This year’s focus on debut poets features ten of the most notable first books of poetry published in 2018. The selected books, which encompass a broad range of styles and subjects, take on complicated and weighty topics—Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us traces the impact of the Partition of India, Tacey M. Atsitty’s Rain Scald draws on Navajo ceremony to elegize and pray for the land, Mario Chard’s Land of Fire reckons with a sense of exile, and Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood and Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency contend with, among other issues, the injustices Black people have endured in America. Each poet seems to address the question Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason, asks: “How much of our aliveness can we bear?” 

For all the gravity of the poets’ concerns, though, there is also a sense of play and invention throughout their work. Asghar’s book contains poems written as riffs on Mad Libs and bingo grids and crossword puzzles, José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal crackles with jokes, and Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin flashes with self-deprecating wit. When we asked the poets to describe the stories behind their books and how they work through writing impasses, many pointed to this balance between the serious and the playful. While writing his book, Olivarez says he wanted to tell stories with an “eye toward mischief.” Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level, says that when she reaches an impasse, it feels “completely necessary to lower the stakes, to restore some sense of play, or to build just for the sake of chasing a question, a sound, or the mind’s movements, wherever it leads.” Other poets describe it as the willingness to experiment—Clark discusses toying with different forms and syntax when she’s stuck—and other poets present it as daring: Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of, advises writers, “Dare to take on ambitious, large poetry projects that terrify you.” 

Whether it’s through mischief or experimentation or rebellion, through anger or pain or the process of recovery, the ten poets featured here all seem to seek the freedom to write without expectation, to eradicate feelings of obligation, and to proceed with a sense of possibility. And this, after all, is what we hope for most from a debut book of poetry: that we might meet language spoken in ways we haven’t previously encountered, that we might, as Xie says, find “wilder forms.” And perhaps the work of these poets might inspire you to play with new forms and move, as George says, “without attachment in a purposeful direction toward what it is you don’t know.”

Tiana Clark, Jenny George
José Olivarez, Jenny Xie
Justin Phillip Reed, Analicia Sotelo
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Mario Chard
Tacey M. Atsitty, Fatimah Asghar

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Tiana Clark
I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
University of Pittsburgh Press
(Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize)

I think about patience     and its stupid song.
I can’t wait—     Yes, I’m always looking     back.

                                                 at my dead.
—from “After Orpheus”

How it began: Survival. The seed of this collection is about poetry as a means of persistence, Black persistence: the extreme hyperbole of Black persistence itself, a tenacious ontological resolve, built and bred from struggle and resistance.

This collection emerged from my MFA thesis. However, after I graduated from my master’s program, I didn’t look at the book for four months. I needed a fallow season. I needed some voices to disappear. I am a deep people pleaser, and I lost my sense of control during the first draft of the book. So many edits were made to make my professors happy and to survive workshop. When I was finally ready to come back to the collection, I had clarity and freedom. I had learned to trust my own imagination again. The book revealed itself to me, and thousands of revisions ensued.

Inspiration: I’ll never forget the advice I received from Ross Gay when he visited Vanderbilt University for a reading and craft talk. I knew he had been a judge for several first-book contests, so I asked him what he looked for in a debut collection. He paused for a moment and said, “Broken shit.” He elaborated that he was interested in a collection that wasn’t highly curated but rather took great risks; even if some of the poems failed, he loved seeing new poets make magnificent attempts. My body slackened—and I took the deepest exhalation of my life. I’m paraphrasing his thoughts, but this notion that I didn’t have to have everything figured out provided a great sense of relief. It gave me permission to be audacious and messy with my work, to make mistakes, to risk making and breaking received forms, modulate my line breaks for speed and surprise, to split a sestina in tercets, to add air with caesuras to a sonnet, to reinterpret “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as my own, to add another epigraph to a poem despite what anyone has to say about too many epigraphs and so on—I say to you: broken shit.

Influences: Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, Nina Simone, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, e. e. cummings, Kendra DeColo, Geffrey Davis, Bill Brown, Kate Daniels, Danez Smith, Donika Kelly, Hanif Abdurraqib, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Jarman, Phillis Wheatley, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, June Jordan, Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, T. S. Eliot, Muriel Rukeyser, Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, Amiri Baraka, Kaveh Akbar, Dr. Houston A. Baker Jr., Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Fatimah Asghar, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Arthur Mitchell, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Rihanna, Nella Larsen, Audre Lorde, Federico García Lorca, and the list goes on and on.

Writer’s block remedy: I allow myself to take a break. I don’t force myself to write when the poem is breaking down or dissolving. I pivot. I read, often in another genre. I listen to music, sometimes the same song over and over (for this collection, it was mostly Nina Simone’s “22nd Century”). I clean or cook; accomplishing a simple task helps me feel like I’m still moving forward, especially when I feel like I’m failing. I take a bath. I watch TV with pleasure and without guilt.

