MH: What can women writers, whether established or emerging, do to help women achieve recognition and success in this field? What are you doing?

 

ED: Well, if you have a big hammer, don’t use it to squash another woman writer…

You can read the interview here: Lori Desrosiers’ Poetry Blog: A Conversation with Jessamyn Smyth on her chapbook, “Kitsune”

Many thanks to Lori for her unflagging celebrations of poets and poetry, and for being one of the first to publish from this collection: “Letting Go of a Man at the Montague Book Mill” first appeared in NRR, and the journal also nominated the poem for a Pushcart Prize.

I spoke with Lori about her own beautiful new book here.

Also, I’ll have a poem called “Obscenity (The Holographic Principle)” coming soon in the exciting  inaugural issue of Slippage, which celebrates work “at the intersection of science and art” – I’ll link it when the issue goes live some time this spring.

It’s National Poetry Month. A good reason to write a poem a day, since tons of people are offering daily prompts for the month of April. For example:

For a smart, funny take on the hazards of NPM, or possibly just of life, check this out, by Paisley Rekdal at Harriet:

“We’re taught, simultaneously, to treat poetry as the purest, most elevated art at the same time we declare it culturally dead, with no practical or economic use. Both positions put poetry outside of our lives and our understanding, making it, essentially, invisible. And how can we read or appreciate what we don’t really see?

I suppose that is what NPM is meant to do: throw poems in the path of people who wouldn’t normally see them. But treated as sound bites, we see them the way we see the latest Dove commercial: as a kind of feel-good ad that is, in the end, still trying to sell you something to stick in your armpits. It doesn’t–and can’t– solve the problem that most concerns me, which is that the ways we treat poetry often exacerbates the larger problems that we have with reading now: that it is a purely passive, not active engagement with language, in which meaning “happens” if it relates to the personal life of the reader, or if it “moves” us. This really does have long-term cultural and political effects for us as a nation, because if we don’t believe we are in control of our reading—that we can parse a sentence to evaluate not only its pleasurable effects but to comprehend its arguments—then we are screwed.”

Here’s what I’ve got, since the book is failed by superlatives (and I’m looking you dead in the eye, here):

I want you to read this.

It speaks for itself, and it speaks right to you, cell by cell, with empathy and humor and the deep relief of large intelligence about language, about us, and about how far intelligence will and won’t get us in matters of love.

It’s sharp and funny and compassionate and wise and many other things that the more I say them the more I just want to say: “Look, if I’ve ever steered you right, just listen to me and read this right now.”

This is the real, outrageously beautiful thing. These sentences invite you in and don’t let go. You will laugh, empathize, recoil, grieve, laugh again, resonate, and be fed.

Go. Read.

I’ll be over here making quilts of her language.

Cento I

 

Without hard feelings, or soft,

we are waffling in the face of history;

Love somehow got left behind, defied

reasoning. These relationships ended

as they began, cordially, in corridors

and seminar rooms, on email, collegially.

 

Philosophy seeks a system, and love—

as any lover knows—is unsystematic

in the extreme. Love’s a messer-upper,

and philosophers, on the whole,

are a tidy bunch—at least I am,

or was, until we met.

 

What will we tell them when they ask

what we knew and when? We are not known

for our success in the realm of eros. Somehow

nothing ever grew from this. No feeling

blossomed in the thin soil of the mind.

To own it would be like owning love itself.

 

Join her. In the bath she will cry. She will say,

“You are untender,” that having sex with you

is like watching a Hal Hartley film.

She doesn’t mean this as a compliment.

She means you are unfeeling. She means

you are cold. An idea with legs. A talking head.

 

As a performative category, the performance

was only so-so. It seems to her that she can hear

each knot give way beneath the blade

with a sound like a relieved sigh:

she sorts the index cards into piles—

secrets, regrets, fears.

 

In the rearview mirror, they look

like enormous moths, or like a flock

of birdless wings, like some strange

new creature making its way, awkwardly,

hesitantly, for the very first time,

into the terrible beautiful bodied world.

