KARAN

Arumandhira, thank you for these powerful and haunting poems that weave through time, memory, and generational trauma with such magic and rich gloom. I love all of these poems even as they escape me. The moment I read “Djinn” I was hooked: “My hunger will root inside your / blood. I sowed a blade too deep / to weed, but your daughters / will water it.” Let's begin with the process question. How do you start writing a poem? Does it begin with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

ARUMANDHIRA

Thank you for this beautiful question and for engaging with my work so deeply! Poetry for me is both a process of excavation and exorcism—a way to make sense of what resists understanding and to sit with infuriating questions that refuse to be answered. And not everything I discover through writing is a neat explanation, but it leads me to an awareness. When I begin writing a poem, it often starts with a single haunting that manifests into a charged feeling that I have to confront. Sometimes it's a memory resurfacing at the wrong time or a visual detail I can't ignore. Then I usually let my imagination just go with whatever it is. “Djinn” began with a GIF of a Matryoshka doll opening, each layer revealing a smaller one inside, endlessly. I found myself wondering—if I were a nesting doll, who would sit at my core? If it were my mother, would her mother be inside her, and so on? I knew this was something I needed to illustrate through form, and the narrative began to take shape.

I don't have a strict writing routine, but I try to stay open to the world, collecting thoughts or lines as I move through my day. I write these moments down in my notes app, and when that charged feeling I mentioned surfaces, I sit with them and see what grows. For me, the first draft is less about structure and more about opening a door and letting the language spill through. Some of my first drafts feel formless or directionless when I finish writing them, but once I let them breathe for a minute, I'm usually able to meet who the poem really is. Revision, then, is where I get to know them, feeling out what's been revealed and what's still hidden. 

If I had to picture poetry, I'd say it's like a dinner party where all my identities—Black, Indonesian, Muslim, Queer, immigrant—sit across from each other, sometimes arguing, sometimes laughing. Poetry feels like an excavation because I'm often discovering new dynamics between these identities while writing. On the other side, there's something about writing poems that allows me to engage with silence from both past and present. I try my best to honor the women in my family, to give voice to the parts of their stories that were erased or they were too ashamed to dissect. This includes the trauma inherited. In exorcizing these experiences through poetry,  I feel like I'm reaching across time, reconciling with the past while trying to offer something to the future. It's messy, magical, and sometimes terrifying work, but I think that's all part of the appeal for me.

KARAN

Your poems often move through historical moments with intimate detail, particularly in the numbered sequence starting with “1937.” How do you think about writing across time? What drew you to explore these particular years and their intersections with personal and political histories?

ARUMANDHIRA

I was just talking with my sister about how history isn't some fixed thing in the past—it's alive and always in the room with us in ways we sometimes don't realize. It's wild how people can have almost identical experiences decades apart. In my family, narratives can often be cyclical, repeating themselves in new contexts. My great-grandmother—who is at the heart of these poems—told me certain stories long before I ever encountered prejudice, misogyny, or sexual violence myself.

“1937” was a memory she shared with me over and over when I was a kid. But the way she describes feeling in that poem isn't far from how I felt at ten years old–like a stranger in a country that's supposedly your home. And then there's the way we both watched our mothers navigate the world under the gaze of men and how we unconsciously shaped a vision of womanhood that we would spend our lives fighting to unlearn. Writing through specific years helps me map these patterns, see how they've shaped my family, my body, my identity. 

These poems carry with them the backdrop of colonial oppression and revolution in Indonesia. It's my hope that these sequence of years are mirrors for understanding how large historical forces—war, colonization, subjugation—filter down into intimate, everyday moments. I wanted to explore how history inhabits the body and how it's passed down, sometimes carried in something as small as a gesture or a single line of dialogue. It's my way of saying that no moment exists in isolation, and that even the most private pain can illustrate larger wounds.

KARAN

There's such a masterful handling of form in these poems. In “Djinn,” the way the lines taper and expand creates this visual representation of breath or spirit. And then there are prose poems—trying to contain an uncontainable trauma—the next building upon the last. How do you think about the relationship between form and content in your work? What guides your decisions about structure on the page? Why did you use the form of the prose poem for this series?

