KARAN

“It is true that she launched a rock into the head of a boy,” begins the first poem here, and a couple of lines later, we’re told that it’s also “true that she wrapped a love note around the rock.” An act of violence is juxtaposed with a gesture of affection, highlighting complexities in expressions of love and aggression that seem to be at the heart of your work. Beauty and violence, hope and despair, innocence and experience are all constantly in a tug of war in these poems. The speaker “learned Italian by reading her father’s porno mags” or “her first kiss was with a pretty glue huffer" – tenderness is found within destructive contexts, intimacy emerging from troubled circumstances. Though these poems speak of dark subjects, alongside tenderness and beauty, a narrative that is both honest and nuanced emerges. This is not a question per se but an observation. Would you like to say anything about this?

ANDREA

Thanks for reading these poems so closely, Karan. I have little to say about those “truths” other than that I’ve lived them, and that their irony and dark humor stayed with me. Perhaps this comes from witnessing a violent fracturing of the world I grew up in — the ideological and then concrete dissolution of Yugoslavia, wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and in the midst of that collective chaos, the unexpected death of my father. Most of us search for connection and tenderness, regardless of what kind of circumstances we live in. That said, I am also interested in poetry that is not overly poetic, in finding beauty in things that might not seem traditionally beautiful or worthy of poetry. To me, that is poetry—recognizing the eros, the live coals of passion, in unlikely places.

KARAN

This vivid recounting of personal rebellion and raw encounters seems to echo Sylvia Plath's exploration of the self in confrontation with others. I’m thinking especially of “Our House.” Structured as a play, the poem moves through different rooms that “live inside you like a tenant.” Shifting from “Loi Bazaar” (wherein the spiritual collides with the material, transcendentalism with capitalism) to “Venezia” then “L.A.” then “Senegal” and so on renders porous any sense of temporal or spatial boundary. This makes one feel as though the rooms themselves represent phases of the mind. Not only Plath, I’m reminded of Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Alejendra Pizarnik also with this relentless candid desire to interrogate the self through visceral, grand imagery of “light” and “mountains(s)” and taking apart ideas of “universal commonality.” Could you discuss the interplay between personal history and the act of poetic confession in your work? Do you think in terms of fact and fiction when you’re writing? “A few truths and a few lies” also plays with the idea of reality versus fiction. How do you see the interplay of truth and fabrication as tools in poetry?

ANDREA

I like to play with the reader’s expectations. I am not too concerned about reporting truth, and I resist the word confession, or confession as a mode of writing, as it implies wrongness. If anything, I am looking to discover a new truth during writing of a poem—a truth that language presents to me as a writer, during the act of writing, which is an act of playing. 

“Our House” started with a few lines that I wrote in response to Leopoldo María Panero, whom I read in a Serbian translation by Damir Šodan and Mehmed Begić. Panero’s brilliant, subversive and rebellious verse is contagious, and I wanted to write a piece that captured the bigger world, across cultures. For years I have been writing poems that either seemed to be rooted in the States or my home country. In the U.S. we tend to focus on the U.S.. The rest of the world seems very far away. My experience is that the rest of the world has a more developed global literacy than we have here, and as such it is far more knowledgeable of the U.S. than the U.S. is of the world. I also wanted to make a poem-play that would capture the theater of wildly disparate economic realities in the world, this world of ours that venerates the rich, the vacuous and the criminal. I also wanted to poke at art, the boundary between its engagement with the world and exploiting its tragedies. 

KARAN

“In Praise of Distance,” weaves the tangible with the metaphorical, urging both a physical and spiritual retaliation against external comfort or, as I read it, “the ordinance of fog.” The unspooling, undusting, and unblooming evokes a sense of both returning and moving forward. How does remembrance and anticipation inform your approach to exploring the concept of distance? I also read the poem as a call for accepting distance between something painful and the healing from that painful event. That these two things cannot immediately coexist. Distance is time, is patience. Other poems here capture moments of violence that are physical, emotional and cyclical, as in “Therapeutic Hold”, wherein the speaker remembers “a man who spent a decade restraining patients in a psych ward” only to come home and express love as if it “was a survival skill and this was the final round before elimination.” Healing is granular, you appear to indicate. And very slow until it is sudden, eclipsing. What role do you believe poetry plays in articulating and processing experiences of trauma? 

ANDREA

Poetry allows us to articulate and make sense of whatever is churning within us. It can help us construct something out of an impossible, unresolvable situation.  We can turn that situation into a piece of art, and then we can look at it as an object. That might be a cathartic experience, but I don’t want to call it healing. Healing is continuous . . . We have to be careful not to confuse poetry with healing. Poetry is and should be an independent force. My mother was a nurse her entire life; she worked on a dermatology wing of the general hospital in Rijeka, Croatia. What I’ve learned from watching her treat many patients with enduring skin conditions is that some things cannot be cured — they can only be managed, alleviated, tended to. That is what healing is. Healing is not an absence of pain. In other words, it is human to hurt. To sit with discomfort. To acknowledge it. 

We have to be careful not to confuse poetry with healing. Poetry is and should be an independent force. “In Praise of Distance” is a breakup poem. It’s a “don’t let the door hit you” poem and a “I wish I never knew you” poem. At the same time, this poem is a reclamation of oneself. It’s an ode to a clean slate. As for “Therapeutic Hold”—yes, the cycle and interplay of violence and tenderness is ongoing. Nature is violent, its most beautiful seasonal expressions are violent. Pain often makes us love harder. Falling in love feels like a catastrophe, a destruction of the existing state of affairs. Isn’t that fascinating?  