Those lines are from:

“The men she dated were friendly, good companions; they discussed the subaltern and structuralism; they went to movies; they went to bed, but somehow nothing ever grew from this. No feeling blossomed in the thin soil of the mind; though they talked endlessly about sex as a performative category, the performance was only so-so. Love somehow got left behind, defied their reasoning. These relationships ended as they began, cordially, in corridors and seminar rooms, on email, collegially. Without hard feelings, or soft.”

- The Best Way Not To Freeze

“”What will we tell future generations when they ask us how we let all this come to pass?” she’d asked Gil. “What will we tell them when they ask what we knew and when? … We are waffling in the face of history.”

- The Theory of Enlightenment

“”Philosophers, it would seem, have little to tell us about love; I know, because I am one. Despite the name, philosophers—lover of wisdom—we are not known for our success in the realm of eros. Truth is, our greatest minds have been losers when it came to love… Perhaps that’s because philosophy seeks a system, and love—as any lover knows—is unsystematic in the extreme. Love’s a messer-upper, and philosophers, on the whole, are a tidy bunch—at least I am, or was, until we met.”

- My Life in Theory

“As they write their sketches, she sorts the index cards into piles—secrets, regrets, fears. After sorting them, she sits on her desk and reads through a few.

I am afraid of a world in which art does not matter.

I am afraid of suffocation. Of being suffocated.

Squirrels.

…In the rearview mirror, they look like enormous moths, or like a flock of birdless wings, like some strange new creature making its way, awkwardly, hesitantly, for the very first time, into the terrible beautiful bodied world.”

-  Rat Choice

“To own it, June thinks, would be like owning love itself.

…it seems to her that she can hear each knot give way beneath the blade with a sound like a relieved sigh.”

- Small Bright Thing

“Join her. In the bath she will cry. She will say, “You are untender,” that having sex with you is like watching a Hal Hartley film. (Feel, fleetingly, complimented by the comparison to Hartley, who is your fave, though you know she doesn’t mean this as a compliment.) In Hartley’s films, she says, everyone is always talking about love like it’s an idea rather than a feeling that they feel. She means you are unfeeling. She means you are cold. An idea with legs. A talking head.”

- Theory of Dramatic Action

Cento II

 

His was not so much a death as an unbecoming.

His feet hardly reached the floor.  His body

did not so much give out, as erase into the air.

 

If you give a man a mystery you will end up

with one of two things—a cop or a philosopher:

a confetti of images, inconsolable

 

beside the eviscerated figure of a papier mache donkey,

sun, or deer—it happened every year, the same old loss.

They slowly tore apart in the course of the day’s festivities.

 

We are the ones who are neither so poor nor so rich

as to be indifferent. We have the leisure to sympathize

and mourn; a dying breed, going the way of the dodo.

Those lines are from:

 “In the final week before Christopher died, whenever he walked—which was not often—he floated. His feet hardly reached the floor. His was not so much a death, Tuni will tell me later, as an unbecoming. ‘He unbecame himself.’ His body did not so much give out, as erase into the air.”

- Theory of Transportation

“I have observed that if you give a man a mystery you will end up with one of two things—a cop or a philosopher.”

- The Three Christs of Moose Lake, Minnesota

“What Richard will remember of the evening after that is a confetti of images, like the colorful piñatas his mother made for him each birthday when he was young, which they slowly tore apart in the course of the day’s festivities, leaving Richard inconsolable beside the eviscerated figure of a papier mache donkey, sun, or deer—though he should not have been surprised since it happened every year, the same old loss.”

- Gravity

“But in our defense I say that we are the ones who are neither so poor nor so rich as to be indifferent. We have the leisure to sympathize and mourn, and the good sense to be ashamed of ourselves. … The professor says we are a dying breed, the middle classes. … Even here, we are going the way of the dodo.”

- Theory of the Leisure Class

.

.

You see? You’ll have no choice but to roll in these sentences.

.
.

Why are you still here?

