The ingenious collections included in our nineteenth annual feature celebrating debut books of poetry are composed of poems that were written more than a decade ago, if not a few years back. Given the sheer amount of time that goes into dreaming up, creating, writing, and editing a book, it seems fitting to focus on the past, present, and future aspects of the following ten collections—both temporally and in the collapsing and conflation of the chronological that often takes place within art. In the beginning of the pandemic, Leah Nieboer (SOFT APOCALYPSE) was paying attention to the growing instability and treacherousness of our world and “thinking about the future…as something an erotic trace of the past or present can release, something we can perform through our rhythms of relationship.” In writing the present, Nieboer created a poetics for the future that is intimate, phantasmal, and neon-lit. Ina Cariño (Feast) and Amanda Gunn (Things I Didn’t Do With This Body) offer a physical poetics. Cariño, with their intergenerational and voracious speech, feeds us the brown skin and pink guava insides of the speaker’s body while decentering the fermented milk of the white gaze, and Gunn demonstrates the fragility, will, pleasure, and grief of the body, from Harriet Tubman to the speaker. Elisa Gonzalez (Grand Tour) and Carolina Hotchandani (The Book Eaters) present the delicate poetics of death, exploring a “before-after binary,” as Hotchandani puts it, holding space for the constant transformations of life.

Joshua Burton (Grace Engine) and Shaina Phenix (To Be Named Something Else) showcase a poetics of endurance, in which language is slashed through, redacted, bolded, acted out, and rewritten to a sobering and enlivening effect, respectively, where the “Black-was” meshes with the “Black-is,” per Phenix’s language. Leslie Sainz (Have You Been Long Enough at Table) gives us a revolutionary poetics, diving into the Cuban American experience both personally and historically, with a radically feminine perspective, and Simon Shieh (Master) presents a poetics of emancipation, grappling with and deconstructing the memory of a master figure’s misused power. Finally, Kweku Abimbola (Saltwater Demands a Psalm) gifts us a poetics of healing, turning to Akan tradition as a way of offering rebirth and possibility through elegy.

Though these poets vary in how long it took them to find a publisher, ranging from four months to three years, and in their life experiences, from being a martial artist to a medical copy editor to a member of a post-punk band, these noteworthy writers find similarities in being no strangers to rejection, sometimes counting as many as forty-eight nos before that long-awaited yes. In handling the undulations of the literary life, Cariño tells us that “instead of striving for some abstract capitalist idea of success, remind yourself that your work is not transactional. Let it bloom on its own time.” Sainz echoes a similar tenderness by sharing her list of musts as a writer: “I must write following a warm shower, with at least one lit candle nearby.” In our nineteenth year joyously spotlighting debut poets, we present ten writers who teach us how to explore ourselves—our familial, historical, social, and spiritual lineages and, by extension, our microcosms—and further, how to cast the world anew to create a gentler, more expansive future.

Ina Cariño | Simon Shieh
Amanda Gunn | Carolina Hotchandani 
Leslie Sainz | Kweku Abimbola 
Elisa Gonzalez | Joshua Burton 
Leah Nieboer | Shaina Phenix 

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Ina Cariño

Feast
Alice James Books
(Alice James Award)

in exchange I’ll show you how
to nourish yourself. lift your grandmother’s knife.
slice through the fattest layer in your gut     & eat.

—from “Lean Economy”

How it began: The poems in my original manuscript were initially part of my thesis for the MFA program at North Carolina State University, from which I graduated in 2019. Writing a full-length manuscript was at first daunting. I came to the program with a strong writing foundation, but my voice and the direction of my writing were unclear. I often wrote what I now call “surreal fluff”: writing that is pretty and well worded but too “universal” and without much resonance or meaning. I started writing with more focus toward the end of my first year, especially when my thesis adviser, Eduardo C. Corral, encouraged me to write about things that were more tangible in my life—namely my upbringing in the Philippines, my lived experience as an immigrant in the United States, and the ways in which my native languages and, in turn, my identity have been whitewashed over time. I leaned into the idea of intergenerational nourishment and abundance beyond trauma, which is where the food motifs come in. I’ve always experienced the acts of making and eating food as communal and familial, and I wanted to show that in this book.

Inspiration: Making food with my grandmothers, mother, and two older sisters in the kitchen. Matrilineal magic. I lived in a house with all of them as well as my extended family (in many non-Western households, living with titos, titas, and cousins—a slew of people—is not uncommon). So I found the house to be always bustling, especially at mealtimes and during celebrations, for which we’d lay out platters and platters of food for everyone to share, despite money sometimes being scarce. To me, the act of feeding one another is an act of self-nourishment.

One memory that inspired this collection is that of my fifth birthday; my family bought a live suckling pig and slaughtered it in the backyard for the feast. I remember watching the process with both fear and fascination. These ritualistic acts of violence are somehow also those of sustenance: sustenance of body and of culture and identity.

Influences: Because I’d taken a meandering path back to creative writing (I originally aimed to major in music performance on the violin, and only later studied English literature), my introduction to Li-Young Lee’s debut poetry collection, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), happened much later than it should have. Reading his work for the first time in graduate school was incredibly influential for me. The idea of someone writing in their own voice, with an Asian American perspective, about experiences that aren’t only Asian American, really gave me an opportunity to explore similar sensibilities in my own work.

Dorianne Laux, who was one of my professors in graduate school, on the other hand was someone whose work I’d read even before writing seriously again. She is a master of the extended metaphor and I think she really embodies intellect, image, and emotion in most if not all of her poems. She also has a generous spirit and is so nurturing to her students. Her work is very different from mine, but I’ve learned a lot from her.

I also believe my music studies over the years have contributed to the application of rhythm and the sense of musicality in my writing. I’m inspired by the polyphonic, nuanced, and complex simplicity of Bach and Vivaldi; the lively verve coupled with darkness in Mendelssohn’s and Beethoven’s work; the boldness and overflowing abundance of Tchaikovsky; Ravel, Coltrane, ESG, Caroline Shaw, Blood Orange, BADBADNOTGOOD, Yaeji—I could go on. Music is extremely influential on my poetry.

Writer’s block remedy: I turn to other art forms and let go of my writing for a while. I’m in a post-punk band, and we regularly play shows, so that gives me a different creative outlet. In addition to playing music, I also draw and paint. At the end of the day, though, I’ve always felt reading, and reading widely, is what stokes my creative fire and sustains my writing practice. I try to read living, breathing writers’ works. It’s so important to champion your contemporaries, as well as those who’ve come before.

