Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

I

Hear Santa’s sleigh with the bells-

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they forecast joy that’s coming,

In the dis-play at the mall.

While the stores with music thrumming,

And the Christmas carol humming,

While it’s barely even fall.

Spending cash, cash, cash.

Though my purchases seem rash,

It’s that time of year when my credit card bill swells.

All the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells.

II

Hear the song, “Jingle Bells”—

Catchy bells!

What a tale of Muzak, now, their repetition tells

As I rush to do these chores!

Countless presents, countless stores.

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of my folly,

In a mad interpolation demanding I stay jolly,

Making my skin feel crawly

With a new hatred of holly

And a resolute desire

To shout at Target’s newest hire.

Awful bells, bells, bells.

What a tale their inanity tells

Of despair!

How they clang and ring and roar.

What cloyingness they outpour

On the bosom of the nutmeg-scented air.

And my heart distinctly tells,

How desperation sinks and swells,

As they knell, knell, knell,

All the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells.

While the stores with music thrumming, And the Christmas carol humming, While it’s barely even fall.
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III

Hear the tolling of the bells-

The doorbells!

What a world of frustration their interruption tells!

In the silent calm of night.

Oh, carolers! I feign delight

At the sentimental blitheness of their tone.

For every song that floats

From their cozy, be-scarfed throats

Recalls my own

Forgotten joy.

Now my grown-up heart’s a stone.

I never dream of sugarplums,

Only of Amazon orders that never come.

And with all the songs about Noels,

My forced smile grows so numb.

Why isn’t this eggnog spiked with rum?

To the Salvation Army bells,

“I gave last week!” I yell.

To the reindeer with the bells,

I turn the other way and run,

And their king is he who knows,

And he “ho, ho, ho’s”

From the North Pole where he dwells.

And the jollity he compels

Never wanes but only swells!

Forget the exhaustion it impels,

I must obey the bells,

All those bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells.

Oh the jingling and the jangling of the bells.

Every day this fall, as push alert after push alert described another powerful man’s history of sexual abuse, I turned to the women.

To the stories of victims, yes, but also to the stories and work of women whose voices, over the years, had managed to transcend the forces determined to ensure their silence. Reading Maggie Nelson’s lyrical meditations on motherhood or Michelle Alexander’s unparalleled text on mass incarceration allowed me to live in a world where women could be the final voices dictating our culture’s conscience.

I was able to carve out a small world—a refuge, rather — away from the news’ daily re-traumatization. It gave me the strength to read these harrowing stories of abuse and focus on the power of bringing these experiences out of darkness, rather than succumbing to despair.

Among the women I chose was Anne Sexton, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and guiding light for the mentally ill. Her poetry pulses with confession and feminine rage, a welcome change from the disingenuous apologies and intellectualized discussions of pain that were permeating public discourse around sexual assault.

She won the Pulitzer in 1967 for her book Live or Die, which was released in 1966. At the time, she was only the tenth female poetry winner in the Prize’s 50-year history. Her poetry illuminated the powerful complexes within relationships and psyches during a time when Western culture was beginning to acknowledge the darkest parts of its own structure. Between the Civil Rights movements and the Cold War, with the horrors of the Holocaust still reverberating through contemporary life, the West was confronting myriad monsters of its own making.

Sexton’s poetry was marked by this same energy, but turned that gaze inward.

As a result, she also had the rare luxury of receiving cultural praise and support as she produced her work; Sexton’s power was not lost on her contemporaries. She was a true poetry star. Her poems themselves spoke of marriage, suicide, love, Sylvia Plath, and, perhaps most potently, about her daughter Linda Gray Sexton.

By speaking to Linda directly, her roles as parent and artist intertwine and we can read the powerful bond between mother and daughter. The mother as protector and shepherd; the daughter as an individual and psychic extension.

In one example, the poem “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman,” Sexton writes:

“What I want to say, Linda,
is that women are born twice.
If I could have watched you grow as a magical mother might, if I could have seen through my magical transparent belly, there would have been such ripening within…”

Her poems to Linda depicted a mother cherishing her daughter and seeing her as a woman in a world that has a tendency to abuse them.

