KARAN

Elizabeth, thank you for these luminous and layered poems that navigate motherhood, memory, and the natural world with such precision. In “Window Installation,” you write, “Every new house needs a window. Every window a cornfield. Every cornfield needs a boy against which to compare height” – this accumulation creates such a powerful meditation on perspective. 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?

ELIZABETH

Thanks for your generous reading of these poems! 

You’re catching me at a transition moment in terms of process. Until recently, I mainly wrote personal essays. I’d begin from images and anecdotes that struck me as vivid or interesting, and then I’d write into that image/anecdote and see what questions or tensions it yielded. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a particular writing “routine,” other than that I’ve tended to need a few hours of focused time in a single sitting to make real progress.

I had to more or less reinvent my approach to writing when my first child was born. For a while, I just didn’t write at all. When I tried to strike up a writing practice again, I struggled. I mean, I was doing it. I wrote several essays. But I wrote out of this feeling like well, this is who I am, right? This is what I do, and this is how I do it. I wasn’t really excited about anything I was writing. My shift into motherhood was at the forefront of my thoughts, but I didn’t feel I had much to say that hasn’t been said. Plus, my essays tend to lean into tension and uncertainty, so at a certain point I realized that writing was draining me when I needed those rare and precious moments for writing to be fueling. I wanted to develop a mindset that honored and loved the work I was doing as a mother, and instead I was centering all the ways it was hard. 

Fast forward, and I end up in a hybrid workshop with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who had us develop a “commonplace book,” a physical notebook to collect miscellaneous thoughts, lists, freewrites, collages, sketches. It changed my writing process. Handwriting had never worked for me in the past, but all my poems have begun in this notebook, alongside pictures or bits of text I’ve cut out and glued in to come back to later, or sketches of things I’m thinking about. It’s lowered the stakes and made my writing process more oriented around play. I find it’s also more doable to be physically writing things down or drawing when I’m hanging out with toddlers. The moment I open my computer, they want to press buttons. They feel shut out, rightly, and want my attention.  

So these poems began as drafts written around naps and lunch prep and diapers and going to the park. Sometimes they began with an art project—cyanotypes, say—or sometimes a story I came across on Instagram or podcast would trigger a train of thought, sometimes it was something I saw in our neighborhood on a walk…

So my process changed, and so did my relationship with genre. I don’t know if I made a conscious choice to start writing poetry, but I did make a conscious choice to embrace low-stakes writing—writing without pressure to finish or publish—and that led me into persona poems.

Ultimately, poetry gave me a way to write towards a narrative truth without being confined to an autobiographical truth. Poetry has made more space for imagination and association, which better reflects my headspace of late. My days are defined by rhythm and routine, but also distraction and interruption and multitasking and miscellany, and this leaves its mark on the poems, I think, as in the case of the accumulation you mention.

Another thing that feels good about poetry right now is their flexibility—their capacity to hold many truths, even conflicting truths. Recently there’s been a revival of the term “matrescence” to refer to the process of becoming a mother, a period of so much change that it’s compared to the changes we undergo in adolescence. I feel that sense of my own changing deeply. Poetry has been able to accommodate that and give me a way of speaking into and through this feeling of unsettledness, and to a degree some of my poems/speakers themselves reflect a kind of “trying on” of ideas or feelings or conclusions.

So, you know, it’s possible I’ll change my mind about everything I’m telling you tomorrow. 

KARAN

Your poems weave biblical narratives with contemporary motherhood. In “Bathsheba at Christmastime,” you reimagine this figure making salt dough ornaments and skipping YouTube ads. What draws you to these intersections between the sacred and domestic? How does motherhood influence your relationship with these ancient stories?

ELIZABETH

Yeah, interesting question. Jia Tolentino talked about this not long ago on the Ezra Klein Show, and drew this connection between the sacred and domestic/mundane—especially caring for very young children—in the idea of submission and disappearance into something, and how often those things that are most holy or profound are those things we seek distraction from, perhaps because engaging with it requires so much of us. I’m interested in this possibility. I have a very new baby, and right now I just can’t engage with any media that I know is going to really move me—like, I got excited when I saw Janet Planet was available to stream, and then immediately was like—oh, I can’t watch that. It will wreck me. I’m wrecked enough right now as is…

So I guess I’m interested in distraction. Its attraction and risks.

