she was married with a child, middle-aged, and a professor of communication. I do hope the collection resonates with a larger audience, however.

Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
As a poet who also happens to be an ethnographer, I am always making notes for poems. I took a German for foreign speakers class twice a week in Mannheim. I made all kinds of notes in my class homework that later made it into the poems. When I realized that I wanted to write a series of poems about my time in Germany, I looked in my journal and class homework. I made notes for poems that I needed to write. I took bits of observations from my journal and homework as a starting point. I wrote poems, and then went into my collection of photos to see if there were images that spoke to the poetry I was writing, the themes that I saw coming out.  In a few cases, I wrote a poem that spoke to a postcard I had created. I wanted to read the poems in my voice for the collection, and as I recorded the poems, I revised. This is a strategy I use with all of my writing. Read out loud. Revise. Read out loud. Revise.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
I worked back and forth with images—the postcards—and the poems I had written. I wanted to tell a story and considered how I could do that with images, sounds, and words. I made the postcards, and then I selected the poems that went with the images. A wrote more poems for some of the postcards I created.
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I love a poem that makes me stop thinking until the end, being so immersed in the world the poet has created that I can’t do anything but be in that space. I am not sure how to craft that into a poem, but I know that when I am working on a poem that ends up being a tiny world, I can’t think of anything but that poem.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
 
Ode to Jetlag
 
You can be in two places at once,
finally have the here and there
be the same in your fog of where
am I. The language you overhear,
sounds with no meaning,
could be your mother tongue,
English or Deutsch or just noise
you can’t see through,
a peripheral haze with no way
to filter in this place of the in-between
where you can make time warp
and erase the tedium of the everyday.
 
This poem is the first poem in the collection. It describes the space in which I was writing the poems, and the feminist ethnography in verse of my time living in Germany. This was the first poem I wrote, and it was also the poem that set the theme for what I wanted to do with the collection.  I wanted to make the strange familiar, which is a technique that ethnographers often use in their work.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
There are pictures! And sound. Really, I think the experience of this chapbook is like a good friend coming back from a trip and talking about her travels, the real travels. It is the story behind the postcards and Facebook postings that you only get over a cup of coffee or a two-finger pour of the good stuff. Best of all, it is free!

For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
I cannot not write. It is how I process the world. Oftentimes, the writing helps me figure out what I think about a situation. The most frightening thing is the thought of not writing. Sometimes I am miserable when I write, and I know that I am miserable when I don’t write. The pleasurable part is when I have created a world in my writing.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
Given that I am a relationship researcher, I often find that relationship theory and feminist texts help me. There is not poetry in them, but I like to create it.
 
What are you working on now?
I am working on an ethnography of women and running titled, Real Women Run. It is a memoir in research, poetry, and creative nonfiction.
 
I also am working on a series of poetry collages on MotherWork composed from family artifacts, feminist research, and systematic recollections, I use words and images to queer staid understandings of White middle-class mothering. The MotherWork collages serve as a kind of queer Pinterest scrapbook that critique and interrogate expectations and attitudes about what mothers should do, think, and feel. I am using images to push what text can do.
 
What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you would tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Denise Duhamel
Kim Addonizio
Karen Craigo
Tim Siebles
Nicole Cooley
​
***

Download (or read) for free here!

Sandra L. Faulkner is Director of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Communication at BGSU. Her poetry appears in places such as Gravel, Literary Mama, Rat’s Ass Review, and damselfly.
She authored three chapbooks, Hello Kitty Goes to College (dancing girl press, 2012), Knit Four, Make One (Kattywompus, 2015), and Postkarten aus Deutschland (http://liminalities.net/12-1/postkarten.html). Sense published her memoir in poetry, Knit Four, Frog One (2014). She researches, teaches, and writes about relationships in NW Ohio where she lives with her partner, their warrior girl, and two rescue mutts. Visit her online at https://bgsu.academia.edu/SandraFaulkner.

THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
I chose the title Fleshgraphs because the book is a literal graph of flesh. The book is composed of confessions (inspired by both religious confessionals and online confessions), and is about benign or intense or horrible things happening to bodies, and each experience is told through a different numbered fragment. The book is also composed of fragmented short paragraphs, or graphs.
 
For the book’s cover, I knew I wanted there to be a graph or web of some sort, and that I wanted it to be black, red, and off-white. The amazing people at Nightboat sent me several covers to choose from, all graphed (my second favorite one was composed out of a print of the veins of a leaf!)  
 
The three words I’d use to describe my book are: bodily, gurlesque, and grit. I wrote the book as a kind of shrine to the obscene: an internet Mütter Museum-like collection of flesh-secrets and confessions, a burlesque of sexuality and anti-sexuality, and the body.
 
What were you trying to achieve with your book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
I was trying to write a feminist dissection of rape culture and online confessions, but also a celebration of the body’s resilience.

Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
I wrote Fleshgraphs in a few weeks when I was fourteen. I wrote most of it late at night at my desk.
 
For revisions, I’ve always liked getting physical with the work: I’m a visual artist as well, and I think that that process corresponds to my revision process. I usually print out the work and then highlight or color certain pages, phrases, or passages. Each color has a different code. Sometimes I cut parts of the pages out and then combine them with other pages. I usually do this to a manuscript about four times before I make the changes digitally. I keep the old versions of all of my manuscripts in binders in case I ever want to go back on some changes. I have about ten different versions of the same novel in a storage box that I keep in my writing desk.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
For this book, I wrote most of the fragments as a kind of Jenga puzzle, each section fits into the other. During the editorial process with Kazim, I wrote more into the ending, cut some fragments, and moved other fragments around.
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I like to try to craft strange body worlds with my poems, to make them kind of like a bizarre grotesque-burlesque show. I like to take language used against women or queer people and then juxtapose it in a way that takes away the demeaning usage of it. I love reading poems that break you but make you want to read them again.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
1.
I alphabetize the girls by tens and letters. First: Annie and her cellulite thighs that made her say of herself: walrus. I would bite them with my too sharp incisors. Second: Betty and the weird sounds she made that were more like birth than sex and her pinup rolled back hair. Third: Carrie, and her light moustache. Fourth: Diana and her autumn mouth and how she always burned cookies. I stop at six because that’s too fucking sad but I think of her knuckles and the sound they made against my forehead still.
 
2.
The birth was a slick of fluids I never knew existed, the color spectrum on a palette of torn labia and mewls. My baby’s face looks like a burned cat and I don’t want to name this cartilage watermelon, this alien kitten. Instead I let it bite my torn nipples and sing lullabies in the language of my mother that I never bothered to know.
 
3.
Marco says, you like the girls, fucking them, I mean? I think, have you seen my haircut? And the way I know how to walk in strip clubs, how I know to hold my over-priced beer?
 
4.
Every time I sleep I dream of an abscess, usually on the side of my face. I squeeze and an explosion of pus, a tidal in my fingers and I don’t like bandaids.
 
5. I put on my wife’s lipstick.
 
These were the first Fleshgraphs pieces I wrote—before it became a book, I initially thought it was going to turn into a hybrid poem.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
“Please read this. It’s about confessions, sex, bodies, and secrets.”
 
For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
For me, being a poet is a political act. I was talking to my father about this a little while ago, and he said something along the lines of: being a poet is automatically political because the work doesn’t adhere to the conventions of language. You can have a poem composed out of air, or rocks, or written in dirt, or a poem composed of the same word a thousand times. It’s harder to be that free with prose (I know, because I write in all genres). As for what gives me the most pleasure: when my writing effects or changes someone. I’ve had people message me about being inspired to come out or start writing or publish gay work because of my poems, and it makes me cry every time.  I’m not sure what truly scares me, I haven’t figured it out yet. For a while I was really afraid of writing autobiographical or more personal pieces, but I just wrote a book-length essay written in the forms of poems about fertility runes and girlhood and discrimination, so now I’m no longer afraid of writing personal pieces.

I’ve heard poets say that they’re writing the same story over and over in their poems. Is that true for you?
I write mainly about bodies and lost people, but other than that my stories change with each piece.
 
Do you think poets have a responsibility as artists to respond to what’s happening in the world, and put that message out there? Does your work address social issues?
It tries to! I’m a lesbian, and almost all of my work addresses violence against women/queer women/queer people’s bodies, queer sex and sexualities. I write literary fiction and YA too, and in my fiction I try to normalize queerness (in most mainstream novels, queer people never appear except as tokens, or tropes). So because of that I make all of my characters LGBTQ+. And I try to write about the histories of violence and persecution and anger towards women and femmes/fems, and queer female sexuality. I think all art is political, even work that doesn’t seem overtly so, because the act of creating something is innately political.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
I like old medical textbooks, especially ones pertaining to physical anomalies or geography, or old psychological texts or reports.
 
What are you working on now?
I’m working on the first draft of a collection of political and personal essays and a lesbian comedy screenplay pilot!
 
What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, by Maggie Nelson.
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you would tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson, Aidan Forster, and Tarfia Faizullah.
 
What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)
“What do you most want to write?”
 
And the answer to that would be a novel about Catherine of Siena, her queerness and her sainthood, how she obtained the title of a saint through starvation and flagellation, and the correspondences between godliness and masochism in medieval Christianity. 

***

Purchase Fleshgraphs.

Brynne Rebele-Henry’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Fiction International, Rookie, and So to Speak, and she was the recipient of the 2016 Adroit Prize for Prose for an excerpt from her novel. Her first book, Fleshgraphs, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books in September 2016. Find her online at Brynnerebelehenry.com.