The page was my freeing space to say some truth about shit, to wrestle in the wide berth of freedom it created for me,” says poet Threa Almontaser about writing her debut collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen. Almontaser’s book and the nine other titles included in our seventeenth annual debut poets feature show what can happen when writers wrestle within that freedom. Moheb Soliman reinvents and politically recharges the nature poem in HOMES, while Desiree C. Bailey weaves together songlike poems in quest of a self and freedom in What Noise Against the Cane. Dennis James Sweeney imagines two explorers in Antarctica in his hybrid collection of prose poems, In the Antarctic Circle, while Shangyang Fang attends to the tensions within longing, desire, and beauty in the lyrical Burying the Mountain. There’s the boundary-defying, sprawling chorus of voices in Aurielle Marie’s Gumbo Ya Ya, and the sustained conversation between art, film, and politics in Cheswayo Mphanza’s The Rinehart Frames. Almontaser preserves Yemeni American history with photos and tender, sly poems in The Wild Fox of Yemen, and W. J. Herbert offers whittled-down lyrics and elegies for extinct species and a dying mother in Dear Specimen. In To Love an Island, Ana Portnoy Brimmer marries poems of protest and love for Puerto Rico, while in Philomath, Devon Walker-Figueroa conjures a past life in a small Oregon town. Each of these ten debuts is imbued with a sense that the poet made it knowing, as Bailey says, “that this work is yours, that you are creating it according to your rhythm, your aesthetic.”

The poets all answered the same set of questions about the origins and journeys of their books. Their responses are rich with insight and specifics, revealing many of the struggles and joys one might encounter, from reckoning with painful subject matter and weathering rejections to uncovering the book’s shape and finding a publisher that honors one’s work and person. But in describing what compelled them to begin writing their collections, many of these poets note it is not always easy to explain—that much of the process is not predetermined or even visible to the poet. Fang says, “In the early years, like most, I wrote in unattended darkness.” Walker-Figueroa observes, “Inspiration might be inevitable and often occurs when we aren’t looking or don’t yet feel it animating us.” Herbert adds, “On your particular journey, only you can see how dark the water, how luminous the light.” 

While much of what goes into penning a collection might be illegible even to the poets themselves, they all have ideas about what a book can be—a site of awe, a stay against the past slipping away, a space to bear witness and resist, an artifact of the imagination, and/or a blend of “affect, intellect, and being in the world–ness,” as Mphanza says. The ten debuts here inhabit these possibilities and show what comes from building a craft, leaning into “the strange, the wild, the fugitive,” as Marie says, and seeing what poems emerge.

Threa Almontaser | Desiree C. Bailey
W. J. Herbert | Ana Portnoy Brimmer
Cheswayo Mphanza | Shangyang Fang
Aurielle Marie | Dennis James Sweeney
Moheb Soliman | Devon Walker-Figueroa

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Threa Almontaser
The Wild Fox of Yemen
Graywolf Press
(Academy of American Poets First Book Award)

The first hope was no bigger than an eyelash,

was born in the middle of war, where we were told prayer
can change the fate of anything. Even dirt.

—from “Operation Restoring Hope”

How it began: It was less a sudden idea and more a gradual obsession with the notion that what has already been said is still not enough. Yemen and South Arabia are always on my mind, and the page was my freeing space to say some truth about shit, to wrestle in the wide berth of freedom it created for me. 

Studying writing in college was wonderful. I didn’t know anything about poetry—I was a visual artist. I had read nothing but fantasy and comics. And even the poetry I did read later never felt fully enough, that connective thread that made the poem relatable to the reader was, for me, always half-found. Part of it was simply mustering the courage to be like, “Okay, I need to write this, I just need to write this.” And each poem made my skin a little thicker. 

My biggest fear was readers feeling sorry for me or my people. I want them to feel awe, admiration, attentiveness. I was tired of subconsciously internalizing the way the white gaze writes about Yemen in the media and in literature. We’re not all about child brides and camels and bombed school buses. I attempted to write about experiences that have been underrepresented in modern literature because I couldn’t find contemporary work written by an Adeni American of this generation. It makes me sad to know a culture so rich and ancient is hidden in this way.

Inspiration: I see myself as a preserver of South Arabian and Yemeni history in a context where we are not recognized in the Arab American literary world. I’m essentially a research-based poet, so I read a lot of political and anthropological texts on the country. I also visit museums and library archives for photographs from South Arabia’s past times of prosperity and joy, photos with titles such as “Afternoon gathering of neighborhood women,” “In the kitchen before the midday meal,” and “Lewi Faez Studying in His Grandfather’s Jewelry Workshop.” Because I was a visual artist first, I love finding the stories within image-based texts. 

Influences: The tribal poets from my village influenced my work a ton. Poetry in Yemen is a tool used to record history. At each birth and death, each victory and tragedy, we call on poetry to do its wordy, ancient magic. It may counsel royalty and even offer diplomatic analysis to political leaders. Arabic, specifically in poetry, delves into new depths with language, so Abdullah Al-Baradouni’s translation effort also empowered and fueled my writing, especially when I engaged with his grammar and music. 

Jibran Khalil Jibran’s books showed me a new way of multimodal writing. He mixes parables and fragments of conversations teetering on the philosophical, aphorisms, short stories, and political essays—combinations that explore diverse literary forms, sometimes all at the same time. From him I learned to give myself as a writer the grace to know I’m always capable of change in myself and in my work, even more when imagining the myriad possibilities for myself and where this first book could go. I love seeing bio titles like “poet and photographer” or “essayist and filmmaker.” They’re not constricted about who they might become.

The late rapper MF Doom’s imperfectly perfect loops and rough-sounding vocal takes, coupled with his obsession with cartoons and comics, reminded me to let that childhood endeavor of being an Artist sweep over. It’s a cultural stew I grew up absorbing. Whenever he used words mid-rhyme like Zoinks! that signaled to those who watched Saturday morning cartoons, he really made it fun to confront this book. Hip-hop has a confrontational nature, a hungry pterodactyl tone of voice I hope is projected in my own work.

Writer’s block remedy: Daydreaming a lot. Recording voice notes on my walks when I have to hack out a new idea. I also like watching music videos or short student animations on Vimeo. When I’m struggling to put sentences together, watching other art forms outside of my orbit helps me visualize the strange note or evolved twist I had been trying to put into words. 

My writer’s block usually is just me being lazy about the process I know I need to do, sitting and writing this thing I’m trying to make for the long haul. Because it will not satisfy me until twenty-three drafts down the road. So when I’m blocked, that’s me telling myself I don’t have the bandwidth for that long-term relationship with the project right now. 