In another poem—”Pain for a Daughter”—she writes of an unspecified daughter. It is perhaps Linda or her other daughter, Joyce, or even just the idea of a child — and that daughter’s existential burden.

“Oh my God, help me! Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
She bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out…
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment, in her own death and I knew that she
knew.”

Sexton is able to trace her daughter’s transition into the chaos of life as well as articulate her premonitions of what was to become a lifelong grief. The personal and intimate demonstrations of love in her work touched and invigorated me. Even when Sexton wrote about isolation and terror, her words served as a potent and tangible reminder that a depth of spirit and a courting of resilience could counter that fear.

But as I read more poems, I sought out Sexton’s story, and discovered she sexually abused Linda. The tender, passionate, and illuminating words I had carried so tightly in my heart was radiating from someone who committed one of the darkest acts of humankind. I reeled from the new information. My affection towards her poetry began rotting under my skin.
The story of abuse first became public in the early ‘90s. Sexton had spent a significant amount of time in intensive therapy and all her sessions were recorded. Dr. Michael Orne—the psychiatrist who made the tapes—eventually released them to Diane Wood Middlebrook, who included the information on the abuse in her 1991 National Book Award-nominated biography of Sexton.

The inclusion of the tapes elicited concern and outcry from the psychiatric community at the time. In a New York Times article leading up to the book’s release, a Columbia professor and expert on medical ethics described Dr. Orne’s actions as a “betrayal of his patient and his profession.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Dr. William Webb, an ethics consultant for the American Psychiatric Association at the time, said, “Unless you have the explicit approval of the patient, then you are essentially operating on supposition, and supposition puts at risk all future patients of psychiatry.”

Publicizing the contents of Sexton’s therapy sessions was both unethical and illuminating. It contextualized her poems on depression, mania, and suicide and told stories of extramarital affairs. It also, crucially, revealed the abuse she committed against her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, the very same Linda to whom she wrote that women are born twice.

It was also abuse that Sexton, at the time, didn’t believe was abuse. In Middlebrook’s biography, Linda explains a time when she attempted to establish boundaries between herself and her mother. Middlebrook wrote that Sexton “resisted the changes,” and “reported to Linda that her psychiatrist said there could never be too much love between parent and child.”

Linda lived as an avatar to Sexton’s desires.

The tender words I had carried so tightly in my heart was radiating from someone who committed one of the darkest acts of humankind.
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And yet, Linda is one of the people who believed it was appropriate to release the therapy tapes. At the time, she had already become her mother’s literary executor. She consented to revealing the truth of her mother’s past — including stories of abuse directed at her — to the world. She took to the New York Times Book Review to add context to why she chose to allow the tapes to become public. She spoke about the events not to shed light on her history of pain but, instead, because “these aspects would be critical to understanding her poetry, so clearly inspired by the events of her life.”

“Anne Sexton never spared her family — not in her art, not in her life,” Linda went on to say.

It’s her art — the confessional, depressive, feminine poetry — that also allowed American culture to keep Anne Sexton in the pantheon of poetic greatness despite the realities that unfolded during her life.

With every topple of an artistic great, with every revelation that a creative genius has used their power to abuse another, we lose something. But it is not just the joy of enjoying their art—which is where many people focus their grief—but the loss of the victim’s potential to create. And because the statistics of rape and sexual assault demonstrate how the danger predominantly affects women and trans and nonbinary people, the victims’ whose potential we lose are the very groups who remain profoundly underrepresented in art.

How many people have lost the opportunity to change the world—to shape it with their creativity—because an abuser had traumatized them and forced their dreams to give way to suffocation?

And how many people rationalized their own suffering because an abuser’s art served as justification to give up their own body, story, soul?

Linda speaks of her own abuse as cursory information to the real story, the genius of her mother’s words. She gives her own self away for the sake of a poet who writes at the altar of personal confession. The story of her life remains caged by the trauma she experienced.