For me, it’s crucial to let my writing ferment often in darkness and without my incessant need to revise and fiddle and fix. After a few hours or days, I’m excited to meet the poem again like a long-distance lover. All this anticipation has built up, and I’ve forgotten what has annoyed me about this person—I mean poem, ha! 

When I’m stuck I try to let my poems reveal themselves to me by experimenting with different containers. I will throw my poem in couplets, then tercets, or a ghazal. Sometimes I’ll employ what Carl Phillips calls the “grammatical mood” by changing tenses or adding a command or a question. With each costume change I’m weeding and slicing my syntax, and the poem can start to tell me what it wants from me. If I’m patient and attentive enough, the momentum of the poem swells and the shape starts to click into place like pushing down on matching puzzle pieces, satisfying.

Advice: Trust your imagination. Be on your own timetable. Ask yourself what you want out of this first-book process. Demand and determine your desires. Some advice from David Baker: “There is no hurry.” Some advice from my therapist: “Everything you want is not upstream.” Have a vision for your work before and after publication. Control your own narrative. Redefine what success means to you. Read or reread first books from your favorite poets. Write your own introduction to your collection. Ask a friend for their marketing questionnaire and fill it out. Trace your literary ancestry. Remember the last poem in your book is the entire book (I learned this from Nancy Reddy). Be kind to yourself and others. Keep submitting. Oh, and read this stunning excerpt from Heather Christle’s poem “Shelter in Place,” from the Harvard Review:

When you write a book you must not

forget to build a door you can use

to get out or else you will die there.

It is very exciting to make a new mistake.

Finding time to write: Due to teaching full-time and traveling for readings, I try to make the erratic and irregular nature of my schedule work for and not against me. For example, I often come up with poem ideas or lines in my car, so I’ll grab my phone and start recording. The major trick, for me, is to not only chase the impulse when it strikes, but to follow up on those notes whenever I can. My writing happens in a lot of intense bursts, so if an idea comes to me in the middle of a movie or during a conversation, I must stop and write it down. I’ve been woken up by a poem rattling through my body a few times too. I allow a new poem to take over my day, my weekend, all through the night when possible. 

I also try to give myself buckets of grace when I feel I’m not writing enough. I remind myself that paying intense attention to the world is also writing. Revising is writing. Resting is writing. Loving myself through my failures is a way into writing. Defining my own relationship to writing is writing.

Putting the book together: It took me about a year to organize the collection. My amazing thesis director, Kate Daniels, gave me the idea for the title, which comes from a line in my poem “The Rime of Nina Simone.” Once she voiced the idea, the bones of the book coalesced in my mind. Instantly, I knew wanted to organize the manuscript as a triptych from the title:

“I Can’t Talk”

“About the Trees”

“Without the Blood.”

This triad structure helped to define the themes and movements of each section and to guide the flow of the book. From there, I decided to shape each section into its own thematic collection like three mini chapbooks.

I wanted to bookend the collection with two poems that dealt with a racial epithet being hurled at the speaker. I began with “Nashville” as the prologue poem because I wanted to set the tone with this frantic chase between Apollo and Daphne, coupled with the speaker feverishly searching the mob repeating, “Who said it? Who said it? Who said it?” The hunt for an answer is at the seam of every poem in this collection. I then chose to end the triptych book with my triptych poem “How to Find the Center of a Circle,” a poem that circles back to the origin of the speaker, as a child, being called a “n—” for the first time by two white boys on roller skates. The wound at the end is raw, yet permanent. The trauma is in the past—indelible—but always fresh in the speaker’s mind, a wound that resists healing.

After the structure was set, I commenced with the floor stage. I printed out every poem and spread them out on the floor, shuffled papers in each section until an order and pattern revealed itself to me like a giant Magic Eye picture. I read the intros and outros of each poem out loud like musical arrangements, and then I addressed aesthetic concerns. I often think about the eyes and ears of the reader. After a long poem, I want their eyes to rest on shorter poem, but I want to maintain a satisfying balance between fulfilling and thwarting expectations. I think of bookmaking as curating a new exhibit in a museum, as deciding how much access I want my readers to have to each poem. Some poems want to be touched, others have a ten-foot velvet rope.

What’s next: I am working on my second book of poems, which is invested in transcending pain and exploring length. I am fascinated with reading and writing long poems at the moment. I am trying to take up as much space as I need on the page and not apologize for myself.

Similarly, I’ve also begun to write essays. The dilation from poetry to prose—letting my mind unspool without compression—has been a wonderful surprise. I have a new essay out from Oxford American, an immersive homage about Nina Simone. I was fortunate enough to visit her birthplace in Tryon, North Carolina, and also conduct an oral history with my family who live nearby in Lenoir, North Carolina, reckoning with the damage that made me. 

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Age: 34. 

Residence: Edwardsville, Illinois.

Job: Assistant professor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. 

Spent writing the book: Six years. The oldest poem in the collection, “The Ayes Have It,” after Trayvon Martin, is from 2012. In some ways, the book started after that tragic tipping point, which intertwines with my origin story in the South.