I love revising old work to keep me going. It feels like all of the mysterious stuff that isn’t quite in this realm of understanding is out of the way and I can just sit down and be a person who likes to read, who is reading this thing, and I can figure out what is and what is not satisfying me, what doesn’t sound right when I read it out loud. Or I catch the one line that’s way longer than the rest on the page itching at me. I feel like I have tangible skills I can apply for that. It’s just first making the thing—every time I sit down to do it I’m like, “How did I do this last time?”—and going from there.

Advice: My friendships with other artists, often in different genres, have nourished and encouraged my soul a million times over. Surround yourself with a community of people, whether face-to-face or online, who genuinely want to see you succeed, who celebrate your successes even louder than you do. Disentangle yourself from that vision of success or victory being in the hands of the institution. Ask yourself, “What keeps me lit and lifted?” then embrace those things with your whole chest. Because you can get lost in the hustle proving that you deserve to be somewhere, and that’s very tough work. 

Most of all, the advice I wish I’d gotten was to chill out and relax and have fun. Which is super basic, but I was getting some heavy advice from people and I remember just wanting someone to say something light about the whole thing. 

Finding time to write: I carve it out during sunrise, so around five or six in the morning. I’ve learned through practice that following the sun is the most generative way for me to write. It’s the reading that I tend to let fall when I get overwhelmed, and it’s reading that later reels me back in. 

Putting the book together: I’ve always had three sections in my manuscript, maturing in both narrative and voice the further it got toward the end. I compiled the poems and decided which felt complete and which felt like they were supposed to be a different book. I did it the old-fashioned way, laying all the papers on the floor, my poet gaze roving for recurring images or words, moving the pages around like a jigsaw puzzle until they somehow fit into one body.

What’s next: I’m currently working on a full-length duology about a hijaby boxer and the new kid at school, the exciting and sometimes morally gray ways in which they interact with the world around them. I’ve always dreamed of picking up a story that starred a South Arabian girl who was the apple of someone’s eye, was brave, confident, and grew as a character, and her being hijaby or queer wasn’t the focus. I also very much wanted Muslim teens to get a magical surrealist adventure that so many other teens get to have. I actually first came to write this story because I wanted to read a book where a character didn’t have to get away from their Muslim identity in order to make sense to themselves. These protagonists are neither the perfect human beings setting up unrealistic standards for their age group, nor are they the worst, throwing their culture, family, and religion under the bus in favor of “fitting in.” I also wanted to find more empathy for the immigrant adults in a YA protagonist's life, and to understand what informed their lives and traumas. I tried to write something that is at once a witness to the destructive spirit, while also learning to care for the self. I hope it helps teens dealing with grief to understand, process and validate their own feelings, and for people who live with obsessive thoughts to feel less alone. Essentially, it’s a contemporary story about courage, loss, and generational magic. It navigates love in all of its forms, the loyalty of community, and finding tenderness behind the violence of trying to survive. I’m absolutely stoked to share it with the world soon.

Age: 28. 

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Residence: Raleigh, North Carolina, and Yonkers, New York. 

Job: I used to teach ESL, which I love, but I recently returned to scholarly research. 

Time spent writing the book: The fetus form for these poems started in 2017, and I didn’t finish editing them until the week my proofs were due in 2020. That’s where I really felt like I was going into uncharted waters. The e-mail Graywolf sent saying this was the last time I could change anything freaked me out so I decided to give the poems a full metamorphosis. I did things I was afraid to do before. What came from it were my original poems in a range I didn’t even know they could reach, drawing things from unexpected proximities. That final manuscript felt like its own ecosystem. In all, I would say about three years of writing and hard-core revising, but many years before that just learning how to read and write poetry. 

Time spent finding a home for it: About a year after I graduated with an MFA, I sent the manuscript to four or five contests, nervous not only about who would take my work, but what kind of home they would make for it. I thought deeply about the company I wanted it to have, and was very intentional—and rightly nervous—when sending it out. During the waiting period, I had to remind myself to celebrate everything. Rejections, acceptances, sending out work, all of it. It’s all a becoming. Then the Academy called to tell me the news about the First Book Award and Graywolf Press, and how proud they were of me.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I loved Desiree C. Bailey’s What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press), Emma Hine’s Stay Safe (Sarabande Books), and Diamond Forde’s Mother Body (Saturnalia Books), just to name a few.

The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser 

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Desiree C. Bailey
What Noise Against the Cane
Yale University Press
(Yale Younger Poets Prize)

my goddess is 

the wave unsheathing    my name  
strung through 

      the conch’s contralto

—from “Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade (Slight Return)”

How it began: What Noise Against the Cane came out of the water: the Caribbean Sea that was a large part of my childhood; the Atlantic over which I immigrated to New York; the Atlantic over which my ancestors were trafficked, forced into enslavement to build Western empires. When I wrote the first couple of poems that made it into the book, I was enthralled and inspired by the long global history of Black resistance to enslavement and colonialism—quilombos in Brazil, the burning of plantation crops, the preservation of African spiritual practices, to name a few. I was also trying to make sense of my relationship to place and home as an Afro-Caribbean woman in the United States. I then took a remarkable course with Dr. Anthony Bogues that deepened my understanding of the Haitian Revolution and its centrality to the modern world. I felt like, “Wow, we all owe so much to Haiti and the revolution, and we should all be talking about it, all the time!” In that course I wrote a few poems to think through the role of the ocean and spirituality in the revolution. Those poems eventually became “Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade,” the long poem that opens the book.   

Inspiration: I had many sources of inspiration in music, art, and nature, but I’ll expand on two here: Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s work and especially the collage painting Beneath Lies the Power, with its sea creatures, bones, and brightly colored birds, was a huge inspiration. I’ve always been drawn to her examination of monstrosity, beauty, and mythology. The idea of collage also informed the construction of the book—the layering of chronologies, places, and voices. 

And traditional Caribbean dances like yanvalou from Haiti, which requires you to undulate your body like a wave or a snake, and bélé from Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and many other Caribbean islands, which incorporates French and West African movements in a dynamic performance of courtship, have also inspired me. The Orisha dances as well. An immense amount of history is carried through these kinesthetic stories. It feels miraculous to move in the ways that my ancestors might have moved.

Influences: M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Casa de las Americas, 1988) has been at the center of my poetic practice for many years. I was introduced to this text in an undergraduate poetry course with poet Mark McMorris. It felt radical and unruly, like my mother’s mother. Here was this Black woman, from Trinidad and Tobago like me, an immigrant like me, writing in the literal margins, layering registers and sources, working through ideas of displacement, colonization, and home. This book showed me how to work through these large questions and movements of my life while experimenting with space and language. 