In the aforementioned Times Book Review essay, Linda said:

“To speak publicly of my mother’s sexual abuse of me was agonizing. Yet as I read through the nearly completed manuscript, I began to recognize that — as with everything in my mother’s life — her daily life was inextricably bound to her work…The only way to transcend the hurt is to tell it all, and to tell it honestly.”

And yet, when she writes her own memoir in 1994, the story is of how she survived, thrived, hurt, and loved as Anne Sexton’s daughter. As much as Linda works and writes to rid herself of the pain, she is not free of its existential weight on her narrative. Sexton’s poetry may offer its readers freedom from isolation—and it may have offered Sexton herself freedom from some of her darkest impulses—but her work and her life controlled Linda’s long after she died.

Facing the realities of Sexton’s actions, I felt my heart selfishly and hypocritically grip even tighter onto the poetry I had read. It is far easier to reject the art of a man who so clearly takes up more space than needed. Rejecting one of a few women who managed to dominate a world intent on shutting women out felt like an act of self-inflicted pain.

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How many people have lost the opportunity to change the world because an abuser had traumatized them?
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When there is little room for the art of women or people of color, the exceptional artist who manages to climb to the top takes on an air of untouchability. We don’t want to examine our heroes.

Toppling a woman, however abusive she is, feels final. Like a death. Believing Sexton to be a voice I couldn’t sacrifice, though, and therefore ignoring her real-life actions, is a more vicious act than forsaking her. It reflects the scarcity mentality of a culture that props up abusers, and, more broadly, a culture that props up oppression.

Rather than looking to the countless other poets who have written work that could speak to me, I found myself wanting to justify her specific words in my life, as if they held some special power no one else could provide. I was operating in the zero-sum game oppression fools us into believing is the only way to live.

One of art’s greatest powers stems from making the invisible visible; the intangible tangible. But when an artist renders another person invisible, and their feelings intangible, the virtue of the art ceases to exist.

To pride an artist’s art over their human interactions is the pinnacle of self-absorption — it privileges that in which we see ourselves, rather than the empathy to see another human being. Before letting go of Sexton’s work, I was claiming my feelings of reflection and connection took primacy over the suffering of another human being. But the accolades for and popularity of Sexton’s poetry means she wasn’t alone in her feelings, and in turn, neither are we; as such, we do not need to identify with an abuser in order to legitimize our psychic realities.

Looking to an abuser’s art denies any other work the opportunity to move us, affect us, and change our lives. It is communing around something with hatred at the center of its core — hatred for others, hatred for ourselves — and keeps culture trapped in a horror of its own making.

Sexton’s story is ultimately one of destruction; she died by suicide at age 45.

Her abuse towards others was inextricably linked in her own irreconcilable pain, and it’s possible her art really was enough of an emotional outlet to prevent an earlier suicide or further abuse towards others. But to elevate it outside the realm of humanity and separate it from the hands that created it implies that the art itself is worth both Sexton’s mortal anguish and the anguish she embedded into the life of her daughter.

It implies that art in general is worth the pain, suffering, and abuse that may exist in its orbit. In reality, the exchange is the opposite; life is what makes art worthwhile, not the other way around. Art exists for humanity to propel itself into power. Keeping abusers in power pushes humanity further into the shadows.

The thing about poetry is that it’s kaleidoscopic, protean, malleable. It’s an art form often very open to projection; what one wants to see is often what one might see. Unlike prose — which, arguably, is exponentially more interested in conveying a clear idea or image — poetry is delightfully layered and fractured, inviting interpretation like a beautifully wanton stare.

This is not to imply that the poet doesn’t have a crystalline agenda, a maybe-convoluted but meticulously rendered journey that they’ve honed and polished with the maniacally deft precision of a master watchmaker.

This is all to say that one doesn’t typically get to float their interpretations to the poet-wizard behind the curtain; usually us logo-philic peons are left wandering the shoals of a poet’s brilliant wordscapes, never quite knowing just what they meant.

