Submit yourself to the uncertainty and mystery of it all,” advises Darius Atefat-Peckham, one of the ten authors spotlighted in our twentieth annual debut poets feature. Of course, verse has always been known to have an enchanting quality, a certain, or not so certain, je ne sais quoi. Poetry often moves beyond the concrete physical realm in slippery and nebulous linguistic ways, refusing to be understood in its entirety through sheer intellectual prowess alone. This year’s feature rather ceremoniously includes writers who keep to this wondrous definition of poetry while reaching further still. In the “mystery of it all” that these books both dig into and surrender to, they provide a landing place for our sorrows and deepest ruminations, a salve for our earthly and psychic wounds.

These are collections that spring forth from the inquiry, “What is poetry next to death?” with ensuing poems written in the voice of a late mother and friend (Jimin Seo’s OSSIA), to call them back, to be near. Within them lamentation becomes hard-earned and tender wisdom (Christian J. Collier’s Greater Ghost) and grief reveals the strong undercurrent of love beneath it (Darius Atefat-Peckham’s Book of Kin). These collections were carefully and painfully molded, as if through back braces, headgear, and expanders screwed inside a small but mighty mouth (Stephanie Choi’s The Lengest Neoi). They whisper in your ear about the shards of a queer childhood (Matthew Gellman’s Beforelight), pray in Victoria’s Secret fitting rooms (Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies), where faith becomes “feminine, breasted / and irregularly bleeding.” These are collections that are international and rooted in hometowns (Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo), that speak of colonialism, distance, and understanding the multifaceted self in three distinct tongues (Diego Báez’s Yaguareté White). They break ground, excavating personal and collective histories (Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives), and conjuring a desert landscape that aches as the body aches, nature that loves as the body loves (Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature).

In their replies to our questions, these poets astutely remark on their literary journeys to date, some of which included almost fifteen years of writing and rewriting a manuscript, while for others it took three months to find a publisher. Despite their varied paths to publication, they commonly advise not rushing into getting a book published and aiming high while focusing on presses that understand your unique vision and can introduce your work to the world in a way you see best fit, though “the caterpillar phase is wearisome,” Kenzie Allen is careful to add. In marking the two decades this magazine has spent celebrating emerging poets, we have ten writers who remind us of poetry as illumination, alchemy, medicine. Poets who prove that care—deep attention to all beings (of the past, present, and future)—is still the greatest connective tissue binding us all, invisible though it may feel at times, and that it can still unite author and reader in word and thought and, yes, spirit. As Matthew Gellman writes, “Poetry was a means of having an intimate, private conversation with my most inward self, but it also served as a gesture outward, a bid for connection and understanding from other people.”

Kenzie Allen | Jimin Seo
Sarah Ghazal Ali | Diego Báez 
Saretta Morgan | Matthew Gellman 
Christian J. Collier | Stephanie Choi
Darius Atefat-Peckham | Yalie Saweda Kamara

Kenzie Allen

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Cloud Missives
Tin House

We tipped our throats to night showers
and tried to lick back stars the city had obliterated,

to resurrect anything at all by taste,
their glittering signs and warnings.

—from “Light Pollution”

How it began: I wanted to find a way to speak to what felt unsayable at the time, to name the violences I’d experienced, to uncover the personal and cultural memories that had been buried, and to commemorate the connections I’d made with the world around me. Poetry affords the creation of new vocabularies—new ways of naming things—and ways of interrogating what might be mysterious or elevating that which might otherwise seem commonplace. I wanted to make my own language through the writing of these poems, and then recognize and cultivate the stories that emerged as the pieces were set in proximity. I wanted to write back against stereotypes and misconceptions of Indigenous peoples, to use this new language, alongside the influence of oral histories and lived experiences, to reclaim culture, identity, and survivance. 

Inspiration: Anthropology has always been a source of fascination and inspiration for my work. Anthropology and archaeology are their own kinds of storytelling, where the observer pieces together meaning from remains and evidence found in excavation. That’s poetry, too, isn’t it?

My parents are certainly guiding forces—my mom on the Indigenous side, and my dad, a biologist and fire lookout. There’s flora and fauna in both of those worlds, ways of knowing and ways of being, pow wow dance styles and traditional medicines, learning each peak and valley of the horizon by heart, caretaking the land, reading the earth as its own literature. My dad can name every kind of cloud. My mom teaches me and reminds me to move in good ways. 

I also like to surf Wikipedia articles via the “Cool Freaks’ Wikipedia Club” Facebook group to find subjects to explore, particularly those that are multifaceted or taxonomic in nature. The crab love poem [“Convergent Evolution”] in my book is a direct result of this kind of cruising for categorical knowledge, in this case “carcinization,” or how so many things seem to want to evolve into crab-like shapes. And then I layer these subjects with news stories, memory, emotion, or imagined experiences. 

There is also those kids books with the see-through pages that show, layer by layer, the inside of the human body or a beehive or a bird’s egg. I think that, alongside my excavatory impulse, led to my interest in interior and exterior forces. 

Influences: Pattiann Rogers, Stephen Dunn, Roberta Hill. There are so many I could name, but these three are some of the writers I turn to when I need to be soothed by the capacity of poetry to evoke love, grief, ways of knowing. Rogers inspires me toward reverence, Dunn offers lifelong wisdoms, and Hill is a beacon whose “[h]ouse of five fires” raises me up. 

Writer’s block remedy: Sometimes I’ll smudge or say the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address before sitting down to write, particularly when I’m working on a difficult poem or through a tangled emotion, or when I just need to honor the land beforehand. Writing is its own kind of ceremony or medicine, but I find that turning to Oneida ways of knowing helps keep me grounded. 