Aracelis Girmay’s the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016), which is such an exquisite offering. I almost want to stop responding to this question so that I can crack open this book right now! Girmay’s rendering of Eritrean history, including the ongoing, perilous journey of asylum-seekers across the sea, and state violence against Black people in the United States is monumental. the black maria allowed me to see the structure of my own book. It showed me how to include different times, places, and stories in one book. It pushed me along as I had my own musings about the ocean and what it has witnessed. 

Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” weaves the history of the Parsley Massacre, the nineteen-year U.S. occupation of Haiti, and the Haitian Revolution while exploring intergenerational trauma, memory, and the bond between a mother and a daughter. It is everything. I teach it whenever I can. I admire how Danticat works with history while never weighing down the narrative or sacrificing lyricism. 

Writer’s block remedy: Rest. Reading. Laughing with friends and family. Visiting Trinidad always revives me. Moving my body. Slow wining or twerking in the mirror. Being in the ocean. Honoring my boundaries.

Advice: When you’re writing a book and perhaps submitting individual poems or the entire manuscript for publication, it can feel like everyone but you has power over your work. Resist this feeling as much as you can. Remind yourself every day that this work is yours, that you are creating it according to your rhythm, your aesthetic. That its timing is in accordance with yours and no one else’s. Regardless of how others may or may not receive it, your poems are yours! They already have a home with you, and you’ll share them with the world when the time is right. 

Finding time to write: In the past I’ve found it difficult to find time to write due to years of teaching and a nagging feeling that writing was not as important as literally anything else happening in the world. We don’t live in a culture that values introspection and slowing down, which writing requires. Writing workshops really helped me when I first started writing poems. It helped me to carve out space to dream and explore. It held me accountable. These days, I find that creating a ritual or a habit really helps. I get up early in the morning, I light a candle and sit down with a marble notebook and a pen. Some days I don’t write, and that’s okay. I’m not interested in torturing myself. 

Putting the book together: The ordering occurred in multiple parts since my book has two sections and a line of text running along the bottom margins. Naturally, the long poem “Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade” needed its own section. Since I didn’t write those fragments in order, I organized them with the goal of showing how a person may arrive at the decision to risk their life for the possibility of freedom. I imagined arriving at such a decision to be a tumultuous process for some individuals, and I wanted to highlight the psycho-spiritual complexities involved. I organized the second section somewhat, though not completely, chronologically. Poems that dealt with my younger self are largely at the beginning. I’ve taught many coming-of-age books to my middle-school students and it’s possible that I was inspired by the transformational arc of the bildungsroman. I wanted to show the process of coming into one’s self. 

What’s next: I’m writing very loosely at the moment, but thinking about climate, Black people’s relationships to land, uterine fibroids, and Jouvert in Trinidad. We’ll see how—or maybe if—it all comes together. 

Age: 32. 

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Residence: I recently moved from Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Providence. 

Job: I’m an English teacher. I experienced serious burnout after teaching in a pandemic, completing an MFA program, and releasing a book at the same time. I decided (or maybe my body decided) to take a few months off from any kind of teaching. I was initially very nervous about this but now it feels amazing to have more control over my time, even if briefly. I may return to teaching of some kind soon, but for now I’m challenging myself to remain open to new possibilities.

Time spent writing the book: It took about five years from the earliest to most recent poem in the book. I took many breaks mostly because of work, health, or a lack of belief in my ability to create this book. I feel very grateful that I completed it.

Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted an early and very different version of this book to chapbook contests in 2015 and 2016. I received rejections. I took a break, worked on the manuscript, and submitted a full-length version in 2018. I received many rejections and continued to work quietly and seriously on my manuscript. When I wrote “Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade (Slight Return),” which became the last poem of the book, I knew that everything had finally come together, that the manuscript’s direction was clear. I submitted it to three book competitions in late 2019, and a few months later I got a call from Carl Phillips who selected my manuscript for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I’ve been incredibly moved by Diane Exavier’s The Math of Saint Felix (The 3rd Thing), Isabel Bezerra Balée’s diluvium // a bluejay (Dogpark Collective), Diamond Forde’s Mother Body (Saturnalia Books), Aurielle Marie’s Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press), Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press), and Shayla Lawz’s speculation, n. (Autumn House Press). 

What Noise Against the Cane by Desiree C. Bailey 

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W. J. Herbert
Dear Specimen
Beacon Press
(National Poetry Series)

Ghost fish, tail flapping
like a translucent scrap
of linen in the wind, 
flag of surrender
with a spine inside,
eyes riding on slow 
light through the deep
ocean’s darkness:

Do you know what my mother was looking for?—

—from “At the Sea Floor Exploration Exhibit, Sarah Asks”

How it began: I began drafting Dear Specimen at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where I felt both mesmerized and saddened by the sight of a feathered dovekie tucked into a drawer, ankles delicately bound, and a tern chick floating in formalin, skin glittering. Some of the poems I wrote pointed to our brutal treatment of other species, but only a few touched on our culpability for the climate crisis. After Trump pulled us out of the Paris accord and began dismantling hard-won environmental victories, I felt despair. When I stumbled upon the Zuhl Museum in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the fossils of five-hundred-million-year-old species are displayed beside the few whose descendants survive, the magnitude of the losses we face suddenly felt real to me. But Dear Specimen is more than a collection of fossil and specimen poems. In talking to fellow poet Tim Carrier, I realized they not only reflect my meditations on personal mortality, but also explore our connections to one another. Within six months I had expanded the manuscript to include the “Sarah” poems, intimate exchanges between a dying speaker and her daughter. Thankfully they aren’t autobiographical! 

Inspiration: Wild places inspire me. In the early sixties, vast tracts of sand stretched from the foothills of Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains to the wilderness at Joshua Tree. Eight years old and set loose to wander, I watched chuckwallas wedge between the rocks, followed the sidewinder’s zigzag tracks in the dry wash, and imagined the nocturnal lives of creatures that emerged as I lay sleeping. 

As a teenager I backpacked in the High Sierra. As a parent I took our daughters on hikes led by ranger-naturalists who knew well the threats posed by climate change. Finally, on a camping trip to the Canadian Rockies in the early nineties, we drove across the Icefields Parkway at the foot of Mount Athabasca and saw for ourselves what rapid glacial retreat looks like. 

Like many of us I’m fascinated by the myriad species and fragile ecological niches they inhabit: The desire to express that awe often infuses my writing. But Dear Specimen also reflects my personal landscape, and several generations of my family feel ever-present to me in these poems.

