In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 246.
In the process of writing my collection, no swaddle, I found myself engaging with a lineage of writers who have gone before me and with those in the present who are walking numerous parallel and overlapping paths. To be a woman and to write sonnets, with their long and varied history, situated me inevitably in a dialogue with Anne Vaughan Lock’s early sonnet sequence, as well as the later sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I also found myself amidst the overwhelm of sonnet stereotypes: a lineage of male writers musing on objects of their desire. No matter the topic, in all traditional sonnets, I notice a clear attention and determination to connect emotionally amidst a structure of rules, which is something I respect but also did not aim to repeat.
I chose instead to employ a more contemporary sonnet form, the American sonnet, with its origins in the work of Wanda Coleman. In her poetry, Coleman boldly and stunningly pushes back against the container of the sonnet while critiquing the containers present in American society. In “American Sonnet 7,” from her collection, Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets (Black Sparrow Press, 2022), Coleman writes, “to know grief my unnaming tongue / it reaches for its lyric the mother of / all pain….” To describe the suffering present she turns to origin in an attempt to recognize and situate the self in a deeply flawed context. Similarly, in Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018), the sonnet becomes a container that closes in until it breaks: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” I also read and reread Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), continually moved by the energy of the collection’s raw and sprawling lines.
There are many contemporary poets who have found themselves drawn to this kind of “loose” sonnet. Most recently I noticed a powerful sequence of sonnets in Megan Fernandes’s I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House Books, 2023). Yet, to write an entire manuscript committing to the American sonnet is an understandably uncommon choice. So I felt close to the collections that commit to this strangely open fourteen-line obsession, and I was mesmerized by their recurring stops and starts.
I was most influenced by Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (Henry Holt, 2018), which is a book that changed my life and gave me strength to write the poems I had been afraid to write. I have struggled to find the vulnerable space of ambivalence about motherhood described by poets in their work, and this is partly what led me to write this collection—I wanted to give voice to something that felt lonely and unspeakable. There are, of course, so many kinds of grief present within the topic of motherhood, and I’ve read poetry exploring miscarriage and losses in mothering, the complexities of post-partum and identity post-birth, griefs in witnessing and navigating parenting. Books that come to mind are Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality (Soft Skull, 2022), Bridget Bell’s All That We Ask of You Is To Always Be Happy (CavanKerry Press, 2025), and Maria Hummel’s House and Fire (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). I know I am not alone in considering and questioning the life that I have chosen alongside the life that could have been and the life that will not be. I feel comforted to be amidst such a lineage of writers who are not afraid to name what feels complicated or counter to society’s urgings and assumptions and to have the long history of form that connects me to writers from the past.
I encourage you to consider the lineage of writers you belong to, whether through form, subject, style, or tone, and to hold these tethers up as a way of gaining perspective and refining your message. Remember that we exist as part of a community of voices, and community is where we find strength to be ourselves and to share the pieces of ourselves that feel difficult to name.
Mackenzie Kozak is the author of no swaddle (University of Iowa Press, 2025), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, the Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Kozak serves as an associate editor at Orison Books and works as a grief therapist in Asheville, North Carolina.
image credit: Felix Mittermeier
