This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rhoni Blankenhorn, whose debut poetry collection, Rooms for Dead and the Not Yet, is out today from Trio House Press. Winner of the 2024 Trio Award, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet explores nonlinear landscapes of grief, desire, and identity. The collection revolves around love and loss (parents, family, friends, childhood, pets, the environment) while confronting the inescapable presence of longing. Even as our speaker butters toast, pets dogs, drives across bridges, kisses lovers, admires art, and holds hands with friends, she observes with unflinching perception, uncanny imagination, and a bizarre sense of humor. Observing shadow on a white brick wall turns elegiac. Desert hikes expand into the surreal. Despair coexists with ghosts eating candy, and unspoken danger lives alongside linguistic comedy. Replete with explorations of sexuality and multicultural selfhood, these poems embrace complex emotions as an act of resilience. Jessica Q. Stark writes, “Rhoni Blankenhorn’s Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet exposes what it feels like to be both alive and haunted by one’s aliveness at this particular moment in time.” Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. Her poems have been featured in Narrative, the Slowdown, the Margins, Adroit, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Breadloaf, Saltonstall, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Rhoni Blankenhorn, author of Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet. (Credit: Nabila Wirakusumah)
1. How long did it take you to write Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet?
My entire life is the cliché but true answer. The earliest poem that made it into the collection, “Before the Butcher Knife,” is from 2019. It’s the poem that encouraged me to dedicate more time and intention to poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Feeling like any poem was finished was extremely challenging. I edit vigorously. There are some poems I know I could fall right back into reworking, likely to their detriment. I had to learn how to trust the poems and the sparks they emerged from, as well as the person I was when I wrote the poems. What I write today is different from what I was writing a year ago because who I am today and my experiences are different from a year ago, and I learned that it’s okay for poems from different aesthetic eras and experiments to coexist in the book.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I take notes, which aren’t poems, but which can be the seeds of poems. Notes/fragments help me relive moments that carry seeds, sparks, moments of import, humor, and beauty. Most of what I write down is visual, or something that actually happened—the way a shadow flickers across jacaranda petals on the sidewalk, an overheard bit of conversation I find hilarious, the way a dog looked at me. When I sit down to write a poem, reliving these specific moments and trying to understand why I was interested in them helps me access memories and emotions. I don’t know where a poem will end when I start it.
4. What are you reading right now?
The Original Daughter (Doubleday, 2025) by Jemima Wei, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abbjection (Columbia University Press, 1982) by Julia Kristeva, We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025) by Patrycja Humienik, and Covert Joy: Selected Stories (New Directions, 2025) by Clarice Lispector and translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Whenever I meet a poet who hasn’t read Paisley Rekdal, I insist they write down her name for later reference.
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
I laid my manuscript out on so many floors, beds, and walls as I was working on the order. Walls worked best, because I could see all the poems at once. I started with ninety-ish poems I think, and I coded them all with overarching themes, recurring characters, symbols, and metaphors, to uncover patterns I might have missed. I learned that dogs were everywhere, so I leaned into that. I decided to frame the book with sampled artwork from my friend Ginny Benson, and my poems about grieving her. The final shape began taking place when I started paying attention to individual poems again versus the overarching order, and what the poems needed to come before or after in order for their layers to reveal themselves. The poems ended up showing me what order they needed to be in.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Whenever I was feeling doubtful or insecure, Natasha Kane and Kris Bigalk would remind me that Jessica Q. Stark chose this book, and that they believed in the collection. Their support always helped me refocus.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, what would you say?
Write as much as possible, don’t overthink it, make mistakes, trust the work.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet?
My friend Ginny Benson was a multimedia artist who passed away. Often, Ginny’s work manipulates VHS tapes into abstract visuals and music. How does remembering, and re-remembering people and moments change the original memory? I incorporated samples of Ginny’s work into the book in two sections—one towards the beginning, and one towards the end—to function as portals, to invite Ginny and all my ghosts into the book. Ginny and I had an art teacher in undergrad, Gary Burnley, who loved the Bruce Nauman artwork “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” I hope this collection helps people find their own ways to commune with their loved ones.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Refrains that echo in my mind: Keep all your notes and drafts. What does the poem want? How is time functioning in the poem? Read more. Read work that was written before you were born.