Go read it. Go.

Her chapbook, Three Vanities, was published in 2009 by Pudding House. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium Review, Contemporary American Voices, BigCityLit, Concise Delights, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The New Verse News, Common Ground Review, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practices in Poetry, and many more. She has an MFA in Poetry from New England College.

Lori is editor and publisher of Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry. NRR treasures and advances the narrative form as few journals do, and Lori’s broader, tireless support of a vibrant poetry scene in New England is well known & cherished.

I bought The Philosopher’s Daughter (finally) at AWP this year, and had the chance to talk with her about it: consider yourself introduced to Lori and the book, and enjoy!

Jessamyn:

One of the things I like so much in your writing is the light touch that creeps into the poems, the turning toward humor and celebration of the absurd. This can become a cop-out if it’s avoidance or cowardice, but in your work, it’s woven powerfully with difficult losses and complex emotional realities.

“A Dog’s Day” is a perfect example of that weaving:

.

“That day we visited our father, sick with brain cancer,

her was barely able to speak.

.

We walked with him in the woods,

his yellow mutt Hector bounding alongside. …”

.

The final line of the poem is devastating, funny, and tender all at once.

What’s your writing and revision process with these kinds of layered-mood poems?

Lori:

Maybe it’s the way I was raised. My parents were children during the Great Depression and especially my mother’s family dealt with trauma through humor, and still does. The funny stuff comes to me first, and I find myself crafting a poem around it. The poem about walking with my father was a true story. It happened just the way I wrote it. I remember arguing with my brother in the car, letting out a long sigh together, then laughing. In our family, pain and anger are tethered to humor and tenderness.

 Jessamyn:

The images of family are so secure in these poems, even as loss is both imminent and immanent. In “Looking at Bees,” “In the Croton Woods 1965,” “’59 Olds” there is a sense of innocence hurtling toward loss “faster than a red dwarf swell/sudden as a supernova burst” (“Star Cancer”).

There are also vivid and complex portraits of people and places past (“Womanly Ways,” “Blanche Remembers,” “Mom at 16″), and then some have a striking, sharp darkness inside the light voice (“From the Porch,” “The World is Flat,” “Wedding,” “Drunk”) –

 

“…The way you look at me sometimes.
Bridges crumble in your eyes.
Cold and blue with drips of water rushing into grates.”

(“Some Answers”)

 

 

Amidst these darker poems, there’s something very gentle, so present in the memorable line “eiderdown’s the measure of her heart” ( – “Room with Feathers”).

There’s tremendous sense of solitude and yearning in the poem “Call.”

And in the structure of the book, the reader is moved through these changes easily.

What was your thinking in structuring the manuscript as you did?

Lori:

It’s interesting how when we order a manuscript, sometimes it is hard to find the string that holds the poetry together so that it creates an arc. I spent a good deal of time with these poems.

Eventually, I found myself listening to them to see which poems spoke to one another. I ended up grouping them by people and place, pretty much. The mother and father poems are near one another, and the rest was more an organic process, letting the poems sing. I come from a musical background (I was a singer/songwriter before I was writing in earnest) and it has helped me listen to this music.

Jessamyn:

What poets do you read for comfort and camaraderie? Whose work feeds you?

Lori:

I love this question because it is not just which poets do I read, but who brings me comfort, who is my friend by the side of the bed at night. There are several poets I seem to return to again and again. Ruth Stone and Maxine Kumin are two of my go-to poets. Their humor and attention to nature and poetic detail is inspiring, and they are two of my poetry mothers. I have recently been spending time with new work by Dan Vera and Howard Faerstein, both of whom have that uncanny ability to combine humor and pathos in their work. I have a new favorite every week, so these are poets I’m thinking about right now.

If my spirit needs to dance, I reread Ilya Kaminsky’s “Dancing in Odessa” or stories in poetry by Susan Deer Cloud or Pam Uschuk. I think one reason I love editing Naugatuck River Review is it is full of poems which nourish whoever reads them. I’m always reading a new book of poems by my amazing friends, whose work surprises and inspires me. I also listen to music quite a lot, and it consistently inspires my writing.