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

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: If They Come for Us (One World) by Fatimah Asghar, Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books) by José Olivarez, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Julian Randall, Indecency (Coffee House Press) by Justin Phillip Reed, Virgin (Milkweed Editions) by Analicia Sotelo, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco) by Emily Jungmin Yoon, Perennial (Coffee House Press) by Kelly Forsythe, and Ceremonial (Orison Books) by Carly Joy Miller.

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Jenny George
The Dream of Reason
Copper Canyon Press

This is the afterlife, but
I’m not dead. I’m just
here in this field.
—from “Death of a Child”

How it began: The inquiry in these poems is shaped by the question: How much of our aliveness can we bear? Another way of asking that is: How much of our own capacity for violence must we tolerate in order to be fully awake? At the same time, I was very interested in humans’ complex, emotionally charged dependence on animal life and in the relationship between animal consciousness, dream consciousness, and childhood. These threads met in my work.

Inspiration: Fields and rivers; pigs and cows; object relations theory; Texas Hill Country; silence and solitude; Carl Jung; farming manuals; mystic traditions; conversations with my sister; dreams.

Influences: I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, the town where Emily Dickinson lived her whole life. Dickinson’s language was some of the first poetry I heard; that musicality and compression is still very much in me. I love Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich for political work with beauty and formal rigor. And Brigit Pegeen Kelly for restraint and mythic intelligence. I also read a lot of psychoanalysis. I read it like it’s poetry, in other words: to be moved, arrested, brought into relationship with my own interior.

Writer’s block remedy: I remind myself that language isn’t my job. Writing a poem isn’t my job. My job is the human job of waiting and listening, and language is just what poets use—like wind chimes—to catch the sound of the larger, more essential thing. Wind chimes themselves are not the point. The point is the wind.

Advice: All the best advice I’ve been given is some form of the same advice: A writing life is a long process, and engagement with the work itself is the antidote to fear and to anxiety around your career. The practice is to move without attachment in a purposeful direction toward what it is you don’t know. 

Finding time to write: I have a quiet and minimal life, and I work part-time, so I have space for writing.

Putting the book together: I shuffled my poems around fruitlessly for a long time before I realized there was content missing, which was why the book wouldn’t cohere. But I didn’t know what that content was. My mentor Louise Glück gave me some very good advice: She suggested that I discover the missing material by pushing myself to use new syntax, by writing different kinds of sentences than I typically do. Over time, the new sentences led to the new material that fleshed out the book. Then I sat down and tried various orders for the poems. At some point, the poems just clicked into place, down to the final poem—suddenly there was a deep, precise feeling, like a voice saying “Done.” That was an immensely satisfying moment.

What’s next: I am working on being more courageous. I’m starting to write poems again after a period of several years when I wasn’t writing at all because I was caring for my life partner who was sick with cancer. She died last year. Now I find myself asking: What is really crucial for me to write? What is my artistic responsibility—to my own lived experience, but also to the grave, raw need of the world in these times? Who must I be now as a writer? 

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Age: 40. 

Residence: Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Job: I work in social-justice philanthropy.

Time spent writing the book: Eight years.

Time spent finding a home for it: One year.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Eye Level (Graywolf Press) by Jenny Xie, The Lumberjack’s Dove (Ecco) by GennaRose Nethercott, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing) by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Julian Randall, and Half-Hazard (Graywolf Press) by Kristen Tracy.

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José Olivarez
Citizen Illegal
Haymarket Books

i killed a plant once because i gave 
it too much water. lord, i worry 
that love is violence.
—from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains”

How it began: There are a couple of origins. The first was just play. I was unsatisfied with the narratives that were emerging in my poems. The speakers seemed too stiff, so I kept playing with those stories and narratives with an eye toward mischief. The second origin is that I was unimpressed by the narratives I saw about Chicanx people in culture. The narrative the news tells us is so tired. Either we’re model minorities or we’re experiencing violent trauma. I set about to write poems that felt realer to me and my particular Midwestern Chicano experience.

Inspiration: My brothers inspire me the most. All I do is laugh when I hang out with them. I stole all the good jokes in my book from them.

Influences: Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Aracelis Girmay, and Ada Limón are four poets whose work teaches me how to see new possibilities in poems. When I get stuck, I turn to Chicago visual artists Sentrock, Victoria Martinez, Yvette Mayorga, Kane One, and Runsy. I usually write in silence, but when I’m walking around the city gathering images, I’m listening to Kaina, VICTOR!, Sen Morimoto, Joseph Chilliams, and Saba. My friends are brilliant. Erika Stallings is such a great partner: She encourages me to write more courageously just by the way she lives.

Writer’s block remedy: I used to try to write every day, and I would get upset when I failed to keep this goal. And I often failed. I’ve learned that even though writing every day works for some people, it doesn’t work for me. So when I reach an impasse, I go for a walk. I eat ice cream. I call someone I love. I trust myself to come back to the work and try again.