It’s a blissful ignorance, but an ignorance nonetheless.

But 2018 has already granted me a tremendous gift; I’ve been able to read a tremendous collection of poetry — behold the glory that is July Westhale’s Trailer Trash — and converse with the aforementioned poet-wizard about all my quandaries, all my grief, all my admiration.

When pressed to talk about how this book came about, July insists that “art is very clever — it happens unconsciously, writing does.” She says that she was actually writing a very different collection about historical figures — Virginia Woolf primarily — when she received a fellowship in 2015 at the Vermont Studio Center.

She sat herself down on the floor, fanned the pages and pages of poems around her, and began indexing everything.

Suddenly she realized, “this was not a book about Virginia Woolf, it was a book about ’80s and ’90s Southern California chemical warfare and poverty. I had spent three years on this manuscript before that, but once I realized what it was really about, it took me a month to finish. I knew exactly what to do with it.”

Trailer Trash is distinctly July’s story — a harrowing tale of grief, childhood, and loss. But it’s also about America, God, and poverty; the collection nimbly toggles, with the grace of a feral cat, between the “I” and the Universal. “You want your readers to be asking questions,” July told me.

And we are.

What can poetry do for a memory that prose can’t? For me, I have always been obsessed with rendering the truth as beautifully as I can — meaning there are decided boundaries that I have to operate in. I need those boundaries. With poetry, storytelling seems boundary-less in that, to me, when you are Telling a Story or Describing a Memory you can render it exquisitely in so many ways. How on earth do you decide how to tell it…

JULY:

I would argue that poetry — at least in its inception — was actually the most boundaried art form. The fundamental difference between poetry and prose is the white space.

One of the things about canonical poetry — although it’s primarily old white men — is that it teaches you how to break all the old rules.

This book has a lot of religious existential crisis. I grew up in the southern baptist church tradition. Hymns are written in ballad forms. Rhyme and meter create hypnosis in the body. What I love is understanding rhyme and meter and poetic forms as they traditionally exist…but using radically different content. Write a sonnet about fisting someone — that juxtaposition.

Image has always been my greatest strength and my greatest weakness — my mentor in grad school use to call me a metaphor making machine. It’s poetically useful in that I think a lot about the world in the ways one thing represents something else. But if you just have something that’s made up of images there’s no there there.

The thing about poetry too is that it’s very economical. You have to figure out how to go a long way with very little. Everything is extremely intentional. Words aren’t there by accident.

‘Poets are really amazing liars.’
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Are you a dogged 3-hour-a-day writer/thinker or do you dash things off on napkins and notebooks as they come to you? Or are you somewhere in the middle…do particular feelings or stories gnaw gnaw gnaw at you to be told? Is poetry a purging?

I do journal a lot…and I do believe in a pretty well-worn path of getting the junk out of your brain. And I go through periods of hyper-productivity — intense reading and then intense writing. I do write a lot. I am prolific. The vast majority might not be good, but that’s not the point.

I will say, I’m a neurotic person — everything has to be just so. Down to the pencil. Right now I am in a period of intense writing. This last year was amazing in terms of publications, but it was so focused on editorial, marketing, tour planning — it didn’t leave a lot of bandwidth to create new stuff. I don’t know what’s coming next. I guess I’ll just start writing now and then I’ll know in a couple years what it will be about…

I’m always curious when folks write memoir — and indeed “Trailer Trash” feels like a deeply personal and familial collection. How much restraint do we “owe” to those in our life that we write about? When are our stories our own to tell?

This is an issue I will have to sit down with when I write memoir. These poems are autobiographical, but they’re still poetic representations of it…they’re still translations of experiences.

Even though I write a lot about people in my life that are living, like my sister…a lot of people I am writing about are not living. Honestly this is a bigass book about my mom. And she’s not living. A lot of these memories exist through the dishonesty of hindsight. I also experience some privilege in that the people in my family don’t really read. They’re just not readers. So there’s a lot of privacy for me — that is both exciting and a bit heartbreaking.

