I can't be healthy, I have twenty uteruses

Liz Breazeale received a 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction for her first book, Extinction Events: Stories. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and lives in Denver, where she works at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2020, Kenyon Review Online, Best of the Net 2014 & 2019, New Ohio Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Fence, Fugue, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and others.

Her story, "Hysteria," appeared in issue 102 of  The Rupture.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about our absurd times, not wanting kids, and women not being allowed to control their own bodies. 

Please tell us about the origins of "Hysteria." What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

You know, I don't remember what triggered this specific idea for me. I was probably reading some news article about yet another attempt at banning abortion somewhere across the country, and that probably set me off! Just thinking about the myriad of ways that women aren't allowed to control our own bodies, it really makes me furious, and when I'm furious, I write. Most of my best stories are born out of a deep, deep well of rage.

In this story, you juxtapose body horror (a woman with multiplying uteruses) with the childlike exuberance of many of the doctors. Because of this collision, the story feels absurd, rather than absolutely sinister (which it certainly could've been). Why did you decide to use this juxtaposition and what do you think it does for the story?

Woof. We are living in truly absurd times. For me, there was really no other way to tell the story, no other tone that would really capture the absurdity in which we're existing. But here we are! And the medical field—a field that historically has employed mostly men—has a long and storied past of ignoring the seriousness of women's injuries, illnesses, and pain in general; of course, it's always been worse and still is worse for Black women. But I really, really wanted to capture how it feels to be trapped in a body that is often willfully misunderstood and dismissed by physicians and the medical community. I mean, women, especially Black women, die every day because their pain is dismissed. And it's 2020. That is absurd. To me, this was really the only tone that would capture the horror of that in the most pointed way possible.

There is, of course, a running theme in "Hysteria" of men either thinking they know what women are going through, or men thinking of the abstract ("a medical marvel") rather than the concrete ("I can't be healthy, I have twenty uteruses"). When a female doctor finally enters, she sympathizes with the protagonist, but still isn't interested in giving her exactly what she wants. Since much of the story deals with the deep-rooted differences in personal experience between men and women, why does your narrator end up alienated from women too?

This is loosely based on my own personal experience of being a young woman who has always known she doesn't want kids. The minute you say that to anyone—friend, family, medical professional—there's always, always an implication that you, a 30 year old woman, couldn't possibly know what you want or what you want from your own body. I can't tell you how many times I've had someone dismiss my disinterest in children or birthing one as "Well, you may change your mind," or "you just haven't met the right guy yet." So there's a very real disregard of women and what we say and what we want that forms the basis of the story. And I felt that it was important for the final doctor to be a woman. She's an ally to the narrator, insofar as she does take her condition seriously. But she still, still believes she knows best. Women are often harder on one another than men are—we do the patriarchy's dirty work ourselves, I suppose. When women absorb the language of the patriarchy in which we live (we live in a world that despises women), when we weaponize it against other women, using it to paint over their concerns or desires, it is a unique kind of betrayal, and I wanted to capture that in this story. 

What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?

I've been working my way through Jane Alison's book about craft and narrative, Meander, Spiral, Explode, and I highly recommend that. It's given me a whole new way to look at structure in my work.

What are you writing these days?

I'm working on stories for my next collection, which is going to be a lot of what I've been classifying as "feminist body horror." I'm still in the early stages, but it's going well so far. "Hysteria" will definitely be going into this new collection, along with several other very weird stories.

A Palimpsest of Strangeness Appropriated from Strangeness

Tara Stillions Whitehead is a multi-genre writer and filmmaker from Southern California teaching film, literature, and writing in Central Pennsylvania. Recent publications include cream city review, Monkeybicycle, PRISM international, Jellyfish Review, and Pithead Chapel. She is the recipient of a Glimmer Train Award for New Writers, and has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Award and Pushcart Prize. Her story collection The Year of the Monster is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press.

Her story, "Inciting Moment," appeared in issue 103 of The Rupture.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about rape culture, the intimacy of second person point of view, and Hollywood displacement. 

Please tell us about the origins of "Inciting Moment." What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

This story was originally part of a chapbook titled Not for Syndication, which was ultimately absorbed by my forthcoming collection because of its relevance to the theme of latent monstrosity, something that I associate with celebrity fetish and the Hollywood rape culture that I worked in during my early 20s. The stories in the sequence are titled after traditional plot points for the purpose of subverting narrative expectation. An "inciting moment" is when the protagonist officially embarks on a journey to fulfill a dramatic need. For the protagonist in "Inciting Moment," the journey doesn't begin until she goes through the process of losing her financial security, dignity and desire for intimacy. At the end of the story, when she has her "first industry epiphany," we are at the inciting moment, and the dramatic need is actually the absence of human desire—well, the love of another person anyway. That's where the subversion comes in. That's where the theme of monstrosity lies. I'm openly critical of Hollywood grooming culture, and it has taken me just over a decade outside of it to see that loss is where a lot of success stories and tragedies begin.

I don't mean for it to sound like my whole film and television industry experience was tragic. Even though I grew up with adversity, I went into my career with a brand of academic privilege. I graduated with a B.A. in Production from the School of Cinema-Television at University of Southern California, which was at the time the most elite, famous, and cutting-edge film school around—I mean, I was in a fifty person cohort that included The Fonz's son Max Winker, "This Is America" and Atlanta director Hiro Murai, Chef's Table creator David Gelb, and many other now-successful artists. I don't mean to name drop, but it helps give context for how lofty my expectations were. 

But film school is nothing like the industry. There's a sometimes interminable period of disillusionment that happens for a lot of women who enter into production, regardless of success. I worked hard and ascended to a DGA assistant director quickly, within a year of graduating, and I was so young and so abused. I have no fear using that word now, but for a long time, I did. I recently published an essay in cream city review about being assaulted on Two and a Half Men and the resulting cover-up. I had to work with my abuser, a millionaire who continues to create shows many people love, continues to enjoy impunity. I was working as an assistant to the executive consultants on The Big Bang Theory at the same time, and because it was in its first season, there was room for me to grow if I could hold out. I don't know. Maybe I could have been a supervising producer, maybe a staff writer. There's a lot of maybes, and none of them happened because I refused to accept the requisite complicity. I refused to be groomed, refused to shut down completely like the character in "Inciting Moment." I left. So, to answer your question, the story came from a decade's worth of hindsight. It's a portrait of what it could have been like if I'd been able to divest myself of the desire for true human connection. 

Although I, personally, am in love with second person point of view, there are people (even now) who are put off by it. Why did you choose second person for "Inciting Moment" and what do you think it does for the story?

It's so funny you ask that because I have been following the current Twitter storm over the second-person POV, and I have to admit that I have been intentionally reluctant to chime in because—yes—I use a lot of the second-person POV, especially when it comes to my post-Hollywood discourse and texts revolving around transgressive characters. I suddenly feel a huge responsibility to say something profound about the second-person POV, haha.

I have a story forthcoming in the new and exciting Vox Viola, and in it, the narration switches from third- to second-person. The story self-reflexively states, "When it's happening to you, the story shifts into the second-person." And what I mean by that is second-person is deeply intimate. It is like the literary equivalent of having sex on the first date. It's taboo. It's a thrill. It's not the suggested method for a long-term relationship with the reader (a novel, let's say). There's a lot to live up to with the second-person. But, it has a tremendous ability to ambush the reader. I tell my creative writing students that second-person, present tense is the most immediate and urgent means of coaching your reader through something they would otherwise not do without the protection of diegesis. That's it, actually. Second-person POV is a form of coaching the reader through something they haven't experienced before. 

I'm not trying to say that the narrator in "Inciting Moment" is a snowflake. I mean, the story is a version of a popular mythology about moving to LA to make it big—sell all your stuff, move into a craftsman in the hip part of town, sustain on air and adrenaline—but the emotional journey, or rather, the process of losing one's emotional self, is where the singular experience of the story is focused, and I think you really have to coach most people through dehumanization. Second-person is the most equipped for that rhetorical aim. 

Here you describe Hollywood as a combination of high culture and artistic travesty and the main character as "a palimpsest of strangeness appropriated from strangeness." Since these two ideas are closely aligned, your protagonist appears to have found their rightful place. Why is it, then, that your main character feels displaced, perhaps permanently so? 

Displacement is the driving force behind Hollywood strangeness (as I experienced it). It's the cultural equivalent of an alcoholic in active addiction: Millions of self-deprecating egomaniacs vying for singularity, for the elusive branding of "I'm original, but in a familiar way." The protagonist in "Inciting Moment" is recognizable. Her effort to be interesting is so overzealous, it's embarrassing, and this is most apparent in her excitement over Bukowski's penis drawing in the pocket door. She reveals it to get the man to sleep with her, but it's already obvious that he is going to sleep with her. It's a non-negotiable part of the narrative that we have seen before. By the end of the story, when the man upstairs is lonely and high and crawling through her window, the protagonist has accumulated enough strangeness to achieve estrangement, which is why I was drawn to LA. I wanted to escape my unbearable self and completely transform into anything else, the less familiar, the better. 