Mainly I tend to switch modes and mediums as needed, which helps me return with new perspectives later. It also means I don’t think about things in terms of writer’s block—getting stuck is just a sign I need to pivot for a moment; it’s more of a squeaky wheel than a barrier. And sometimes I just let myself be, rather than pushing the issue. I’ll continue to observe and mentally work through ideas, but the brain needs its own pivot points and its own time to marinate, so I recognize the fallow periods as an important part of the process too.

Advice: It can be helpful to have more than one project going. If what you initially sent out isn’t the right fit but they like your writing, you might be asked to send more work in the future. In my case, since I’d sent out what was really more of a second book, I asked myself, “How soon is the future?” and I already had something (the “first book”) ready to send right away. 

It’s also okay to take your time. There can be such pressure to put out a book right away—there are job ads open only to those who have “emerged” (and the “emerging” contests can feel like an endless merry-go-round). There’s some sense of a ticking clock with the proliferation of “30 Under 30” lists and so on, and in general the caterpillar phase is wearisome. But it’s really wonderful when you find the right press and you’ve spent all that time polishing your manuscript until it can’t help but shine. Of course, you don’t have to be fully at that stage before sending it out. A great editor is an invaluable influence, and it’s good to stay open to what the book could yet become. 

Finding time to write: I’m still working on this, but I’m constantly writing in some form or another. I will absolutely interrupt a conversation to take notes. Or I’ll write in the shower (on waterproof paper). Or during a family outing. Anywhere an idea hits. It’s ruthless. And I like to write when I’m out in various landscapes, so I do a lot of walking and writing. This means, of course, that I need to change up my surroundings every so often so that my environmental influences also shift. You can only write about the same type of bird so many times. But the brain is always making its connections, searching for narrative, juxtaposing what it sees and what it remembers. We’re always writing even when we’re not. We’re percolating. And we just need to remember to stay active about it. Go on and feed the cauldron. 

Putting the book together: Once I’ve gotten a manuscript to critical mass, I tend to print out the whole stack of poems and tape them up on the wall, on what I call my “poetry murder board.” In the movies when you see one of those walls of pictures and sticky notes, with colored string linking all the components together, that’s supposedly called a “murder board.” I haven’t progressed to the string bits yet, but I use the sticky notes and a pencil, and I move poems around to see how they speak to one another and where the gaps might be. For me, it’s not enough to just stare at a manuscript on my computer screen. I’ve got to live with the poems for a while, to inhabit the same room and be faced with their overall shape. 

For the last few years Cloud Missives was up on a wall that you could see from the street in front of our house. It must have looked…concerning. I finally took all the poems down the other day, and it was such a big shift—the whole room felt alien and empty. I wondered if it was just as disconcerting for anyone else that the pages had suddenly disappeared. But the wall never stays bare for long.

What’s next: I tend to have multiple projects going at any given time. Right now this includes a multimodal manuscript about the transnational journeys of generations of my Oneida family, a memoir-ish collection of poems about matriarchy, and a follow-up to Cloud Missives currently titled “Diary of Belief.” I have a couple prose projects, and I’m also learning how to be a mom.

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Age: 38.

Residence: Toronto.

Job: I’m an assistant professor in Indigenous literatures and creative writing at York University.

Time spent writing the book: Over a decade. Some were written in 2011, some in 2024. All were revised through the editing phases of book production, often with new material.

Time spent finding a home for it: Seven years in some form or another. Three years in its current form.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: I’m excited for the wellspring of Native poetry coming out right now: m.s. RedCherries’s mother (Penguin Books), Kinsale Drake’s The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press), and Amber McCrary’s Blue Corn Tongue (University of Arizona Press, 2025). As well as Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven (Texas Review Press), Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies (Alice James Books), Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism (Tupelo Press), and Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press).

Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen. 

Jimin Seo 

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OSSIA
Changes Press
(Changes Book Prize) 

I bless the knife that skins the fawn from its
mother’s field. I bless the fat between the 
hide, the flesh, ignites. I bless your dream,
its bullet caught in the poet’s bite. 

—from “OSSIA”

How it began: I wasn’t able to build poems in my own voice after my mother’s death in 2013, so I stopped. I mean my poetry voice stopped. It could only ask me: What is poetry next to death? Still, during the pandemic silence I began to build poems in my mother’s voice. That same year I found out my friend Richard Howard had dementia. When I called him on the phone, he forgot who I was, and I became desperate. I reanimated Richard’s voice in dramatic monologue (to me, always his form), to remember, to have him talk to me. I was in a kind of mania, I think. It still feels selfish to reanimate my dead and transfigure them into a book. After all these years what can I miss? Memory? The mooring of this book was to show Richard and my mother I was writing again. I failed to show them any achievements (merely being alive didn’t count) during their lives. I was running out of time. And time did run out. This is a book of loneliness and regret.

Inspiration: My friends and fellow artists were a great source of comfort. Rebecca Hazelton, Asa Drake, Nicole W. Lee, H.Sinno—they gave me a reason to keep writing when I wanted stop.

Influences: I was training to become a classical pianist before I became a poet. I gave myself nerve damage in my right index finger and there was poetry, waiting. Accident led to accidental poetry technique class and here I am. That’s a long way of saying I draw most of my inspiration from classical music and musicians. I love how musical forms are conjured relationally in poetry. As a failed musician, I conflate the interpretation of music with poetic practice. You can have so many interpretations for one piece of music, and I find those minute variations in approach hugely influential. And because so much of the critical writing on poetry uses the lexicon of music and music-making, I learn a lot from music and literary criticism. Edward Said’s writing on music—a favorite, Musical Elaborations (Columbia University Press, 1991)—is a boon. As are the forms of conjuring in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s performances, Bach’s fugues, Schumann’s Études symphoniques, and Gershwin’s The Man I Love played by Isata Kanneh-Mason.