Any poet worth her salt knows that, generally speaking, you can do one of two things with language — You can use your words to reflect what society surrounds us with. You can represent the insipid mainstream culture and repeat it however prettily or dolled up you like. You can distract with pseudo-epiphanies or masturbate to empty language games until you’re living in a vacuum of your own making. Or you can be a creator, you can write the poetry that is not popular because you are saying things that don’t just comfort people and tell them that the way they’re living now is perfect and lovely and oh-so-right. You can either reflect or you can create, at great risk, to improve things, reveal complexities, point out those brilliant chinks in the mainstream armor of duality and western rigidity. You create to show that there is more to perceive, that change is always afoot, that you want to have a hand in what that change should do, that you can visualize a keener, more interesting and diverse world where the roles and lines and tasks relegated to “woman” and “man” are thinning fronts that can no longer support humanity’s advancement. These “confusing” “crazy” creations are often unpopular because they shake us up; the status quo resists because people aren’t accustomed to seeing in radical and as-yet-unfathomed ways, they can’t visualize themselves in the odd pictures such poets are making. We are afraid to imagine other ways of being on a planet dominated by wars, environmental destruction, and the luxury of ignorance. We hope that if we stay very still, don’t move, and speak clearly, nothing will come undone—and we’ll be safe.

…

So it is with feminism and poetry, which are movements, hand-in-hand progressions, the visualization of hope and the often-belittled notion of investing in improvement, even *gasp* looking for some moral imperative in context. Feminist poets do not invest substantial attention in that static image of a hairy angry bitch meant to shut us down and squelch our efforts and dry the ink of our pens; we are too busy moving and shaking shit up and asking people to become aware of and check the power structures we participate in and to give up certain power privileges so that we each might arrive at some semblance of equal footing with access to basic necessities and accesses and to share and to look at other aspects of our humanity that we have been told to repress because they’re too feminine. Feminist poets are putting pen to paper where and when it counts and challenging the very core notions of what it means to be human, literally, conceptually, and emotionally. If I blur and confound the line between one more “them versus us” modus operandi, then I’m doing my job and causing people to pause & reconsider the next actions they’ll take: to hit and kill and segregate, or to lean in, study, consider, smell, see, think and breathe shared air—and then act and react.

 

Seriously, go read it. It will feed you.

Margo is a painter and poet. She is also an associate professor of fine art at Lasell College, where she teaches painting, illustration, and writing. She is the author of several children’s books: this is her first poetry collection.

What is the working title of your book?

Believe In Water, from a poem by the same name. Even though it talks of believing in water, it is about believing in aspirations and having faith in your own unique vision.

Where did the ideas come from for the book?

I have 2 purple composition books – one downstairs and one upstairs by my bed. I am inspired by little things: the sunlight illuminating a treetop with gold at sunset, the sweet taste of a fresh baked cookie, the comfort of my two dogs curled up on the sofa next to me. When a thought hits me, I write a draft for a poem, which I will later revise, often for a meeting of my poetry salon. When you are surrounded by writers who are better than you are, it forces you to demand more of yourself.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry. A chapbook. Poetry is the highest form of literature because it allows the most freedom within the strictest structures. That sounds like an oxymoron but the best creativity happens when you are forced to respond to strict parameters. Think of the westward pioneers in the early days of our country traveling through wilderness with barely even enough food. They were forced to incredible levels of creativity. Trying to write in a new, unique, and clear way while still using the tools of communication of our culture and language is the ultimate challenge.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Believe In Water is about focusing on small moments, everyday happenings, and savoring (or commiserating) later.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Some of the poems in this chapbook were over ten years in the writing. My inner poet is never satisfied. I am always looking for the better word, the more meaningful phrase, the best way to sneak in an internal rhyme. Language provides a whole smorgasbord of delightful choices.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

While I have been inspired by many poets – Becky Kennedy, Jane Yolen, ancient Chinese poets, Yeats, I could go on – I would never compare myself to someone I admire. I am still learning, finding my way, and my voice is still evolving.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I want to give credit to the members of my poetry salon – Becky Kennedy, Susan Page, Liz West, Salam Mir, Karen D’Amato, Jim Kennedy – for the very best encouragement inspiration.