Influences: In my career as a flutist, I looked for emotional resonance in music’s complex ordering of sounds, but when our young daughters asked me to recite Mother Goose’s often archaic rhymes, I became enchanted again by language. I was writing a novel when I met Maurya Simon, author of The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems 1980–2016 (Red Hen Press, 2018). After she offered a miraculous poem to the writers’ group she had invited me to join, I switched genres. Decades later, the group still meets to share poetry, and we have become devoted colleagues and friends. 

I also reached out to B. H. Fairchild, author of The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2014). Though my writing was wildly overwrought back then, he generously mentored me. I am grateful not only for his skilled guidance but for his confidence in me.

I met Robert Wrigley, author of The True Account of Myself as a Bird, forthcoming from Penguin Books, when he came to Claremont, California, to accept the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. I’m inspired by the syntactic and emotional complexity of his poems, many about the natural world. He has always been generous with his time.

I’d like to give a quick shout-out to other skilled poets I studied with: Charles Harper Webb, Joshua Mehigan, Jessica Greenbaum, and Kathleen Ossip.

Writer’s block remedy: I send myself to a writers retreat: not an actual one—mine’s imagined. Recently, the two books I took were Jacques J. Rancourt’s Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Stephanie Rogers’s Fat Girl Forms (Saturnalia Books, 2021). I read both again and again to absorb their energy. Another answer to this question is: I give up on poems I’m heavily invested in, if they seem to want to be cut loose.

Advice: Sarah Kortemeier submitted Ganbatte (University of Wisconsin Press) for eight years before it won the 2019 Felix Pollak Poetry Prize, and her book is every bit as good as mine. Keep submitting! 

To those who write and intend to publish a book, I’d say: Avoid idolizing anyone. On your particular journey, only you can see how dark the water, how luminous the light. 

Finding time to write: As a flutist, I encouraged students to practice: Whether for five minutes or five hours, the first step is opening the flute case or picking up the pencil. Before I had a smartphone, I scribbled on a notepad that I kept in my back pocket. I rarely miss a day, but everyone knows that writing practices differ wildly. 

Putting the book together: During a weekend chapbook workshop given by Arisa White through the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, I learned to think of each poem as energized by earth, air, fire, or water—amorphous categorizations maybe, but a way of understanding the visceral effect of each on the reader. Too many fiery poems in succession and they’re scorched. Too much water, they drown. Ordering in this way helped me to sense the resonance between poems. The process also helped me to create two parallel journeys for the larger manuscript: one, the inexorable arc of a single human life as it’s lost; the second, a slow unfolding of geologic time juxtaposed with the immediate and horrific extinction event we’re experiencing. 

What’s next: I’m writing kaleidoscopic poems exploring the moment of my mother’s death. But I will also make calls and/or knock on doors in advance of the 2022 midterm elections. I’ve joined Bill McKibben’s new climate activist organization, Third Act, and will continue to participate in the Sierra Club’s climate campaigns.

Age: The calendar says I’m seventy, but that can’t be right! 

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Residence: In Portland, Maine, most of the time. 

Job: I’m a retired performing and teaching flutist. 

Time spent writing the book: Rick Bass once said that as he was learning he wrote one hundred stories, or the same story one hundred times. So for me, three years. Or three decades. Both are correct. 

Time spent finding a home for it: I sent a version without the “Sarah” poems to the 2019 National Poetry Series, as well as to a few other contests that year. I wrote the collection’s “Sarah” poems over the next six months, then resubmitted it to the 2020 contest. Because Dear Specimen was my first manuscript, I was delighted when Kwame Dawes selected it for the National Poetry Series.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Meghan Dunn’s Curriculum (Gunpowder Press), Jenny Qi’s Focal Point (Steel Toe Books), Susan Nguyen’s Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press), Trevor Ketner’s [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press), Amanda Moore’s Requeening (Ecco), and Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath (Milkweed Editions).

Dear Specimen by W. J. Herbert 

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Ana Portnoy Brimmer
To Love an Island
YesYes Books

If the intimate conceivement 
of self is to call upon a history 

of place, summon the spirit
of home. If when I write 

a poem, every poem I write 
is home. If when I write 

this poem, I ask you to forgive me 
for the earth tumbling out of my mouth. 

—from “Forgive me when I speak of land”

How it began: If I’m being honest, I wish this book never came to exist. By this I mean I wish the conditions and circumstances that brought this book to fruition—hurricanes, earthquakes, political disasters, colonialism and all the ongoing violences that come with it—never afflicted the place I call home, but history stretches too far back into those storms. Right after Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico—when most of the population, if not all, was stripped of electricity, water, telecommunications; so many, of their lives—I sat under a propane lantern in the dark of my parents’ house in Mayagüez and started writing because for a while there was nothing else I felt I could do. I joined mutual aid efforts and grassroots brigades, reciprocated caretaking with neighbors and loved ones, but the systemic abandonment and forced isolation that followed in the aftermath of María for Puerto Rico was scarring, to say the least. Writing poems about what I was experiencing and witnessing was one of the ways I survived this phenomenon that marked an entire generation of people. And unbeknownst to me, that’s how and when To Love an Island started and continued to take shape as Puerto Rico’s crises unfolded along with my own political formation. The book and my relationship to it have had many iterations throughout the years. More than anything, I hope that this book, as part of a larger tapestry of poetic and political traditions, inches us a little closer toward collective mourning, healing, and the sovereign futures we ardently fight for. 

Inspiration: Definitely poets, writers, and at times singer-songwriters working under decolonial and revolutionary traditions, for the unbridled and exquisite ways they reconcile politics and sentimentality. Contemporary poets I’ve built relationships with—such as Raquel Salas Rivera, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Lark Omura, Laura Villareal, Richard Georges—who have crafted such a careful and lush poetics around home, landscape, and the intimate. Caribbean theory and landscape. My MFA and workshop cohorts have been spaces of meaningful exchange. My family, for encouraging leave-takings, returns, and creative pursuits. And of course, compas and comrades, and the legacy of those who came before us, for the expansiveness of their imagination.   

Influences: This question always feels limiting and the responses incomplete, but this book lives and breathes thanks to community that accompanies and precedes me. Raquel Salas Rivera for their decolonial imaginary. Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s Periodo Especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora, 2019) and Kei Miller’s There Is an Anger That Moves (Carcanet Press, 2007) for teaching me how to write my way (back) home. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008) for engaging the politics of disaster with such grace and inventiveness. Rigoberto González, Willie Perdomo, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Loretta Collins Klobah for guiding me in the delicate dance of developing voice. 