Writer’s block remedy: I write in intense bursts. Something like three months of the year, from 10 PM to 5 AM. I think the most interesting things happen when you’re at the bottom and it feels like there is no way out. But then again, this is my personal practice. I put myself in crisis and dig myself out. I don’t recommend it! Joking aside, I think it’s useful to know how you work and to honor and tweak that as it comes.

Advice: A draft of a manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to work. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from music was recognizing what a finished work sounds like. A poem can be good or bad, and in the span of organizing poems into a full manuscript, how these good and bad pieces resonate with one another informs a working, breathing organism. Don’t worry about the value of a single poem. Try to recognize the manuscript wholly—send it out.  

Finding time to write: I think being single helps, though a romance would be nice, even a spotty one. I don’t like to write. I wait and wait until my body is fed up with me. That is why I write nights into early mornings—the lonely hours. It makes for a tiring daytime, but driving out the words feels wonderful.

Putting the book together: I initially had the collection separated into four sections, in the order I’d written them in. First came “Crown for Peasant Heads,” then “Three-Part Inventions”—named after Richard Howard’s Two-Part Inventions (Antheneum, 1974)—“Profanities,” and the section I hated, “Neither Divine or the Garden Like It,” which became the ossia. In the editing process my editor Kyle Dacuyan asked me if I would consider reshaping the book, to have the voices collide and speak to each other. I spread out each poem on the floor and shaped the book again. I followed the logic of how I would program a piano recital, a theme with variations where each ghost reappears and disappears. The crown of sonnets was moved to the end with a translator’s preface written to close the book da capo (begin again).  

What’s next: I’ve finished a chapbook titled A – 1982 (out winter 2024–2025) for my friend Ian U Lockaby, who curates the incredible online zine mercury firs. I’m spinning the chapbook into a full-length collection. I want to find out why I am so averse to writing about myself; I’m fond of saying I have no interest in my own personal narrative. It traverses my queerness, my family’s gas station, the disaster of petrol as the lifeblood of my immigrant family’s livelihood, and asks: What is autobiography beyond narrative detail?

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Age: 42.

Residence: I recently moved back to Brooklyn, New York.

Job: I work as a personal trainer, tutor, and adjunct.

Time spent writing the book: I began in September 2020 and finished a complete draft by October 2022.

Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted my manuscript to contests beginning in April 2021. I was a finalist for the 2022 Nightboat Poetry Prize (rejection) and received encouragement from Action Books (rejection). I submitted to the National Poetry Series (rejection), Wesleyan University Press (rejection), Four Way Books (rejection), Futurepoem (rejection), the APR/Honickman First Book Prize (rejection), and Tin House (rejection). Changes Press accepted my collection in January 2023. I’m grateful for the previous rejections, though, because I saw them as a way to continue asking my questions. Questions I hope I never fully answer so I can examine whatever it is I see from all possible vantage points—if I even know what those questions are, that is. Richard Howard used to say, “You must work on the next great thing.” If our questions are always new, so are our answers. And I can keep writing.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Megan Pinto’s Saints of Little Faith from Four Way Books is a beautiful and exacting account of familial, romantic, and platonic love—something I wish I could do. Azad Ashim Sharma’s fourth book, Boiled Owls from Nightboat Books, masterfully moves through, and beyond, addiction within our socio-political wreck and reckonings—Sharma really is a Late Modernist. Jay Gao’s recent poetry pamphlet, Bark, Archive, Splinter from Out-Spoken Press, looks at man-made history through the cyclical eternity of trees—nature as the witness to human folly; it makes me honor the sentinel, and the sentient stewardship of trees. Ian U Lockaby’s Defensible Space/if a crow— from Omnidawn Publishing takes our familiar domestic and natural tangibles and refracts them through the bird’s-eye view of the wonderous, ill-maligned crow. The distance of Lockaby’s tactical if, as if to show how the distance between our sight and worldly objects is only truly visible by breaks in poetic syntax. And finally, Asa Drake’s Beauty Talk forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2026. I love the way Drake’s poems reveal every bit of our psyches; her ability to do this reminds me of George Eliot’s omnipresent narrators.

OSSIA [6] by Jimin Seo.

Sarah Ghazal Ali 

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Theophanies
Alice James Books
(Alice James Award Editor’s Choice) 

From a clot
   I’ll make men. Hollow

myself holy.

—from “Self-Portrait as Epiphany”

How it began: There are a few different origin stories for this book, but I’ll share my early academic one. I was on the prelaw track in college and considered adding literature as a double major. When I took a course in ancient political thought, I was surprised to find the books of Genesis and Exodus on the syllabus alongside Thucydides and Aristotle. I didn’t know you could close read scripture in a political science class, let alone consider it a point of origin for political thought. It was a life-changing class for me, one where I felt free—and encouraged—to look more closely at the women in scripture and recognize their agency, their political choices. Soon after, I was given the prompt in a creative writing class to write about the origin of my name. Choosing my middle name, Ghazal, felt too obvious, so I chose my first name instead and wrote a persona poem in the voice of scriptural Sarah for the first time. I became obsessed with matrilineage and Sarah and, through her, the many women of sacred history across Abrahamic faiths that I could look to as models for my own living. 