Ironically, I didn't truly escape myself until I left Hollywood, got married, had kids, earned my MFA, and got sober. One might say that my perspective of Hollywood's ennui and angst is outdated, and maybe it is. 

However, I recently produced my first show since working on The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men in 2008, and the director, who has worked with everyone except God, told me that he had read "Inciting Moment" and that he liked that I used big words. "Like palimpsest," he said. I was in the passenger seat of his convertible, drinking coffee, going over our shot list and call sheet as he drove us over the Hudson to the private studio of a man I had worked with back in LA, a man who had asked me to come from Pennsylvania to help produce an anti-Hollywood show. 

An hour later, inside the studio, the director and the man were heckling me about being a college professor with an MFA who teaches screenwriting and fiction to undergrads and uses words like "transgressive" and "palimpsest." "What the fuck does that even mean?" these men laughed. Both have worked almost forty years in the industry. Both never went to college and consistently brought it up alongside their celebrity anecdotes, such as being the idea man behind Little Richard officiating Tom Petty's wedding, or marveling at how by virtue of a stage Rodney Dangerfield could switch from falling down drunk into brilliant stand-up mode—the list goes on. 

After we completed principal photography, I had an altercation with the man who sought me out to produce this show. When asked what I thought of the cut of our first episode, I told him that it needed work, that the content was brilliant but the technical presentation was not great. The man, who had started the conversation with a recap of how bullshit his recent trip to L.A. was, with a preamble of how much he "loved me" and our creative partnership, especially after he didn't stand up for me when I was assaulted under his nose at Warner Bros., responded with, "Not great?... I'm sorry, but what have you created that has come even close to what I have? Nothing. Not great? You have no fucking opinion." 

More of the same.

One could argue that it's not Hollywood that does the displacing, that it's the person who abandons ship for shore—a mirage just beyond reach of the drowning. If that's the case, then the illusion of success is one hell of a mirage that people risk their personhoods for, and many who make it to shore are so disoriented and baffled by their own survival that they believe themselves to have become gods. 

Money has a role in that delusion, too. And being white. And male. 

What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?

I've been reading a ton over the quarantine, a lot of which has received good press, too. If you're looking for something that will hypnotize you with beautiful sentences and devastating brutality, I would recommend Garth Greenwell's Cleanness. It takes place in Bulgaria, but I was consistently transported to my time studying at FAMU in Prague. Another writer whose sentences are worthy of praise is Amy Hempel, and her recent collection, Sing to It, destroyed me. It was well worth the fourteen-year wait. In terms of poetry, I've found myself studying the interplay between narrative and estrangement in Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic, the coup d'éclat that is Jericho Brown's The Tradition, and the darkly resonant coming-of-age poems in Todd Dillard's Ways We Vanish. 

I also read a ton of literary magazines and have spent a good deal of time going through the back issues of Fairy Tale Review, which was, up until recently, free for the public to access.

What are you writing these days?

In February, I signed a contract with Unsolicited Press, who will release my debut collection The Year of the Monster, so I have been working on first-round edits, which are due in August. However, in the process, I have accumulated what I think is a hybrid chapbook about stories we don't tell our children but should. I have two kids, a seven- and five-year-old, and they inspire me to want to be more honest and more aware in my writing, and the stories in this newly formed chapbook reach for honesty, which for me involves acknowledging past darkness and future light. As I mentioned above, I got sober a few years ago, so recovery has become a dominant theme in my writing. My essay in cream city review was the first where I explained that I'm no longer a drunk trying to walk a straight line, that I'm trying to be right-sized and loving, and that was pretty freeing. 

I'm feeling really free right now, in spite of being in quarantine, losing my summer workshop gigs, and handling the uncertainty of what fall will look like. The freedom I feel has definitely impacted my form. I've recently published prose poems in Pithead Chapel and Gone Lawn and have some experimental essay/script narrative forthcoming in Writers Resist. I've stopped trying to place expectations on who I am as a writer and have let myself follow the content to the form, even if it means pushing boundaries and navigating my own discomfort. I'm in a period of writing that is exciting, where I feel full of discovery. This, too, shall pass, I know, but I'm going to hold on to it for now. I'm going to enjoy this freedom while it lasts.

A Celebration of Heat

Catherine McNamara is an Australian/Italian author living in northern Italy after many years in West Africa. Praised by Hilary Mantel, her short story collection The Cartography of Others is currently a finalist in the People's Book Prize 2019/2020 (U.K.), and was awarded Grand Prize in the Eyelands International Book Awards (Greece), and listed on the Literary Sofa's Best of 2018 Reads. Pelt and Other Stories was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Award (Ireland) and semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize (U.S.A.). A flash fiction collection Love Stories for Hectic People is out in spring 2020. Catherine was a finalist in the Royal Academy/Pin Drop Short Story Award (U.K.), and has been shortlisted in the Hilary Mantel/Kingston University Short Story Competition, the Short Fiction International Short Story Competition (Plymouth University Press), the Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition, among others. Catherine's work has been Pushcart-nominated, short-listed and widely published in the U.K., Europe and the U.S.A., appearing in Lunch Ticket, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literary Orphans, Vestal Review, Jellyfish, Ellipsis Zine, Moonpark Review and Connotation Press in the U.S.A.; Ambit (U.K.), Structo (U.K.), Southerly (University of Sydney), Two Thirds North (University of Stockholm), Short Fiction (University of Plymouth), Litro (U.K.), and Trafika Europe, among others. She is Litro magazine's flash fiction editor. Catherine lives in Italy where she runs tailored writing residencies in the summer.

Her Stories, "As Simple as Water" and "The Woman Whose Husband Died in a Climbing Accident," appeared in Issue Eighty-Six of The Rupture.

Here, she talks with interviewer Dana Diehl about ravel, the joys of hosting a writing retreat, and using a first sentence as a springboard for a story..

Please tell us what inspired your stories, "As Simple as Water" and "The Woman Whose Husband Died in a Climbing Accident." Where did these stories begin for you?

The first story came when I was in a bad mood over Christmas, inspired by catching trains in Athens and feeling a little lost there. I wanted to be the guy in this tricky situation of betrayal, abandonment and sex. And I like hotel rooms. Athens is a favourite city.

In the second story I wanted to explore the dynamic of an established couple, a nasty guy, and an accident in the mountains. I've done a lot of hiking in the Dolomites in Italy and seen some awful, unthinking things occur. A friend has climbed a few of the less commercial major peaks across the world, and I find this seeking out of extreme hardship absolutely fascinating.

It sounds as though I actually plotted these stories but they rushed out of me and there was no prior planning, just the springboard of the first sentence. For me, the act of writing is absolute liberty and invention, threaded through with instances and effects from the great bank of sensations that is the subconscious. I have to say that I am protective of my many stories and uneven background.

The characters in these two stories feel very worldly, unrestrained by borders. How have your own experiences with travel shaped your writing? 

When I was 21 I left Sydney and ran away to Paris to write, and ended up in West Africa running a bar. I was shy and brainy as a kid, so as soon as I left my environment I began to veer out of my comfort zone, which entailed learning languages (and feeling foolish!), and learning to feel at home in places where one might feel estranged or isolated—the Other. I quickly had to detach from the way of thinking I had absorbed, and to observe and respect everything around me, trying to understand different mindsets, an essential skill for the writer. I worked in diverse environments—from Paris to Mogadishu, from Milan to Accra—and in different economic circumstances (from the sublime to the ridiculous, a friend used to say), and also travelled through places that are now racked with instability and war, a lot of mad road trips and situations where I saw normal lives, humbling stuff. I also ran a business, gave birth in different countries, caught illnesses; spending ten years in Ghana and several decades in Europe, mostly Italy where I now live. I love listening and watching, hearing stories, seeing into people. I steal a lot of details and settings. The door is always open.

What appeals to you about very short fiction?

I began with very short fiction when I was stressed out by two factors: a long wait for news from my agent about the submission of my short story collection The Cartography of Others and a difficult teenage son! At first an exercise to commit to my creative self in a compressed time frame, the attempt to write effective short pieces became a lesson in the essentials of story. I learned to cut to the chase, discard, invent. I've always loved beginnings and endings but this form allowed me to play with the substance in the middle, extract true meaning and learn to suggest, toss out back story, and employ the present. It also cleaned out any excesses in my language. For almost a year I worked on what has become a flash fiction collection called Love Stories for Hectic People, which includes these two stories and is coming out in the UK in April 2020.

