book interview: bone of my bone by nicole rollender

I’m curious: what’s your elevator pitch for your book?

That’s a good question to start with because I actually recently wrote a few sentences about what my chapbook Bone of My Bone is about:  Through the half-lit poems in Bone of My Bone runs a troubling line of questioning – what’s beyond this life? – as the narrator contends with death on a very visceral level: “The hip is something/ no longer examined in the light.” In these poems’ rooms, which are like the ruins of a cathedral open to a night sky, the haunted narrator explores the real ways that we take which is ours, both in this life and in the next. There’s a chance to seize at “what is also the divine: There is no saint/without a past.”

How did you come upon the subject of your book?

I was raised in the Catholic tradition and was taught to pray throughout the day – and if you forget, every breath or every heartbeat can be a prayer if you desire. One day, I was reading Blackbird and came upon Malachi Black’s poem, “Quarantine,” a crown of sonnets that follow the 10 movements (Lauds, Prime, Terce and so on) in the Christian monastic prayer known as the canonical hours. These movements follow the passage of one day, so Lauds is a predawn prayer, None is the afternoon prayer, Vespers is sundown’s and so forth. Black calls “Quarantine” a poem “to the possibility of God.”

Black’s poem struck a familiar chord: one of the books that has stayed with me for years is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours. It’s wonderful, thinking of the 23-year-old Rilke writing intense love poems to God, incantations coming to him in “an inner dictation,” as he described it. He had visited a monastery in Russia and was moved by the Christian practice of praying throughout the day. It’s a departure from a God of fear (as is Black’s poem) – and I love Rilke’s self-discovery in these poems: “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.” And, there’s a deep, contemplative peace between stanzas.

But, you know, I don’t really experience a lot of peace in my daily life, as probably is true of most of us. And poet Anne Carson said something that makes sense of this disquiet. I’m paraphrasing here, but Carson described the feeling as walking through your life with an inkling of what’s also running alongside you on the other side, the flame of God, the afterlife, the darkness or light. So that sense of mortality, of an internal straining toward something – St. Augustine of Hippo said that our hearts won’t rest till they rest in God, so is that what it is?

I often feel an internal crying out, a sense of loneliness. So I wanted to portray that journey in this chapbook – call it carpe diem, call it searching, whatever it is you need to feel full. But this struggle happens among the quotidian, and that’s where the book is rooted. As in, you’re taking a walk with your kids and you have this feeling wave over you, that we’re together here so short a time, and yet the beyond, eternity, is endless and unknown. Where do we root?

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 wrote the title poem “Bone of My Bone” when I felt un-rooted. So the poem started with me considering maternal lineage, how I can follow my grandmother, who’s now dead, back to her birth more than a century ago. The poem begins:

I’m my own land, unmanageable. There’s a cross

            road where my hands and lips intersect

with an illumined city’s open windows …

I chose Bone of My Bone as the chapbook title because we originate from someone else and we also put part of ourselves forward, whether it’s through our children, our art, our stories. I wanted the chapbook to be about searching for roots, for somewhere to call home.

Tell us something about the most difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.

My son, my second child, was born nine weeks premature. I woke up at 5 a.m. to find that my water had broken, so we took this eerie, awful drive to the hospital with my daughter chattering in the backseat. I didn’t feel him move for more than half the trip, and I kept thinking we had lost him. It was surreal and terrifying. Several of the poems in the chapbook are concerned with this – what if I lose a child I had never met?

On the drive, I finally felt a flutter in my gut. He wasn’t gone. My son spent time in the NICU, though, before he finally came home. So writing those poems with the cast of how do I look toward God in this struggle was painful. Here is a part of “Driving to the Hospital After My Water Breaks Nine Weeks Early”: “Hold me, Lord / his face as he dies / his winds shake me / shake me through / my body doesn’t move / while his waters / shake through me.”

And the most pleasurable?

I remember December 19 of last year, reading Bone of My Bone in the evening before I sent it in to Blood Pudding Press’ 2015 Chapbook Contest, and feeling like it was done, that it captured for me the idea of carpe diem – and also of the struggle of being an embodied spirit that’s straining toward your God. When BPP Publisher Juliet Cook sent out the announcement that I was one of the three winners, I was elated – I felt so happy this chapbook had resonated with the press. And then, recently, just before I resent the copy-edited manuscript to BPP for layout, I again felt like it was a complete little collection whose poems spoke to the concerns I was addressing. I feel hopeful that others may read it and find a bit of their own struggle – and maybe some movement toward answers.