Inspiration: My mother; my mother’s hands; the specters of my grandmothers; my aunts; Mary and Mary Magdalene; Sarah/Sarai; the great white shark that beached at Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz, California; the land and seascapes of Santa Cruz; Max Richter; Urdu ghazals sung by my father; the rhythms of the Qur’an in Arabic; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Harper & Brothers, 1943) by Betty Smith; The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992) by Louise Glück; the story of Prophet Yusuf/Joseph; the story of Yusuf and Zuleikha; Christian iconography and Islamic aniconism; the Arabic letters taped to the fridge in my childhood home; René Magritte; Sadequain; Whitney DeVos; June Jordan’s model of the engaged and unappeasable artist; Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry written in solitary confinement; the chorus of competing adhans in Karachi; every dead bird I’ve found in my path; Vivaldi; Urdu nasheed; Urdu marsiya; and my faith, which never wavered for, and welcomed, my doubt. 

Influences: Etel Adnan, whose sacred attention to Mount Tamalpais across text and image has bewildered me; Mary Szybist, whose work makes mine possible; Brigit Pegeen Kelly, whose peculiar, precise eye has sharpened my own; Mahmoud Darwish, whose rhythmic, piercing questions call forth new questions; Dan Hillier, whose visual art offers a face for my poems, whose art lives on beyond him, whose art I am unbelievably lucky to have as the cover of my first book. 

Writer’s block remedy: If I feel burned out, I take a break from poetry and turn to other media. I rewatch comfort TV shows, and I read fiction until my well feels replenished, which I know has happened if my imagination feels alive and capacious again. Novels are my great love, and they help me step out of anxious, capitalist production mode—they remind me that I am a writer because I love, more than anything, to read. If I’ve reached an impasse but still feel the itch to write, I love reading/watching/listening to interviews and lectures by poets I admire. I consider myself a lifelong student, and spending time with them through their public speech always, always gets me fired up and eager to write again.  

Advice: Write into and through your curiosities until you feel as if you’ve exhausted them. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is writing or how—your work is yours and it doesn’t need to fit anyone else’s mold. Read other poets’ first books, and second books, and third books. Don’t let the scarcity model get in the way of community building, of friendship. Cultivate a relationship to the page that has nothing to do with awards, recognition, or publication. And this is a big one: Only submit your manuscript to presses where you’d be thrilled to have it find a home. Do tons of research on the presses that have open contests or reading periods. What do their contracts look like? How is their publicity and marketing? Will your manuscript go through an editorial process? Is that important to you? Do they treat their writers with care? Ask around, then ask some more. 

Finding time to write: I’ll answer as pre-mother me who wrote and published this book, because new-mother me is figuring this out all over again. My book evolved out of my MFA thesis, and it was the structure and pressure of weekly workshops that helped me write consistently and without much overthinking. Then the pandemic began in the middle of my time at graduate school, and the return home to California offered a new kind of pressure and intensity. The lockdown gave me time to myself, and after resting I took countless online poetry workshops that cropped up in the spring and summer of 2020. It was a period of intense drafting, and I don’t know that anything like that will ever be possible for me again—the circumstances were so unique, almost desperate, because it really did feel for a while like everything as I knew it was coming to an end. I had to write because what if, very soon, I couldn’t anymore? Now, with a toddler, I don’t know what time is. The only time I’ve been able to write has been on a writers retreat when I was away from home and the demands of motherhood for a few days. Those opportunities will be far and few between, at least for now, but that’s just the season of life I’m in.

Putting the book together: I wanted to create an even and balanced experience for the reader. A visual approach helped me see the clusters across theme, imagery, form, and so on. I printed the poems out and taped them to a wall in my apartment. For months I let them just exist on the wall until I stopped feeling precious about them. Then I mapped them using different-colored sticky notes. I identified recurring images and themes—faith, eyes, sex, Sarah, and so forth—and assigned each a color. Poems in traditional and invented forms (like the three “Matrilineage…” poems) were given another label. This helped me ensure that there weren’t too many “green” Sarah poems at the front of the book, or too many “pink” dead animal poems all at the end. It was important to me that the book began by beseeching, and ended on a hopeful note; the opening and closing poems were clear to me early on. I also used the book Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2006), edited by Susan Grimm, which offered a variety of perspectives on sequencing a book of poetry. 

What’s next: Time management as a mother and a professor, and being present for my family and my students. I don’t have the required distance yet from the subject I need to write into to better come to terms with it—vague, but I don’t have the distance to write about it even here. I am working on finding a sustainable path back to poetry and away from the corrosive pressure of publication. I’m also working on settling into a new home in Minnesota away from my family and friends, and getting accustomed to the new rhythms of my life, which looks very different from what it was a year ago. 

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Age: 28.

Residence: Saint Paul.

Job: I’m an assistant professor of English at Macalester College, as well as the poetry editor of West Branch.

Time spent writing the book: Altogether it took seven years to write and edit these poems. The oldest poem, one I consider the initial seed of what would become Theophanies, was written in 2016 not long after the election. That poem didn’t remain in the book, though it revealed my obsessions to me.

Time spent finding a home for it: About four months. I began submitting the manuscript in September 2021 and received my first acceptance the following January.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press) by Saba Keramati, Ward Toward (Yale University Press) by Cindy Juyoung Ok, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press) by Emilie Menzel, and Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press) by Joshua Garcia. I feel incredibly lucky to share a debut year with these brilliant, innovative poets. 

Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali. 

Diego Báez

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Yaguareté White
University of Arizona Press

My brothers and I
stand there aghast,
like straight men or suckers.
Like three gringo amigos
made up like mariachis.

—from “Abuelo Delouses Mister”

How it began: I have always written about language, family, inheritance, and heritage as it pertains to my own experiences as a Paraguayan American. But the birth of my child fundamentally changed my relationship to all those themes. New futures unfolded in the poems through the prism of parenthood. I came to see this new generation as another dimension to the text, one through which I could envision new possibilities, new liabilities, new dangers, and new forms of abundance. What had been a loose collection of poems really catalyzed into a cohesive book, one that wouldn’t exist in the same way without her.