Can you speak about the writing retreat you host in Italy? What do you love most about hosting writers? How has it changed you as an artist?

I've been hosting writers from various countries for a few summers now and I find it fulfilling on many levels. Firstly, I live in a country house where the winter is long and challenging, so the summer is a celebration of heat and flowers and long starry nights and outdoor life that I enjoy sharing with others. My kids have left home now and as I once ran an art gallery in Ghana the rooms are many and filled with traditional art, cloth, sculptures and photography, which creates an inspiring environment for writers. Some enjoy the detachment and unlocking of ideas simply through the surroundings, while others rarely surface from their desks. I enjoy this variety. It is also a picturesque area with no shortage of villas, landmarks and nature—including nearby Venice and Verona—so I like to tailor each visit to the writer's interests and preferences. This can mean a hike in Petrarch's hills or Campari-sipping in a Venetian piazza. The visits leave me refreshed and ready to throw myself into my own work again, with a lovely network of new and encouraging writer friends. So much of our work is uphill, and in solitude, so it is also food for me. 

How has your writing evolved and changed since The Rupture published these two stories back in 2016? Or, alternately, how your writing not changed?

"As Simple as Water" was the very first story written in Love Stories for Hectic People and governed the arc of the collection, with its interest in the many facets of modern and intercontinental love. As above, I worked for around a year with the flash fiction form, which also combined well with my job as Flash Friday editor for Litro Magazine (UK & USA). The collection came to a natural ending after around thirty pieces—I knew I was through with the shape and themes, and most of the pieces had been published (these two stories were also among the Wigleaf top 50 in 2017). It was my dream to have this book published but I had to put it aside as my short story collection had been accepted, so I began work on editing and, later, promotion. This takes a lot of time and energy! Over the past year and a half I've been writing a novel, but I am convinced that the lessons learned from producing very short pieces have been valuable in teaching me which questions to ask—ceaselessly—while engaging with the reader and mapping the work.  

Inexplicable Treasure

Shaun Rouser was a cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of The Blackstone Review, where he also contributed fiction and nonfiction. His chapbook of short stories, Family Affair, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks, and more of his short fiction has appeared in Colloquium.

His story, "The Circular Republic," appeared in issue 104 of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about Möbius strip-like structures, footnotes, and the eternal struggle of the dispossessed. 

Please tell us about the origins of "The Circular Republic." What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

I don't recall what sparked the story, per se, but for some time, going back years, I've wanted to create a story with a Möbius strip-like structure that turns on itself seemingly without a definite beginning and ending. My attempts before "The Circular Republic" were degrees of meeting expectations and failing short of expectations, but they thankfully led to this story.

Although the story itself is mind-bending, what overwhelms (in a good way) the reader here are the nesting footnotes. So, why did you choose this particular form for this particular story? What effect do you hope for it to have on the reader?

I wanted to find a way to have the story's narrative replicate and mesh with the story's structure, which the nested footnotes provided. It was vital for me that plot and structure reinforce one another to such a degree that they become inseparable. The more impossible it is for readers to imagine the story being told with a different structure, the more successful I believe the story is.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of "The Circular Republic" is the fact that, based on the excavations, nothing has really ever changed. Right off, we would expect that the islanders' way of life was much different before, but that doesn't appear to be the case. I'm wondering, then, if you could talk about the ideas connected to colonialism and postcolonialism that pervade this story and how you are using those ideas. 

My reading of the story has always been a mix of nihilism and optimism. The St. Marians are victims of colonization, but they also defeat that power to win their independence. With that in mind, the story for me is about eternal struggle, especially for the dispossessed. A very good friend of mine complicated this idea for me, however. Looking at the final two lines of the story, he noted that it's not said directly what's found but implied, which opens the possibility the seat of government is not discovered and a different history (and, by extension, a different future) is realizable. This wasn't something I considered, but the best readers always see angles that writers don't.

What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?

I recently finished Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, which was awesome. I'd read Sula years ago but didn't return to her work until her passing, like many people I suppose. Regardless, Song of Solomon is definitely worth reading.

What are you writing these days?

I have a possibly irrational fear that if I don't stay busy I'll forget how to write or lose my voice in some way, so I like to be at work on something. I'm currently writing some short stories for a possible collection as well as a nonfiction project of personal reflections.

Between the Eye and the Arc

Christian Anton Gerard’s a woodworker and the author of Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella (WordTech, 2014). He's received Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarships, the Iron Horse Literary Review’s Discovered Voices Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize nominations, and he was a 2017 Best of the Net finalist. His work appears in places like The Rumpus, Post Road, The Adroit Journal, Diode, Orion, and Smartish Pace. Gerard is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Find him on the web at www.christianantongerard.com and https://www.facebook.com/PoetmadeWoodworksandBooks/ or follow him on Twitter @CAGerardPoet 

His poems, “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” and” Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past,” appeared in Issue Seventy-Eight of The Rupture. 

Here, he speaks with interviewer Courtney Flerage about honesty, welding, and using line breaks to say the unsayable.

How did “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past” and “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” come about? Did they have similar origins? 

These two poems came about differently, but came to where I felt they were finished as I was courting the woman who is now my wife, poet Heather Dobbins. The difference between them is the way I worked in revising them. I had actually drafted “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past” several years before I met Heather when I was studying in Prague as part of the Prague Summer Program (which I recommend everyone apply for). In that initial draft, I was imagining a love I thought only possible in poetry, but then I met Heather and everything changed.  

I’m always writing about love and I’m fascinated by its intricacies. That sounds rather cliché, but that’s sort of the point. When I was talking to Heather about the poems and about love poems in general, I mentioned how hard it was to not be cliché. She said, “what about love isn’t cliché? That’s part of the wonder in how we write about it endlessly. It’s the oldest story and the one we can’t stop telling.” She’s totally right and she gave me a sort of permission to let myself be cliché and use the book metaphor, especially because I make books, so I suppose I can’t avoid the fact that the metaphor isn’t always metaphor for me. My relationship with Heather helped me find an emotional honesty in the drafts that weren’t addressed to a specific someone. I love the idea of the time when there is no past between lovers, but the feeling that a past, and thus a relationship, is being built kiss by kiss, conversation by conversation. That poem also had roots in thinking about Alan Shapiro’s poem, “Eggrolls,” in which the poem’s couple doesn’t make it, but every time I read that poem I want them to and wish they did, but they can’t or hi poem wouldn’t work as beautifully as it does. So I wanted to make a poem when love wins in a different way.

My wanting love to win is also what made “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” happen. The poem was drafted fast and was written almost as an epistle to Heather. That’s how I think of it, at least. I worked in a factory that made boom trucks (cherry-pickers (sometimes called bucket trucks) that electric companies use) for a couple of summers when I was in my first years of college. I loved watching the welders and talking to them about how welding works. It’s an incredible science. When two pieces of metal are welded together, they’re no longer two pieces joined by a weld. They quite literally become one piece if the weld is done right and well. I wanted Heather and I to be like that. The thing about welding, though, much like a relationship, is that so many things can go wrong. Welders have to pay attention, constantly. Vigilant might be a better word. And the weld can only happen when the electricity that makes the arc that melts the welding rod that joins the two metal pieces takes place in a small cloud of argon because the oxygen content of “regular air” doesn’t allow the right conditions for the electricity and the metal and the welder to do all the things that need to happen so the weld can be nurtured. 

The welder, though, can’t look directly at the weld as it’s happening because the light generated during the process will burn the eyes and cause immediate blindness. That kind of risk is what lovers risk in creating the context necessary in which they can be joined. That’s what “let us risk our sight” is all about; the risk and intimacy created in looking right at each other with no mask, nothing between us.

I’m curious about the way line breaks generate a sense of wonder in “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past.” Throughout the poem, short —even single-word—line breaks add space and pause to the poem, as when you write, “Here is his breath on / her // hair.” Here, the stanza breaks before and after “her” read as a moment of wordlessness, so that when the image completes—“Her nails, / ten scalpels singing through his skin, / saying prayers inside a night making each from each”—the lines feel especially full, vibrant. Throughout the piece, you work in these subtle moments of withholding and answer, fitting for a poem interested in “us yet without a past.” Could you share about the lineation decisions you made while writing? 

