Interviewed by Madisen Gummer, Pigeon Pages’ Poetry Editor.

Your third collection of poetry, One More World Like This World, came out a little over a month ago—how are you feeling?!

I feel gratitude and awe to live a life where poetry is at the center of it. I’m grateful to work with the wonderful team at Four Way Books.

When you sat down to write the poems in this book, what did your process look like? How do you approach writing a poem?

Each book has had a different process. With This Alaska, the endings of the poems came first, for example. Sometimes poems arrived through dreams. When There Was Light incorporates documentary poetics; I draw on various documents from my family’s immigration experience. With One More World Like This World, the poems came almost every day—sometimes multiple in a single day. That had never happened for me before. It was exciting, but also strange to navigate.

How has your creative process changed over time? From book to book?

The writing process changes as I continue to deepen and develop my craft. For me, poetry is devotional, and the process is deeply private. I see poetry as a way of being in the world, attuned to the ebbs and flows of daily life. It’s a deeply attentive process.

What is a book you always come back to or carry around with you?

I love this question! I read far more than I write, which is also part of my process. You know how young kids will sometimes drag a blanket around the house? That’s how I am with poetry books. I just looked up from where I’m writing and saw a book sticking out of my sock drawer. I return often to Emily Dickinson, Mark Strand’s Blizzard of One, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (a delightful poem to read out loud—I used to carry a copy with me and recite it on the train until I reached my stop), Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Casino,” Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions, and Ai’s collected poems—especially her book Cruelty. And I couldn’t live without a thesaurus.

What are you reading now?

Right now, I’m enjoying new releases by contemporary women poets I admire for National Poetry Month: Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth, Keetje Kuipers’s Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, and Allison Benis White’s A Magnificent Loneliness.

Your poem that we published, “Myth of Icarus as Girl, Leaving,” connects the speaker’s troubled relationships with her religion and her brother. Alongside it is “New World,” which contemplates the speaker’s connection to God. Though they are twenty-two pages apart in your book, and in two different sections, I thought they’d be interesting to publish together to complicate the speaker’s relationship to God and religion. So I was wondering, how do you see these ideas of God and religion continuing to work in your poetry?

I’m interested in the ways poetry, prayer, and music connect and move inside, through, and beyond ourselves. I understand religion and God as important to my work in the sense that love and hope are vital to the human experience—which I believe both poetry and prayer provide. In this way, poems offer alternate ways of seeing and being in the world, instilling a kind of fortitude and strength to carry on. I think this has always been, and will always be, necessary.

Your work is in deep conversation with the natural world, which shows up in both of the poems we published. I don’t know if you’ve listened to the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett, but she begins each interview by asking guests to describe the spiritual background of their childhood. We’ve touched on that a bit, but I’d love to twist the question and ask about the geographical background of your life—and which specific environments inform your work.

I haven’t heard of this podcast, but I’ll definitely check it out.

I am a deeply attentive person, and I feel the world intensely—sometimes excruciatingly or even debilitatingly so. It’s something I’ve had to learn to accept about myself over time, through poetry. Because the alternative would be to harden, to resist letting the world in—and I don’t want to live that kind of life, if I can help it. Poetry is the heart of living for me.
I think it’s a good thing to be utterly moved by nature, by a conversation, by a song or a single line in a poem. I try to remain open to moments of shocking awe at the experience of being a person—and a woman—in the world, while also not turning away from pain.

It’s like when Ellen Bass writes, “Oh, I know, / it’s a miracle to have a life,” in her poem “Indigo.” She writes this in the context of the speaker’s envy that their child doesn’t have a stand-up father. Bass captures the importance of allowing ourselves our gripes, our sadnesses, our moments of frustration and longing—all of which can exist alongside, or even within, gratitude.
We can feel despair about the state of the world and at the same time be steadied—maybe even saved—by the sight of newly blossomed tulips. Poetry slows me down. It teaches me forgiveness. That kind of emotional tension is something I’m always drawn to—something I want to explore in poems, as part of the human condition.

In addition to writing your own poetry, you also translate poetry from German. This is a theme that comes up in a few poems in One More World Like This World, but I was wondering if you could say more about your experience of translating, and how that connects to or differs from your creative practice.

The late, inimitable Pierre Joris always said, “Let a thousand translations bloom.” Translation is intrinsic to my writing process. I love language and learning new languages. I love reading poets from all over the world and from all times and places. Literary translation also enriches my reading practice. I always want to live a life of poetry that remains as expansive and multilingual as possible.

You’re also the founding editor and director of Small Orange Journal, a nonprofit poetry journal. So, you’re on both sides of the contemporary poetry scene—a writer and editor, submitter and publisher, as most of us are. Can you speak to the importance of literary journals and magazines today?

It’s a harrowing time for everyone. Little presses and small magazines are vital to poets and to poetry—past, present, and future. Most of us do this work voluntarily, out of a deep belief in poetry and a genuine love of poems. It’s an act of devotion, a commitment to the idea that poetry is necessary and belongs to all of us. I admire—and am deeply grateful to—all the people behind small magazines and presses who continue to do this important, vital work.

What are some of your other favorite literary journals?

Pigeon Pages, of course! There are so many magazines I admire—Brink Literary, and Hannah Bonner’s terrific work championing hybridity, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Salmagundi, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Magazine, and their fantastic “Off the Shelf” podcast, Smartish Pace, and so many more out there!