I am just so pleased that my collection placed in the New Women’s Voices (Finishing Line Press) competition, which had many entries. While writing is personal, recognition provides a sense of accomplishment.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I did think long and hard about including a poem about a toilet brush. Was it too irreverent? Irrelevant? And I still have the toilet brush mentioned in the poem. I think of it now as an old and dear friend.

Believe in Water will be published in June, 2013, by Finishing Line Press. You can pre-order it here.

Generally speaking, we like our heroines reduced to needlepoint slogans on the walls of our offices, where we can safely ignore them [indeed, Margaret Mead, it is the only thing that ever has adorned the wall of every women’s center I have known: how ubiquitous, your domestication, how we have shrunk you to fit!].

Specifically, we like to distance ourselves from those who are doing what we say we want, so we are not also responsible for doing it.

There is an article about Anne Carson in the New York Times.

She says, of Red Doc>: “I made up ice bats, there is no such thing.”

She says, about what she does:

“I’m really trying to make people’s minds move, you know, which is not something they’re naturally inclined to do,” she told me. “We have a kind of inertia, sitting and listening. But it’s really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has never moved before. That happens partly because the material is mysterious or unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material around from word to word in a sentence. And it’s that that I’m more interested in doing, generally, than mystifying by having unexpected content or bizarre forms. It’s more like: Given whatever material we’re going to talk about, and we all know what it is, how can we move within it in a way we’ve never moved before, mentally? That seems like the most exciting thing to do with your head. I think it’s a weakness to fall back into merely mystifying the audience, which anybody can do. You know, throw in a bit of Hegel. Who knows what that means? But to actually take a piece of Hegel and move it around in a way that shows you something about Hegel is a satisfying challenge.” There is hardly a pause before she added, in her usual deadpan, “So maybe I didn’t make any clear point there, but I was impassioned.”

I love this woman with the hard, bright fire with which I love Gilgamesh. And I mean by that both the epic and my dog. Which is to say: so much that sometimes I fear my heart will explode if I let myself gaze too directly at the beloved.

I don’t know Anne Carson, of course.

I mean, I heard her read in Boston at AWP last week, and told her thanks for her work, which has made both me and my work more possible in this world, and I gave her a rose. She smiled, and I was fiercely, brightly happy to have been able to meet her acerbic humor, her self-contained and generous wit off the page where I’d already loved it for a long time. But we don’t hang out, so possibly I should say “I love this woman’s work” rather than the more inappropriately personal “I love this woman” – but it’s intentional, the inappropriately personal. The fact of her person is what makes possible her page, and her page is what makes me and my work more possible. I don’t want to distance from the entire fact of her, or think myself not responsible. The fact of her entire makes me more responsible for myself. And I like it like that.

Dante reportedly said: if the reader has an itch, let him scratch it.

When I shared the article on Facebook, the title of the piece included the word “inscrutable” before the word “brilliance” and the tagline asked: “Is she a poet? No one quite knows for sure.”

I edited those parts away, in a flash of hard, bright refusal to participate in our habitual language of discomfort with unabashedly smart women, even when it bends toward praise.

My all-time favorite profanity is in Ancient Greek:  baal eis korakas. Throw yourself to the crows.

That curse is what I muttered when I deleted the “inscrutable” and the tagline, regardless of how they were intended, for their larger resonance with the rest of the crap.

It sounds funny, or funny-ish, the throw yourself to the crows thing. But what it really meant in context is what I want for the sentiment, the habit, the habitual sentimentalizing of women and the knee-jerk discomfort with their hard, bright wit: may you die and remain unburied and unmourned, flesh picked over by scavengers, and wander the earth forever invisible and irrelevant, denied even the final resting place, whatever it might be, after riding Charon’s goddamned boat.