Advice: My advice is to read as much as you can. Write a lot. Experiment in your poems. If you start to notice patterns in your poems, see if you can break them. Be generous to other writers. Remember that ciphers rise together.

Finding time to write: A lot of times I don’t find time to write. I have to reassess constantly to make time to read and write. I prefer to write early in the morning, but sometimes that’s not possible. I try to be flexible about finding time.

Putting the book together: My major breakthrough was splitting “Mexican Heaven,” which I wrote as one poem, into eight separate poems that happen throughout the book. I knew that I wanted the reader to keep arriving at those “Mexican Heaven” poems. Nate Marshall deserves credit too. He helped me rework the sections the night before I turned in the manuscript.

What’s next: Celebrating this book. The next project will come, but I just published this book, so I’m going to celebrate for a bit.

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Age: 30.

Residence: Chicago.

Job: I write. I perform. I teach. I work at Young Chicago Authors, a nonprofit that organizes writing workshops, teaching residencies, poetry festivals, and more for young people. While writing this book, I was also a freelance tutor and a freelance arts administrator.

Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem dates back to my sophomore year of college in 2007, but the vast majority of these poems were written in bursts between 2014 and 2018.

Time spent finding a home for it: I found a publisher before I finished the manuscript. I have a longstanding relationship with Haymarket Books and the editors of the BreakBeat series, so I knew they were interested whenever I was ready to show them something.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: If They Come For Us (One World) by Fatimah Asghar, Black Queer Hoe (Haymarket Books) by Britteney Black Rose Kapri, Throwing the Crown (American Poetry Review) by Jacob Saenz, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco) by Emily Jungmin Yoon, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Julian Randall, and Virgin (Milkweed Editions) by Analicia Sotelo.

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Jenny Xie
Eye Level
Graywolf Press
(Walt Whitman Award)

Desire makes beggars out of each and every one of us.

Cavity that cannot close.
That cracks open more distances.
—from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season”

How it began: Some of the very earliest poems in this book were seeded in graduate school and crafted after a few years’ hiatus from writing poetry. I’d built up a mass of mental knots and stubborn questions, some of which had been born out of my time living abroad in Hong Kong and Cambodia. Others came out of certain appetites developed through reading: the drive to try out wilder forms or tones, to carry out conversation with selves I wanted to invite onto the page, to think and feel my way through certain modes, and so on. I’d also always been interested in sight as a manner of consuming and constructing the world and curious about how we are shaped by visual encounters and entanglements. This was showing in the poems, but it wasn’t until later that I saw the connective thread.

Inspiration: Basho’s travel writings; Forrest Gander’s Core Samples From the World (New Directions, 2011); Anne Carson’s poetry and translations; Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); books of translated Chinese poetry from Zephyr Press; sequences from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and Chris Marker; Zen Buddhist literature and koans; critical theory; and the bottomless complexity of other people.

Influences: There are so many, more than I can name here. Some constants: Tracy K. Smith, James Richardson, Eduardo C. Corral, Li Shangyin, On Kawara, C. D. Wright, Linda Gregg, Brenda Shaughnessy, Anne Carson, Jeff Nunokawa, Ilya Kaminsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jean Valentine, Andrei Tarkovsky, Meghan O’Rourke, Rigoberto González, Deborah Landau, Sylvia Plath, Henri Cole, Sarah Manguso, Sahar Muradi, Vivian Gornick, and Yiyun Li. Also, the work of my friends, which I keep close.

Writer’s block remedy: Impasses often arrive when I’m heeding demands made by the ego. To work through it I find I need to extinguish self-set expectations for how I need to write and at what pace—concerns intertwined with how I anticipate the work will be seen. To keep going I have to strip myself of that layer of self-consciousness and self-watching. It feels completely necessary to lower the stakes, to restore some sense of play, or to build just for the sake of chasing a question, a sound, or the mind’s movements, wherever it leads. 

Advice: This is advice that gets repeated quite often, but I think there’s firm wisdom in it: Take your time, block out the noise that aims to conflate the work of writing with being visible as a writer, and hold out for a publisher whom you have faith in. I don’t regret at all not publishing my first book sooner, and I’m frankly relieved I didn’t send out earlier iterations. I also think that getting too much feedback on poems and manuscript drafts can be inhibiting at times and may lead you to mistrust your instincts, so be thoughtful about whom you choose to show your work to and at what stage.

Finding time to write: It’s difficult to find the time, especially when other demands seem to press much closer to the skin of daily life. Most days it feels less like locating a stretch of time that’s available for the claiming, and more like forcibly insisting on the clearing of space. Since I don’t have the inclination to write in small bursts, I need to be intentional about setting aside at least a few hours or half a day. When I’m off from teaching, the aim is to treat writing like any other work, which it is. This means if I mark off time to write, I can’t go off to run small errands, agree to coffee with friends or acquaintances, sit in front of my phone answering text messages and e-mails, or distract myself by chipping away at random tasks. When I’m teaching, I have to be in the classroom and devote my full attention to being there. What I owe to the students, I owe to my writing practice too.