Thank you for your kind words in your question. One of the reasons I most love verse is what happens after enjambments. This poem figured out its content long before it figured out its form. I had been working in couplets often during the time of the initial draft, but no matter how I configured the lines in different lengths, I couldn’t make the couplets work to move the narrative while making lines that interested me. I was reading Merwin and H.D. and I think some of these decisions came out of trying to let the poem figure itself via Merwin’s long lines and H.D.’s short lines, especially in “Night,” where I borrowed those words “each from each.” Need is one of the poem’s largest un-sayables for me and the lines became interesting to me in how they might work to enact this need’s unsayable nature when they began to spool out and reel back in. I’m not often a poet that looks at form looking for a concrete shape or something that bears verisimilitude to an object in the 3-D world in which we live, but as the lines began their motion toward the final form I felt like the poem and I began holding hands; it felt like we like each other. 

In this form, I was able to see a line like, “so he could jump above her house, parachute into her” as its own image of the need I felt the poem was working to say, but for which there isn’t a word in my lexicon. I also began to see in this form that the narrative allowed the poem to do things I didn’t know it would do, like moving from “Her” saying, “a story with an arc. A book overflowing / anything the mind can imagine. It’s as if,” which allowed the poem to imagine Christian Anton Gerard jumping from a plane into her/her room where they could be together in the most (un)imaginable ways that lovers want and need to be together.

I came to see that the longer lines felt to me like they were able to build energy like you might see happen when an electric stove’s coil is turned to high and the short lines stated to feel to me like the spots of energy you see when you put your fingertips on one of those plasma balls. I don’t know that this particular poem achieved such energy transfer everywhere, but in its making it certainly taught me something about how I wanted to feel with poems, just like answering this questions has taught me about the fact that maybe I’m more visual with poems than I’d previously thought. Thank you for helping me see that.

As in “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past,” your poem “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” makes use of your name, though the poem itself is in first person. In this way, the title of “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” works to create a unique intimacy with the reader—with the “I” of the poem so defined, the confessions of the poem read with an extra tinge of risk, as when the speaker admits, “Sometimes I cry // thinking of the way you listen because you listen like that.” How did you decide to include your full name in these poems?

I think you might be one of the most ideal readers these poems could want for themselves. Really. Thank you. The name thing has a bunch of answers and they’re all true at the same time. One of the stories is that I was in the park with my son one day and (he’s always loved to listen to music) and he was two or so and I was playing The Smiths while he was climbing on some World War II artillery placed in the park. When he got to the top of the artillery piece, he started scooting out further and further on the barrel of the large-caliber gun and laughed and laughed as I tried to get him to scoot back to me. So there we were, both straddle-scooting the barrel of this huge gun, which I still love trying to imagine seeing. 

“Sweet and Tender Hooligan” came on shortly after we climbed down. I started singing his name along with the line “He was a sweet and tender hooligan, hooligan” because he’d been acting rather sweetly hooliganish and I was singing along and stopped saying his name because that song’s “sweet and tender hooligan” does some terrible things though he keeps swearing that “he’d never never never never never never do it again. Not until the next time.” I started saying my own name and making the syllables work, which they kind of did if I dropped the line’s second “hooligan.” I hadn’t thought of it before, but the song reminded me a lot of the way recovered alcoholics talk about ourselves (if you haven’t read Holdfast, the book in which these poems appear, I’m a recovered alcoholic.). But it was also just kind of fun to think of myself as my own character in my own life and when my sobriety snuck itself into my poems, I had to learn how to let it in and using my own name was one of the ways I handled that.

Somehow, using my whole name instead of “I” (and I revised “I” out of a lot of the poems in the book) helped me to be more emotionally honest with the page than I could when I was using the “I” all the time and became enormously tired of myself in the “I.” All of the book’s narratives seemed to work better together (the risk you noted in your question was fun) when I was in the third person.

What are you reading right now?

I’m an insanely slow reader outside of the book’s I’m teaching (I teach books I want to read so I have time to read them), but I’m completely obsessed right now with James Geary’s Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How it Works and Why We Need It.It’s like Geary’s affirming what I’ve learned in the past 18 years while teaching me and entertaining me at the same time. He’s blowing my mind in my favorite ways.

Poetry-wise, I just finished B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe (I’m totally late to the party on that one, but I’m more than glad I finally got there). I’m also reading Sara Henning’s View from True North, Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler, Darren Demaree’s Emily as Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire, and Kathryn DeZur’s Blue Ghosts. I’m looking really forward to Tara Shea Burke’s Animal Like Any Other, Charlie Clark’s The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin,Christine Butterworth-McDermott’s Evelyn As: Portraits of Evelyn Nesbit, and Katie Condon’s Praying Naked.

What project(s) are currently in the works for you? 

I’ve been writing sonnets, pseudo-sonnets, or sonnet-esque poems for the past two years centered on a character Heather Dobbins, the wildly amazing poet (and quite fortunately for me, my wife) and I have been calling “tough guy.” I’ve recently finished a draft of the manuscript I’m hoping will be my third book. Tough Guy’s not exactly that tough though, or rather, he is in some ways, but he’s self-aware and emotionally involved with his world in a way that belies his seemingly thick skin. He’s an amateur boxer, a hotrod drag racer, a small-town guy who’s in love and spends a lot of time walking a small stretch of railroad tracks just outside his town. I imagine him in the Midwest where I’m from and for where I long to be. These poems have been a ball to write. Some of them have found homes in some fabulous growing journals, which you can find here:

https://www.thehungerjournal.com/five-rounds-in-a-laurel-crown-gerard

http://www.decompmagazine.com/droveoutlastnighttosee.htm

https://www.nicecage.com/issues/008/gerard.html

The Rupture Holiday Gift Guide

Happy Holidays from everyone at The Rupture! To help you decide what to give this holiday season (and what to get for yourself), we’ve put together this handy list of books our contributors published in 2019. Something for everyone!

Short Story Collections

Liz Breazeale, Extinction Events (University of Nebraska Press)
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. “A myriad of extinction events large and small have ruptured the history of the earth, and so it is with the women of this book, who struggle to define themselves amid their own personal cataclysms and those igniting the world around them. They are a mother watching the islands of the world disappear one by one, a new bride using alien abduction to get closer to her estranged parent, a daughter searching for her mother among the lost cities of the world, a sister trying and failing to protect her mythical continent–obsessed brother.”

Dana Diehl & Melissa Goodrich, The Classroom (Gold Wake Press)
“Eerie and haunting as feral children at play, this brilliant collaborative collection coheres around themes of childhood, technology, consent, and pleasure. Each story concocts a complete world, believable characters steeped in complex ethical dilemmas, at once humorous and disturbing, compassionate and distorted. Parents build children byte by byte; children vanish into subterranean classrooms where recess is their only hope of engineering an uprising; a bee enrolls in school to escape the groupthink of the swarm. I loved reading this sly, edgy collection. It made me look for hidden seams, signs of an imaginary world as dazzling and delirious as this one.”  -Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics and With Animal

Greg Gerke, Especially the Bad Things (Splice)
“Wry and absurd, pithy and profound, the short fiction of Greg Gerke takes the pulse of couples arriving at the end of something, lovers entering the "unendurable zone." Moments of improbable grace are salvaged from bitter break-ups, prolonged languor is punctuated by bursts of panic and violence, and the acute pain of thwarted hopes dissipates into indifference. In each of these forty stories, Gerke diagnoses the poisons of heartache with results that pull in two directions at once: comical and grotesque, caustic and humane, sharp-tongued and stirringly sincere.”

Elise Levine, This Wicked Tongue (Biblioasis)
“In moments of exile and self-exile, exodus and return, Elise Levine’s uncanny narratives lay bare the secret grammar of their characters’ psyches. An ill-tempered divinity-school candidate refuses to minister to a dying man’s wife; a couple fails to connect as they tour an ersatz cave in the south of France; holy women grieve in medieval England, and a pregnant runaway hitches a ride with a Church leader of dubious intentions. Propelled by their longing for pasts that no longer exist, these reluctant Adams and contemporary Eves confront the unspoken, the maligned, the abject aspects of their inner geographies, mining them for gems that glint and scatter in the light. Uncompromising and honest, lyrical and wry, This Wicked Tongue dares to tell the truth about the places we have come from and the new ones we might find.”

Maryse Meijer, Rag (FSG Originals)
“Meijer’s explosive debut collection, Heartbreaker, reinvented sexualized and romantic taboos, holding nothing back. In Rag, Meijer’s fearless follow-up, she shifts her focus to the dark heart of intimacies of all kinds, and the ways in which isolated people’s yearning for community can breed violence, danger, and madness. With unparalleled precision, Meijer spins stories that leave you troubled and slightly shaken by her uncanny ability to elicit empathy for society’s most marginalized people.”

Kimberly King Parsons, Black Light (Vintage)
Longlisted for the National Book Award. “With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.”