Advice: I think we’ve all heard “try and try again.” It’s important to persevere, yes, but I think it’s more important to be kind to yourself in the face of rejections. To be gentle when critiquing yourself. To remember that everyone has a different pace, a different trajectory, some landing sooner than others, and that’s okay. Instead of striving for some abstract capitalist idea of success, remind yourself that your work is not transactional. Let it bloom on its own time. For those who have landed their manuscript at a press, take your time and make sure that the press’s values align with your own, and that they’ll treat you and your work with respect.

Finding time to write: This is a tough one because I’m busy juggling so many projects at the moment. I’ll admit, I take on too much. I’m the kind of writer who doesn’t have a daily writing practice, which somehow still works for me. Oftentimes I find that I’ll think of a line before going to bed, or I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a line in the forefront of my mind. I once drove home with a line stuck in my head that eventually turned into the last poem in Feast. I write sporadically, so I take it as it comes and write little bits down as much as I can, until I can find a bigger of chunk of time to sit and flesh it out.

Putting the book together: In graduate school I was discouraged by my professors and peers from being too “on the nose” in ordering my poems; for example, I don’t think Feast would have worked had I ordered it chronologically. It takes the surprise away; it feels expected. Instead I looked for motifs and common words between my poems, how they spoke to each other depending on placement, and how different elements were emphasized depending on where in the manuscript they were. That’s what I love about poetry collections, as opposed to anthologies or novels, the poems are in a threaded conversation with each other throughout the collection, even as they stand alone. Regarding sections, I think of them as little worlds within a larger ecosystem. These worlds can group poems by era, or they can be dominated by a particular tone or voice. It’s important to take your time with ordering.

What’s next: I’m working on refining my second manuscript, which is slated to come out in 2026 with Alice James Books. I’m excited to eventually share it with the world!

Age: 35.

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Residence: Raleigh, North Carolina.

Job: I sling espresso five days a week in downtown Raleigh. I run a reading series centering marginalized poets and other creatives in the Research Triangle area. I also take on manuscript consultations, give readings, and teach workshops.

Time spent writing the book: About a year in graduate school.

Time spent finding a home for it: About a year and a half.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: This year I’ve really enjoyed I’m Always So Serious by Karisma Price (Sarabande Books), Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and ASTERISM by Ae Hee Lee (Tupelo Press, 2024).

Feast by Ina Cariño  

Simon Shieh

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Master
Sarabande Books
(Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry) 

To spite me, he hid the moon
in the shadow of a jackrabbit, the deepest craters
in its eyes. 

—from “Master (Five Nocturnes)”

How it began: I started writing this book at twenty-four, soon after returning to Beijing to teach English at a university. Beijing was the city where, at fifteen, I first found refuge from the person who inspired the book’s master figure. Returning there felt like returning home, and everything I was too young to process as an adolescent poured out of me as poetic language, giving way to memory. I wrote the first line of the poem, “Self-Defense,” which reads, “To be saved            and unsaved,” and I really believe the book originated in that line. I’d written poems before, but they all felt like exercises. “Self-Defense” activated something I didn’t know existed, the beginnings of what I immediately recognized as the subject of a book that was inside me. It was the first poem I wrote that felt like it was mine. I knew immediately that this book would be called Master, but this collection really took shape when I realized it is not about the one who, in childhood, I called master. It is about the speaker, his loyalty to the master despite the master’s tyranny, and his eventual liberation from this authority figure.

There is one more catalyst I need to mention. Before writing poetry, I was a martial artist who distrusted what I saw as the artifice of language. Instead, I spent years expressing myself through combat, with the belief that what I experienced in the boxing ring was more real than anything expressed through language. Jericho Brown’s The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) showed me that poetry can use language and white space to transcend and spark visceral sensations beyond language. With the poems in Master, I aspired to do just that. 

Inspiration: Reading other poets’ first books and feeling the energy and momentum unique to great debuts inspired me to sustain the impetus of Master despite my changing feelings about it. Notably, the first books of Eduardo C. Corral, Jenny Xie, J. Michael Martinez, Richard Siken, Mai Der Vang, Taylor Johnson, Natalie Diaz, Sally Wen Mao, Thomas James, Ocean Vuong, Ilya Kaminsky, Sylvia Plath, and Jenny George were guiding lights.

Poets & Writers’ annual debut poets feature inspired me anew each year when the prospect of writing and publishing my collection felt bleak, as did Dan Chiasson’s poetry reviews, and podcasts like VS, Between the Covers, the New Yorker’s poetry podcast, and the Poetry Magazine Podcast.

Derek Walcott’s sun-drenched islands and James Wright’s rainy Midwestern plains; Thomas James’s and Eduardo C. Corral’s imagery; Jericho Brown’s line breaks; Lucie Brock-Broido’s and Carl Phillips’s verbal singularity; the Tang poets’ silences; Louise Glück’s poetic sense of narrative; Terrance Hayes’s wild voices; Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (Columbia University Press, 1984); Jacques Lacan’s seminars and writings; Ocean Vuong’s tenderness; Jean Valentine’s mystery.

Sherwin Bitsui’s undergraduate poetry workshop at San Diego State University gave me permission to take my writing seriously and Sally Wen Mao’s poetry workshop, part of the DISQUIET International Literary Program, provided me with vital feedback on my poems.

The places and weather of Beijing and upstate New York.

Finally, this book would not exist if not for the many long conversations I had with my wife and best editor, Charlotte.

Influences: There are three collections that I can say really changed me. First, Jericho Brown’s The New Testament—which begins, “I don’t remember how I hurt myself,”—showed me that mystery, not meaning, is the poem’s origin and its purpose. Second, Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012) made me feel like I was discovering a new genre, a new way of writing, a new way of seeing the world; his imagery and temporal gestures changed what I thought a poem could do. Finally, Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead (Penguin Books, 2010) showed me the poem’s affinity to the unconscious, which is also the source of its music.

Writer’s block remedy: I used to think I could outwork burnout and writer’s block (an impulse I attribute to my experience as a martial artist, when I had to fight through exhaustion), but I’ve figured out that the impasse is productive for the poet—that’s where the thinking, the process happens. The poem is a by-product of the impasse. When I don’t know what to write, I do anything but write and trust that the poem is writing itself in my body, waiting to be heard. I also do a lot of my writing and revising on my Notes app while I’m walking.