Putting the book together: I didn’t entertain any ideas about ordering until I knew I’d accumulated enough poems to at least reach the minimum number of pages for a full-length poetry manuscript. It seemed to me a far more daunting task to write poems than to order them, which isn’t to say the latter came easily. 

When I had enough pages for a book, I printed all of the pages and separated them into piles. Some poems had clear relations, some seemed to be in dialogue, and some shared certain affinities or preoccupations. After this period of grouping, I thought about the ordering within these sections and tried to organize with an eye toward the movements across the poems. Thinking by way of film metaphors proved useful; I tried to visualize the “shots” that the poems presented and how they dissolved or cut to ones after. Some poems seemed to be invitations into some space or mood, so I would usher those to the front. Others felt like they faced in a different direction—outward toward some far-off horizon. Those I might save for the ends of sections. Slowly, I began to see the contours. Doubtless there was a good deal of accident and chance in all of it too.

What’s next: At the moment, I’m not yet writing toward another collection. I’ve been putting together new poems here and there, but I don’t know if they fit inside something yet or are threaded together in any coherent way.

In response to this same question, in these same pages [11], Rickey Laurentiis wrote that he was working to access “the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to.” This resonates quite strongly with me.

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Age: 32.

Residence: New York City.

Job: I teach writing to undergraduates at New York University.

Time spent writing the book: Some of these poems had their start more than six years ago, but those were radically revised and rewritten. Much of the manuscript was shaped and written between 2014 and 2016, although I continued to write and tinker with the manuscript until August 2017, when I had to turn in my final edits.

Time spent finding a home for it: I had been sending out manuscript to a handful of contests for about a year or so. It was in the second round of sending out the manuscript that I received a call from Jen Benka from the Academy of American Poets. She let me know that Juan Felipe Herrera had selected it. I was very lucky in that respect.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin (Milkweed Editions), Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco), Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press), Chase Berggrun’s R E D (Birds, LLC), Amy Meng’s Bridled (Pleiades Press), Carly Joy Miller’s Ceremonial (Orison Books), Ben Purkert’s For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books), Celina Su’s Landia (Belladonna*), Soham Patel’s to afar from afar (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s Isako Isako (Alice James Books), Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency (Coffee House Press), Faisal Mohyuddin’s The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear Publishing), Kelly Forsythe’s Perennial (Coffee House Press), Nabila Lovelace’s Sons of Achilles (YesYes Books), Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing), and Duy Doan’s We Play a Game (Yale University Press).

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Justin Phillip Reed
Indecency
Coffee House Press

their whole heavy tongue slack
in my own throat, opiate-slow.
—from “Anesthesia Is a Country You Leave for America”

How it began: It didn’t exist yet. I don’t mean that to be snide or dismissive. I wrote the poems in Indecency because I had not found them elsewhere. I needed text to represent and then transform the way that my body and my many iterations of self move through my life and its various environments.

Inspiration: It’s difficult to whittle this down, as I welcome inspiration from almost everything I encounter. I’ve been prompted to write by social-media posts, news articles, sculptures, paintings, songs, and films (with poems in direct conversation with Alien, Queen of the Damned, The Hitcher, The Witch, and a few porno clips). Most reliably my inspiration has come through reading literature, including essays, novels, and plays, in addition to poetry collections. I’ve found venturing out of my living space and spending time among natural landscapes to be an invaluable, productive practice. My local parks and rural landscapes have probably yielded most of the poems in my current manuscript-in-progress. 

Influences: This may be quite a catalogue of shoutouts. My teachers, of course: Carl Phillips, Mary Jo Bang, Wayne Thomas, Heather Elouej, Desirae Matherly, and Clay Matthews, to name a few. The writers—friends and peers among them—Dawn Lundy Martin, Douglas Kearney, CM Burroughs, Claudia Rankine, Timothy Donnelly, Frank Bidart, francine j. harris, Khadijah Queen, Blair Johnson, Harryette Mullen, James Baldwin, Jericho Brown, Essex Hemphill, Phillip B. Williams, Rickey Laurentiis, Jonah Mixon-Webster, and Jayson P. Smith. In my most recent work, I see the influences of Jorie Graham, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright, Wallace Stevens, Federico García Lorca, and others. Quiet as it’s kept, I’ve been heavily influenced by the band Deftones and Chino Moreno’s lyrics, as well as music by Marilyn Manson, From First to Last, and—perhaps less quietly—the moods of Radiohead and Massive Attack.   

Writer’s block remedy: I revise, and I engage the work of other artists in various genres and media. From the friction between these two acts emerges the magnetism of new work, typically. What keeps me going is a conflict of awe and disappointment. Either I’m writing a poem that I’m sorry to have never read or written before, and/or I’m writing toward a feeling of dumbstruckness—sometimes to construct a similar feeling (the “inspiration”), and sometimes to create a sensation that doesn’t elsewhere exist in my life. I’m not terribly invested, though, in the idea of impasse. I can pass, and I prefer to—to write beyond where I expected to land in the lyric. 

