May as well start here. I’m curious: what’s
your elevator pitch for your book?
Garden Effigies explores the varying intersections of desire,
intimacy, and loss. With poems that span subjects such as familial
relationships, celebrations of intimacy, and awakenings into female reclamation
and empowerment, the collection is both lush and analytical, willing to examine
the most beautiful and painful moments of existence. One theme that haunts the collection—that
of disclosure, culminating in the collection’s final poem entitled “Erasure
with Starlings and What Women Won’t Tell You—nods to contemporary
neo-confessionalism, a poetics that delves and breaches the manifold
expressions of human experience.
How did you come upon the subject of your book?
I came upon the
subject of Garden Effigies when I was
looking to dovetail poems dedicated to social justice—specifically violence
against women—with an exploration of matrilineal relationships. By uniting
these seemingly disparate notions, I began to weave a collection that wove the
subjects together in a way that felt culturally enriching to me. Living in a
world where women are stolen and imprisoned—I am specifically thinking of the kidnappings
of women by Ariel Castro, among other such cases—I began to think about how crimes
against women percolated in my own reality.
And the title? Sometimes, it seems to me,
titles can strike like lightning or can be extraordinarily elusive. How did you
go about finding your title?
I appropriated the
title from a poem in the collection entitled “Apostasy Concerning Lingerie and
Garden Effigies.” I did so because the poem seems to take to task the notion of
how women cluster their most painful and ecstatic experiences in an emotional
secret garden, tilling their memories there and tending them like exotic
plants. This seemed to be a productive way to consider how the collection
treats notions of memory, longing, and preservation.
Tell us something about the most difficult
thing you encountered in this book’s journey.
The most challenging
thing for me was yoking together the disparate notions of social justice and
private lineage. I wanted both to illuminate each other rather than cause
minimization or hyperbole.
And the most pleasurable?
Seeing poems with
thematic differentiation come together under an overwhelming architecture was
very satisfying to me.
What’s the best and / or worst piece of advice
(writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?
I think that the best
piece of writing advice I have ever given is fairly pat and regurgitated, but
very useful to my projects: write what
you know. I think that this particular piece of advice can come with a
warning label unless an individual is constantly engaged in research and
extending one’s experiences. Writing what I know feels very liberating to me,
and I often extend and complicate it by considering trope, metaphor, and
creating images that delve at the level of the poem and the line.
Tell us one of your favorite books you’ve
discovered recently and say a little about why.
This summer, I finally
got a chance to spend time with Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec. It has been on my reading list for a
while, derailed over the past three years by the demands of Ph.D. program
coursework and my preparation for written and oral comprehensive exams. The
collection is moving because it considers cultural, familial, and intimate
lineages in ways that feel compelling and seamless. The painful themes of poverty,
drug addiction, teen pregnancy, and familial loss are explored with dignity and
candor. The collection offers a tapestry of depth and range that few
collections these days really harness.
Can you share an excerpt from your book? Give
us a taste.
Sure, I would love to
do so. Here is a poem entitled “Woman, Border Crosser:”
WOMAN, BORDER CROSSER
—In Japanese folk literature, a Kitsune is a
celestial fox that can take on human form, often in the form of woman, girl, or
elderly man.
The vixen trespassing my mother’s gazebo, the
one whose tail helixes in the turn spindles as she crouches by the parquet
deck—will she fit reeds and skulls like avatars over her head at dusk, will she
stand erect then, a tincture of hips and clavicles, though the brush stays
fused to her pelvic girdle?
She’s a body zigzagging between darknesses,
only flirting with space and time as she’s one place, then another.
I’m watching her sashay, not prowl, toward the
storm-fractured pine trees bordering the yard, then turn back, as though her
secret’s already slipped into pantyhose, flattened and cinched into a pretense
of spine.
Fox by day, woman by night. I want to watch her
lure any man not inoculated against her beauty into fever, watch him grow
lacerations of desire like seeds of Spanish moss winded or carried by birds,
watch him thrash under the fate of her body still swathed in almond-colored
organza.
I want to watch her decide between eating his liver, unfolding the russet lobes like leaves of
artichoke, tonguing long strips of his heart trimmed and seared in shallot oil,
or letting him lift her hips in his car seat’s sun-bleached suede.
She’s what I mean by woman, not transformation.
He’s what I mean by man misled by pleasure, thighs glistening like bitten star
fruit.
So what if he closes his eyes, grasps her
flushed belly, so what if her tail is unraveling into a bolt of lightning?
She’s only waiting for him to come so hard she disappears.
And then by his front axle, he’ll see the red
plume loitering as she’s loitering now by the gazebo, my eyes still caressing
her, dandelion florets catching in her fur. What do I call this border crosser,
this parable once awkwardly concealed in stilettos, now running at full
throttle? Her hocks and hind feet, translucent in her wake, are kicking up
names and dust.
What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how
would you answer it?)
What is your favorite
gustatory writing muse? My answer: sea salt dark chocolate, especially if the
salt used is Fleur
de Sel. J
OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to buy your
book?
Thanks so much for
saying so! You can buy my chapbook at the Dancing Girl Press website linked
here: http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/garden-effigies-sara-henning
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