Advice: My first book gave me a lot of grief! Every rejection hurt, and there were forty-eight of them. There were times when I felt like scrapping half of the manuscript. There were times when I felt like scrapping the whole thing. I gradually learned to disassociate my work from the process of publishing it, but unfortunately this only came with failure. I learned that every reader and word of feedback is a blessing, not to be taken for granted or even expected. I learned that I am not a writer but a student of poetry.

Finding time to write: Writing this book taught me a lot about my process. These days, I need longer holidays to do any substantial writing, and as a high school teacher I’m fortunate enough to have that. Longer stretches of time allow me to immerse myself in the work, which is necessary to start new projects, or forge new paths in existing projects. But writing is only a small part of the process; reading, enjoying time with my family, enjoying time alone, and exercise are all integral.

Putting the book together: My wife, Charlotte, played a big part in this, as I had trouble seeing the poems from a distance. She revealed to me the narrative arc that the poems were suggesting, and in doing so opened up the manuscript to more fully include the process of narrativizing and poeticizing my experiences. The order changed many times. New poems entered and old poems fell out. A poet I admire greatly told me that even if you think the manuscript is finished, it’s not, there’s still more to be done. I didn’t stop trying to make it better until Sarabande sent it to the printer.

What’s next: I’m working on something totally different, which feels great. This new project is still forming so I won’t say much about it, other than its influences are totally distinct from those for Master, and the impulses behind it are different as well. 

Age: 32.

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Residence: Washington, D.C.

Job: I teach Theory of Knowledge to eleventh and twelfth graders.

Time spent writing the book: I wrote the first poem in 2016 and the last one in 2019.

Time spent finding a home for it: Three years, over which the book changed shape many times.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Leslie Sainz’s Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House), Gabrielle Bates’s Judas Goat (Tin House), Dong Li’s The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press), Sahar Muradi’s OCTOBERS (University of Pittsburgh Press), Xiao Yue Shan’s then telling be the antidote (Tupelo Press), Alexa Patrick’s Remedies for Disappearing (Haymarket Books), and Jane Huffman’s Public Abstract (American Poetry Review).

Master by Simon Shieh  

Amanda Gunn

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Things I Didn’t Do With This Body
Copper Canyon Press

This thing I wear that looks like grace or reserve
or taste but sits on my skin like a stain or a sin,
this thing I bear but cannot name, it may be
this—a borrowed shame.

—from “Girl”

How it began: I’ve been reading and writing poetry since I was a young teenager, but the earliest poems in Things I Didn’t Do With This Body go back about thirteen years, before I got my MFA and I was working as a medical copy editor. For most of those years I wasn’t really conscious of the poetry as a project with a theme or an arc. These days I think we’re seeing a lot of first books being written in a shorter time span and with more structure and intention from the outset; earlier career poets now are much more advanced in terms of professionalization than I was. When I was working full time and writing poetry on the side, I didn’t know a single other poet. The communities I was a part of had nothing to do with being writers or artists. I didn’t know about any prizes or how to submit to literary journals. Years later, forming the book became an act of looking back, seeing what my obsessions had been, and curating a collection of poems that dealt with those obsessions best, with the most depth and complexity. A lot of the poems I had written, even some that I placed in magazines, turned out to be not much more than useful studies and didn’t end up in the book. What coalesced in the manuscript was quite clear: a story of what it means to inhabit a terrifyingly fragile body that is nonetheless capable of love and violence and creation and pleasure.

Inspiration: The people I love. Partners, family—chosen and not. History. Poetry can be so distilled and suggestive, which for me is held in tension (productively) with my strong desire to tell a story. I’m not always certain I have the right to tell these stories, but I try to make up for my presumption with as much gentleness and curiosity and honesty as I can. In the last few years, I’ve written about food and nourishment quite a bit, and those topics also feel bound to family and history and Blackness. During the first year of the pandemic, when my housemate and I couldn’t go many places, couldn’t see our families, and our days seemed packed end-to-end with Zoom calls, I taught myself how to cook, and it became a real source of solace and happy ritual in a time of estrangement and worry. During that time, too, I took up an old project of documenting my family’s generational wisdom around food. All of that found its way, inevitably, into the poetry.

Influences: Because I wrote this book over so many years, the poets whose work feels especially present in the collection influenced me over very different stages of my development. Some that come to mind are Judy Grahn, Natasha Trethewey, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. 

When I stumbled across Judy Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman (Crossing Press, 1984), I was fourteen and just starting to be aware of my queerness. Here was a book of poems dealing so overtly and bravely with the lives and labors of women, especially queer and masculine-of-center folks. Until I found this collection of selected works by Grahn, I didn’t know you could write a book like that, much less with a beautiful hot-pink-arm-tattooed, mulleted person on the cover and the words “Edward the Dyke” in bold letters. Formally, I was instructed by Grahn’s ambitious sequences. I’d never before seen poems written with such stamina and commitment and with images whose meanings accrued and transformed with each repetition. I was still young as a poet, but I immediately started writing imitative poetic sequences that centered storytelling and queer femme self-making. 

I read Natasha Trethewey much later, at the suggestion of a good friend in my MFA program. He knew her work would speak to me, and I instantly admired her surefootedness, her patient pacing, her deep research. Reading her work taught me so many essential elements of craft, like how to break a line and, therefore, how to manipulate the breath, and how to balance research with that incisive, even brutal, poetic thinking, how to get to the poem’s core. Every one of her poems asks (and answers) the questions: What makes the poem imperative? How do we understand cruelty beyond merely pointing at it in outrage? When I forget how to be a poet, I go back to her work and something fundamental clicks into place for me. 

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s work has a historical rigor I admire, and a lyric power that gives the poems liftoff. I saw her perform some poems from The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) at her Witter Bynner Fellowship reading in 2014. She’s an astonishing reader; it’s as if she’s singing the poems, and the way she reads them amplifies Phillis Wheatley’s voice clear across the centuries and into the present. I left that reading asking myself how on earth she had accomplished this. How had she given herself permission to take on that voice? How had she managed it with such grace and an absence of judgment? I woke up the very next day and started writing a sequence about Harriet Tubman. It was an ecstatic process of research and writing that resulted in seventeen poems in five weeks. I revised them radically and they ultimately became a tight, columnar quartet of poems that are featured in my book. They possess a whole new music, no doubt influenced by Jeffers’s vocal performance.