Advice: Be patient and respect your instincts. Write the book you never expected to have in you. Contest judges and publishers, if they are right for you, can wait for that. Take time away from your manuscript and return with renewed energy. Recruit a few invested readers of your work—not many—and hear their feedback. Remember that you’re creating an artwork with which you will, fortunately, have to live. Aspire to a consistent book of poems where each poem puts in work and not for a handful of collections from which only a few poems apiece, if that, emerge. I will attempt to do the same.

Finding time to write: I don’t write consistently, and I certainly don’t write on a set schedule. I was taught that I should write every day, and while I think I do this in many forms, my practice doesn’t include carving out a piece of each day to sit down and attempt a poem. I try to carry my notebook with me everywhere I go, even when I know I won’t open it. My poems typically arrive in seasons. For a few months, I will write a poem every other day; it’s an ecstatic experience, and I live for it. But in the time between those seasons, I acknowledge that each moment has the potential to lodge a parcel of poetry in my mind and body—be it an image, an utterance, a somatic response, a gesture, or a sound.

Essays, though, are a different matter. When I write them, I write feverishly. Essaying finds me in a tenuous state because I’m liable to ignore such necessities as meals and regular sleep, to be late for work or distracted while there, and to grasp for my vices. While I welcome a poem to unravel from the edge of a dream and wake me up, I find a good deal of stress in how unavailable I become to myself when researching for and writing an essay. I sort of resent the possessive gravity of essaying. There’s a want for grace in it.  

Putting the book together: I let a more imaginative, intelligent, and prolific writer, Khadijah Queen, arrange it according to her experience of the poems. The order became a matter of resonance, a sort of ambulance effect of subjects and images. Also, people have asked me why Indecency has no section breaks: I wrote the book during a clearly intentional barrage of state-sanctioned murders of Black people and in a state of personal exhaustion—physical, emotional, spiritual. I wished to simulate that in the object itself, as much as it was possible. There is little pause. The onslaught is reciprocal.

What’s next: My sophomore collection of poems, at least three essays, my intuition, surviving winter, and the understanding that I’m worthy of a lot and am entitled to nothing.

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Age: 29.

Residence: Saint Louis.

Job: An assortment of things that don’t include “gain exposure” and do include making art. I work as a server. I lead community poetry workshops when the time is right. I visit universities to deliver readings and lectures. I publish essays. I sometimes win monetary awards for my writing. All of these contribute in some way to subsidizing my living costs. In my mind, I live to write and to read and discuss writing, so what I do for a living is done to protect and enhance that particular livelihood. It’s largely a lesson in patience and intuition.

Time spent writing the book: In my body? My whole life. On paper? Let’s say three years. While I produced the majority of the poems as part of, or at least during, the creation of my MFA thesis, I like to think that they’ve been coming along for many years, reinterpreting here and there previous lived experiences and struggling for language to articulate feelings I’ve known for much longer than I’ve written poems.

Time spent finding a home for it: According to my personal publication datasheet, I started sending out drafts of the manuscript that would become Indecency in Fall 2014, which would leave a little over a year until I was in conversation with Coffee House Press. In that brief time, it was rejected on at least seven occasions—which, I understand, is relatively slight. Honestly, I felt during that time a distinct paranoia that I would be shot by police or similarly dispatched or driven to an otherwise ill fate before the book would meet the world. I am not exaggerating. This anxiety spurred me to spend much of my time trying to ensure its publication, and it is not an energy that I miss. I wish the circumstances had been different, but of course I would have written a different book. 

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I didn’t read many debuts in 2018 while I allowed myself some space to gain productive distance from the inundating business of contemporary poetry. I wanted to better understand my voice and art as part of a continually unfolding lineage, ancestral and otherwise. Perhaps this is somewhat irresponsible, given how fortunate I am that Indecency has enjoyed such graceful and careful readership in the year of its release, but I also have hope that someone will read it years from now and welcome it then. Likewise, there are debuts stronger than my own that I look forward to experiencing in the future; good reading is timeless. That said, Sons of Achilles (YesYes Books) by Nabila Lovelace is an astounding arrival and deserves your attention. Lovelace is incomparably generous and perceptive, and I’m lucky to live and write in her lifetime.

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Analicia Sotelo
Virgin
Milkweed Editions
(Jake Adam York Prize)

My veil is fried tongue & chicken wire, 
hanging off to one side.

I am a Mexican American fascinator.
—from “Do You Speak Virgin?”

How it began: All I thought about when writing this book was whether the poems were honest in their investigations. While there are many poets I love, I don’t always think of their collections as a whole. I think instead of beautiful, sonic, individual poems and strong lines. I like it when a poem visits me unexpectedly while I’m doing the dishes or sitting around trying to figure out a feeling. There’s an emotional connection that a good, powerful poem can make across timelines and spaces. I often think there is so much more to that poem than the poet who originally wrote it. I think a poem is sometimes a conversation that was so powerful it was meant to continue. 