Richard Hugo says in Triggering Town, “you owe your emotions everything and the truth nothing.” You’re not writing a news report. But don’t be an asshole.

Our stories are always our own to tell. Folks who are marginalized already have enough people telling them not to speak or erasing their words. I don’t want to live in a world where people are telling other people not to tell their stories…

I mean, christ, me either, but I still kind of lose sleep about it.

So…how much time does this collection represent? What was the most difficult and wonderful thing about this book of poems? How do you know when you’re “done”?

The whole collection in total took about three years. The most difficult thing about this book was actually the editorial process with the editor — Ann Dernier — who is an amazing women. When the manuscript was accepted she said, “I’m going to work with you”…and she really pushed me in a couple of poems to expand into broader meanings.

A lot of the poems were more finished than others, which is an arbitrary allocation but…the ones she was pushing me to edit were the ones that were the most emotionally difficult for me, which makes sense right? When you’re close to something you can’t write it in the same surgical way — it’s nothing that’s imagined or distanced.

Retelling the story of when I heard my mother had died [in the poem “Dead Mom,” or “How News Travels in a Small Town”] was excruciating for me. I was trying to write a la Szymborska’s poem “Identification.” Ann kept pushing me and pushing me and the result is great, but it’s not a poem I’ll read at readings. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again. It’s the one poem I’ve ever written that feels like too much.

And the best part….?

The best thing about the book for me is that it’s a book about class. Poetry is often considered to be an academic sport. An elitist sport. Something that belongs to people with privilege even though in America we have an amazing canon of poets who write about work. Like Philip Levine. I feel extremely proud and excited that my first full-length collection is all about a very specific kind of wrecked and ravaged agriculture — a kind of poverty that exists in abundance in this country.

What kind of child were you? I know a bit from reading your essays, but did reading play a role in escaping what seems to be a goddamn difficult childhood? I think for myself, escaping, or immersing in books, felt very different than realizing I could write myself. And in truth, writing is the opposite of escaping for me. It’s delving. When did you know you wanted to write? What’s your relationship to words?

I was a strange child. Dreamy and very much in my own head. The white space around me was filled with grief. There was very little I did or could do to alleviate that. I had imaginary horses and I would charge people to ride them. I was six. My [adoptive] mother made me give the money back but…I think there was an aura around orphans which was driven by the media at the time. A lot of the mainstream characters in ’80s and ’90s literature were orphans…which isn’t so anymore.

No one wants to hang out with [orphans]…but they’re also powerful. My mother died in 1991. Time marches forward. I was like one of those plants that grows around the cement instead of smashing through it.

I got my love of reading from my birth mom…I think that because I had a really rough childhood, especially my early childhood, I was expected to be an adult a lot of the time — the adults were not doing a great job of being adults. Reading was absolutely an escape.

Reading became a thing that was mine — it was a hangover from my life with my birth mom that I brought to California with me.

I would love to talk about specific moments and themes in some of the poems themselves…

The opening poem — “Ars Poetica” — is just gut-wrenching…it’s one of my favorites in the collection.

It feels so beautifully loaded, all wrapped up in this gauze of the Fairytale. Love has betrayal baked into its guts I suppose. I also feel as though one self is murdering another self? Which is perhaps something we all do, but maybe without that seemingly cruel level of calm. How much do you think about the first poem setting the tone for the entire book?

Excerpt from “Ars Poetica”

One would like to see oneself walking through the forest as two girls/ along a creek, the golden carp under the ice like blurred poppies.
The tall, hooded girl will extend a basket, offering bread and water, a kindly/ face and a thick cloak…

We can assume systemically — not anecdotally — that all choices in a book are intentional. This is a kind of poetry manifesto. The poem is about two girls walking in the woods. They both share some of the same resources — it’s a beautiful setting, and then…that’s the way the poetry process works. Things work until they don’t.