Writer’s block remedy: I’ve slowly been learning that an impasse is more often than not a warning sign you don’t want to miss, and burnout the result of disregarding it. Capitalism wants your writing practice to be a self-flagellating experience. I’m gradually training myself to listen to these moments and embrace them as signs to feed other areas in my life that may be lacking, or simply give myself the detour and rest tugging at me. I’ll sometimes go for walks or runs; blast music and dance (I love dancing); spend time with friends, community, family, and loved ones; organize, jam, and get creative with comrades; take myself on dates; spend time with the stray animals that hang out at my parents house; watch a silly movie; cook and eat food that I relish; rest; and get into the practice of reminding myself that an impasse is sometimes nothing more than life asking you to move in a different direction for a while. 

Advice: Here goes my humble and ever-evolving advice: (1) Writing is a collective experience; you’re never writing alone. Your work is woven through with all the people who have moved you—whether that be other writers, visual artists, musicians, your teachers, your comrades, your neighbor, your mother, a stranger. Writing may often be a solitary practice, but it never happens in a vacuum. Take the time to reflect on and pay homage to the people, traditions, and lineages you’re writing under. (2) Don’t mine your trauma. Establish healthy boundaries with your craft. There are already so many external forces trying to exploit you and your hurt—don’t be one of them. (3) Like any living creature, you have to feed your poetry. To do so, remember to go out into community, explore yourself outside of poetry, do things and meet people and contribute to the continuous task of world-building. And avoid basing the whole of your identity on being a writer. You are valuable and worthy outside of your craft. (4) Read internationally; develop a broad geopolitical reading practice. (5) Hold on tight to your values and politics as your book makes its debut; how the book moves through the world is just as important as what’s in it. (6) Writing won’t always come to you, and that’s okay. There’s so much left to do in this world. Come—join la lucha! 

Finding time to write: These days, navigating a global pandemic, the ongoing political disasters we’re subject to in Puerto Rico and worldwide, and my mental health, it’s been hard to both carve out time to write and find the impetus to do so. After finishing the MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark and moving back to Puerto Rico, I also had to rethink my writing routine. At the moment, I’m exchanging poems with a dear friend and poet, Laura Villareal. We send each other a poem a month, usually at the end of the month, but it varies. Some months we’re able to send each other work, others we aren’t, but it’s a consistent and gentle deadline that we can count on. And it’s always such a joy to exchange poems and watch our work grow and evolve. 

Putting the book together: I attended the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark, which is where To Love an Island was completed. I had the privilege of having access to a gorgeous wooden, winding table I could spread my poems on. Once the pandemic hit, I kept organizing my manuscript on the floor of my apartment. There were poem clusters all over the floor arranged in different shapes and orders. I remember sending my parents pictures of the spectacle. Friends and mentors at my MFA program suggested using colorful sticky notes and markers to help conceptualize and organize clusters more efficiently. Ultimately, putting the manuscript together was a combination of accounting for the chronological, thematic, and conceptual—which led me to divide the book up into different sections—and trusting in the experiences that birthed the poems in the first place.  

What’s next: I’m currently working on my second poetry collection. I’m attempting to explore the intersections between sex(uality), disaster, political organizing, and a return home to Puerto Rico. When I started the project, I was reading Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001) and Hala Alyan’s The Twenty-Ninth Year (Mariner Books, 2019), both of which were influential in framing and conceptualizing the book. While some of the poems consider the vulnerability of exploring sex and queerness in tandem with pandemic isolation and trauma, others contemplate the ongoing violences of a colonial state and imperial overseer, the hope for a decolonial and anarchic future, all the while holding the amassed grief from which Puerto Rico has found no respite. I’m also organizing and doing beautiful and meaningful political work with the Alacena Feminista-Luquillo, which feeds my poetry in so many ways. 

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Age: 26. 

Residence: I live on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico, in the town of Luquillo. 

Job: I’m currently working as an education and outreach specialist with the Puerto Rican Literature Project, and I’m on hiatus from working as the impact producer for the documentary Landfall by director Cecilia Aldarondo, along with the comings and goings of other freelance side gigs. 

Time spent writing the book: I started writing these poems days after Hurricane María devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017. Since then, I wrote and revised poems alongside Puerto Rico’s ongoing political disasters until about mid-2020, so approximately three years. 

Time spent finding a home for it: When I started submitting To Love an Island, it was in chapbook form, and it took about a year and a half to get picked up. YesYes Books gave it a home as the winner of the 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest and then offered to publish an expanded edition of it as a full-length collection, along with a Spanish edition of the book in collaboration with La Impresora in Puerto Rico. I worked on both editions during my time in the MFA program at Rutgers University–Newark, and prior to that as a master’s student in the department of English at the University of Puerto Rico.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: To be honest, I have been reaching farther back in my reading, whether by a few years or decades, and have not kept up with this or the last year’s debuts. A few of the books I’ve been reading recently are The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems (University of Massachusetts Press, 1991) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and translated by Agha Shahid Ali; The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (Norton, 2009) by Agha Shahid Ali; I Don’t Want This Poem to End (Interlink Books, 2017) by Mahmoud Darwish and translated by Mohammad Shaheen; We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) by Epeli Hau’ofa; The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001) by Bhanu Kapil; The Twenty-Ninth Year (Mariner Books, 2019) by Hala Alyan; Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) by Shivanee Ramlochan; Periodo Especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora, 2019) by Nicole Cecilia Delgado; La distancia es un lugar (La Impresora, 2020) by Amanda Hernández; 4645 (Editora Educación Emergente, 2020) by Christopher Powers Guimond; and Sobre el hombre y otros sistemas de colapso (La Impresora, 2020) by Karla Cristina.

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Cheswayo Mphanza
The Rinehart Frames
University of Nebraska Press
(Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets)

How do I reach a home aside from the imagination?
An image insists.

—from “Frame Eleven”

How it began: For a while I truly believed I was going to be a doctoral candidate in cinema studies and not have anything to do with poetry or any kind of literary writing for a while. So after graduating from my MFA program at Rutgers University–Newark in 2018, I took the summer to absorb and learn as much as I could about the craft and history of cinema. I spent a lot of my time going through second wave Iranian cinema (particularly the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Forough Farrokhzad), postcolonial and new wave African cinema (Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Abderrahmane Sissako, Moussa Touré, Andrew Dosunmu, and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, among a few), and Russian cinema with the works of Mikhail Kalatozov and Andrei Tarkovsky. Simultaneously, I noticed a narrative aesthetic akin to film language developing in my own writing of poetry. And I think that naturally just started informing my own ideas about poetry and how I was thinking about it as a craft and tradition I was placing myself into. What ultimately triggered a concrete idea of how the book was to be a conversation between art, history, and politics were two films: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (2000). 