With this collection I tried to honor the power that language carries by writing first, then seeing what might go together. I like to explore the feelings between feelings, the relationships that aren’t exactly linear. That led me to an anachronistic project through which I wrote from the perspective of a young woman trying to understand love, loneliness, and desire. At times Greek myth, Victorian life, and the Southwestern landscape all arrived in the same poem. I was questioning what has changed and not changed about the power dynamics of relationships. The book shaped itself in the spirit of that transformation.

Inspiration: How a delicious, quiet dinner can make a conversation with a friend go on for hours until, by the end of it, life seems a little nicer. The titles of most surrealist works. Bodies of water. Art nouveau. Thrift shops. Victorian curiosities. Old love songs. New love songs. 

Influences: Elizabeth Bishop, Larry Levis, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert, Franz Wright, Dorothea Lasky, Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson, Lorrie Moore, Andre Dubus, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville. In music: Janelle Monae, Lianne La Havas, Corinne Bailey Rae. Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Bill Evans, or any of the old-timey love songs that are irresistible even now. All the ones obsessed with longing. In visual art, everyone. Clyfford Still, Marc Chagall, René Magritte, my mom.

Writer’s block remedy: I’ve decided I don’t always have to be writing. I let myself live and try to let go of the pressure to always physically write. In some ways it feels like I’m collecting feeling. That’s not to say I don’t sit down and try regularly to get something on the page, but it might not look like a poem. It might look like writing in a journal about what I’ve seen and heard that day. That process helps me feel more willing to listen to what’s possible rather than predetermine what I think I should be on the page. 

Advice: Try to write authentically and read as much as possible; make notes on all of your favorite first books, and love poems more than publishing. Love poems.

Finding time to write: I try to leave every Saturday morning and early afternoon open to reading and thinking. On a good week, I wake up early and make coffee. Then I wait awhile, and I wake up to the world and try.

Putting the book together: At first, I tried to organize the poems as if they were emotional waves. I ate a lot of dark chocolate and drank copious amounts of black tea. I showed the poems to a couple of people, but they were sitting a little flatly next to each other, all the poems about heartbreak stacking on top of one another with very little breathing room. I read books and more books, and I thought about how I admire when a poet’s book has an overall form that gives their poems some space for me to absorb them. When I reordered Virgin, I was doing something labyrinthine. Each section is a path, with the poems in “Pastoral” leading into the poems in “Parable,” and then “Myth,” and so on. I wanted the reader to feel a little lost, but always aware of where they were, just as Ariadne leads Theseus through the maze of himself, only to find herself needing to articulate what it means to love someone that way. 

What’s next: I’ve been playing with nonfiction and fiction, as well as some new poems. I feel very superstitious about it all. My dad taught me one of my favorite clichés: “Don’t talk about the cake before it’s done.” It is one of the only clichés I have allowed myself to love, perhaps because I really do love most kinds of cake. But to give a hint and break the adage: I’m interested in color right now. Color and light.

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Age: 32.

Residence: Houston, Texas.

Job: I work in communications, marketing, and development at a nonprofit.

Time spent writing the book: Seven years. Some poems took seven years of relentless tinkering, some took a few months, and some closer to a week. There were many things in between the drafts, like work and school and relationships. I have so many other drafts I never finished or published that are early versions of these, all in pieces. They’re a mess, but an important mess, because they show me how hard I was on myself, trying to get the poems just right, while not actually being honest with myself or even really enjoying the writing. I needed to trust myself to intuit my way through the process. After I started tuning in that way, it came together pretty quickly.

Time spent finding a home for it: I think I sent out the manuscript for a couple of years, while continually revising before it was chosen by Ross Gay for the Jake Adam York Prize run by Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions. I had convinced myself it could take up to five years to get the book placed, and that I would write and rewrite it until I found a home for it.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I enjoyed Eye Level (Graywolf Press) by Jenny Xie. 

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Diana Khoi Nguyen
Ghost Of
Omnidawn Publishing

n empty hou
se, her siste
  rs dead bel
  ow her; no
  wind, no r
  ain; we st
         ayed
—from “Triptych”

How it began: The suicide of my brother, which led me to look closer at my immediate familial history and then my parents’ histories in Vietnam and after the Vietnam War.

Inspiration: Max Richter, HBO’s The Leftovers, the Mediterranean Sea.

Influences: Abbas Kiarostami and his film Close-Up, Lucie Brock-Broido, Cal Bedient, Danh Vo, Harold Pinter, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eliot Weinberger, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson.

Writer’s block remedy: I turn to other media, schools of thought. I read science texts, immerse myself in visual art and film, listen to avant-garde composers.

Advice: Be uncomfortable. Get lost intentionally. Dare to take on ambitious, large poetry projects that terrify you.

Putting the book together: By starting at the junction of my brother’s death and my ongoing life—and then weaving in familial histories, which include my parents’ exodus from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. I knew I wanted three sections in the book because my parents had three children: me, my sister, and my brother. Even though my brother is no longer with us, I wanted to keep the trinity intact.