ARUMANDHIRA

Thank you! I'm so giddy about your observation of the form in “Djinn.” For me, form is always in conversation with the content and narrative—it's the container that shapes how the poem lives on in your head after you're finished reading. In “Djinn,” I wanted the visual structure to reflect how this family lore of the djinn has survived through generations. Always amorphous yet all-encompassing, much like how the trauma we inherit sleeps and wakes and repeats. Of course there are also fun personal or cultural decisions that influence the form I choose for a poem. “Djinn” is a repetition of nines until the last couplet, ending the poem with two nine-syllable lines. In Javanese mysticism, cycles of nine symbolize unseen forces shaping one's fate. Unseen forces here can be attributed to the supernatural or legacies of trauma. I wanted the form to illustrate the recursive, nesting nature of the djinn's–or trauma's–influence. Like a Matryoshka doll—one burdened spirit contained within another. 

I love the prose poem format because I find that they tend to resist containment–they blur boundaries, just as trauma and memory do and don't conform neatly to line breaks or expected forms. When I read a prose poem, I can feel its weight immediately. The density can create a kind of claustrophobia or sensation of being trapped inside the poem. That's ultimately what I was going for to have the form converse with the narrative, where the speaker feels trapped–within her body, her lineage, and what society has written for her fate.

Before I decide on how to format a poem in the revision process, I ask myself, “What does the narrative need to resonate?” I try my best to conjure a reading experience where the language feels simultaneously physical and spectral, intimate and expansive. Form, in my opinion, is a key way to embody that on the page.

KARAN

Language and its multiplicities appear throughout these poems – from Indonesian to Dutch influences. In “1937,” you write about “the stolen language enforced across your village.” Tell us about your relationship with language(s) in your poetry. How does moving between languages shape your work?

ARUMANDHIRA

I love this question so much! Language, for me, is both a home and a foreign place. Growing up in Indonesia, words bore complex layers of colonization. These poems are written in English and feature Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, and Dutch as evidence of the ongoing evolution of language as both inheritance and defiance. For me, to write in English is to write in translation. Even as I write, I feel the textures of other languages desperate for air, reminding me of meanings that are impossible to fully capture.

When I write about "the stolen language enforced across your village," I'm pointing to the violence of erasure—how language can carry the weight of assimilation. I write primarily in English so I'm a product of the erasure I'm identifying. In that sense, language is both a gift and a weapon. Poetry has demanded me to pay attention to what language can and cannot do. But for me it's not about finding a single “right” word–it's about capturing the multiplicity of being—how our voices, like our histories, can hold both rupture and resilience.

KARAN

The body appears in these poems as both a site of violence and resistance. For instance, in “1941,” you write, “Nothing stops him from thinking you're his wife. / Every night, Ibu walks from her house to his.” How do you navigate writing about trauma while preserving the humanity and agency of your subjects?

ARUMANDHIRA

Writing about trauma is still something I'm working to mindfully practice. It's the intentional approach of depicting the body as a testament to survival rather than a vessel of harm. Yes, the body holds violence, but it also holds resistance and reclamation, which is the complexity I aim to honor. Some of my favorite poets who expertly navigate this are Taneum Bambrick and Hala Alyan. As a sexual assault survivor, it's important to me that while I focus on the interiority of violent experiences, I give the poems space to exist beyond the trauma depicted. When I resonate with a poem where trauma is present, it's because of the strength that endures within it.

KARAN

This is a staple question for us and I'm always surprised by the range in everyone's responses: There's a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

ARUMANDHIRA

What a fun and challenging question! I guess it's hard for me to see body, mind, heart, and soul as anything but a single ecosystem. I was raised on the Javanese philosophy that the harmony of the body (raga), mind (pikiran), heart (ati) and soul (jiwa) is what makes us human. It sounds weird to say that my work is “poetry of the human.” But I think looking at the fullness of human existence—its contradictions, instincts, histories, and emotions—leaves room for the complexities of identity, culture, and memory to shape the work in a way that feels organic rather than categorized. As for whether my poetry is moving in a different direction, I think it's always evolving, but I don't see it breaking away from this. 

KARAN

Your work engages deeply with Indonesian mythology and folklore, particularly in “Djinn” where the supernatural and everyday merge. How does mythology inform your imagination? What role do you see poetry playing in preserving and reimagining these cultural narratives?

ARUMANDHIRA

I think the term mythology implies a collection of fictitious beliefs to explain the world, human nature, and the unseen forces that shape existence. But this concept of mythology—whether it's ancient Greek, Javanese, or from any other culture—becomes deeply entwined with the lived realities of the people who hold those stories. 