Natanya Ann Pulley, With Teeth (New Rivers Press)
“Experimenting with voice, form, and genre, Natanya Ann Pulley crafts a chorus of women voices who are in the process of reclaiming and telling their own stories as they slip through the cracks of our spacial and temporal reality. This collection explores how we tell stories, personally and collectively as a society, as we become stories ourselves. Through turns haunting, playful, tragic, and comedic, Pulley crafts a fever-dream surreal collection that will linger with you long after you finish reading.”

Joe Sacksteder, Make/Shift (Sarabande Books)
“Readers of Make/Shift will find themselves confronting moments in which status and ceremony are shown to be destabilized, contingent--sorting through the suddenly unfamiliar contents of a time capsule, hanging poolside with parents while their hockey player sons devastate a hotel, and wandering the memory palace of a traumatized valedictorian during a commencement address--all while flash vignettes based on corporate slogans saturate the story collection with greater and greater frequency, like the commercials of a TV movie.”

Christian TeBordo, Ghost Engine (Bridge Eight Press)
“Christian TeBordo weaves between narratives in search of the answer in GHOST ENGINE: STORIES, a Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize Winner. A convicted murderer teaches why the rainbow is the most insidious of all metals. Fashion designer Gordon Gartrelle adapts to his identity as fashion designer Gordon Gartrelle. Frag and Watt take turns with a wrench, hoping to assemble something that just might work, if only for a moment. From scenes of chilling hilarity to an underlying absurdity, GHOST ENGINE keeps the haunt alive long after you've finished reading.”

Novels

Duncan B. Barlow, A Dog Between Us (Stalking Horse Press)
"Duncan Barlow traces the sharpened edge of his flawless language across the living flesh of story in A Dog Between Us, and every page bleeds raw, human feeling. Connection, companionship, compassion, the nature of living itself is excised from the inevitability of death, held up to the harsh light, and examined. All love ends, we find, all of us are flawed, and each of us will return to earth, but there is beauty, and tenderness." -Sarah Gerard, Author of Binary Star and Sunshine State

Melissa Broder, The Pisces (Hogarth)
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. “Funny and dark, vicious and tender, The Pisces is a sexy and moving portrait of a woman longing for connection and pleasure in our strange and alienating world. I can’t stop thinking about it." -Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17

James Brubaker, The Taxidermist’s Catalog (Braddock Avenue Books)
”The Taxidermist's Catalog is a compelling examination into the disappearance of musician, Jim Toop. Given meticulous attention to obsession, song lyrics, and biographical detail, this rare and carefully evoked novel is both challenging and conspicuously fun: admirers of Pynchon, Borges, and Nabokov will especially love it. "I'm not that different from the conspiracy theorists and mystery hounds," Brubaker's narrator tells us, but it is the conspiracies and mysteries that drive this exciting and ambitious novel. I absolutely loved it.” -Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking

Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio)
“The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday -- school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents -- with the surreal -- rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats -- Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.”

Madeline ffitch, Stay and Fight (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
“Delightfully raucous . . . ffitch’s superb comic novel evolves . . . touchingly depicting the tangled and tenacious family bonds that develop in wild places.” -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth (Counterpoint Press)
"Playfully, poetically unstable . . . What compels a woman to turn to the wilderness? What brings one, after a decade of caregiving, to exchange a terminal parent's final vigil for the company of strangers? Goldblatt poses these questions with great assurance." -Lisa Locascio, The New York Times Book Review

Matthew Kirkpatrick, The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art (Acre Books)
“A strange museum, an even stranger curator, the deceased artist who haunts him, and the mystery surrounding the museum founders’ daughter, lost at sea as a child . . . The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art is by turns a dark comedy, a ghost story, a romance, a whodunit, a family saga, and an exhibition catalog.”

Johannes Lichtman, Such Good Work (Simon & Schuster)
“Lichtman [is] a remarkable thinker and social satirist…Such Good Work introduces a writer who is willing to openly contradict himself, to stand corrected, to honor both men and women, to ask sincere questions and let them ring unanswered...Jonas finds a companion in his neighbor Anja, one of the more autonomous, intelligent and unpredictable female characters to grace a male novelist’s debut. Lichtman has a terrific ear for the tiny linguistic cues that reveal completely correct English to be nonetheless foreign, and Anja’s dialogue is delivered in sometimes heartbreakingly poignant German-English…The reader feels the potency of a kind of communication between lovers that is non-national, non-hierarchical and pronounced in peace…The novel outgrows its own boundaries, becoming stranger and more robust." -The New York Times Book Review

Norman Lock, Feast Day of the Cannibals (Bellevue Literary Press)
“In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873-79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab's, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant's Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city.”

David Leo Rice, Angel House (Kernpunkt Press)
“A mind-bending, heartbreaking exploration of small towns and the legions upon legions of ghosts they contain. Elegant, freaky, and visionary--a must read " -Guy Maddin.

Joe Sacksteder, Driftless Quintet (Schaffner)
"An admirably strange and inventive debut novel. Driftless Quintetis about hockey the way End Zone was about football. What the pigskin was for DeLillo, the hockey puck is for Sacksteder: a petri dish full of American paranoia and poison, perfect for measuring our cultures of belligerence, masculinity, sports psychosis, conspiracy theorizing, white supremacy, and empire. Funny, fevered, and unclassifiable, Driftless Quintet perfects the hybrid genre it invents—coming-of-age, small-town conspiracy, postmodern hockey noir—and introduces Sacksteder, like his gumshoe goalie Colton Vogler, as a talent worth scouting." Bennett Sims, Author of White Dialogues

Joseph Scapellato, The Made-Up Man (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
"Scapellato's blend of existential noir, absurdist humor, literary fiction, and surreal exploration of performance art merges into something special. . . . The Made-Up Man is a rare novel that is simultaneously smart and entertaining." Gabino Iglesias, NPR

Pierre Senges, trans. Jacob Siefring, Geometry in the Dust (Inside the Castle)
“Senges’ prose in Geometry is syntactically thick. Sentences, like alleys in a strange city, begin in one place and end up somewhere quite different. The interposition of jostling clauses might cause a reader to lose the subject, to drop the thread or diverge from the path (or pick your metaphor). The effect is sometimes profound, with our narrator arriving at some strange philosophical insight after piling clause upon clause that connects the original subject with something utterly outlandish.” -Edwin Turner, Biblioklept

Yuriy Tarnawsky, The Iguanas of Heat & Warm Arctic Nights (JEF Books)
"By turns reminiscent of Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Kosinsky's The Painted Bird, Yuriy Tarnawsky's WARM ARCTIC NIGHTS is a swift and deeply engrossing fictive memoir of an idyllic childhood whose martial and masculine tenets presage an onslaught of inhumanity and fear. Steeped in subtle irony and the surreal, it is also a sui generis act of remembrance, memorial, and love." -Michael Mejia

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin)
Longlisted for the National Book Award. “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal. . . . Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Nonfiction

Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press)
“How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.”

Caren Beilin, Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books)
"'Love does leave you open, ' Caren Beilin proves in this heart-breaking, book-breaking work. Beilin opens her memoir of illness to the voices of others harmed by the IUD, a medical device that makes the writer's daily living and thinking into a story of autoimmune disease. Beilin and others who know the risks of being heard and treated as women include us in their generous acts of rage, empathy, gratitude, and information. Reading and writing are witchwork, transforming the isolation of suffering into a tender and common ground. This book reminds us that our bodies are sites of language we can trust and love and offer in forms more radical than we know." -Hilary Plum

Paul Crenshaw, This One Will Hurt You (Mad Creek) & This We’ll Defend: A Noncombat Veteran on War and Its Aftermath (University of North Carolina Press)
“You’ll find no romanticizing or myth-building here. This One Will Hurt You is a devastating and necessary book, frequently heartbreaking in its examination of the bad humans can do to one another—but full of redemptive acts of goodness, too.” -Holly Goddard Jones, author of The Salt Line

Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade, Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press)
“THE UNRHYMABLES {COLLABORATIONS IN PROSE} is a dual female reading experience that navigates the social clock, desire across the gendered spectrum, marriage, divorce, fertility/non-motherhood, violence, and body image with humor, poignancy, thoughtful reflection, and striking narrative scenes. Duhamel (b. 1961) and Wade (b. 1979) harmonize their unique voices that bracket Generation X.”

Greg Gerke, See What I See (Splice)
“See What I See is the very brew needed in these parched times. Greg Gerke’s generous, thoughtful reflections on the beguiling experience of art are full of uplift and reverence for the illuming efforts of writers and filmmakers: Louise Glück, William H. Gass, and William Gaddis, Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson, to name but a few. And he does not stint intimate experience, the riches of the examined life, and the possibility of “engaging with the work and then each other.” Take up this wonderful book and “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” -Christine Schutt

BJ Hollars, Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country (University of Nebraska Press)
“Part memoir and part journalism, Midwestern Strange offers a fascinating, funny, and quirky account of flyover folklore that also contends with the ways such oddities retain cultural footholds. Hollars shows how grappling with such subjects might fortify us against the glut of misinformation now inundating our lives. By confronting monsters, Martians, and a cabinet of curiosities, we challenge ourselves to look beyond our presumptions and acknowledge that just because something is weird, doesn’t mean it is wrong.”