What’s next: My PhD dissertation, a multi-modal collection that includes poetry, drama, and multimedia work (video-poems, site installations), all of which will explore poetry as a stylistic mode that manifests in multiple media and activates narratives in both Vietnamese and English as a visionary vehicle of resilience for refugees and children of refugees.

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Age: 33.

Residence: Denver.

Job: Assistant professor of teaching at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.

Time spent writing the book: Thirty days—fifteen in August and fifteen in December of 2016.

Time spent writing the book: Astonishingly fast—four months.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Jenny Xie’s Eye Level (Graywolf Press) and Duy Doan’s We Play a Game (Yale University Press).

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Mario Chard
Land of Fire
Tupelo Press
(Dorset Prize)

What is your name? they said.    
     I am nameless I said.
          Yes they said.
 —from “Renditions”

How it began: I wanted to write poems about migration, war, parenthood, and childhood. But without authority beyond attention or observation, I wrote through personal implication. Migration is still the book’s heart. My mother waited twenty years to return to Argentina after marrying my father in the States—it took my parents twenty years to afford a trip back for all of us, back across the borders. And the truth is we couldn’t really afford that trip, but my parents took us, their four children, and the trip changed our lives. Today I know and work with many people who make regular trips home to their countries of origin or heritage; people who could, this afternoon, buy the first flight out to anywhere. And that, for me, proves the myth of borders: not of sovereignty or nationality, but the myth of their permanence, their precedence. How we often confuse what was given, found, or taken with what is owed, native, or heritage. The book was a reflection of my desire to understand why. 

Inspiration: Memory first. Great anger. The empty space a sense of recognition might fill and hasn’t. But also what has filled it: my wife, Wendy, and our sons. My family. And the greatest poem of exile and migration, parenthood and childhood: Milton’s Paradise Lost. And Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. The trees of Silicon Valley. Straight-line winds in Indiana. The desert outside Blanding, Utah.

Influences: Frost is my first wonder, followed quickly by Neruda. For these poems in particular, Milton and Herbert and Borges. All my teachers, and perhaps especially Marianne Boruch and Mary Leader. Naomi Shihab Nye. My friend Travis Crane and many others dead and many living. The list is much longer.

Writer’s block remedy: The impasse is never with the writing itself; it is with the reasons to keep going. I read Jericho Brown on Twitter recently: “Real gratitude looks like responsibility.” Yes, absolutely. I have reasons to be grateful—many. I was born on one side of a border that people this moment are marching toward from the other side. And what have I done? What am I doing? I have no right to speak for them, but I can listen. I can remember. I can be grateful. And grateful, I am responsible: to my family, to my people. I am responsible to the borders of my body, to my country, and what they will become. Poetry is an expression of gratitude. It is an action. There is too much to learn and do. I have a suspicion that many of our impasses are rooted in ingratitude. 

Advice: There may be only one Pacific, but there are many peaks in Keats’s Darien. I am grateful for those who cleared the path for me. I am grateful for the peaks I climbed alone. I am grateful for advice generally and suspicious of its worth. The conquistadors wept when they saw the ocean. Standing on the same ground, those they enslaved knew the sight from birth.

Finding time to write: With difficulty. Even with reluctance on some days. I remember the writers I love describing their sense of discipline to me: waking early to write, clocking in, and clocking out. I’ve tried both. I even took my briefcase hiking once, and everyone who passed me climbing down or climbing up laughed at the sight. But every day I carry that briefcase: I try. And sometimes I get an afternoon or a morning, and those are good days. And most days I live until it gets too heavy to carry and then I write.

Putting the book together: With obsession and revision. “Caballero,” a documentary poem in six sections, was the central weight. The rest of the poems would orbit its gravity. Sometime before publication, Jim Schley, the managing editor of Tupelo Press, reminded me that people rarely pick up a book of poetry and start from the first page (especially people new to that book or poet). So I knew that if someone were to thumb through it—looking for a short poem, an aesthetic idea of one, a line—the book needed to survive. The poems needed to persuade on their own. I still believe, however, that the best way to read Land of Fire would be from the first page to the last. It begins in the desert and ends in mountain snow.

What’s next: Every night for ten years when I was growing up, my family cleaned a grocery store called Jubilee. I am writing what my family saw there and what we learned. What I haven’t learned yet.

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Age: 33.

Residence: Atlanta.

Job: Teacher at an independent high school.

Time spent writing the book: An arc of ten years. But I wrote and finished the majority of the book from 2011 to 2013.

Time spent finding a home for it: Four years or four months. Land of Fire was a manuscript in search of a home for four years, but the moment I saw its order, the moment after something in me confirmed it, I saw it as a book. I knew what it was. It was accepted four months later.

Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Cenzontle (BOA Editions) by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press) by Jenny George come immediately to mind. Many others I know in pieces and am eager to see their finished forms. We live in a lucky age.