Inspiration: I am especially inspired by the built environment around me. Whether it’s a converted chicken coop off the grid at Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee, or the messy tangle of pre-grid streets that quickly succumb to Manhattan’s rectilinear latticework, I find myself most inspired to write when I can immerse myself somewhere new. That said, the most beautiful places I’ve been privileged enough to visit are los campos outside my father’s hometown of Villarrica, where the landscape is defined by great expanses of rolling hills, birch trees, and sugarcane sparsely marked by makeshift homes and termite spires. I’m endlessly fascinated by humans’ architectural interventions in physical space. This expansiveness reminds me that poetry, too, exists within a particular time and place yet contains the potential for boundless imaginaries.

Influences: Rigoberto González, for his generosity, guidance, and kindness. Jorge Carrera Andrade, for his gift of concision. The textile art of eco-feminist Faith Wilding is with me, often recently, as I poke new frontiers within my own Paraguayan American artistry. I think about “Untitled (Perfect Lovers)” by Félix González-Torres a lot.

Writer’s block remedy: If I’ve held on to a piece of writing for a while and find trouble progressing, it’s usually time to share it with readers I trust. Conversely, if I’m not getting what I need from repeatedly workshopping a piece, it may need to rest with me for a spell. But more often than not I struggle with procrastination, so my problem is not so much confronting impasses as it is actually reaching them in the first place.

Advice: Prioritize presses and publishers putting out work that really resonates with you. Forget about any perks or prestige—real or perceived—that attend the more popular names in poetry. One of the most useful rejections I received was from a contact at a big literary house who passed on my book and cited the “pressures” of working with a Big Five publisher. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, of course, but I’ve come to understand the many advantages of collaborating with a small team of dedicated folks, especially within the interdisciplinary environment of an academic press.

Finding time to write: I write poetry almost exclusively in fits of inspiration that strike around eleven at night. I’ll get maybe an hour or two in before fading. It wasn’t always this way, but parenting plus teaching full-time squeezes my daily writing schedule down to admittedly thin wedges of the clock on any given day.

Putting the book together: I handed early drafts to poet friends and former professors whose opinions I trust and they helped me with big picture organizational decisions, like section breaks and thematic arcs, which allowed me to then focus on more granular moments of symmetry and continuity. There are a few places where one poem leads to the next or reiterates a word, phrase, or image from elsewhere in the book. This was important to me, to create this kind of cohesion. It does mean that certain poems might not make as much sense outside the container of the collection, but that’s fine. After all, the only time anyone will encounter most of the poems is when they pick up or click on the book itself. 

What’s next: I’ve become obsessed with Formula 1 motor racing. It started with binge-watching Formula 1: Drive to Survive on Netflix during the pandemic. I desperately needed a diversion from the horrors unfolding everywhere and quickly found myself deep into the Formula 1 rabbit hole. So, I’m writing a lot of F1 poems? 

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Age: 40.

Residence: Chicago.

Job: With luck, make this planet a better place for all its inhabitants who are not billionaires. For money I’m an assistant professor of Multidisciplinary Studies at the City Colleges of Chicago.

Time spent writing the book: One of the oldest poems, “The Skin,” dates to around 2008. I think the most recent poem is “Punchline,” which was still a blank placeholder page until almost right up to the date we approved final proofs. So close to fifteen years.

Time spent finding a home for it: I spent two years (2020–2022) investing a fortune submitting to every prize, contest, and open reading period I could find. The book got two little nods, I believe, which is nice. When the opportunity to be published by the University of Arizona Press, as part of its Camino del Sol series, presented itself, I jumped at the chance.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Santa Tarantula (University of Notre Dame Press) by Jordan Pérez, Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press) by Saba Keramati, The Span of a Small Forever (Amistad) by April Gibson, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press) by Kinsale Drake, and My Limbs a Cradle, My Whisper a Song (Finishing Line Press) by Cathy Gilbert.

Yaguareté White by Diego Báez.  

Saretta Morgan 

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Alt-Nature
Coffee House Press

This epic has no hero but flesh
              which defies imagination.

—from “Dearth-light”

How it began: Originally I wanted to write poems that described the ways I saw U.S. militarization impacting desert landscapes in Arizona, as well as where and how representations of Black people and our histories took shape in that space of the Southwest. I eventually decided the best way for me to tell that story was to share what it felt like for my body to witness and navigate the physical and affective manifestations of settler violence in those deserts.

Inspiration: Experiencing the different ways people organize to protect relationships with land. Some examples that stand out from the years I was writing Alt-Nature are the 2019 Native Liberation Conference in Gallup, New Mexico, where I first heard Nick Estes speak; the #StopLine3 movement’s Red Lake Treaty Camp, where Amber Morning Star Byars modeled practices for welcoming the day, arriving with trauma, and opening to healing; the NATIVE HEALTH agency’s garden plot I shared with dear friends Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Amanda R. Tachine, and her family in Phoenix; years of collaboration toward Mojave language preservation between Natalie Diaz and her elder Hubert McCord. 

Influences: Ed Roberson for the carefulness and playfulness of his attention to the ambient poetics of Black living. Also Sylvia Wynter and Suzanne Césaire, who aren’t often identified as poets, but I read their work the same way I read poetry. I’m deeply indebted to the frames they offer toward reasserting Black consciousness in relationship to land. This past year I was sitting with a question from the writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi: “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” The essay this question opens wasn’t published until after Alt-Nature was in print, but I added the quote by hand as an epigraph to my personal copy so that I carry it with me and the question informs my relationship to Alt-Nature as it evolves. 