Inspiration: I went through a lot of the imagist/objectivist writings of Ezra Pound and Lorine Niedecker. I can barely remember a particular poem by the two if you asked me, but I think I was more so drawn to objectivism/imagism as a theory for getting as close to the poem as possible. It was easy for me to understand the description of a scene in cinema with how the imagist/objectivists framed spaces and people. In these moments that this description happens, what becomes erased or left in the margins? With that in mind, I was led back to the Oulipo, a collective Cathy Park Hong introduced me to. I was enamored by how the Oulipo writers are interested in restraints as a praxis for writing—living. I was beginning to understand how imposed limitations in language—and it being conveyed through writing—mirrored some of my own failures of synchronizing cinema and poetry and the complexity of displaying my Blackness on the page. Hence the book is framed around centos as points of demarcation. Hence I referenced the character of Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And the goal from there became even clearer: to construct a protagonist who was an amalgamation of others as the ultimate restraint because it is making sense of your existence as an act of curation, imitation, hesitation, and all the etceteras attached.

Influences: A. Van Jordan’s work in M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (Norton, 2005) and The Cineaste (Norton, 2013) will always be the foundation for the first instance (to my knowledge) where I saw film and poetry synthesized to that level of literature. Nathaniel Mackey’s infinite poems “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu,” which remind me of how the poem(s) can take up their own lives and be persistent in how they continue to resound on the page. I know I mentioned Tarkovsky, but I must invoke his name again. I was introduced to his film essays Sculpting in Time by a friend and filmmaker, Musa Syeed. I still haven’t being able to look back after reading that gorgeous work.

Writer’s block remedy: I can’t say I ever reach an impasse in my writing. For all intents and purposes, I love the labor of research and writing. I am obsessed with the process and revel in going through its many stages to reach the iteration that, after careful and tedious deliberations, I have settled on calling the finished product. There is always more work to be done and ideas visit me often, but I have to make do with this one lifetime I have and settle on what I can do to the best of my abilities.

Advice: It truly is a marathon. Especially given the fact that what we do exists in such an insular community of people who are also running their race to construct this thing that will be brought forth into the world and be collectively judged in whatever capacity. I say all that to say: Take your time with the craft aspect of it. Develop a language for your project that isn’t entirely composed of your affective responses to the world, but a combination of affect, intellect, and being in the world–ness.

Finding time to write: As I am working toward a novel project of sorts, so much of my writing now is taking notes of everything I am consuming pertaining to literature, music, cinema, and theory. The research takes up months and perhaps will go on for years. The writing will happen in a brief amount of time. So it is not that I necessarily try to find time to write, but I eventually lead myself to the writing when all the grunt work has been settled. 

Putting the book together: A. Van Jordan published an essay with the Cortland Review titled “The Synchronicity of Scenes.” The essay is essentially a practice of understanding linear and nonlinear time. How does the world build around us, and how do we walk through it? It reminds me of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series of novels in which the protagonist(s) exists in what I am calling a fluid relationship to the world. Every single action or motion influences the stability of the world and how it receives you. I wanted the order to feel as if the narrative of Rinehart in the collection was a performance of disturbance. So the prologue is an announcement of the self and what follows are a series of digressions somewhat related to the self. Everything is splayed, and the act of reading becomes an attempt to reach a fulfillment of the self that is ever so evasive and elusive.

What’s next: I am working on a novel with the working title “The Afronauts.” It is based on the life of Zambian revolutionary Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who in the early 1960s proclaimed Zambia would win the space race before the United States and the Soviet Union. He created an unorthodox space program to say the least. What I want to essentially accomplish in the novel is a riff on his life. His story is fascinating for thinking about Afrofuturism, Black Absurdism, and metafiction. As guiding lights, I am thinking of the writers Simeon Marsalis, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, John Keene, Percival Everett, Miguel de Cervantes, Renee Gladman, Dany Laferrière, Gail Scott, and Roberto Bolaño, among others.

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Age: 28.

Residence: Chicago. 

Job: I teach workshops here and there, but I am transitioning toward a full-time freelance job copywriting and editing. 

Time spent writing the book: About a year, and another year for editing and publishing. 

Time spent finding a home for it: I had an idea of where I wanted my work to have a home so I developed a list of five spaces to submit to. I was fortunate enough to have been picked up by one of the publishers within five months after the submission.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I have been so excited by the publication of Ananda Lima’s Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), Tracy Fuad’s about:blank (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Antonio de Jesús López’s Gentefication (Four Way Books). I think these are all incredible poets carefully weighing what it means to create, what is the function of art, and the many idiosyncrasies we follow or invent to respond to art. 

The Rinehart Frames by Cheswayo Mphanza 

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Shangyang Fang
Burying the Mountain
Copper Canyon Press

The vase stayed empty, the sky started to rain.
My toothbrush leaned against his.
The man must be lonely, I said. No, the mountain
is never lonely. Burying my forehead inside his shoulder 
blades, the mountain is making itself a man. 

—from “Argument of Situations” 

How it began: I didn’t have the idea of a “book” in mind. There were scattered words, and I tried to collect them. I think I always wanted to escape from the environment I grew up in. When I started running away, I started writing. I can’t tell if it’s the other way around. Poetry served as an exit, an alternative way of being alive. I was obsessed with some European modernist poets at the time; each of their poems is like a small labyrinth through which I find myself strange and elsewhere from this world. I was confounded, also fascinated. So I started writing in hopes of finding a different self at the end of each poem. This odyssey of searching for a new and hopefully truer self, has sustained my writing. This book is a byproduct of that journey.

Inspiration: Solitude has been one of the sources, and time spent with books, artworks, music. In the early years I wrote in unattended darkness. I draw inspiration mainly from different forms and modes of art—things that surprise me or confront and challenge my ways of thinking. Later, I found friends, fellow writers—conversations with Daniel Ruiz, Johann Sarna, Yuki Tanaka, and Rachel Heng inspired me. Being with them, my perceptions are constantly questioned and changed, so are my poems. Since then, my aesthetical and epistemological boundaries are shifting, permeated by the brilliance of others, like a watercolor painting.

Influences: I like artists whose work possesses the expression of tragedy at its core, a kind of es muss sein that can’t be mended. This sort of expression, to me, voices the failure of human effort, caused by humans. I often return to Johannes Brahms’s music. I’d always thought his works, despite their indisputable beauty, are dense, dark, heavy, composed with unspeakable pain and forbearance. Among all composers, Brahms is the one that took me the longest to fall in love with. It was not until I listened to his first piano concerto that I became his devoted addict. Particularly when the piano enters the orchestra after the introduction—so vulnerable, lonely, yet at the same time, formidably heroic. A paradox. Or as Mandelstam puts it, “in a slow vortex / the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.” That is to say, I was influenced by the idea of paradox, which I also recognize in Franz Schubert’s and Gustav Mahler’s music. You see, I relish things that are tender, fragile, but also indestructible, like that strand of thin milk in Vermeer’s painting, a knot of the universe.