I guess that writing and brutality go hand in hand in ways that we don’t want to admit. This poem is almost like a legend — it’s not a disclaimer and it’s not apologizing, but it’s a way to read this book.

Excerpt from “Tomato”

… “Once I was a hothouse gone to seed
in a trailer park in Blythe, the sky
vermillion in airlessness, in suffocating
sunsets of dust and pesticides,
our food dead and gone. The dinner table
was the color of a beetle trapped in sap.”

Can you talk a bit about the evolving role of religion and faith in your life…there is a tremendous amount of religious wrestling and imagery in this collection.

Excerpt from “Crop Dusters”

…Our melon fields have been blessed by the Lord.
We and our canals are filth waiting to be turned to loaves.

The role of religion is one that is complicated, but complicated in the same way that it’s complicated for anyone who is raised religiously. I feel grateful to the church for rhyme and meter and reverence and music and sound.

I’m not a religious person myself, but I think the presence of it in this book is actually more about the ways in which religion and poverty go hand in hand. We live in Christian country and many poor agricultural rural parts of this country are extremely religious.

In rurality, everything is amplified.

Violence in these rural plains settings — like the brutality and anguish of the murder of Brandon Teena [the young trans man who inspired the film Boys Don’t Cry] in Nebraska — affect us in a way that it wouldn’t have set against the skyscrapers in New York City. We assume there will be violence in a city. It’s not that we’re desensitized…but. We have a false sense of security.

I am trying to parallel this idea of faith and whatever God is…and say it’s more resonant and more omnipotent in rural places because of the amount of actual space that faith can take up. But also in the fact that rural places mean poverty and poverty comes with an assumed sense of devote-ness. The world isn’t giving you anything…so that must be the lord’s way.

I want to show how religion and poverty inform and touch upon one another in a way that is so starkly American.

This poem feels like a kind of forgiveness, which again, feels like a return to a kind of faith, to a kind of religiosity. This idea of people formally and publicly receiving forgiveness for their sins…

Excerpt from “Saguaros”

Blythe rises in welts.
It pinches California and my mother,
the menstruating horizon between the two….

For truth, I say I remember
this mother, the mother of my nights
bringing home a jackrabbit,
pulling a tooth trap from its pelage to slit
the pregnant belly, knowing
the body to be a stasis and the desert a hell,
and the knife the only bridge between the two.

This entire book takes place in the desert. If we’re talking about the ways that landscape can highlight emotion…the desert is a place where you live or die. You better be prepared to inhabit this entirely uninhabitable place for humans.

And that’s a helluva thing to be brought into. But I still feel at home in the desert.

The desert is really volatile. It can change temperatures radically in just a few hours. It can be completely clear and full of light…and then suddenly pouring. Nobody does thunderstorms like the desert.

When insects sing in the desert it takes up everything. Frogs and crickets and coyote in the desert — just the sheer volume of it. There is so much out there that is able to yell that you haven’t seen! It’s not insignificant that the relationship between the speaker and mother is all about survival.

The odds are against your survival.

This collection is chock full of menses and menstruation. Why/how does all this uteral lining play such a poignant role in this collection? How does it — besides literally — dovetail with motherhood? With your own potentiality as Mother?

Excerpt from “Etiquette”

My granddaddy is a man of God.
He drove a busted truck, the color
of menses, through Death Valley.

As for menstruation…I think that these are visceral things we’re talking about and they deserve something visceral. There is unrealized potential in periods.

My mother was bedridden the entire 9 months and gave birth alone. It’s incredible to me. She wasn’t with my stepdad and my family didn’t even know that she was pregnant. She was very estranged from my maternal family. They were very WASPy and didn’t talk about things and I have the feeling that my mother was someone who DID talk about things…

Men. Holy moly. WHAT DO WE SAY ABOUT THE MEN IN OUR LIFE DEAR JULY. But this poem felt tender to me. It also felt like a kind of forgiveness in the way he was willing to try and make Blythe, California beautiful when you both knew full well it was a lie…

Excerpt from ‘Wake’

The Colorado River is getting big
in the britches, stepping on Blythe
like that. All wild goose and border.
Some country, hey kiddo?
The lie uplifts us. Our cotton
hasn’t been watered all year, and our towns
are blossoms of mosquitos.