Writer’s block remedy: An impasse in writing is almost always connected to something being “off” with my body, so when language doesn’t feel available, I pay extra attention to my sleep hygiene, my digestion, how I’m dreaming, breathing, and moving. Similarly, when I’m burned out, the best thing I can do is tend to my nervous system through prioritizing rest, nourishing foods, and subtle medicines, like sitting near water or at my altar before dawn.  

Advice: Something I was grateful to be reminded of along the way is that books continue to take shape even after they’re published. Think about the community you’re creating around your work as you write it. Build a space that your book can best arrive to.

Finding time to write: I tend to focus on the quality of my writing time rather than the quantity. I can spend months determining what the ideal conditions are for what I’m thinking through. Is it language that feels most present in the mornings as the light is changing? Or directly following time with family? Or after martial arts training the night before? Once I understand what time and presence best prepare me to express a particular feeling, then I know when to protect time for writing. When the conditions are appropriate and consistent I find that I can do a lot in very little time.

Putting the book together: There’s a poem sequence, “Consequences upon arrival,” that I think of as the spine of Alt-Nature in that everything else is physically organized around it. I also see the poems in that sequence as extending Alt-Nature’s nervous system throughout the book. “Consequences upon arrival” was one of the last poems I wrote, but the process of writing it deeply informed how I revised everything else in the book, and even clarified which poems (there were many) I could set aside. 

What’s next: Right now I’m sitting with, and learning how to listen to, the rhythms and ecologies of central Georgia, where I am a guest for the foreseeable future. I’m making language toward a novel based on my experiences with the U.S. military and carceral systems and thinking about the different ways Black land stewardship intersects with those industries.

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Age: 37.

Residence: Atlanta.

Job: At this moment I’m teaching.

Time spent writing the book: I wrote this book—then wrote it again, and again—a total of three times over the course of five years.

Time spent finding a home for it: Something like three months.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: O (World Poetry) by Judith Kiros, translated from Swedish into English by Kira Josefsson, and Language Arts (Wendy’s Subway) by Justin Allen.

Alt-Nature by Saretta Morgan.  

Matthew Gellman

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Beforelight
BOA Editions
(A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize) 

I want my lips to split
the lit space between the words dance and don’t.

—from “So Much Light”

How it began: I had an intense desire to create order out of the internal chaos I felt as a young person, which I think is the reason so many young poets begin writing. I wanted poetry to serve as an anchor for me, a source of identity in a world where I had never really belonged. Poetry was a means of having an intimate, private conversation with my most inward self, but it also served as a gesture outward, a bid for connection and understanding from other people.

Inspiration: Louise Glück and Anne Carson. My true teachers: April Bernard and Lucie Brock-Broido. Shoegaze bands (Slowdive, Lush, My Bloody Valentine, and so on). Sofia Coppola movies. Japanese woodblock prints. Other queer poets. My friends. My mom.

Influences: Poets Richard Siken and Larry Levis, and photographer Francesca Woodman.

Writer’s block remedy: I try to focus on something outside of myself so I can refresh my perspective and remember that the poem is, at the end of the day, just a poem. Usually this stepping away involves connecting with other people and trying to absorb some of their thinking. I meet a friend for dinner, or call my mom, or go for a walk and listen to music. Then I trust my intuition and let the poem come when it wants to.

Advice: Be willing to write past your own endings in a poem. Don’t stop once the poem clicks shut or “feels done.” Keep the clay wet, aim for surprise, and keep getting out of your comfort zone. When I leaned into uncertainty in my drafting process and stopped only writing the sort of poem I already knew how to write, the book really started to come together. 

Finding time to write: When I feel that a poem is ready to come out, I cancel whatever I am doing and give into the experience. This often means staying up late—I’ve always been a night owl.

Putting the book together: I rearranged the poems in my book dozens of times before it was published. I wanted a logical development and for the reader to be taken on an emotional journey that felt satisfying at the end. I also wanted to make sure that none of the poems hit the same note, especially not in close succession. I knew the first five poems were critical, so I spent a lot of time selecting poems that felt strong while also providing key context for the story I tell in the collection.

What’s next: I am working on a second book of poems that deals with queer desire, trauma, and codependency, mostly in the form of interconnected, double sonnet crowns.

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Age: 31.

Residence: Los Angeles.

Job: I teach college courses and am currently a PhD candidate.

Time spent writing the book: I worked on the book seriously for about five years, but I have some poems in there that I wrote drafts of when I was 20.

Time spent finding a home for it: Four years.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Callie Siskel’s Two Minds (Norton) and Christian Gullette’s Coachella Elegy (Trio House Press).

Beforelight by Matthew Gellman.  

Christian J. Collier

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Greater Ghost
Four Way Books

If only you could’ve felt the tremor, the stars unknit
       from my gut.
If only you hadn’t disappeared,
I would tell you what I have told no one.
I swallowed all I could of you that day,
every bit I could keep down.

—from “Ghost [Talisman]”

How it began: In 2019 I finally abandoned a manuscript I’d been working on for years because it just wasn’t coming together in the way I wanted it to. I spent a week at the Frost Place working with Tyree Daye, and I wrote every day. The poems that emerged were doing things that felt different and interesting, and they brought me into the work in ways I’d not allowed or desired before. When I got home and looked at what I’d made, it felt like the path those poems revealed to me was the one I needed to spend time exploring. Not long after, I got the idea to interrogate ghosts. It occurred to me that all of us live with any number of ghosts; we are always haunted by something. That gave me a lot of terrain to roam, and in the process of writing into that theme, I found myself creating what became Greater Ghost.