What’s the best and / or worst piece of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?

The best? Imitate, and then don’t imitate. You probably remember an early writing class where the teacher read you a poem or two, say by Emily Dickinson, and then said, “Write a poem as if you’re Emily Dickinson.” And then you clumsily (or maybe not so clumsily) wrote a poem after Emily. And that advice is good, when you’re a starting writer, to find poets you like and to try out their styles or how they construct a poem. I wrote some pretty awful poems while trying to imitate some good poems – Jon Anderson, Lyn Emmanuel and Jane Hirschfield among them. When I guest-edit or read from a journal, I sometimes come across these types of imitative poems, that of course, give homage to the poet in the title, the first line or an epigraph. But most times, these poems are at best imitative. The other side of this advice is to stop imitating. At some point, your voice arrives. You write a good poem, and then another. They get accepted at some good journals. And people tell you that they can recognize your work. So when that happens, start trusting that voice and honing it. Of course, read other poets voraciously, but don’t rely on that crutch of imitation. Jump into your own abyss.

Here’s the worst: When I was in graduate school, at one of my end-of-year conference with my poetry professor, a widely published older male poet, he told me that except for one very talented woman in our class, he didn’t expect anyone else to publish books. He was right – in the short term. This woman poet in her late 20s did go on to win a large poetry prize for her first book and then publish a second book relatively quickly. However, what I’m seeing now is that many of the people I wrote with back then are really coming into their own as poets in their 30s, publishing their first chapbooks or books in that decade. The point is that developing a voice can sometimes take longer for one writer than for another. It’s a very real thing, writing out all the bad poetry before you can start to create good art. I published my first chapbook at age 27, and now in my mid-30s, have three chapbooks coming out and a full-length collection later this year. So persevere and keep writing, right? Because the best work is to come.

Tell us one of your favorite books you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.

Oh, I’m so glad to mention a poetry book that I love right now. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s gorgeous poetry book, Paper Doll Fetus (Perseus) is a collection of haunting poems about pregnancy and motherhood, and the history of obstetrics, from medieval midwives to early doctors who were pioneering the field. There’s an unusual cast of characters who speak in this collection, like a deformed ovarian cyst apologizing to the woman in which it grows, or a phantom pregnancy speaking to a nun who wanted a child. Since so much of my work does center on pregnancy and motherhood, themes that also figure in this manuscript, and the role this act of creation within the body plays for women in different time periods, I was happy to encounter this book now. I have a review posted on LiteraryMama.com, if you want to learn more.

Can you share an excerpt from your book? Give us a taste.

Sure. This short poem is part of the Christian daily movement of prayers. I wrote all of the prayer poems in the sequence, but only selected certain ones to appear in Bone of My Bone. They still do reflect the passage of a day, or of the way an individual searches continually for a God – and is that God a loving deity, or a cruel one?

Nocturne

Question: If you can’t enter yourself, what makes you think you can enter heaven?

Answer:  There are wolves within me, creatures I’m afraid to name.

Answer: I’ve spread blood on my mouth’s lintel. Death can’t enter this way.

Answer: I hang skulls in the trees. They clink in the wind, death’s sturdy music.

Answer: The resurrection plays over again every night. The stone letting you in and out of the tomb.

What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)

How about: What does your poetry attempt to do? I’m stealing this spot-on line from poet Amber Rambharose: “A mentor of mine told me that a successful poem is ‘someone in trouble singing.’” When I write, it comes from a place of chaos, a place of many whirling and disturbing things. Many disparate things. And I try to make music, a song, from the chaos, joining together the grotesque and the gorgeous. The visceral and the sublime. The dead and the living.

OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to buy your book?

You can purchase Bone of My Bone from Blood Pudding Press. This chapbook was one of three winning manuscripts in Blood Pudding Press’ 2015 Chapbook Contest.

Nicole Rollender is editor of Stitches. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Radar Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot and others. Her first full-length poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications. She is the author of the chapbooks Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio), Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She’s the recipient of poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine and Princemere Journal. Find her online at nicolerollender.com.