One last influence that’s surprising for me—during those years when I wasn’t able to write I spent a lot of time reading 1980s and 1990s paperback romance novels—is my favorite historical romance author, Mary Jo Putney. Often when I sit down to write a poem, the first idea I have is something that feels like a terrible, unfixable problem to me, and I am not certain if, when, or how I can resolve it, even with all my powers of poetic argument and access to form. What made Putney’s books so moving for me is that she would start her (very round) characters as individuals, each in truly impossible emotional turmoil, often having undergone and even inflicted trauma that seemed out of place in a romance novel. Then she would spend the next 300 to 400 pages painstakingly walking them through the trauma towards a real sense of self-knowledge. The romantic relationship itself, and the inevitable reconciliation and wedding at the end, seemed secondary. Historical romances of that earlier time had fairly rigid narrative constraints, and the gender politics can be more than a bit shocking now. A Mary Jo Putney novel—especially of that era—feels like a lush, deeply psychological realist novel of the nineteenth century dressed in the starched uniform of a twentieth-century harlequin. What I admire most about her work is that sometimes Putney writes herself such difficult conflict that she doesn’t actually succeed at reaching a plausible resolution. But it’s the challenge and the striving that feels so gutsy; picking the hard material and moving forward. May I be so gutsy in every poem and keep trying to walk it through. 

Writer’s block remedy: I’ve been lucky enough to experience a lot of formal breakthroughs over the past seven years or so. Usually I keep writing in one mode until it starts to feel static. At that point I always feel like I’ve forgotten how to be a poet. But what I really need is to be reminded that there are infinite ways to solve a poetic problem. Reading helps. I often go back to my favorite poets to be reminded of why we do this. And sometimes I just have to let the work go dormant and cleanse my palate. Bake a pie, work at perfecting my grandmother’s caramel cake or my mother’s greens. Pretty soon I’m documenting the recipes in long and painstaking lines. Sometimes the sumptuous language of recipes and food will lead me back to the poetry, feeling renewed. 

Advice: I think for getting individual poems and books published, it helps to spend time as a reader early in your career—for a magazine, a contest, wherever you can get your foot in the door. That allows you to understand what the rest of the field looks like and how decisions get made among reading committees. You start to understand how totally subjective and capricious the process is and just how much excellent work gets rejected. Ultimately, I think it makes your own rejections feel less painful and less personal. Maybe more importantly, do the service you have the energy for.

During my MFA my friends and I spent a lot of time in coffee shops “applying for rejections” as we called it. I know this is much easier said than done, but I think it’s crucial to have a very firm (and maybe slightly unreasonable) belief in the fundamental worth of your own writing. Do the reading, yes. Write your guts out, yes. Talk to other poets as much as possible, yes. If you have a tight circle of first readers, or even one first reader, or maybe a mentor you really trust, then theirs are the opinions that should take up space in your writing process. But once the poem or the manuscript is done, let it be done—at least for a good long while. Belief in your own work makes it possible for you to continue to send it out even after many, many inevitable rejections—and it holds you back from reactively editing your poems into oblivion. Editors, judges, and the folks who screen slush piles are gatekeepers, and most of the time they have an enormous number of options in front of them besides your manuscript. You have to protect yourself and your well-being and not allow them to have a place in your emotional life or in your assessment of your own self-worth.  

Finding time to write: This is a big question and I think it’s actually asking two things at once, namely: How do you develop discipline around your writing practice, and how do you find a poetry-work-life balance? 

For me, discipline in writing is less about setting aside a certain number of hours to write in a week and more about an attitude of attention, or in other words trying to maintain the mindset that I’m writing poetry all the time. I keep a notebook with phrases, images, and interesting words (my oldest friend is a mathematician and I have a running list of the most astonishing math words I’ve overheard from her and her collaborators over the years). This practice makes work as a poet feel less like discombobulating starts and stops. The blank computer screen therefore becomes less frightening and aversive, and more a site of pleasure and possibility.
 
What I lack entirely is balance around my writing. I’ve spent a lot of years thinking, within my poetry and outside of it, about chronic illness and especially chronic mental illness. After decades of fantasizing about a life lived in balance, where my work, my home life, and my health all get equal attention and care, I’ve concluded that it’s just not possible for me. Some weeks or months I spend a lot of time feeling unwell and need to hibernate. Some weeks I cook elaborate meals every day. Some weeks there’s nothing but work. When I write a poem, it takes me about half a day to establish a first draft: something with a structure, a tone that makes sense, and an argument that feels complete. Once I have the draft, I spend the next five to seven days working on it almost constantly, often waking up in the middle of the night to do so. It’s a completely dysregulating process, but once I’m in the grip of the poem, I neglect virtually everything in my life except feeding the cat. 

Putting the book together: Ordering a manuscript is such an art! I ordered Things I Didn’t Do With This Body at least three or four times along the way, enlisting the help of friends and mentors who had more clarity than I did on my work as a whole. One piece of good advice I came away with was to look at the book as a long chain. How are the poems matching up end to end, last lines against first lines? Does something get excited by those adjacencies? Does each poem complicate the one that precedes it or follows it? Another piece of good advice I received was to place what I felt was the best or most important poem at the exact center of the book, and then spend the collection working my way into, then out of, that moment. 

I will say that ordering the book for publication versus for submission did look slightly different—something like the difference between constructing an album and dropping the first few singles. For submitting, I put the best poems first because I was anxious to grab those initial readers, anxious not to be passed over immediately. In the final book, I wanted more of a slow build, something that made sense and didn’t feel top-heavy, so I changed the arrangement a bit. 

What’s next: I have the sense that I’m in a transitional place with my writing. I included quite a few elegies in Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, poems for my former partner that felt very open-hearted and clean somehow. But grief has a way of enduring and also changing and turning you into a person you don’t quite recognize. These new poems are freighted with guilt and confusion. I’m not sure these poems will end up in a book, but I feel like I need to write them. They’re less a project than a process. In Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, I also wrote a lot about the question of motherhood, about childlessness. I’ve felt a shift there too, into a kind of life-making and meaning-making beyond that question. I guess some grief gets heavier and some gets lighter.  

Age: 47.

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Residence: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Job: I’m a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in English at Harvard University, working on a dissertation about Gwendolyn Brooks’s formal experimentation.