KARAN

There's a recurring theme of bodily autonomy and violation across your poems. By using imagery that ranges from intimate encounters (“We drive down the dark interstate of the tongue . . .”) to moments of profound isolation (“who’s to say that’s me standing in the piles of debris”) or infringement (“I was his first red-rumped swallow of the season”), you invite readers into a dialogue about the boundaries of self and the dynamics of consent. For instance, when you describe actions that blur lines between autonomy and imposition (“It is true that beautiful men made her feel like she was a sleek silver fish with a hot hook in her lip”), it raises questions about where agency lies within these interactions. Through these portrayals, what conversations do you hope to provoke about consent, agency, and the inherent dignity of the body?

ANDREA

I actually hope to provoke conversations about the erotic act and nakedness of the body in poetry. I hope we can look at eroticism more honestly and see its uses in a poem. The erotic is an unavoidable part of the human existence. It’s an inexhaustible topic. How does the erotic present itself to us? What does it tell us about our own creativity, communication, agency? What is our relationship to our own bodies, our own desires, and our own nakedness? I want a conscious and full observation of self, including that of the body, the psychosexual and spiritual conflicts we carry within us, instead of the artificial intimacy, the airbrushed body, the avoidant bourgeoise attitudes toward intimacy that we are exposed to at all times.

SHANNAN

“Food” presents a narrative that intertwines the mundane act of sharing meals with profound emotional experiences within human connections and disconnections. The binary judgments that might accompany infidelity are expertly muted in favor of centering the woman’s emotional narrative. With each description of food, there is a transition into desire, as though the act of consuming was symbolic of lust and love. The consequences of acting on this desire are expressed as they are perceived by the body, as incidental to the desire itself (“Her anus bleeds for days.”) I am also struck by the final lines that act as an erasure of that desire while simultaneously doubling down on the symbolism. “They never have another meal again” is not just indicative of a break-up but also a reclamation on the part of the woman who, we find out, “doesn’t care about food that much.” Would you please speak more about the choice to frame a story we might be conventionally familiar with in this way?

ANDREA

The framing of the story around food came through the bigger notions of hunger, which include a desire for intimacy and connection, but also drug addiction (which is implied in the poem) as a different kind of craving.  But in order to get to the place where I could address these crosswires of need — two people negotiating their personal, private cravings — I had to place them in the innocuous arena of dating culture, which revolves around food. Food, restaurant dates, and such hold an important role in the American culture of dating and romantic relationships. We don’t meet in groups, with friends, in parks and beaches and city streets — we meet at restaurants, at tables for two, over food. In public we honor and show an acceptable kind of appetite, yet we keep other appetites hidden.  And you are right — while the final sentence marks an ending for this couple (albeit not necessarily a breakup), this is in no way the ending of their desires, cravings, and needs. 

SHANNAN

You open “tarot reading” with a line that feels like it came straight out of one of my most-favorite novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The poem itself plays with themes of destiny and premonition through which “you” and “I” are vying for attention. Towards the end, we get the hint that the “I,” the true speaker, is reaching out to the reader, the “you,” and in a way, reading the destiny of the reader through the poem the reader is reading themselves. This is a delightful revelation that also makes me consider poems about poems and poems that speak to their readers. Often, poets can either lean into those too hard and end up with cliches or other times ignore the reader altogether. You, however – framing it within the idea of a tarot reading – create a wholly unique way to explore this popular theme. Would you speak a little bit more about the reasoning behind it? Also, have you ever used tarot cards in your writing practice? How so? Would you like to share how mysticism influences your writing process?

ANDREA

I see tarot and other divination, like reading coffee grounds or one’s natal chart, as a lens through which we can look at the world and at ourselves. It’s also a way of interpreting visual texts. I am familiar with tarot cards, and I had my cards read a few times, mostly by students of tarot, but I don’t know how to read them and have not used tarot to write. 

The language and imagery of tarot is highly symbolic, so it was easy to let the format of the tarot reading guide the poem. The idea of the wild card came naturally. In tarot The Fool (and in astrology Uranus) is seen as an unpredictable factor. This naturally led me to playing with questions like: Who is doing the reading for whom? Is the reader speaking to the client, or is the reader subconsciously speaking to themselves? When having our cards read, are we hoping to gain new insight, or are we simply hoping to reacquaint ourselves with our true, perhaps lost selves? And how is that different from experiencing a poem?  

That said, I once did a pretend reading! I was a teenager; the war in Croatia just started, and there was an air raid. We lived in a tower block, and the basement got crowded with neighbors quickly. To beat boredom, I told a boy that I knew how to read palms. I looked at his palm and made up stuff. He was flabbergasted by my ability to glean his world, and for a moment, I was entertained. Then we went back to being bored and figuring out whether the skies cleared up and whether it was necessary to sit in the basement. 

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know poets who have influenced you most (preferably 3-5 but totally okay if there’s more). 

ANDREA

My biggest and earliest influence was the Croatian avantgarde writer Janko Polić Kamov, who was from my hometown of Rijeka. And my biggest American influence is CD Wright. Aside from those two, I’d mention Paul Celan. That said, my aesthetic sensibilities were to a large degree formed by music, visual arts, and prose writers, too, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Dubravka Ugrešić, artists who did not conform to the expectations of the time and place in which they worked. Art is primarily a mental, thinking work, and secondarily a creative process. All these musicians, painters and writers made me think about the function, the aesthetics, and purpose of art long before it occurred to me to create anything artistic. So, when I started, I knew what kind of note I wanted to strike, and I wanted it to be an independent one. Today art is drowned in culture and spectacle, at the expense of its independent force. It seems to primarily serve decorative purposes, for design or political causes. I think it’s important to keep in mind that everything, including art and poetry, exists primarily for its own sake. Only when it is there for its own sake, can we see it contribute to a better society.