Inspiration: Visual artist Mark Bradford has been a huge inspiration. Watching him work and observing the thinking that informs many of his pieces cracked my head open in the best possible way. The idea hit me that if I applied the same lens he used to text, what would happen? That resulted in a range of permissions that completely changed the way I approach writing and revision. 

Music was also inspirational. Minus the Bear, Portishead, Blind Willie Johnson, and more are in the collection, and when I was arranging the manuscript I toggled back and forth between songs by Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, formerly Christian Scott, and Mingus Plays Piano, by Charles Mingus, to help capture and sustain the collection’s tone.

Influences: Tyree Daye, Vievee Francis, Airea D. Matthews, and Eduardo C. Corral are four poets who’ve radically changed the way I see poetry as well as my place in it. I had the good fortune of studying with Tyree, Vievee, and Airea in workshop settings, and each gave me several permissions, for instance: Tyree gave me permission to embrace the more surreal aspects of my writing and to not shy away from the music of my language; Vievee encouraged me to work toward rarifying my voice and the worlds I build in my work; and Airea gave me the encouragement to be okay with being misunderstood. Eduardo was someone I kept returning to in video and print interviews. In 2020 he was on a virtual panel and mentioned the technique of braiding different thematic works and how it can be a great way to amplify the sum of what a collection can say. He also recommended not giving everything away to the reader. It’s important to keep some things just for you, and I’ve carried that with me since. 

Writer’s block remedy: I turn to so many things. I have a slew of writing and art podcasts I listen to regularly. On YouTube I’ll look up craft talks, readings, and so on, to help shift my approach a bit. Reading is always instrumental in shaking the tree, so to speak. Also, doing nonwriting activities has proved helpful over the years. I like physical tasks like mowing my grass or working out, and several of the poems in the collection came about after I went for walks. Those activities give me space to think broadly, and more often than not I end up hitting on something that I can bring back to the page. 

Advice: I think some of the best, but hardest, advice is to not be too eager to publish a book. Over the years I’ve come to know several people who’ve published with presses that had no way of getting books in people’s hands, no platform to build an audience in the twenty-first century, and so on. Is it always exciting when someone finds value in something we’ve made? Absolutely. Beyond that excitement, though, we as authors are the parents of our work. It’s important to choose a press that feels as passionately about what we’ve made as we do and has the means to bring it into the world in the manner we would like.

Finding time to write: The older I get the more challenging this becomes, which I feel is natural. I try to write when I can throughout the day. I’ll write a few lines down here and there and then spend some time at night seeing what I have and moving things around. My wife goes to bed at least an hour before me, so if I have something with legs to it, I’ll read it aloud to get a sense of the music and start figuring out what the next moves could or should be in terms of narrative.  

Putting the book together: I originally intended to put the poems in sections, but after I tried Eduardo C. Corral’s method of braiding the work together, I felt that everything was enhanced [and sections were no longer necessary]. I laid all the poems out, separating them by theme, and then selected one from each pile repeatedly until I reached the last poem. This gives the book a cyclical feel.

Much of my life has been spent making mixtapes and DJing, so I’ve long enjoyed curating an experience for others. I know there is a belief that one should begin a collection with their strongest poem, but I don’t really subscribe to that. I’m more interested in which poem does a good job of introducing the reader to the world I’ve built, so I knew that if I began with “Boot Hill” and ended with “When My Days Fill With Ghosts,” not only do I aptly hip the reader to the place I’ve created, but the first and last lines of the book are in conversation in a fascinating way.

What’s next: Right now I’m in the midst of wrangling my graduate school thesis. It’s exciting to be making an abundance of new work while still thinking through and promoting a book. So far I’ve had a good time living in both worlds simultaneously. 

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Age: 41.

Residence: Chattanooga.

Job: I’m a music manager for a company that has a streaming service for libraries.

Time spent writing the book: Most of the poems were written between July 2019 and the beginning of 2020. During the first year of the pandemic there were about nine poems I wrote as more and more people around me passed away and it appeared that the world was literally coming to an end. I’d say that it took a year and five or so months from when I started until the last poem I wrote for the manuscript was done. 

Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out at the end of 2020 and was offered a contract with Four Way Books in September 2022, so it took less than two years.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Theophanies (Alice James Books) by Sarah Ghazal Ali, Song of My Softening (Alice James Books) by Omotara James, and What Good Is Heaven (Texas Review Press) by Raye Hendrix are some of my favorites. 

Greater Ghost by Christian J. Collier. 

Stephanie Choi

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The Lengest Neoi
University of Iowa Press
(Iowa Poetry Prize) 

Even when she is not here

her hand reaches out 
to brush my hair.

—from “Where I Find Her / Where I Leave Her”

How it began: I started seriously writing poetry after undergraduate, and I specifically went to graduate school so I could focus more on reading and writing toward a book. My first draft of The Lengest Neoi was conceived for Jackie Osherow’s manuscript workshop the first year of my MFA program at the University of Utah. It was pretty daunting to have to put together a “collection” for my peers to read and think about, especially so early on in graduate school, but it was also exciting and forced me to start thinking about how the poems I had written thus far spoke to one another. My peers and Jackie gave me a lot of great feedback, and in my last year of the MFA I wrote and revised to shape the first draft into a manuscript I was happier with for my thesis. Paisley Rekdal was incredibly helpful as well, especially in thinking about the vision and questions of the book as a whole. 