Time spent writing the book: Thirteen years, all told. After college I worked for about a dozen years as a medical copy editor, and for most of that time I didn’t have the mental energy for writing poetry that I had when I was a teenager. I found ways of being creative that felt more restful, more rooted in the body (I got very serious about home-baking, for instance). Eventually, I started taking online poetry workshops and then looking into MFA programs. Even during my MFA experience, I didn’t think of myself as producing a book. My program, like a lot of programs around ten years ago, had a real aversion to the notion of professionalizing us. Knowledge of how to write applications and submit to journals was largely passed down peer-to-peer, through the cohorts. Otherwise, we wrote week-to-week and poem-to-poem. It wasn’t until later, during my PhD, that I had a mentor who encouraged me to look beyond the individual poems and start recognizing them as a body of work, to consider its contours and obsessions.

Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted to first-book contests and publishers’ open calls for about a year and a half. Before the book was accepted, I was shortlisted for one prize—which was encouraging since by-and-large offering feedback is out of the question for screeners—but other than that I count about twenty outright rejections.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: I really admire Karisma Price’s I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books). It’s such an exciting collection; there’s so much formal daring in this book, and so much emotive and narrative movement. I’ll also mention, in fiction, Courtney Sender’s debut story collection, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me (West Virginia University Press). Her writing is gutsy and moving and ambitious.

Things I Didn’t Do With This Body by Amanda Gunn  

Carolina Hotchandani

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The Book Eaters
Perugia Press
(Perugia Press Prize) 

Imagined futures:
I need you to stay under
the grass, wriggling deep in the Earth.

Close to its unknown core. 

—from “Wormholes”

How it began: Many poems in this book bubbled up in me as my daughter’s babbling turned to words, which then strung themselves into sentences. I wrote as she began to establish what we call an “identity.” Concurrently, I witnessed the opposite trajectory in my father’s life: His sentences shortened; antecedents slipped away from their pronouns like beads off a bracelet. Slowly, my father faded into dementia. I found myself thinking and writing about what an identity even is—and what memory is. I was overwhelmed by the disintegration of our shared memory, a loss that was, at the time, unthinkable for me. I needed to contemplate and somehow metabolize this reality, which I did by creating metaphors, and poems around those metaphors, and a collection (The Book Eaters) around those poems. 

Inspiration: I am usually compelled to write by experiences that defy easy comprehension. Any event that creates a dividing line between the past and present sends me to the page. The election of 2016 created this before-after binary. Becoming a mother occasioned another such rift: The pre-mother me suddenly seemed foreign and distant, as though she’d been a figment of my imagination. My father’s decline and death created yet another rupture in my personal history. Coincidentally, he passed away one day after I deemed my manuscript complete, in October 2022. He died from a heart attack—an event disconnected from his cognitive decline. His death made my manuscript feel unfinished, so I wrote more poems and, in a sense, edited death into the book. Poetry allows me to cross the fault lines of my consciousness, and even if I don’t suture them, I can acknowledge the fissures and, in some way, hold them in my mind and bring them to the page. 

Influences: I’ll mention writers whose works I’ve fervently admired and felt influenced by, though it’s possible a reader would find no trace of their influence on my aesthetic. Influence is a funny thing. Sometimes we’re influenced by books that annoy us! And it’s possible the writers I’ve adored wouldn’t care for my work or want theirs to be seen as part of my lineage. That’s my caveat. But here are my heroes: I encountered Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992) when I was twenty-three, and I turned into a steadfast devotee of hers, devouring everything she’d written. Her balance of emotion, thought, and image pleases me. I can’t believe we’ve lost her. I’ve always read Virginia Woolf’s prose with a swoony adoration; I love it so much I almost can’t teach her books. When students react negatively to her insistent interiority, I take it personally. In the last decade I’ve discovered Terrance Hayes’s and Diane Seuss’s sonnets; I love how they both tailored this form to their own passions. And I can’t end my response here without mentioning Victoria Chang’s poetry, which has touched me in a way no other poet’s work has. Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) expanded my sense of what an elegy could be. Her elegies tackle the question of what it means to be a person, what it means to have memory. These questions inspire many poets, but I suppose it’s Chang’s intense gaze, her pacing, and her nondecorative language that gave me permission to write with a voice that is thinking through questions and isn’t trying so hard to be “beautiful.” 

Writer’s block remedy: Usually for me an impasse comes to exist in my writing because of a misalignment between what I want from my poems and what they—or poetry more generally—can offer. I hit a roadblock of this sort in 2018, when I found myself tired of the voice in my poems. It was a bitter voice. Why was it bitter? At that time, I was frustrated with the visiting and adjunct positions I’d found myself in, upon completing my PhD in English. Certain jobs came with no health benefits and frankly, I was filled with rage at the hypocrisy of institutions that purportedly care about the harm that capitalism inflicts upon humans yet blatantly exploit their own workers. Could poetry bring me health insurance? It could not. And I was not interested in writing poetry that merely gave vent to my anger about the health care system in this country. (Don’t get me wrong; I think poetry can shed light on problematic institutions and systems, but I was too close to my feelings at the time to make good poetry out of it.) So I took a break from writing and focused on finding a position that fulfilled me. In general, I have found it helpful to step away from writing and ask myself, “What do I want from my writing? Can my writing give me what I want from life right now?” If there’s a mismatch between my desired end and the path that writing can forge, then I place my energy elsewhere.

Advice: As a poet with only one book published so far, I feel like a toddler who just took her first steps and is being asked for wisdom on walking! Rather than offer advice, I can share one of my guiding principles. I think there’s a vast difference between a group of thematically connected poems and a book. In early 2021 I had achieved the former, but I wasn’t content with my manuscript’s structure. I wanted to feel about the whole book the way I can feel about a single poem when it’s working well—when all its parts contribute to the symphony of the whole. It’s helpful to mull over how the manuscript moves from one poem, or section, to the next. I spent almost two years obsessing over the architecture of my manuscript, and in October 2022 I finally felt about the whole book the way I feel when a single poem’s parts click into place. 

Finding time to write: I write at night when everyone’s asleep. This means that I sleep less than I should, and sometimes that fatigue becomes too heavy for me to lug around as if it’s nothing. I used to drink too much coffee, but then my thyroid decided to malfunction, so I can’t consume caffeine the way I once did, which means that sometimes the need for sleep trumps my need to write. As a result, I’ve started to rely more on semester breaks, when I have some time that’s not eclipsed by teaching. I suppose I’m trying to say that none of my ways of stealing time to write have been especially graceful.