I like American literature a good deal because of its spareness. The things we can say about it and the country in the voice of the public…the poems come out kind of plain, but that feels intuitive.

You are driving along…then suddenly the water is up to your door handle. You can’t do anything else. You just wait. You go to this place that is exceptionally dry — in front and behind, you think you see water. A flash flood waiting to wash you out.

We were trying so hard not to talk about it. About her.

So many of these poems tackle poverty and the potent (non)presence of food. I loved this powerful and tangled conflation of momentarily communing with God, accepting one’s fate while also ascending/transcending your being somehow…

Excerpt from “Cootie Catcher”

We ate the carp, carp is poor
folks’ food. We take communion
regularly. This is no different.

Riddle me this world. If God is the main farmer here…and he’s heading up agricultural production, which in turn is the machine that creates food…I guess then we turn that food back into his body and we eat it? But in this idea that the meek/poor inherit the earth…we end up eating ourselves.

My uncle was found dead where we went fishing. I became obsessed with this idea of something that seems harmless, but isn’t. We ate fish from those canals all the time…there is a cyclical nature of depending on God for food. Which may or not may come, but when it does we turn it into communion….

Memory, memory, memory. How deceptive, how haunting, how lovely and terrible it is to hold all of these stories behind our eyelids…

I often look at young beautiful photographs of my parents, and think, why why why couldn’t I have known you then? Look! You’re joyous. You’re light, buoyant — you are yet to be what I know you will become. The photographs just about break my fucking heart.

How much did you talk to family, look at photographs, revisit your old haunts to be haunted in writing this book….?

Excerpt from “Meditation on a Lost Photo Booth Picture”

…Though I am not there, I feel the center/ of there, of theirs. As if they knew,
preemptively, that they would not be able/ to see me in this unfamiliar place, at the desk of
my life,/ and thought to take this picture so that they, too, might participate. I know this/ is
self-indulgent. I know this is arrogant. I know/ these are stories I tell myself as I fall asleep,
fearing death or impermanence./…

In 2012 I gained access to this storage unit that had all of my mom’s belongings in it…when she died in 1999, my grieving stepdad just put all her things in there and locked it up.

I went out there during Thanksgiving 2012 and went through all these belongings and it was a profound experience of agony for me. Having lost her at such a young age there were so many ways in which I didn’t feel like I knew her. And in this way, I got to know — acutely — everything I had lost in losing her. It was devastating, but also an amazing gift. I had baby pictures. My mother was also a writer — she wrote me letters. And photos. And these things of her — I didn’t get too much but what I did get are my most prized possessions.

I had complex PTSD from childhood trauma…this book was written with the research of memory and experience. People in my family don’t know what happened — she was so estranged at the time.

I was looking at a photo when I wrote that poem.

Even though these poems are based in autobiography, they are actually about things much larger than me. My hope is that people who have been othered or don’t have class privilege or find a lot of solace in poetry or songs or hymns…people who have experienced trauma or not…that wide gamut of people will find themselves reflected in the work.

Ultimately it’s a book about triumph. It’s not a book about grief. It’s about the ways in which people triumph in the the things they are asked to do. By God. Or by society. In thinking about it, this isn’t so much my memoir or my story but one way of thinking about these very complex identity questions in relation to the impoverished American landscape.

What’s next on your radar…what are you keen to write or do next?

A book of micro essays, something similar to Ann Carson’s Short Talks.
I think people poo-poo prose poems…not out-loud, but…

Why is that you think?

I think because there’s this erroneous idea that it doesn’t make use of the one thing that poetry has uniquely going for it — i.e. white space. Efficiency. If you’re talking about prose poetry, how are you delineating — literally — between prose and poetry. The answer is, you don’t have to.