I think that's why it's important to consider the difference between what we call mythology and the lived, felt, and experienced truths of different cultures. To the people who believe in these stories, the supernatural forces of their mythology might not be "mythical" at all. Growing up, djinns and ghosts weren't tall tales for me. For us, the supernatural is not thought of as separate from the material world, but part of it—like the wind, or the earth, or the ocean. To this day, I struggle to frame these experiences as "mythology" because I hate to reduce them to an academic abstraction, when for many, the supernatural is just as real and impactful as any physical phenomenon.

Thinking this way has really helped my writing break free–I don't feel restricted in the experiences or narratives I can write and I don't feel the need to be conventional in order to write something that resonates. The metaphors I draw from “mythology” are also a lot of fun. As people, I think it's in our nature to make sense of events, emotions, and experiences that cannot be easily explained through logic alone. So to me, in a sense, poetry and mythology have similar roles–both are a lens through which I can interact with the world, connecting different layers of experience. 

KARAN

The mother-daughter relationship is threaded through these poems with such complexity. In “1944,” you write about “the desperation to save the doll from what it can't understand.” Intergenerational relationships and inherited trauma seems to be at the heart of your work — would you speak a little about this? How important is it to excavate our histories and to be able to speak our truth, especially when it's not part of the popular imagination?

ARUMANDHIRA

Maybe it's just the stage of life I'm in—everyone around me is having kids—but I keep thinking about how we try to shield the people we love from the very things that shaped us, even when we don't fully understand or can't undo them ourselves. There's an inherent complexity in the mother-daughter relationship, one that's at once nurturing and painful, protective and suffocating. It's this simultaneous desire to shelter and to pass on resilience that can also unintentionally wound. This tension is common among my friends who are the children of immigrants. Talking about it together raises such strong emotions. The pressure to break from inherited trauma is very real but I also think it's a privilege to be in a place where I can think about doing that rather than just surviving. Breaking free from inherited trauma wasn't a luxury my mom, my grandmother, or my great-grandmother had. 

To me, excavating these histories—especially those outside of the popular imagination—is both a privilege and an act of resistance. It's my way of carving out a space of power, one that can withstand erasure. Of course, there are moments when I wonder, Will anyone care about this? But ultimately, what matters is that I care. Some of my favorite poems are the ones where the writer fully embraces that conviction. With so much content constantly swirling around us, it's pointless to write for trends or for what has historically been deemed readable. Writing should be an act of urgency, not accommodation.

KARAN

Tell us about your experience with Kundiman and Storyknife Writers Retreat. How have these communities influenced your work? And what is some of the best advice you've so far received?

ARUMANDHIRA

Both Kundiman and Storyknife have been transformative for my writing, not just in terms of craft but in how I understand the role of community in sustaining art. I began pursuing poetry in 2021 so I still feel like a newbie and struggle with the idea of calling myself a poet. Being a part of a community certainly helps with my confidence in writing, but it also gives me access to so many creative, kind artists. 

At Kundiman, I found myself surrounded by Asian American writers who, like me, were wrestling with history, language, and identity in ways that felt both deeply personal and politically urgent. It's cool to be in a space where you don't have to explain the weight of your lineage—it makes room for a different kind of creative risk-taking. There's also power in learning about and contributing to critical conversations that writers in the diaspora are having. 

At Storyknife, I learned to trust that even in stillness, the work is being done. I woke up each morning with nothing but time (something every writer should have the privilege of experiencing), and in that space, I was reminded that storytelling is a communal act–writing is as much about listening and witnessing as it is about being in front of a screen. 

The best advice? Maybe this is cheating, since it wasn't advice directly given to me, but I have it stickied on my laptop for a reason. Before we all parted ways at Storyknife, my wonderful co-resident Melissa Horner-Petrone shared this quote from Arundhati Roy's War Talk:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness–and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling–their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

KARAN

We always ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help them kickstart a poem?

ARUMANDHIRA

The world is falling apart right now, so I think about this a lot. But imagine it's the apocalypse. Write a poem as an unfinished, unsent text message. Maybe the world ended too quickly, or maybe you hesitated—what were you trying to say? Who was it meant for? Did you run out of time, or did you change your mind? Let the gaps, the typos, the abrupt ending tell their own story.

KARAN

We'd also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

ARUMANDHIRA

I'm currently obsessed with FKA Twigs' album Eusexua. That's my whole 2025 moodboard. 

Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is also a forever rec of mine.