Putting the book together: I initially wrote individual poems and deflected worries about a potential book. As my poems accumulated, I started to think about conceptual linkages between them: I was writing about new motherhood and my father’s memory loss. For a while I thought I may be constructing two manuscripts instead of one. Then, when I wrote the title poem of the book, I had an “aha” moment. Prior to motherhood I’d (naively) seen myself as a sealed-off container of ideas, but while pregnant I’d contained a whole human, and as a new mother I contained milk. In the poem “The Book Eaters,” I compare myself to a book being eaten by insects—a book offering a type of nourishment to living beings that its author had not intended. As I wrote this poem it occurred to me that I could write about memory loss in similar terms. Both my father and I were no longer insular containers for ideas. When I came upon this metaphor, I wove it through the book and many pieces fell into place. The book’s first section tackles memory loss; the second one tackles reproduction; the third one tries to formulate a response to the question of what it means to be a self, given that memory loss and motherhood challenge the speaker of this book to see identity as much more porous than she’d previously imagined. 

What’s next: I am currently writing toward a new collection of poems with the working title, Spineless. Some poems are told from the perspective of individuals who are conscious of their character status and experience the book’s confines and author’s dictates as oppressive. Why does an author force characters to perform their desires for the prurient eyes of onlookers? I am intrigued by how we relate to our textual offspring—how we project ourselves onto our artistic creations and, more interestingly, become moved by our creations, as if they are not entities we’ve brought into being, as if they existed of their own accord. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Dover Publications, 1994) had a profound influence on me in my youth, and as I entered adulthood I revisited the novel, reading it as a portrayal of how the artist’s creation can be a monstrous mirror, a beloved, a therapist, a sinister twin. The myriad moods our creations hold fascinate me.

Age: 44.

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Residence: Omaha.

Job: I’m a literature professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.

Time spent writing the book: I wrote most of the poems in my debut collection between 2016 and 2020. Then I spent the next two years organizing and reorganizing the manuscript, adding and stitching more connective tissue into the book while also considering the movement and pacing of everything. Altogether I spent almost seven years writing and editing the book. I might have been able to let go of it sooner, but the separation anxiety was intense.

Time spent finding a home for it: I started submitting The Book Eaters to first-book contests in October 2022 and won the Perugia Press Prize for first and second poetry collections in February 2023. It took four months to place.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: I’ve enjoyed Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books), Leslie Sainz’s Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House), Elisa Gonzalez’s Grand Tour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Emily Lee Luan’s 回 / Return (Nightboat Books).
 

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani  

Leslie Sainz 

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Have You Been Long Enough at Table
Tin House

There is no country
where the dead don’t float. 

—from “Ño”

How it began: Poetry seemed the only appropriate medium capable of holding the many contradictions that have defined my understanding of self, spirit, and state.

Inspiration: The art of Tania Bruguera, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Zilia Sánchez Domínguez, and Clara Varas. Cuban movie posters from the 1960s and 1970s. Max Richter. Radiohead. Melody Beattie’s book Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself (Spiegel & Grau, 2022).

Influences: Hoa Nguyen, Jean Valentine, Blanca Varela, and Federico García Lorca. Their poems never lose the capacity to surprise me, even the ones I’ve reread and re-reread.

Writer’s block remedy: Befriend the silence. I have a rule not to force anything in my life, be that writing, relationships, etc. I want as much softness as possible. When language eludes me, that often looks like asking myself, “In this moment, can I forgive myself if I give up on this poem?” If the answer is yes, I go for a walk, listen to music that devastates me. Afterward there’s usually a reverse psychological effect and I’m desperate to keep at it. If the answer is no, I’ll scour my bookshelves for three books: one I haven’t read yet that poses a challenge, one written in the past ten years that I enjoyed, and a favorite collection published before the year 2000. I’ll flip through all three, searching for answers and, miraculously, stumble into some.

Advice: You cannot be late to your own life. Also, you are allowed your agony.

Finding time to write: While I don’t have the constitution to write every day and most of my activity exists at the mercy of chronic fatigue and illness, I am energized by the looking and obsessing that proacts and enacts poetry. This is made easier, made possible, by catering to my musts. I must write in the evening, after all the day’s unskippable tasks have been completed. I must write following a warm shower, with at least one lit candle nearby. I must have a surplus of other people’s language within reach. These rituals signal to my mind and body that it is time to make contact with language in ways that were previously closed to me as I went about the rhythms of ordinary life. 

Putting the book together: Have You Been Long Enough at Table documents many careful unlearnings. There is some linear chronology at work, which was paramount to revealing the ideological evolution of the primary speaker’s politics, but I’m also attracted to a kind of formal contradiction, an unwieldy symmetry. Within the collection there is a series of seven American sonnets, three poems titled “Threat Display,” and eight poems whose titles are severed by a forward slash. I very much enjoyed thinking about how to disperse these poems—how to maximize their emotional and thematic qualities through juxtaposition (and through juxtaposition: suggestion, echo)—while centering the sensation of destabilization. There’s a fair amount of formal diversity in the collection, and as a buttress to the layers of uncertainty inherent in its subjects, I favored a sequence where unpredictability could produce feelings of discomfort in the reader. I see all these structural decisions as mirroring, on a much smaller scale of course, the whiplash of the “Cuban thaw” and its immediate reversal, and the decades of failed U.S. foreign policy imposed upon the island.

What’s next: My unmet needs, and a series of persona poems in the voice of Esther Hicks.

Age: 31.

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Residence: Small-town Vermont.

Job: I am fortunate to make my living as the managing editor of New England Review.

Time spent writing the book: Roughly eight years.

Time spent finding a home for it: Three years and five different versions of the manuscript.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: OCTOBERS by Sahar Muradi (University of Pittsburgh Press), Master by Simon Shieh (Sarabande Books), Mass for Shut-Ins by Mary Alice-Daniel (Yale University Press), Organs of Little Importance by Adrienne Chung (Penguin Books), Sweet Movie by Alisha Dietzman (Beacon Press), 回 / Return by Emily Lee Luan (Nightboat Books), Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (Knopf), Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver (Milkweed Editions), and The Border Simulator by Gabriel Dozal, translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Tiniacos (One World).