Inspiration: A really important part of the book is the crown of sonnets that weaves the narrative of the American chestnut blight with anti-Chinese policy and rhetoric in the twentieth century. I was working in the sustainability office of Smith College when I learned about the chestnut disease, and a coworker of mine misspoke and said the blight originated with Chinese chestnut trees, when it actually came from Japanese chestnuts. This was a mistake I could have made too, but there was something there that incited the poem—thinking about the rhetoric of invasive species and immigration, specifically Asian immigration. Something about my coworker’s imprecision regarding the origin of the blight triggered the intellectual questions of the poem, which led to historical and archival research. 

Travel is a big inspiration too. Several poems navigate being an Asian American in Asia. I think I became “the lengest neoi” when I was standing in line with my dad and some extended family for Kam’s Roast Goose in Hong Kong. It’s a story that won’t fit in this answer, but it was a moment of mistranslation/cultural humiliation that seared me. Finally, my grandma and mom play a huge role in the book—many poems negotiate my relationships with them. 

Influences: So many, but I think I want to emphasize how influential my teachers have been in the sense that they’ve shaped my aesthetic as well as my reading and writing practices. Joshua Marie Wilkinson was my professor as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. I cannot say I was the best student or poet in his classes but I’m grateful for the grace he gave me, and everyone. He helped me love poetry (originally I wanted to write fiction, or even nonfiction), and he also taught us contemporary poets, which was exciting—to see and experience the possibilities of poetry I’d never seen or experienced before. I quite possibly read my first ever living poet in his class. Paisley Rekdal was my graduate thesis advisor, and I learned how to read and write so much better from her workshops and guidance. One book I encountered when I started to engage with poetry more seriously was A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003) by Brenda Coultas; I don’t think I had the vocabulary or experience to fully comprehend that book when I read it, but it really influenced me. Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) came out while I was an undergraduate, and during my senior year Ocean Vuong came to read at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center—it was not the first poetry reading I went to, but it was the first one I cried at. Finally I’ll say: the one and only Marilyn Chin. 

Writer’s block remedy: I’ve been a runner since high school, and sometimes I work through poems while I’m running—not even consciously. I’ll suddenly have a realization about a poem, or a new angle will emerge at some point around the lake. There’s something about the rhythm of running that stimulates these kinds of revelations. When I feel burned out I don’t try to push myself, I just take a break. I read more and read for fun, see friends, travel, bake, engage in political activism, buy unnecessary pairs of shoes, sit alone at bars, then the impulse to write returns. This is not to say I don’t feel intense anxiety when I’m not writing, because I do, but I try to manage it. Really, I try to balance writing and living, because living is the writing. I try to live a full life—learn new things, see new places, meet new people—so I have more experiences to transform [on the page]. 

Advice: Try to shield yourself as much as possible from the anxiety and laments of other poets trying to publish their first books. Believe in your practice and your book. Be kind to the world and others and yourself. Keep writing.

Finding time to write: I am very disciplined. I think this is because I used to be a competitive swimmer and runner; my body is used to routinely waking up early for practice. And now the practice is writing. I’ve started to do the poem-a-day challenge in April (and October) with my friend, the poet Saba Keramati. It’s delightful reading her poetry every day, even when writing my own feels excruciating. I usually write the most during the winter months and leave the summer months for more travel and fun—recharging. Maybe this will change if I start getting into some residencies! 

Putting the book together: My first three drafts had a really different ordering than my final draft. Ultimately Paisley helped me think about how the poems were speaking to one another, the questions they were raising, and the ways they were thinking, individually and collectively. Though she did not give me specific suggestions on where certain poems should go. I did the whole hang the pages up on a wall thing. I find that practice helpful. The first and last poems in the book are the oldest poems—I think that is significant, but I can’t say exactly why. It just felt right. I did intentionally want the crown of sonnets to be in the middle, the spine of the book. I see the first section of the collection as a sampler for what follows—it intimates all the concerns and questions of the book and includes my range of form and technique. I also thought about how to appropriately space poems with similar images and concerns so that they wouldn’t feel redundant but instead create productive motifs. 

What’s next: I’m writing toward a documentary project and experimenting with some documentary techniques, which has been both fun and challenging. I’m diving into a couple specific histories and archives: the eight Chinese passengers on the Titanic, Polly Bemis, and Chinese communities in the American South. I’ve been researching quite a bit and practicing persona poems. I’ve really enjoyed writing into Polly’s voice so far. 

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Age: 29.

Residence: Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Job: I am extremely fortunate to be paid to read and discuss poems as an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University.

Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the book was written during my two years at the University of Utah.

Time spent finding a home for it: This is kind of a wild story. I was notified that I won the Iowa Poetry Prize the day after I left Salt Lake City to move back in with my parents after graduating from my MFA program with no job prospects. I started submitting the book in January 2023, and it got picked up that June. I know this is very uncommon so I’m grateful the stars aligned for me (thank you, ancestors) and, of course, to the readers at the University of Iowa Press and Brenda Shaughnessy for choosing my collection [as the prize judge]. I had this hope of publishing my first book before I turned thirty and I’m very happy that my wish was fulfilled.

Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press) by Saba Keramati, Plat (Archway Editions) by Lindsey Webb, Winter Here (University of Georgia Press) by Jessica Tanck, The Flightless Years (Finishing Line Press) by Jamie L. Smith, and Chengru He’s second book, a hybrid memoir, I Would Vanish Into Its Stronger Existence (Wet Cement Press). Full transparency, these are all my friends but their books are incredible, and it feels so special to have my book come out the same year as those of so many close literary friends. Also, I have such a backlog of books I want and need to read that I am rarely reading poetry collections that came out during the current calendar year, unless it is my friends’ books. I do want to change this though and start reading books in advance of their pub dates—for reviewing and teaching.

The Lengest Neoi by Stephanie Choi.