Anne Carson is brilliant. Full stop. That is why I love her. There is nothing inscrutable or un-poetic about her, or about that. And nothing uncomfortable, either.

Intelligence is not alien, you know. Even when a woman does it. It’s just a lot more work.

Okay, I lied. That’s just the irritation talking. It’s not more work than the relentless, endless posturing and obscuring and undermining of self and others and constant looking down then back up from under the lashes and gaspy praise that we all know is actually an expression of discomfort and passive-aggression when we say of each other ‘gosh, you’re just so SMART, I could never be as smart as you” as is required of standard-issue Conforming Women™.  It’s not more work than posturing of the other kind, the kind that has something to prove and shoves itself forward at the expense of others for a place at a finite table, invitation to which is contingent upon appeasement and protection of the gatekeepers who hate you.

It’s actually easy, compared to that. All you have to do is stop lying.

And remain endlessly curious.

And read a lot, I guess.

And manage to stay alive and fed in all the ways we need to be fed.

All right, fine, it’s not easy either way.

But who said it would be, and what evidence have we that easy is better, anyway?

Hard, bright joy comes from work. It can’t be borrowed or stolen or given. I exhort you: wise up. Life is short. Your heart might explode from looking too directly at the beloved. It will certainly implode from not doing so. Your heart’s going to stop either way. See? No needlepoint. You’re on your own. Do it yourself. You’re in fine and large company. Or maybe not large, but certainly fine. Exhortations & explosions! Blah blah blah. A crash and murmur of waves.

At the end of the New York Times piece, there is this exchange with the interviewer:

Toward the end of “Red Doc >,” the story leaps into tragic territory: the death of Geryon’s mother. They are some of the saddest pages I’ve ever read. “And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable. They do not forgive it. He turns away. This roaring air in his arms. She is released.” When I told Carson how devastating this was, she seemed surprised. She said she couldn’t quite tell.

“I somehow wrote that book without having any relation to it,” she said.

In the days that followed, I thought about this statement and realized I had no idea what it meant. Carson was back in Michigan by then, so I sent her one last e-mail, asking her to explain. This, in its entirety, was her response:

 

1 a particle is a thing in itself. a wave is a disturbance in something else. waves themselves are probably not disturbed.

2 there are some big particles inside Red Doc> — of information (ice), of grief (mother), of caprice (musk ox mind) — but by the time i wrote them down i had moved out to the condition of wave.

3 maybe i’m just saying that i’m a tough old bugger.

4 remember Monica Vitti saying, I can’t watch the sea for a long time or what’s happening on land doesn’t interest me anymore

What is the title of your book?

Kitsune

Where did the inspiration for the book come from?

A kitsune is the Japanese iteration of a trickster fox spirit found in storytelling and myth traditions around the world. Depending on context and culture, it is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes human-shaped, sometimes fox-shaped, sometimes a shape-shifter, always extremely seductive, and eternally, insatiably hungry.

Some of the tales are enlightenment sagas (leading to the 9-tailed fox who personifies wisdom and is associated with Inari, for example), but in the smaller-scale folktales of daily lived experience, kitsune shows up as a lover who possesses some hapless human, seeking sustenance. The stories are tragic, usually ending badly for both possessed and possessor, neither of whom acted from malice: the human’s heart is broken by the shape-shifting nature of the beloved, and the fox-spirit’s hunger can never be satisfied.

I got interested in merging the archetype of kitsune with the structure of Greek tragedy as a way of opening up the symbols and language of a catastrophic love affair.

It is my belief that tragedy—both Classical and personal—inheres in the fact that character does not, in fact, change. For all that we can change specific behaviors for the better, and effect social change, and can and must and should invest in these ethical ways of being in the world, our fundamental individual natures do not actually change no matter how many weekend workshops we attend.  This is, of course, an heretical view in a self-help culture, but to me, self-help culture simply illustrates how we have domesticated and commodified the notion of “change” beyond all possibility of real use. In a sense we are stuck with ourselves, even as we are solely responsible for our own behavior as adults: we are simultaneously powerful and existentially bound. This generates enormously interesting conflict.