Have You Been Long Enough at Table by Leslie Sainz  

Kweku Abimbola

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Saltwater Demands a Psalm
Graywolf Press
(Academy of American Poets First Book Award) 

I knew you before
you could inhabit water
before you could count rains. 

—from “Adinkra”

How it began: Healing compelled me to begin Saltwater Demands a Psalm. I was curious about how a return to Indigenous West African conceptions of naming and mourning could help heal the personal and collective moments of anti-Black trauma I’ve experienced since moving to the United States. 

Inspiration: The music of the Black diaspora stayed with me throughout the writing process. I see Saltwater, in some ways, as an album that reflects my growth as a listener. The earlier poems are airy and sibilant. Closer to the middle of the collection, we get louder and syllable-heavy, and by the end there is resolve between these two sonic modes. Some musicians that featured heavily in my writing playlist include: Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Erykah Badu, Ambré, Amaria, Fela Kuti, Marvin Gaye, Burna Boy, and Baco. 

Influences: This collection is deeply indebted to the works of Lucille Clifton, Danez Smith, and Ilya Kaminsky. Lucille taught me how to carry water, and how to cherish the language, idiom, and cadence that is most natural to me. Danez injected much-needed voltage into my poetic voice and taught me the potency of the volta. I am quite drawn to Ilya’s use of nuanced, extended similes and metaphors; his writing has a way of sewing itself into my memory. 

Writer’s block remedy: Whenever I can’t write I dance; I don my headphones, queue up some Asake or Uncle Waffles or Rema, and dance like the rent is due. Whenever I can’t dance, I go for a walk. Whenever I can’t walk, I reconnect with friends. Whenever I can’t connect with friends, I read. I find my non-writing rituals to be just as vital—if not more vital—as what I do when I’m able to write. 

Advice: Write the book you long to read. Pay close attention to what haunts you, to what you cannot shake. 

Finding time to write: It’s difficult finding time to write while balancing a full-time teaching load. During the semester I’m mostly able to write during the weekends, whenever I don’t have to grade. During breaks I have the luxury of writing in the mornings, which is hands down my favorite time to write. I’ve also found accountability groups helpful, as well as writing dates—both virtual and in person—with other writers and creators.

Putting the book together: In organizing the manuscript, I took the advice of Cortney Lamar Charleston who noted that whenever you put two poems next to each other, the meaning of both pieces will change. With this conceptual foundation in mind, I sought to order the collection using cycles/shared thematic phrases guided by Adinkra symbols. 

What’s next: I’m working on a novel as well as a collection of poems and essays that I’d like to transform into a play. 

Age: 26.

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Residence: Tampa.

Job: I’m a visiting professor of English and creative writing at the University of Tampa.

Time spent writing the book: About five years.

Time spent finding a home for it: It took close to a year with about twenty rejections before I received my first yes.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor (Graywolf Press, 2022), Freedom House by KB Brookins (Deep Vellum), and Heirloom by Ashia Ajani (Write Bloody Publishing). 

Saltwater Demands a Psalm by Kweku Abimbola  

Elisa Gonzalez

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Grand Tour
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

My hair tangles her fingers
till I unknot it, and I unknot it
as I’ve done many things
to detach myself 
from pleasure.

—from “Roman Triptych”

How it began: There are two answers: The first is that I got tired of waiting for perfection. For years I believed, even though I knew this wasn’t true, that I’d know I had a book when it was whole and smooth and undeniable. The second is that my youngest brother was shot to death in 2021, and while I was prepared not to write again—for a while permanent silence really seemed like a possibility, and I didn’t feel the possibility as a loss, simply an unavoidable change—after several months I felt a graphomaniacal impulse. From close contact with death, I felt keenly how little time there is. And if I wanted to write, I had to stop wasting time. Until then I’d been afraid to risk finishing, and failing, and then I recognized those fears as ridiculous and time for the scarce thing it is.   

Inspiration: My poems are full of other voices, and I think of all those interlocutors—whether members of my family, or writers I’ve read, or works of art I’ve engaged with, or fragments of conversations between strangers I’ve overheard—as inspirations, because those textures and exchanges feel essential to how my thinking develops.

Influences: The artists I most admire in any genre are, in my opinion, inimitable. So I am not sure I can count them as influences on my work. But people whose work I’ve admired immensely, whether or not mine resembles theirs, include Tory Dent, Layli Long Soldier, Laura Riding, Marilyn Hacker, and Petrarch. 

Writer’s block remedy: I recently heard the brilliant Australian writer Helen Garner say, and I’m paraphrasing here, that writing is just arranging words on a page. I find that kind of demystification helpful when I’m stuck. She wasn’t diminishing the difficulty, but as someone prone to melodrama, I find it helpful to yank my head and agonies away from the existential. Writing is both important and not important. 

Also, sometimes I give myself assignments—write a poem with X word, write a poem imitating this other poem I like—so that I can play without applying pressure to the words. The burnout that comes from capitalist stressors—needing to finish a book so you can apply for a job, needing money, not having the time to write—that’s harder to reason away. Then I rely on friends, a mutual bearing up and making our way through. 

Advice: If you can, ignore the pressure to publish sooner rather than later. Let your work evolve. Be disloyal; it’s all right to not publish everything you’ve ever written. Look for people with whom you feel some kinship, personal and perhaps also aesthetic. Find the bedrock that will keep you writing even without any external validation, because a life sustained by what you get from other sources—magazines, publishers, prizes, etc.—is a hollow life. And persist.  

Finding time to write: I am fortunate that over the last few years I’ve had a fair amount of latitude to write what I wanted, when I wanted. From 2016 to 2018 I received an arts Fulbright, and that was the first time in my life I had the freedom to write as much as I wanted without worrying about money. Before that I was writing in little gaps and it was hard; sometimes you have to refuse things you want in order to gather those scraps of time.  

Putting the book together: Since the poems span a long time, the obvious order seemed roughly chronological, moving from a more restricted world of childhood to a more expansive mental and physical territory. But that was boring, so I tried to bring a sense of disorder to the arrangement, a collage of times and places that would disorient and then, perhaps, cohere into a portrait of a whole life. 

What’s next: I’ve written only a couple of poems since finishing the book and am waiting to see what the next phase of my poetic life will be. I would like to find new movements, new sounds, as I don’t want to repeat myself endlessly. I’m trying to be patient. I also have a novel and a nonfiction book under contract, so I have those to work on, and I’m writing some essays and short stories. 