Writer’s block remedy: Usually I like to take a shower whenever I am stuck. But then I realized my hairline is receding, so I had to stop. Was it Sontag who said, “Each time I write, it’s like jumping into an icy lake”? Writing is tough work. One must take off one’s disguise, clothes. Then one must imagine the lake warm, which is against the reality. I think that poets are the obstetricians (what an odd word to my foreign ears) of poetry. Obstetric, from obstetricus, from obstetrix, meaning “one who stands opposite,” is similar to obstacle. I like this little irony—the task of poets is to bring out poetry while their stance is against it. Ego hinders the process. So, whenever I feel stuck in a poem, I try to get myself out of the way of poetry—remove the obstacle. I remain in silence and listen. 

Advice: I don’t think I’m in the position of giving advice. But humility is one important lesson I learned from Brigit Pegeen Kelly. And try to write and experiment with as many styles, subject matters, and forms as you want. Follow your wildest thoughts. In one poem I wrote, “I write to make myself unrecognized.” Namelessness is an invaluable form of freedom. Since I cannot give any wise advice, allow me to borrow a few pieces from others, which I found most helpful. One is from Denis Johnson, who said, “Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it. Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.” Another is from Tsvetaeva: “I can eat—with dirty hands, sleep—with dirty hands, write with dirty hands I cannot. (In Soviet Russia, when there was no water, licked my hands.)”

Finding time to write: One can always find time to write. 

Putting the book together: I constructed the structure of the manuscript using a Chinese quatrain by Du Fu. Each line draws a specific theme based on my interpretation of the poem. So, the book has a thematic arc; the themes are, of course, fluid and intertwined throughout the four sections. When I was doing a residency at Vermont Studio Center, I printed out all the poems, pasted them on the wall, and wrote a little summary on each page—what is the subject, theme, form; what mode each poem is operating in, whether it’s lyrical, meditative, narrative, or rhetorical, etc. I also benefited from the eyes and ears of many friends and mentors before the manuscript was finalized, particularly Louise Glück, who helped to transform it at the last minute. For three months before the deadline of the final draft, Louise worked with me revising the whole book. I was asked to rewrite many poems. Some I did, some I didn’t. The whole experience was a blessing. The book wouldn’t be in the shape it is without her.

What’s next: Living. Trying to improve my soul. Finding a new self who can see differently and write differently. 

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Age: 27. 

Residence: California. 

Job: I am on a fellowship at Stanford University, but I hope to contribute to society soon, as my parents have long requested. Or not. 

Time spent writing the book: Six years. I wrote the earliest poems in the book when I was a sophomore studying engineering. “Aria of an Ebbing Scene,” “Celadon,” “Utterance of a Folding Fan,” “Fish,” and “If You Talk About Sadness, Fugue” were all written at that time when my English was awfully underdeveloped. Though immature, I think now I was more untethered and interesting then. The latest poem in the book would be “Acknowledgement: Erato,” which I wrote after turning in the final draft. I thought the book wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t acknowledge those who accompanied me, or perhaps saved me, in the process of writing this piece of dark mess. I was met by the light of others.

Time spent finding a home for it: Approximately twenty days. Mainly because I wasn’t trying to publish a book. It all happened too fast, too overwhelming.

Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang 

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Aurielle Marie
Gumbo Ya Ya
University of Pittsburgh Press
(Cave Canem Prize)

the opposite of flying is 
       death the opposite
         of falling is death
the opposite of death
is a skinned knee and only a skinned knee 

—from “gumbo ya ya”

How it began: In the early stages of Gumbo Ya Ya, I was a community organizer who had been kidnapped by the police, trying to figure out what I wanted in life. That traumatic experience, being unable to write about little dissonances between who I imagined myself to be as an organizer and who I was as a writer. So I began the project to suture these two selves together. I don’t think I ever set out to write a book; I was simply trying to soothe these jarring dissonances interrupting my life: police and fathers, pleasure in the midst of what felt like a (race) war. What emerged was a road map or a monument, carved out of the “both/and.” This book is tender math, a slow testament to the discordances that are alive at the intersections of our identities. 

Inspiration: In A Map to the Door of No Return (Doubleday Canada, 2001), Dionne Brand writes, “Having no name to call on [is] having no past....” And that has always felt true, even before I heard the phrase. In trying to more deeply understand and articulate what Gumbo Ya Ya was trying to do/is doing, I had to build identities from fragments—my mother’s great-grandfather’s surname, the recipe for gumbo from a great-aunt, the resting place of our oldest matriarch’s bones—and believe in spirit, in conjuring, and in my egun enough to trust that the past was reaching itself out to me. Mapping backward created opportunities for me to talk to all my family in new ways, both ancestors and alive kin in tandem. It’s been the biggest gift. 

Influences: Noname is a hip-hop artist who is, I believe, one of the great revolutionaries of our time. Not that I believe her praxis is perfect, but I believe she is committed to using her art and her work to further ideas of liberation and create access for marginalized folks to have rich discussions among ourselves. I want to be creating in a way that does that tricky, tricky work as well. I read Dionne Brand and Saidiya Hartman and meet myself on the page. From them I’ve learned not just the criticality of storytelling but the value of fugitivity and audacity on the page. Also, my friend and peer Da’Shaun L. Harrison, an essayist and theorist, has helped keep me accountable on the page to the things I believe and profess off of it. And to trust that my work is rigorous enough, scholarly enough, doing theoretical and practical labor.

Writer’s block remedy: If the impasse is merely an impasse, I grab a writing prompt from the workshops I took with the genius Franny Choi. Her prompts always encourage me to lean into the strange, the wild, the fugitive, and I get to work. Mama ain’t raise no quitter. 

But usually real burnout is my body trying to tell me it has hit a limit. I am a Black femme, a disabled writer, an organizer who has faced incredible violence, and so the truth is I am tired more often than I am not! In trying to build a career that moves at the speed of my own capacity, when the burnout comes I’ll either read a book that isn’t in the genre I’m currently writing, go for a drive without my phone (much to my fiancée’s irritation), or grab food with one of my beloveds. 

Advice: As someone who walked away from a book deal and a publisher who was in conflict with my values, my needs, and my voice...listen to your inner knowing. There are a million opportunities and a million more entry points into the literary space. Trust your pen and your potential enough to only walk through doors that are right for you. The future versions of yourself will thank you for your belief and your discernment. 

Finding time to write: I’m a habitual procrastinator so I typically set deadlines for myself then clear time ahead of these deadlines to write. Otherwise, I’m being shaken awake by a poem or an idea that needs to wrestle itself out of me. 