These poems are part of a larger manuscript I’m working on that considers a contemporary experience of motherhood, which is to say motherhood in an era of social media influencing, surveillance capitalism, etc. A pretty common denominator across motherhood experiences is guilt—a sense that we’re failing. We yearn for perfection, yearn for an experience of motherhood that is as beautiful and meaningful as we were promised it would be—knowing we’re not, and it’s not. Sacred it might be, but also messy and frustrating and repetitive. So I kept returning to the idea of the fallen world—a yearning for life as it was in the garden before the fall.

Which requires a certain humility, right? Awareness of the impossibility of our perfection. But we’re living in this era of intensive parenting, this striving for optimization, for an ideal. Momfluencers reinforce this. So much of what they are up to is selling us products—that apron, that set of wooden blocks, that Montessori bed—that will make us better parents, right? And make us feel better. But we’ll feel better in the way a distraction can feel good in the moment. Even the whole notion of what a “good mother” looks like is a socially constructed ideal, a mythology. Like, we probably don’t even have that right.

Maybe I am also yearning for firmness in the face of all this fallibility. Steady ground. Reference points that can endure, and maybe also a container for that raw sense of significance, as opposed to all we make these days to be consumed and discarded. 

KARAN

The natural world appears throughout these poems not just as setting but as an active participant in meaning-making. In “Advent Calendar with Natural Dye,” you create this incredible inventory of colors and their associations. Could you tell us about your relationship with the natural world and how it shapes your imagination?

ELIZABETH

I came across something Anne Lamott wrote—“My husband said something a few years ago that I often quote: Eighty percent of everything that is true and beautiful can be experienced on any 10‑minute walk.” And while she goes on to group together her neighborhood with the natural world, the line usually comes to me when I’m thinking about nature specifically. The natural world doesn’t bullshit you. Which makes our disregard for it all the more tragic. And I say this with some shame, since I’ve been thinking a lot about how little I actually know about the natural world. I’m completely unprepared to survive in an apocalypse. But I also know pretty little about basic things like the names of local prairie grasses. 

One thing I’ll say about some of these influencing accounts is that you come across people with very specific knowledge and skill sets, like using plants for natural dyes. It’s amazing and artful and admirable. But then they try to sell you a workshop or a guide, and their content comes to you as “sponsored,” and I both admire the hustle and the way these people recognize the value of their skill sets, and also resist the way I sense my desire for beauty and conscious living being capitalized on. 

It seems like half of momfluencer content happens in the kitchen, and the other half happens outside. Nature feels beautiful, peaceful, “natural” in the trendy sense. It feels like yet another signal/imperative of a “good mother” is how much time our kids are outside exploring and getting muddy. And I don’t mean to reject that completely. I was privileged to spend a lot of my childhood outside. We had a big yard that I think of wistfully now. Sometimes I think 70% of my struggles and inadequacies as a parent would be solved if I just had a big yard. 

So I guess in these poems I’m attracted to the natural world as it is—and maybe even my nostalgia for my own childhood—but I’m also interested in how it’s harnessed and exploited for “content,” virtue signaling, etc.

KARAN

In “The Momfluencer’s Daughter Breaks her Silence,” you write with such complexity about social media, motherhood, and performance. What led you to explore this perspective? How do you think about poetry’s role in examining our digital lives?

ELIZABETH

I was late to Instagram, and while I knew about influencers, I didn’t really follow any. Pretty sure half of my suggested content was interview clips with Timothée Chalamet. So when the algorithm figured out I was pregnant, suddenly I had an onslaught of content I never asked for from people trying to sell me stuff I didn’t want. Surveillance capitalism had never felt so personal, because there I was navigating sleep deprivation, hormones, exhaustion, guilt, and all this content was designed to exploit those vulnerabilities. I was clearly, literally valued by my purchasing power as a domestic caretaker. It was a culture shock, and sort of… insulting? Dehumanizing? 