Author social media

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ASI_Stitches 

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Writer website: www.nicolerollender.com

book interview: mendeleev's mandala by jessica goodfellow

I’m curious: what’s your elevator pitch for your book?

Where would a Buddhist monk, Iphigenia, and Isaac Newton cross paths? Why would Sarai of the Old Testament write a letter to 17^th-century mathematician Leibniz? What do Wilbur Wright, Remus, Romulus, and Wittgenstein have in common with a fortune teller? What does Schrödinger’s cat know about the blues? Kilroy was where? For the answer to these and other questions, read my book.

How did you come upon the subject of your book?

I was raised in a religious family, but was encouraged to study analytical subjects in school. To balance those influences—trying to be appropriately loyal to both—as a young person I developed a bifurcated worldview as a sort of coping mechanism. One of the tasks of my adulthood has been to try to make a cohesive story for myself without having to jettison too much of my varied and competing experiences.  This book is part of that doomed project.

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?

The book title is also the title of a poem in the collection. I selected it mainly because I love the sound. But it also happens to embody the theme of the book, the balancing of different worldviews. A traditional mandala strives to represent the entirety of the universe in a single picture, while Mendeleev’s periodic table is an organized list of all the known elements in the universe—making it a sort of mandala based on science, on reason.

Tell us something about the most difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.

Identifying the themes of this book was difficult. My other book and chapbook were theme-based by design from the get-go, whereas with this book I discovered the themes midway through the writing process (or more like two-thirds of the way through). It was hard writing from poem to poem, trusting that my unconscious mind had some design I couldn’t access, rather than proceeding as part of a cohesively conceived project. But the book may be (hopefully is) richer for it.

And the most pleasurable?

The most pleasurable part of this book’s journey was when Motionpoems selected a poem from the book, “Crows, Reckoning,” to be made into a short film by L.A.-based studio COMMANDR, under directors Edward Chase Masterson and Alex Hanson. It was thrilling to see their interpretation, which added layers of meaning rather than portraying exactly what I had written (much like a successful Japanese haiga, which is a combination of a haiku and visual art, and which is considered most successful when the two elements do not directly represent the same imagery, but go deeper or add to the other). You can see that short film here:

https://vimeo.com/129687784

What’s the best and / or worst piece of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?

Someone once told me that my writing was too eclectic, that I varied my style too much from poem to poem. A bit of a dilettante, she called me (though kindly). I have to respectfully disagree. While my use of form may vary widely (and even push the boundaries of what is considered poetry), it always serves the theme of the poem. Always. I don’t make choices about form gratuitously. And there is an underlying sensibility that does unite my work, even when I allow voice and tone to vary between poems. The variation and the experimentation are not there without a purpose. I know that, for many people, not having a distinct voice is considered a tell of immaturity, and that may be true in some cases. But it’s not always true: sometimes the unifying voice is there, though disguised in service of the poem.

Tell us one of your favorite books you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.

Earlier this year I read artist and writer Karen Green’s Bough Down, a book chronicling grief after a husband’s suicide, through small (visual) collages and written fragments that taken together approach a lyric essay. The smallness of each piece mimics an interior world that has been devastated, shredded to a manageably-sized scrap that still isn’t manageable. This book deviates from normal forms to recreate an experience, which is what form is supposed to do, crushingly.

Can you share an excerpt from your book? Give us a taste.

Burning Aunt Hisako                 (originally published in diode)

Afterward we sifted through her ashes
with long chopsticks—one bamboo
and one willow, for this life and the next.

The furnace-keeper lifted bone by bone.
“Her ankle bone,” he tendered. “Her left thumb.”
A plate-shaped bone he named “her face,”

just before he smashed it into pieces 
small enough to drop inside a dull bronze urn.
“What are we looking for?” I whispered

as we sifted. “From her throat, a bone
that’s said to hold a seated Buddha.”
From Adam’s rib to this, does at least one bone

from every body belong to someone else? Never
mind—what use are their own bone Buddhas now,
to Aunt Hisako smoldering on her slab,

to my mother’s father sealed beneath a hard 
and glittering snow? Bits of mica, memory 
of fireflies—my own hand on my own throat—

of what use is this thirst for things 
resembling other things, this endless trying
to wring milk from a two-headed cow.