Putting the book together: I worked myself into a frenzy trying to find the “perfect” organization for this collection. It was so noisy, so dense, and contained many (maybe too many) themes that acted as through lines. I was so frustrated! I printed the final version out, then decided to print two previous versions. I wanted to watch from a bird’s eye how the text had matured, to try to find ways for the order to help articulate the growth. There’s no perfect formula. Ultimately, much like seasoning a good meal, I kept poring over the pages and switching it up until an ancestor somewhere walked up behind me and whispered, Stop. 

What’s next: I’m working on an essay collection about the lived experiences of young organizers in the world of racial justice who were most active between the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the death of Ma’Khia Bryant in April 2021. After seven years, I’m finally able to write plainly about the violence, the passion, the love, and the urgency alive on America’s frontlines, and how we still have so much to learn from the lives and work of the freedom fighters, the abolitionists, and the ambulance chasers. 

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Age: 27. 

Residence: Atlanta. 

Job: I am a full-time artist. I’m a writer, a speaker, a facilitator, and a community organizer, and I do consultant work for organizations that need support actualizing their commitment to equity. 

Time spent writing the book: Six years from start to finish. This book has had a life! 

Time spent finding a home for it: Two and a half years all told.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: We Are Owed (Grieveland) by Ariana Brown. Speechless, still. Also, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press) by Threa Almontaser, Poor (Penguin Books, 2020) by Caleb Femi, and Gentefication (Four Way Books) by Antonio de Jesús López.

Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie 

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Dennis James Sweeney
In the Antarctic Circle
Autumn House Press
(Rising Writer Prize)

A heart is too found to run through.

Arrive—

The blizzard mourns fully and gently over you. 

—from “75°30’S 107°0’W”

How it began: What I love about writing poetry is that I never set off to do anything. The process of In the Antarctic Circle was more like this: These moments of icy, white language arose; I followed them and explored that language space; suddenly, immersed in the cold Antarctic expanse, an ambient relationship occurred between the poems; I understood them as, potentially, “a book”; I ignored this thought for as long as possible so that I could continue to encounter the poems in a less intentional, spontaneous way; finally my own plans and ideas got the better of me, and the drafting process petered out. Only then did I allow myself to suspect that I had something. 

So in a way I set off to write the book only after I had already written it.

Inspiration: The hybrid and cross-genre work published by Les Figues Press, Tarpaulin Sky Press, Sidebrow Books, Rose Metal Press, Publishing Genius, Civil Coping Mechanisms—and so many other small presses, past and present—created a community of possibility for the work I write. 

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992) and Mat Johnson’s Pym (Spiegel & Grau, 2011) showed me how to dynamically inhabit problematic Antarctic spaces that I didn’t want to reinscribe. 

Also, it helped that I have never been to Antarctica, the ostensible subject of my book, despite reading and thinking a lot about it. The continent just kept refreshing itself and never crystallized, even now.

Influences: I’ll mention just a few of the writers who had an influence on this book: Jenny Boully showed me the power of the elliptical—how language can be a footnote to something absent or off the page. Zachary Schomburg, who I was reading a lot of when I wrote In the Antarctic Circle, taught me about pleasure and play in the prose poem. I also read Emily Kendal Frey’s Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014) when I was writing this book, and it gave me permission to live in the space between images, to find the magic there. Dorothea Lasky was the poet who began me with poetry. Hearing her read taught me to open a part of myself I didn’t know was there.

Writer’s block remedy: I usually turn to another writing project. I am lucky to have enough things going at this point that when I simply can’t work on something anymore, I put a pin in it, take a couple of notes on what I was doing, and leave it. Sometimes I leave it for years. Many things are in a continued state of being left. Then I work on something else—maybe something more analytical like revising prose, writing book reviews, or sending out work—until something itches at me to return to the thing I had left.

Advice: That old advice—never give up. But with a specific fold to it: It’s not only sending the work out that you should never give up on, but also continually refining the work, developing your approach, reading into new spaces, reevaluating yourself as a writer, critiquing the language itself, questioning your poems toward their best possible selves. Even that won’t guarantee publication. But it will at least make you feel like an active part of the process, so that sending out your work is more of a conversation than a one-way street. Your poems will continue to grow, and that’s what ultimately matters—not the fate of any particular compilation of them.

Finding time to write: These days, it’s about using the in-between spaces, letting the work be magnetic, returning to it as a form of play, as a joy, as a recovery. Weirdly, the more I’m away from my work, the more I’m excited to do it. I always want expanses of unfettered time, but when I get it, it can be really hard to feel invigorated about writing. So in a way it’s invigorating to have the opposite.

Putting the book together: I relied on many different versions of myself to do the ordering over the many years I worked on the book. There was a point when I printed out every piece and experimented with different orders by moving the pieces of paper around on the floor. That process happened intuitively—I could never quite articulate why a certain piece needed to be where it was. But seeing it from far away, “reading” the order over and over, tapped into the part of my body that just knows when a certain order or arc feels right. I love that I don’t remember now why I made the decisions I did. They feel resonant in ways that are beyond me now.

What’s next: The Last Remedy, a book of lyric essays inhabiting chronic illness through my own experience with Crohn’s.

And (secretly) more poems. I always like to pretend like I’m not working on them, that they’re just happening. Somehow that seems to better allow them.

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Age: 33. 

Residence: Amherst, Massachusetts. 

Job: I teach at Amherst College. 

Time spent writing the book: The core of the book was created over a few months: the first drafts, the images that return and return, the concept of the coordinates as titles. But the revisions and surrounding materials and organization and assembly of the book itself, plus the editorial process that I consider also a part of writing, took around six years. 

Time spent finding a home for it: Five years. The book never stopped changing during that period. It only found its “final” form in the year before it was accepted.

Recommendations for debut collections from this year: This is going to involve me cheating a bit in terms of time frame, because there are several recent debuts I can’t stop thinking about. Jerika Marchan’s SWOLE (Futurepoem, 2018) blew my mind with the expansiveness and multivocal possibilities of a long poem—and seeing her perform it completely rewired my circuits. Lara Mimosa Montes’s THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) is essay and poetry at once, a space that makes space for what is empty or at least unsaid. This year strictly defined, I loved Kylie Gellatly’s The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press), an erasure of The Arctic Diary of Russell Williams Porter that exposes the vulnerability of the want behind the dream of polar exploration. And Ada Limón’s debut poetry collection, Lucky Wreck, was reissued by Autumn House Press, my publisher! I was so moved to read her first published work and to see the spirit and experimentation that laid the groundwork for what she’s doing today.

In the Antarctic Circle by Dennis James Sweeney