Kathryn Scanlan, Aug 9—Fog (MCD Books)
"[Scanlan's] project will certainly compel strong reaction, but the product is absolutely fascinating. Its poetic identity comes from its epigrammatic structure; its imagistic touch. A dream-like narrative emerges here, as if from the titular fog . . . A terribly melancholic book that somehow manages to carry affirmation; perhaps it is in the transcendence of the old woman’s voice, its dogged survival to our digital present." -Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

Poetry

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House Books)
“In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.”

Fatimah Asghar & Safia Elhillo, eds., The Breakbeat Poets, Vol. 3: Halal if You Hear Me (Haymarket Books)
“The collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim by holding space for multiple, intersecting identities while celebrating and protecting those identities. Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others.”

Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon (W. W. Norton)
“Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.”

Anders Carlson-Wee, The Low Passions (W. W. Norton)
'If you don’t live it,' Charlie Parker said of his own music, 'it won’t come out of your horn.' Anders Carlson-Wee is a balladeer who has certainly lived his song. The Low Passions makes a Walden Pond of the railyard and cornucopias of every dumpster behind a strip mall. It paints portraits akin to those of James Agee, but to be captivated by them solely is to risk overlooking the urgency of experience in this debut collection. As terror drives the sublime and duende keeps one cold foot in the grave, these poems are as chilling as they are electrifying. Yet the perils of life off the grid are relieved by the light of inexplicable kindnesses discovered along the way. Through it all is the ever-loving American landscape, divine and brutal as Dillard’s Tinker Creek.” -Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest

Sean Thomas Dougherty, ed., Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (NYQ Books)
“ALONGSIDE WE TRAVEL is the first literary anthology to gather over two dozen poets from Canada, the United States, the UK and Israel whose lives are intertwined or affected by the autism spectrum. Included in this anthology are poems from tutors and teachers, aunts and grandmothers, friends and siblings, and from poets with autism themselves. Most of the work here is by highly accomplished poet-parents of autistic children written in a variety of traditional and experimental forms. But be warned. Much of the work articulates the despair, guilt, anger, as well as the joy that arises from engagement with such a complicated and diverse disability."

Camonghne Felix, Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books)
Longlisted for the National Book Award. “This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains. Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Carmen Gimenez Smith, Be Recorder (Graywolf)
Finalist for the National Book Award. “With an urgency propelled by largely unpunctuated language and nimble lines, Giménez Smith careens between devastating accounts of racial and xenophobic violence . . . while taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants’ daughter, motherhood poetics that’s entirely her own.”—The New York Times Book Review

Christine Gosnay, The Wanderer (Beloit Poetry Journal - Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize)
“Gosnay’s wide-ranging and incisive imagination draws from realms as varied as mythology, astronomy, and epistemology to dramatize the efforts of a sharp and hungry mind to cope with grief. In so doing, she offers up a vivid, wise, and innovative chapbook that provides immediate readerly pleasures and rewards our finest attention.”

Amorak Huey, Boom Box (Sundress Publications)
“If poems are magic, then the poems of Boom Box are rife with the magic of childhood in guitar-solo riffs of splendor and nostalgia. Amidst sweeping narratives, the past stands as a monument to be worshiped instead of forgotten. The sorrow, the thrill, the sex, the music, the awkwardness, are all captured as if in time capsules—these are poems of loss and marrow and place, of time and the wars it wields. They are profound in their honesty: bittersweet, heartbreaking, yet redemptive.” —Chelsea Dingman

Jessica Jacobs, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books)
“I’m totally certain Jessica Jacobs’ book is going to save someone’s life. . . . An honest, activist, real world dream of a book. A treasure.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Marream Krollos, Sermons (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press)
“Sermons espouses the holiness and sanctity of our own physical being, holding the human experience in a supernatural light and questioning its existence with both agnosticism and piety. Krollos' examinations of the earthbound condition beg us to believe in ourselves.”

Kenji C. Liu, Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books)
“Using an invented poetry method called frankenpo (frankenstein poetry), Liu takes existing texts and remixes them, creating multi-faceted poems that investigate the relationship between toxic masculinity and forms of violence plaguing our modern society. It also explores the male-male erotic and marginalized masculinities that are urgently needed as a counterweight to today's dominant hypermasculinity.”

Sally Wen Mao, Oculus (Graywolf)
“There are eyes everywhere in Oculus, but not all of them are blessed with sight. Some are all-seeing, panoptic; others are yearning and blinkered, unable to return the gaze they attract. These poems are haunted by images of human faces staring out from all kinds of screens, faces that are themselves screens upon which the world projects its fantasies and anxieties. . . . The poems in Oculus are rangy, protean, contradictory. They offer an alternative to the selfie, that static reduction of a person to her most photogenic poses.”—The New Yorker

Rainie Oet, Porcupine in Freefall (Bright Hill Press)
"There are a lot of young writers with talent but Rainie Oet has a strange and mature vision as well, which dwells in a convergence of clarity and swerve, comedy and disquiet, privacy and sociability, tenderness, and something just a touch hard. PORCUPINE IN FREEFALL is no mere concept album, though it has got a rather original driving concept. Combining the authentic feel of seeming autobiographical narrative with surrealistic, whimsical, sometimes lyric, sometimes anti-lyric adventures, this debut is a curiosity and a delight." -Daisy Fried.

Martin Ott, Fake News Poems (BlazeVOX Books)
"William Carlos Williams famously wrote that 'it is difficult to get the news from poems, ' but poets like Martin Ott keep proving the limits of Williams' vision. In his wildly strange FAKE NEWS POEMS, Ott chronicles the first year of the Age of Trump that a series of stranger-than-fiction poetic news stories, each of which come to speak to the wider apocalyptic rumblings of a society--and a planet--seeming to come apart at the seams. As we run toward the singularity, sex robots, edited embryos, self-driving cars, spying dolls redefine the Anthropocene, but don't stop us from swaddling guns, or cockroaches from sneaking into brains, or woodpeckers from cracking our car mirrors. We haven't yet seen what we've become. We need poets like Ott to pay attention to the way in which the future is staring us in the face, and waiting for us to wake up." --Philip Metres, Author of Sand Opera

Michelle Peñaloza, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire (Inlandia Institute)
“Ambitious and emotionally complex, Michelle Peñaloza's debut poetry collection, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, explores grief and violence, the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the complications of desire. Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Prize. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic, calls Peñaloza's book remarkable and says ‘Of this I am certain: I'll be celebrating this poet for many years to come.’"

Lalbihari Sharma, trans. Rajiv Mohabir, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press)
“Award-winning Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) brings his own poetic swagger and family history to a groundbreaking translation of Lalbihari Sharma's Holi Songs of Demerara, originally published in India in 1916--the only known literary work written by an indentured servant in the Anglophone Caribbean. Sharma, originally from Chapra in the current Indian state of Bihar, was bound to the Golden Fleece Plantation in British Guyana. His poems about the hardships of "coolie" life on the island were originally published in the Bhojpuri dialect as a pamphlet of spiritual songs in the style of 16th-century devotional poetry. I Even Regret Night brings Mohabir's new translation of Sharma's text together with a contextualizing introduction by Gaitra Bahadur, who found the manuscript in the British Library, and an afterward by Mohabir exploring the role of poetry in resisting the erasure of this often-overlooked community.”

Emily Jungmin Yoon, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco)
“The poems...are miracles of clarity and precision that are all the more miraculous because their strength, piercing lyricism, and transparent humanity never quaver or falter or step back for a second.” —Vijay Seshadri

(Please consider ordering through the links above (i.e., via Indiebound); it helps us, and it helps your local independent bookseller. If you are a contributor with a book out in 2019 that doesn’t already appear on this list, please get in touch: rupture.editor@gmail.com. We’d love to add your book to the list.)

Art That Is Venomous

Glenn Shaheen is the Arab Canadian author of four books, most recently the flash fiction collection Carnivalia (Gold Wake Press, 2018).

His stories, “Disfigurement” and “Historical Society” appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about book tours, revising flash fiction, and how it's okay if only one person shows up to your reading.

Please tell us how your two stories, “Disfigurement” and “Historical Society” began. What inspired these two pieces?