What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)

I like to be asked about the cover of my book. I wanted something that both resembled a traditional mandala and also appeared somewhat scientific. I looked at so many images of various arrangements of the periodic table of elements (to reference Mendeleev, whose table is the one we use today), including circular ones (to mimic a mandala), but they weren’t quite right.

Then I stumbled across Nikon’s competition for photography of microscopic images, and I found a world that was both mandala-like yet with a scientific edge, and I knew I could find what I needed. (Check it out—so many stunning images! http://www.microscopyu.com/smallworld/gallery/.)  

Eventually I settled on an image of a diatom (a microscopic single-celled algae with certain characteristics) that can be found in the public domain. My publisher tinted it purple and rotated it for the cover, and I had my mandala that evoked both ancient wisdom and modern science.

OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to buy your book?

Buying directly from the publisher is the best to way support the press and get most of your money into the hands of people who support poetry. So here’s a link to that:

http://mayapplepress.com/mendeleevs-mandala-jessica-goodfellow/

However, people don’t always find direct buying convenient. So here are links to online retailers who also carry Mendeleev’s Mandala:

http://www.amazon.com/Mendeleevs-Mandala-Jessica-Goodfellow/dp/1936419491

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mendeleevs-mandala-jessica-goodfellow/1121128888?ean=9781936419494

book interview: badass by les kay

I’m curious: what’s your elevator pitch for your book?

Badass is a hybrid long poem set, primarily, in Dallas, Texas one Fourth of July near the turn of the last century. The poem, which uses both lyric and narrative modes, follows a group of working class white men from the suburbs, who are not yet old enough to drink legally but bristle—already—with machismo, as they wander the city’s arts and club district after having missed the holiday’s “official” fireworks. As the narrative unfolds, sometimes as a rewriting of the Gospels, the poem flashes forward and interrogates the story itself as well as the conditions that lead to such stories. It is, in short, a poem about the intersections of youth, whiteness, maleness, and class in America.       

How did you come upon the subject of your book?

The subject matter is semi-autobiographical, emphasis on the “semi.” As with a horror film, I’d urge readers to be deeply suspicious of this “based on a true story” claim. It’s only “true” in the sense of Aristotelian invention.

Basically, one Fourth of July well before I was 21, I did go out with a number of friends. Some people were carrying guns. We did have a half-keg in the back of a small truck that would get towed, and we did miss the fireworks and wander around Deep Ellum because it was “something to do.”

For a long time, that was just a story I told at parties. It was, I suppose, one of those cautionary tales about the stupid things many of us do when we’re young and think ourselves, as the cliché goes, invincible. And in a lot of ways, it was one of the more “filmic” episodes in my life, so I thought it made for fun, if somewhat frightening, conversation. 

Then a few years ago, I discovered that one of those friends became a Naval SEAL who had served, I believe, in Afghanistan. That knowledge, gleaned second hand, made me rethink that story I’d told so many times as a joke, and more, it made me rethink my own story of how I grew up and helped me to continue reframing that story. Maybe there was more to the story than the laugh lines and the then unspoken, but now quite apparent, refusal of who I had been.

In telling that story the way I did, there was always this sense of “but look at me now, so level-headed and mature” with no acknowledgement of just how we became fucked up enough to risk everything again and again. Or how lucky we were that nothing truly horrible happened—that night.       

When I made that discovery, I was a first-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. In my third quarter, I took a poetry workshop with Alice Fulton, who was visiting the university. As part of another class, we read her Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems, and I dove more deeply into her notions of “fractal poetry” through her remarkable collection of essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. I also interviewed her for the journal Memorious, so naturally I spent a massive amount of time familiarizing myself with her work and her thinking. Her ideas about using the page as a canvas, as Mallarmé had, as well as her ideas about how different registers of speech could be juxtaposed for poetic effect, helped me find the techniques to re-imagine and re-tell the story that’s now Badass.  

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?