The structure of Classical Greek tragedy—the parados/choral entrance song, the episodes, the stasimons/choral commentaries, the exodus-kommos/choral exit and lament—offered the right emotional conveyance.

The trickster fox lover offered playfulness, intensity, ravenous hunger, uncomplicated dog-like qualities complicated by shape-shifting trickster ones, the opportunity to play with inversions and subversions of who is shape-shifting and tricking and ravening at any given moment, ferocity, sleek fur, sharp teeth, and the color orange.

Kitsune is one of a trilogy of short collections: the other two (in progress), Raven and Coyote, will come together with it to make a longer collection with a current working title of “Tricksters Make Inconstant Lovers.” Or maybe “Trickster Love.” Or “Beware the Trickster.” Or just “Trick or Treat?”

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The manuscript came together in pieces over a period of several months; in January of 2012, I shaped and revised it, with feedback from first readers; in February I sent it out to Finishing Line. I have been known to sit on manuscripts for years, so for me that was extremely prompt.

What other books would you compare this story to?

Comparisons are tricky: for all that they are intended to attract, they can also repel or circumscribe a reader’s expectations, unintentionally making an experience of a book smaller instead of larger. Some books do resonate in similar ways, though, even if at the level of language they are quite different. To me, Kitsune might be in the emotional neighborhood of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Fires.  But each reader might also answer that question very differently, and I want them to.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Tricksters. Ravening. Tragedy.

Oh wait, that’s three sentences.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The story these poems tell required visceral, skinless presence and overt sensuality. In oblique ways, I think my writing always has that: strong location in place, the body, the senses. Kitsune demanded being much more direct about the sexual dimension of the human animal than I usually am, though.

Writing sexuality of any mood—never mind an emotionally complex mythic possession—can be hazardous in any number of ways. It’s such a subjective human experience, and so often completely unexamined, that writing directly about sex can easily end up being not only anti-erotic,  but unintentionally funny, clichéd, bodice-rippy, soft-focus-maudlin, or any number of other deeply untruthful and tiresome things.

People also carry peculiar baggage about sex, and project it aggressively and constantly, especially onto women. So women writing about sex get different reactions than men do: stentorian condemnation, conflation of the writer with the text and/or a sense of entitlement to the writer herself, professional threat, damned if you do/damned if you don’t, that sort of thing. We’re not past any of that.

And yet, sexuality is this powerful language and force and bounty in our lives, and sometimes it is an essential part of the only true way to tell a particular story.

In my personal life, my sovereignty is in privacy. In my writing life, there can be no armor. That means following the story to some hazardous places.

What genre does your book fall under?

Short answer: poetry.  All my work lives at crossroads, though, as that’s where I find the most interesting travelers.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Hooch very sweetly sent a headshot. I do think he would offer a sensitive rendition of the fox-spirit, but he might have trouble fitting into the costume.

Where is your book available & who published it?

Kitsune won a place in the New Women’s Voices Series competition at Finishing Line Press. You can pre-order it now, here.

Ship date/release is May 31^st, 2013.

I’d love to read about the next big thing coming from E.J. Levy, Elizabeth Eslami, Elizabeth Macduffie, Dale Favier, Karen Skolfield, Katherine Durham Oldmixon, and any of the rest of you who want to share what you’re up to and how we can have it!

Fellow Finishing Line Press compadres with upcoming books Margo Lemieux (Believe in Water) and Kim Baker (Under the Influence: Musings on Poems and Paintings), has this interview been passed to you, yet? Would love to see yours.

The book ships May 31st, 2013.

This beautiful cover art is by Mark Mandica.

You can read the blurbs & first reader responses here.

Here’s my “Next Big Thing” interview about the book.

 And here are some of the poems: audio is from the Word Festival in October, 2012.