Age: 34.

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Residence: Brooklyn, New York, though I try not to be in the city, or any single place, 100 percent of the time. For now, at least, I prefer to be a little unsettled.

Job: I freelance in various capacities. I write critical and long-form essays. I also edit and teach writing privately.

Time spent writing the book: I’ve written hundreds of poems since I began writing poetry seriously sixteen years ago and there are hundreds that may never see a book, including some that I think are good. When I started making this book, I first took stock of this mass creation. Then I culled. I included poems that I wrote in my first poetry workshop in college and poems that I wrote right before submitting the book.

Time spent finding a home for it: I waited so long—maybe too long—to both start and finish a book. When I was finally ready, I was very lucky to only submit the book to one publisher and to not wait long for an answer.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates (Tin House); I Love Information by Courtney Bush (Milkweed Editions); Boomhouse by Summer J. Hart (The 3rd Thing); Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Eggtooth by Jesse Nathan (Unbound Edition Press); God Themselves by Jae Nichelle (Andrews McMeel Publishing); and Have You Been Long Enough at Table by Leslie Sainz (Tin House). 

Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez  

Joshua Burton

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Grace Engine
University of Wisconsin Press

The two men who think they will never die
are two opposing laws:

the will to live and the will to live a little longer.

—from “Grace Engine”

How it began: I dedicated my earlier chapbook, Fracture Anthology, to my mother. All the poems were about her, and many of them were even written in her voice. This exploration of her life meant a lot to me, but I’ve come to realize that in many ways I was able to avoid myself while writing that chapbook. I didn’t have to confront the things that move me or stop me. With Grace Engine, one of the missions I had was to center myself and be as vulnerable as possible so I couldn’t avoid any parts of myself. 

Inspiration: The summer before starting Grace Engine, I decided to research the Black Panther Party and other Black liberation organizations as well as movements and activists. Engulfing myself in the lives of these people filled me with a tremendous amount of pride. After that summer I had time to sit with all I learned and try to understand how that pride conflicted with the anti-Blackness I had internalized over the years. That tension inspired Grace Engine. 

Influences: During that same summer I read the work of Terrance Hayes religiously. It was one of the first times I was keenly aware of a Black writer writing directly to me. I felt heard by his work, like my experiences mattered and weren’t arbitrary. My connection to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (Knopf, 1977) gave me similar feelings, and I honestly believe the writing she does in that book is the best writing I’ve read in any genre. Her brilliance and magic wowed me and inspired some of the choices I made in Grace Engine. That summer I discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates as well, not necessarily his writing but his interviews, and they were a great source of understanding for me in the ways that Blackness exists in these in-between spaces in the world, and how important it is for us to uncover and talk about the nuances of those spaces. Additionally, the poet Solmaz Sharif is certainly at the heart of Grace Engine. I met her briefly at a Tin House workshop when I was only a few poems into my collection and she gave me life changing feedback that truly dictated the direction the rest of the book went in. The version of Grace Engine that exists now would not be so without our meeting and her input. 

Writer’s block remedy: Honestly, this is still something I am figuring out. I’m not easily inspired, yet anything has the potential to inspire me. When I decide I’m ready to create a new poem, I usually immerse myself in one or two poems that I’m obsessed with for one reason or another. After sitting with them for days or weeks, the poems tend to pull something out of me, sometimes a word, a sound, a rhythm, whatever it is that gives me the fuel I need to write again.

Advice: The most important aspect of creating and revising a book is your relationship with the poems, so don’t compromise that for any reason. Rejections will come, and they can be debilitating, but if you keep your relationship with the work strong, I believe the poems will find their home. 

Finding time to write: I work as a full-time high school English teacher, so I don’t have much time. Also, because I can only write when the spark hits me, I make sure to take advantage of that feeling no matter where I’m at or how late it is. I will stay up on a work night to get out a draft before the feeling leaves me. In my mind the poem comes first, so I will always make time for it when it chooses to show itself to me.

Putting the book together: With Grace Engine, deciding what poems belonged in which section came easily to me. The book is split into two parts: “I” and “We.” My thought process was that the “I” poems were about me believing that I could work through trauma by centering myself. The “We” poems were about realizing that all of us were needed. Like Solmaz Sharif told me, those who are part of this us know who they are. I decentered myself to see how much more needed to be considered, especially since the trauma I’ve experienced in my life has existed before me and will be here after I am gone. I needed this collective us to hold me and to work with me in completing the book. 

What’s next: A major question posed in my debut collection is, “How do we show grace best to the ones we love and those who have passed on?” The “Giving ____ Grace” poems in the book attempt to capture those different methods of showing grace. But one method that came to me near the end of writing this collection is the power of mythmaking to give us eternal life. I’m an atheist/agnostic, so I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I have a strong desire to believe that we deserve something that stretches beyond our earthly bodies. Mythologizing us is the closest I’ve come to eternal life. I want to create myths for the people I love, my family and ancestors, for them to be able to exist outside of time and live on.  

Age: 34.

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Residence: Houston.

Job: I teach eleventh- and twelfth-grade English at a charter school, but I would like to teach at a university level.

Time spent writing the book: I started Grace Engine in the fall of 2017, and the book was picked up on January 1, 2022. I wrote a few more poems for the book after that and of course did some revising, but the bulk of the book was done by the time it was picked for publication.

Time spent finding a home for it: I was almost at the year mark and was getting rejected by a lot of my dream presses. It was getting to the point where my confidence was beginning to take a hit. The few places that listed the book as a finalist were the last presses I submitted to in that yearlong contest cycle, and one of the places I was a finalist for ended up publishing the book.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: I’ve been happy to share my debut year with so many great poets. Anthony Sutton’s Particles of a Stranger Light (Veliz Books) is an amazing collection with a distinct and powerful voice behind each poem that inspires me tremendously. K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco (Milkweed Editions) is such a special book that masterfully balances grief, grace, and silence. Emily Lee Luan’s 回 / Return (Nightboat Books) has such a unique power over form that constantly left me in amazement of how her poems traveled. Karisma Price’s I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books) has a level of tenderness that left me awestruck. And Eugenia Leigh’s second poetry collection, Bianca (Four Way Books), which was also published in 2023, includes poems whose sharpness seems to cut you with an X-Acto knife; as she reveals more of herself, the reader starts to reveal more of themselves as well.
 

Grace Engine by Joshua Burton