Like many poets, I often struggle mightily with titles. I’m far more likely to have to try a title on a collection, let it sit for a long while, and then decide that title is absolutely awful. I was very lucky with this one and only went through three titles. The working title was “After School Special,” which I still think is relatively apt and funny, but tonally all wrong. When I began taking the poem seriously, as more than a way for me to experiment outside of the kind of work I normally do, I changed the title to “After School Special: Badass” but started referring to it simply as “Badass” when talking about the poem with my wife, Michelle, or my friend, T.A. Noonan, who are the only people who saw the poem before it was sent out. Then, as I was editing the poem to send it to Lucky Bastard Press, the “bolt” came: just cut the working title.   

Now, I think the title does everything it needs to do. It succinctly evokes that landscape of gendered youth where one does everything possible to give the appearance of toughness and avoid vulnerability, but that title still feels, at least to me, indeterminate and transgressive because who really takes such a term seriously?

Tell us something about the most difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.

Given today’s poetry publishing landscape, you might think that finding a publisher and all the almost invisible revisions that go into that process would be the most difficult thing in the book’s journey. But I was extremely lucky in that regard. I sent the poem to Lucky Bastard Press, and they accepted it.

In this case, the most difficult thing was simply learning to trust the poem and the process that led to the poem. As I suggested earlier, the poem really started out as something of an experiment. I wrote the first draft in 2010 while I was finishing my first year of coursework for my PhD. I revised it ever so lightly, and then set the poem aside, so I could carry on with other projects that were more squarely within my “comfort zone” as a poet and more likely to garner the approval of peers and professors. Even though themes of history, violence, and class occur frequently in my work, the poem still felt like an exercise, as though I was imitating an experimental poet. I carried that impression for years, like a rare strain of imposter syndrome, and didn’t return to the poem until after I’d completed my PhD.  

In retrospect, this is despite the fact that I’d been fascinated for years by verse/prose hybrids across the centuries like Basho’s haibun, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, The Satyricon by Petronius as well as more recent long hybrid works like Ray Gonzalez’s Turtle Pictures and, of course, Gloria Anzaldúa’s brilliant Borderlands/La Frontera.

So in the summer of 2014, after I’d taken my PhD and was once again writing solely on my own terms, I reread the poem. Having mostly forgotten it by that point, I was stunned by how much it moved me, as a reader. It didn’t feel like any more of a performance than any other poem; rather, it spoke to those performances we make of ourselves, and importantly, to the silences that surround such performances. That’s when I returned to the poem, editing it, attempting to focus on the silences, to extend those silences, and to tighten the language and the way a number of linguistic registers might be juxtaposed. I also mocked up the poem into book-like pages, so I could better see the text as a spatial composition using the entire page. That’s when the poem started to feel like worthwhile, not just an exercise.

Because I tend to think of myself as someone who writes with a relatively conservative aesthetic that’s deeply informed by “tradition,” simply giving myself permission to write Badass the way that it needed to be written and to trust my instincts, my ear, and all the “non-canonical” traditions that matter to me was one of the hardest things I’ve done as a poet. And I think that difficulty helped the poem. 

And the most pleasurable?

The most fun I had was during that initial drafting phase when I thought, “hey, why not?” The poem felt very transgressive, and I kept making the narrative more transgressive by grafting one narrative on top of another on top of another until the speaker took a position not unlike Judas or John in relation to Christ. I liked the audacity of such comparisons, of the technique, and of slang brushing up against theory. It felt, for a while anyhow, like another poet writing this thing. I suspect that kind of alienation from myself, from the original story, and even from the version of myself that I initially imagined as the speaker was vital for the poem to work. Because in many ways it is a poem of alienation. Alienation through labor, through ideology, through education, through war.

But the thing is that those unfamiliar techniques, those different modes, and the sheer audacity of the poem helped me feel freer as a writer. They let me say “why the fuck not?” and actually get at ideas and feelings I’d tried for years to convey but hadn’t managed.

What’s the best and / or worst piece of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?

When I was in the MFA program at the University of Miami, I had to take an incomplete in a course during my first semester (which was completed by my second semester). I had gone into the MFA straight out of undergraduate and was struggling to adapt to graduate school. I hadn’t yet figured out that feeling as if you belong is often as simple as wanting to belong enough to do the work to the very best of your ability.

So, just after the first semester, I had a meeting with John Balaban, and he told me this anecdote. An American poet (I’ve forgotten his name and apologize for this) was working on translating the sonnets of Jorge Luis Borges. The translator met with Borges and showed him a few drafts of his translations. Borges skimmed one or two then handed them back.