“Historical Society” began as part of a 20 page story that was divided into brief, flash fiction-like sections that ranged from 65 million years ago to 250 million years into the future. It didn’t really work as a “cohesive narrative,” according to most of the people I showed it to, so I salvaged and rewrote a couple sections. I’ve always been interested in the idea of numerical dates—all those troubled times in history and yet they’ve still been able to keep track of what year it is. There is no going back, but if we could we’d probably just waste our chances. “Disfigurement” is about how one’s own awkwardness can cause harm to others—I once made a guy furious because I thought he was somebody I knew so I kept trying to get a look at him, but every time I kept trying to sneak a better look at him he happened to look up at me at that exact moment, and so he thought I was just being a creep, which I suppose I was.

You write both flash fiction and poetry. How is your writing process different for these two genres? How long does it typically take you to finish (“finish,” meaning it feels ready for publication) a flash piece?

I’m not particularly interested in “cohesive narratives,” even in my flash fiction – I’m more interested in emotional and tonal manipulation. However, whenever I have a character or scene idea, I will almost always write it as a flash fiction piece. Poetry begins with seeds of images or sentence fragments. For drafts of poetry and fiction, I write a draft in a couple days, then set aside the draft for a few months before looking at it again. Then I’ll go back into it with at least some ability to approach it as a new reader—If I can’t tell what I was going for, or if it’s just plain trash, I’ll cannibalize it for lines for future pieces. If I still think it’s a bit decent, I’ll work on revising it. I’d say it’s probably six months or so typically before I send a piece out for publication—of course, I often change my mind after sending out a piece I thought I liked, too.

In your story, “Historical Society,” the year is turned back to 2012 and people get a second chance. If you had the chance to roll back time to 2017, what would you do? How would you take advantage of the extra years?

If it’s just a numerical thing, like they change the number of the year, it wouldn’t matter personally to me, or most of us. I guess the piece is a bit fanciful with regards to the effect of these recovered years. If there was actual time travel involved, I’d spend more time with the friends I’ve lost.

You published an incredible short story collection titled Carnivalia with Gold Wake Press in 2018. What advice do you have for short story writers publishing with indie presses?

When setting up readings outside your hometown to promote your book (which unless you’re on some big house press you will be doing for yourself) always try to get in touch with a local writer to read with you, especially if you don’t know many people in the area. It’ll help with your audience, and they may have a better idea of good venues in that area. Don’t be sad if nobody shows up still. I mean, I can’t tell people not to be sad, but reading to one or two people every now and then is just the writer’s life.

The Rupture published your work in 2016. How do you think your work has changed since then? Have your focuses or obsessions as a writer transformed?

It’s always changing—I try to write work that is enmeshed with our social and political world. When writing non-commercial literature there is a duty to frustrate the systems of oppression that surround us. White supremacists are (have been) running the country, people don’t feel ashamed of their hatred, capitalism is killing the planet—we have to make art that is venomous to these structures. Why else do it?

Dressed in a Dream

Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Severance (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2019), Our Sudden Museum (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006), as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (The Ledge Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, and others. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University and the founder and facilitator of The Wellspring Literary Series. 

His poem, “Man Flying Corpse Flying Man,” appeared in Issue of The Rupture. 

Here, he speaks with Interviewer Victoria DiMartino about addressing wider human concerns, being tethered to mortality, and the fact that we are the ones being flown by the cycles of life.

While this poem carries a discernable dark image of a man flying a corpse as a kite, I found that while reading—specifically when I read it out loud—that the words are very lyrical and light, having a flow similar to a child’s rhyme. The poem felt like it was written to be read out loud. Could you talk about the inspiration for this piece? 

Thanks for noting the musicality of the piece—I am a loud poet—and I love when people hear the musicality of my lines because it is a principal focus of mine. Here, yes, the musicality is somewhat at odds with the context of a man flying a corpse like a kite over a busy park. This poem is part of a series of poems I’ve been working on for several years—of a man called Man carrying a corpse called Corpse, sparked by seeing a drawing by 16th century drawing by Luca Signorelli. 

This particular poem originated with the line “Who would fly such a dark kite on such a bright day?” which had been rattling around in my head for a while, long before this series of poems began. 

The poem has a lot of play on words because of your choice to take the nouns man and corpse and make them proper nouns, Man and Corpse. Phrases like, “Man Corpse’s marionette” and “Corpse’s falling lifting Man” made me slow down and re-read them. Seeing how in this piece you play with words in a way that plays with the reader; would you like to talk more about how you go about this and why?

By calling this man, Man, and this corpse, Corpse, I’m removing their specific identities, obviously, in a sense to generalize them. But in doing so it allows me more leeway to address wider human concerns. For one, it reminds us all we’re eternally nameless—and yes, it also creates many delightful and surprising juxtapositions on the page, as the one’s you’ve noted—which also provide multiple layers of metaphor and meaning. 

The imagery is this piece, while dark at times, is very vivid. The images are clear from description, but there is also a lightness and darkness that readers can see beyond just the surface description. Lines such as, “Man unrolls Corpse, spreads him on the grass, / ties
string round his spine and wrists, then releases Corpse / to the wind,” and “she points again, now singing her words, watching / as the corpse begins floating down toward her” carry detailed imagery that show exactly what is going both on and below the surface. Could you talk about how you focused on imagery to enrich the poem?

In poems like these—that lean more into the narrative but that also share a boundary with magical realism, imagery is utterly essential. To ground the reader in the scene, for one. I want this reader seeing (however fantastical) Man taking Corpse out of his pocket, rolling him on the grass and making a kite of him. Especially when one is working in an absurd mode—it is particularly delightful to have a reader watching closely, and believing, the magic, for a moment. And of course, in this poem—it is NOT intended to be surreal or weird for weirdness sake—the poem, dressed in dream as it is, is wearing a powerful human message: In moments of levity, on bright days, we can forget that we’re tethered to our mortality—as Man realizes here—when through the course of the poem a reversal happens, and Corpse becomes the one “flying” him. To me, on a deeper level, the poem speaks to a transformation that happens in middle age—when carefree days are changed by the weight of knowledge that our days are growing shorter, that we are in fact not holding the string, dallying in directing the dip and dive of our lifetime, but that we are the ones being flown. 

Lastly, notice how the baby and the small girl in this poem both see (and delight in!) what their parents don’t want them to see. Nearer the eternal, infants and children are not weighted down by needless fears and shame about mortality. But here the adults are horrified and wish to shield them from the spectacle of this “dark kite” of a corpse. We learn not to look at our inevitable decline, our aging and dying, as a fluid and dancing part of a beautiful process of life—but instead as something that disturbs the peace of the bright and blinding day. 

Is there anything you are currently reading that you think everyone should read, even if they are not into that genre?

Currently I’ve been delighting in John Cage’s Silence, that I should have read a lot sooner in my life. Though I’m neither composer nor experimentalist (to some degree), I’m enthralled by Cage’s focus on presence and his desire to elevate the ordinary, to inquire and re-define music, to make us question tradition and convention. In fact, as my current manuscript continues to evolve, Cage has found his way into the book as a character. At this juncture in my life and art and spiritual practice, he has pierced me like an arrow, reminding me as both human being and artist to trust the current, to remain always open to mystery. 

What are you writing about right now that is really inspiring to you?

Having just published my fourth full-length collection, Severance, which was itself a wild departure for me, I’m lost in the woods—a good place to be—with a manuscript several years in the making, at that challenging juncture where my dissatisfaction with its direction has me striking it with many shaping—and unshaping—blows, to see what new directions emerge that I couldn’t have planned. Foolishly, I was thinking it was nearing completion, but the manuscript is telling me otherwise. And I’m listening. 

Thankfully, there’s no rush—just one fabulous, cherished side-effect of being a poet outside the passing, momentary glare of the limelight. Lately, I’ve been working on a sequence of poems in tight forms, and, following a decade of much wilder stylistic play—it is deeply inspiring to be self-constrained again.

A Continuation of Work

Ian Randall Wilson's work has appeared in Forklift, Spinning Jenny, The Alaska Quarterly Review and Puerto del Sol. A chapbook, Theme of the Parabola, was published by Hollyridge Press.

His poem, “Nights Below,” appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Victoria DiMartino about engagement with the world, getting political with your work, and how eliminating part of the view always requires effort.

Nature is abundant is this piece, both in the imagery and the subject. Did your inspiration for this piece come from the current treatment of the environment by you or by others, or from an experience that you may have had in nature?

This piece is a kind of continuation of a movement in my work that tries to move from the inside to the outside. While there are still concerns with the "I" of the piece, there is at least an attempt at engagement with the world. At the same time, I'm preoccupied with my own mortality. I recently got the memo that gets distributed to all writers when they hit my age, the one that says: You're going to die soon. Start writing about it. I would say that in more recent work—the poem we're talking of is over 3 years old—I have begun to engage with more political concerns, be it the idiot that purports to be running our country or the accelerating degradation of our environment. This poem is an early start in that direction. I have to say also, that the end of the poem is an acknowledgment of something that has run through my work. In the past, I have derided certain lyric poets who wrote about "dead grandmothers and trees." But you know something, sometimes you have to look for a spot of beauty in the world and the majesty of trees might just provide it.