“These don’t rhyme,” he said.

The translator hemmed and hawed and then explained, “You see in English, there aren’t as many rhymes as in Spanish. They tend to sound artificial and funny to an American ear.”

“Try harder,” Borges said. “Try harder.”

I don’t know where John heard that story, but it has stuck with me for years. We have to try harder with our work. That, to me, is so much of what poetry is and means. It’s a collective way for us to try harder. 

Tell us one of your favorite books you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.

Ruth Foley’s Creature Feature is a really remarkable little book. I was lucky enough to blurb it, so I saw the chapbook before it came out this summer from ELJ publications. It’s a fascinating collection that uses classic monster movies, like Frankenstein and Dracula, to examine—in deft and subtle ways—our cultural ideas of monstrosity and beauty. I really can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s delightful and savagely smart. 

Can you share an excerpt from your book? Give us a taste.

Here are pages 20-21 of the poem. You can see both prose and verse in play and notice one of the (many) changes in register:

 

Hush, hush.

             

                                                            Shhhh . . . 

Teach me the language of stealth

The sea snake strikes

Of serrated blade, filmic violence, 

Tell me how it differs from TV,

To feel vertebrae crack 

In your palms—

To feel Life, pulsing in your palms

As Necessity—cold, silence

Pops open into possible

Capture, your own End

Staring—blackened eyes,

Dripping seawater. Teach me,

My friend, your silent trade. 

Hush, hush. 

***

[By pre-established logic, we should build a passion. Here, a platter. There, thorns. An inversion. A tilted simulacra of the original. Good news stalling in parched throats. Stigmata, looped again and again like the final scene of a snuff film. Broken lives transcribed, refigured—a sort of plastic surgery on the face of history, the rhinoplasty and tummy tucks of the soon to one day be sainted. Tsk-tsk. St. Fuck Up, St. Outcast, St. Believe You Me & the outpouring of one day, the dissemination—whispers, letters, faxes, emails. Until their small bodies are as forgotten as what they said, until their small bodies, broken like a baby possum’s back in the jowls of a hound, broken like a promise never promised, broken like earth. And upon that day, that one day of which we dream, families will drop their spades and halt their threshers, come in from the fields to feast, meager. And families will bless their hollowed names, attempting with a frequency approximating never to live lives of fastidious purpose. Only later, much later, will it be revealed that there was no purpose to their spurious wandering. Only later, much later, will it be revealed that there is nothing to reveal. Bodies of bone, bodies of blood—absence and aporia—they will have become (as we are becoming) the space in which we etch our fictions, the catch in a throat.] 

What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)

I’m not sure there is one, but I was surprised you didn’t ask about influences, so I’ll answer that question. 

In Badass, it’s difficult for me to trace the influences other than those already mentioned and the obvious presence of the Bible as literature. While I suspect some brave reader out there will notice the nod to Emily Dickenson in a few of the lines quoted above or be able to spot tones or strategies from New York School poets—who are incredibly important to the whole of my work—I struggle to see more than a handful of direct influences on the text. 

I do think, however, a number of poets of the working class, like Jim Daniels, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Phil Levine, and even Carl Sandburg had a profound impact on me as both a poet and reader. There’s probably a hat tip to one or more of them in the book, but more than any direct textual influence, those poets made me think it was possible to write such a story and for it to be taken seriously as poetry.

In terms of Badass, specifically, in addition to Alice Fulton, whom I’ve already mentioned, a number of aesthetically more radical poets were on my nightstand as I thought about how to make this poem work. Foremost among those is Lyn Hejinian. I hope there’s at least a touch of her disruptive lyricism and sense of play evident in Badass.

Finally, I really adore Arda Collins’s first book It Is Daylight. In that book she uses double-spaced lines again and again to suggest a kind of endless hesitation. I liked the look and feel of those lines and the way those double spaces suggested silence seeping through what was said. I definitely attempted, in a number of ways, to make silence speak in Badass, and that marvelous book helped me do it. 

OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to buy your book?

Badass is available for pre-order from Lucky Bastard Press. It’s only $7.95 plus $3.50 for shipping. Check out their website at http://www.luckybastardpress.com