Colors feature very prominently in the imagery; we start the piece with the image of bones and the color white comes to mind, we move to blue and amber, the sea, lights not being lights, and we end on the image of trees, which call to the mind the color green. Color adds so much to this piece, each one plays into a different part and meaning. Could you talk about what colors represent in the message of your piece? 

I hadn't really thought about the whiteness of bones as part of the color scheme of the poem, but as I tell my students in my UCLA Extension classes, if someone says, Did you mean to do that? Always say, Yes, certainly. The blue and the amber come out of practical experiences. I have read that the blue lights of computer screens interferes with sleep and that if you wear blue-blocker glasses for a sufficient period before bed, you will sleep more easily and better. But eliminating part of the visible spectrum is not without effect. Everything does turn amber and it is disconcerting to try to watch television or to go outside briefly and all the lights are no longer as you remember them. The world is changed—yes, I imposed the change on what I see because of the light-blocking glasses—but changed, nonetheless.

I was really captured by the lines “I spend the hours before bed wearing / glasses that chop the blue— / a better machine for dreaming, / the doctor tells me.” I immediately was drawn to the image of the sea and of blue light glasses with technology. I also looked at each line as its own statement: there seemed to be so much that could be related to in each line. Could you talk more about how you moved through the linework of the piece?

Big idea. Back to the personal. A turn to what can become maudlin if not careful. A movement outward back into the world to rescue the piece from its own darkness. That's how I think of the movement. More than that—and this is already answering the next question that's coming—I've been particularly influenced by Transtromer. I've tried to study the movement in his poems and borrow it for my own.

Are you reading anything right now that is inspiring anything you’re currently working on?

I recently worked with Joseph Massey on a new chapbook of his called Present Conditions. He is characterized as a nature writer who produces these spare elliptical lyric gems that cover tremendous ground in four lines. I admire his work so much. 

Is there anything you’re currently writing that you are really excited to share with others?

In these perilous times—and my comment above clearly reveals my politics—my poetry in particular has become very political. The dance is always to bring forth something that isn't so didactic as to be off-putting. I have regular arguments about this with the poet Rick Bursky who, except for his poems about soldiers, never writes anything with a hint of politics in it. There has to be a way to come to terms with present conditions. The political poetry is my way. I can't say that it changes anything, but it makes me feel a little better.

Every Water I'd Ever Tasted

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going, a memoir-in-poems of love and marriage, and Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Guernica, and The Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as an editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. Learn more about Jessica's work at  https://jessicalgjacobs.com/and @jlgjacobs .

Her poems, "Out of the Windfields"and "And That's How I Almost Died of Foolishness in Beautiful Florida," appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Rupture.

Here, she speaks with Angela Redmond-Theodore about place, sex, and poetry godmothers.

Different as they are, your poems "Out of the Windfields" and "And That's How I Almost Died of Foolishness in Beautiful Florida" read like a landscape painting—the detailed description of a particular place, of the things in that place. And, like a good painting, the poems' details reveal the stories and sentiments that lie beneath the surface. How did each of these poems come to be?

With my poems, I try to let the particular characteristics and quirks of the landscapes that inform them help me tell their stories, drawing on each site for a sensory-rich setting and metaphors specific to that place—a practice especially helpful with these two poems.

I grew up in subtropical Central Florida, a tough place for a queer kid who loved the mountains ever since she first got a brief taste of them in summer camp. Though I left as soon as I could, when I returned to visit my family, I found myself imagining what my life would have been if I'd stayed and done what was expected of me: marry a man, live in the suburbs, have a sensible, office-bound career. With these thoughts in mind, I visited a writing group in Taos where the leader, Elaine Sutton, an incredible woman who's since passed, read aloud Mary Oliver's "Alligator Poem" as a prompt. The moment she read, "And that's how I almost died of foolishness in beautiful Florida," I was pierced by the accuracy of that line and began to write, understanding that such an alternate Florida life would have meant for me—whether in body or spirit—some kind of death.

"Out of the Windfields" grew from a similar experience of deep loneliness, though with a very different setting and situation. When I was 29, my life looked pretty good—from the outside, anyway. I had a promising career in academic publishing, lived in Manhattan, and had a lovely girlfriend. Within the next year, I'd quit my job to begin a graduate degree in poetry, left the city, and ended that relationship, which meant I suddenly found myself single, in Indiana, trying to figure out how the hell to be a writer. To fill the time between teaching, reading, and writing, I began training for races—first marathons, then 50K's—putting all those long hours to good use. In the final month of my MFA, I reconnected with the woman who would become my wife, only then recognizing how lonely I had been, how grateful I was to have found her.

In a way, the couplets in "Windfields" reflect line All I could do was write until my sentence / ended. Couplets allow you to get to the end of a sentence with pause, with ease. "And How I Almost Died," on the other hand, a series of linked stanzas of various lengths, hinges on the lines, I have no doubt / that if I'd stayed—given in to the gravity / of expectations and inertia—I'd be / dead already[…] Can you talk about (a) your approach to revealing (or is it discovering?) conflict and (b) your choice of form in the work of revelation?

Though I am occasionally—veryoccasionally—gifted with those dictation-from-the-gods poems that arrive fully formed, in need of only a little collar tightening and hair smoothing, writing a new poem is much more often an intensive, all day affair for me, with one foot in writing, one in revising, and my whole body working to find the images that will make those static words rise from the page. My first drafts tend to be rife with clichés, which I think act as a shorthand of all I'm trying to get down onto the page in that first rush. So arriving at the true heart of poem, its tension and conflict, is a matter of pressing on those clichés until they yield the message or question beneath their bland surface. Through this process, I often discover some of the wisdom my subconscious was hoarding, an experience of self-revelation I hope I can pass on to my reader.

After working toward the right words ("right," in that they are as forthright and true as I can make them), I then try and sense what form will be most in keeping with their nature. For "And How I Almost Died," the ragged, irregular stanzas cascading into each other felt mimetic of the way things grow in Florida: invasive vines choking out native trees, flowers blooming extravagantly in every season. In "Windfields," couplets felt like an apt mirror for all those parallel farm roads stretching between the fields of corn and soy, for my twinned steps across all those miles, as well as for the pairing found in the poem's final lines.

"Out of the Windfields" highlights the contrasts between domination: When the combines brought the fields / to their knees[. . .] and generosity: In answering / prayer, I folded myself into the footwell; knelt // between your knees; and between harshness: desiccated, field-stripped, brittled / down to parts [. . .] and fluidity: my mouth / to you was every water // I'd ever tasted [. . .] I would love to hear your thoughts on the relationship between sex and writing.

Sex and writing demand vulnerability, an easing of control in order to welcome mystery. And my best experiences of both surpass the confines of a single adjective, allowing room for exchanges of power, for generosity and harshness and love, for a true opening of the self to whatever revelations the body might bring.

Is there a work of literature that you turn to again and again? Please share with us the significance of the work and the author.

The collection in which these two poems appear is my newest, a book published this past spring calledTake Me with You, Wherever You're Going, and ithad three poetry godmothers to guide it. 

I found Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language when I was in high school. It was the first book of poetry I owned and the first I read that assured me a life with another woman was possible. The insights found in both her poetry and prose accompany me to this day. 

The second poetry collection I owned was Satan Says by Sharon Olds, a scathing account of her childhood, as well as a loving record of the early years of her marriage. From reading Olds through the years, I've learned how to write about longing and sex, as well as how to approach our difficult experiences, impulses, and desires in poems that don't hide behind obscure language or irony.

My dear friend Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the final guiding light of these poems (as well as one of the two people to whom my book is dedicated—the other being my wife). Written in the years after the death of her beloved husband, the poet Kurt Brown, These Many Rooms is a searing record of her grief, as well as a map of how she survived such sorrow—the whole book suffused with music and light. These poems help to remind me of how fortunate I am to find love and how important it is to value such love for as long as it lasts.

What are you working on, long term and short term?

I'm currently at work on two paired projects, one poetry and one prose. I'm reading slowly through the Torah—the text, along with commentary and midrash, which is interpretation and close-reading by centuries of rabbinic scholars—and writing the poems that rise from that reading, poems that strive to share the wisdom and contemporary relevance I'm finding there. My essays draw from this research and more, each circling a central topic like heritage, mortality, fear, and time. It's soul-growing work and, honestly, however the writing is received once I begin to send it out, I feel my life will be better for having written it.