Past this, I got interested in why these momfluencers amass thousands of followers, because unlike other influencers, it seems so obvious to any parent that no one’s children are that well-behaved, no one’s house is that clean, no one is that calm all the time when parenting toddlers. Anyone with a toddler knows it just doesn’t look like that. So why do we follow these accounts that are so clearly curated and make us feel bad about our own parenting experience?

I got invested in these questions of performance, authenticity, what it means to be a “good mother,” escapism, nostalgia, economic exploitation of mothers, etc. etc. None of which is new to conversations about motherhood, or new to poetry. Whether I approve or not, our digital lives are so much of our lives. This is a big part of the contemporary experience of motherhood now, unless you’re disciplined enough to stay away from all of it and live off the grid somewhere… which, I might add, is itself idealized in many of these momfluencer accounts, with their brick hearths and Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses like they didn’t just make a reel and post it from their phone. It’s all an illusion. See? It’s fine to just be a homemaker! Like being an influencer isn’t itself a hustle and a job. 

So the momfluencer persona in my poems can be a bit of an unreliable narrator. She isn’t ever quite being straight up with us, and maybe isn’t being straight up with herself, and her followers maybe know this, maybe don’t, and maybe aren’t being straight up with themselves either. 

And here in 2025, the stakes attached to all this are revealing themselves pretty vividly.

(To be really fair and really honest, I’ll tell you there’s a few momfluencers out there who I genuinely love and am happy to follow. Lest I paint with too broad a brush. Mothers are not a monolith. Momfluencers are not a monolith.)

KARAN

Memory and its preservation run through many of these poems. In “Acrophobia,” you write, “Because memory is the housefly that dies dusty still climbing the muntin, a magician that resurrects with a hiss during spring cleaning.” How do you think about memory’s relationship to poetry? What role does writing play in preserving or transforming memories?

ELIZABETH

I have lots of thoughts on this one. It was actually a big reason why I truly didn’t want to write in the early days of motherhood, and part of why I still resist foregrounding my own experience of motherhood. I’ve experienced from writing essays that the more I recall a memory, the more I work it over and narrativize it in the writing process, the more I’m in fact changing the memory, and I can no longer access the more raw version of it. Those early days felt too important, too unfathomable to tamper with. Yet, at least.

To a degree, all memory is the story we tell ourselves, right? It’s selective, manipulated, even invented. As with any story, this can be both destructive and productive. It can be empowering on a personal level, which that poem considers. That you can be intentional in how you write or store your memories in order to build a lens through which to view the present. It’s the difference between recording a memory around your grandma falling and breaking her arm and recording the memory of her breaking her arm and paramedics coming to help. 

It creates an opportunity for resistance, I think. We can choose to build a memory bank that foregrounds joy and possibility, and that doesn’t have to mean naivety or turning away from the problems of our time so much as creating strength and conviction.

I think too we tend to think of memory as this essential thing we must hold onto at all costs, and while I think of this differently when it comes to collective memory and history, on a personal level, and the older I get, the more I find that there’s a kindness in allowing yourself to let some things go. To in fact, forget them, and to become whatever you’re becoming instead. It’s one thing (among many) I don’t enjoy about being on social media—the unforgivingness of it. The way it stores all these old curated memories and “friendships,” beyond their natural lifespan. I want to delete my accounts so bad but won’t I be deleting these memories, this record of my life?  I don’t want to, but I also really, really want to. 

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?

ELIZABETH

I’ve never considered this before, but my initial thought is that I don’t know if it’s useful in my own practice to think of these as separate impulses, or to try to untangle the heart from the mind from the soul. 

KARAN

Your work often explores what we inherit and what we pass on. In “The Bird Test Theory,” you write about “all those silly salt stars sold by whom and for what.” How do you think about legacy – both personal and cultural – in your poetry?

ELIZABETH

My writing has always been about the stories we tell ourselves. Memory. Nostalgia. Magical thinking. Performance and persona. Motherhood. Identity. 

And as I said before, stories can be destructive or productive—or both. They’re necessary—to build selfhood, community, meaning, survival. They’re efficacious. They can also deceive and manipulate. They’re motivated. 

And they can endure and shape belief systems and politics, so I guess maybe this is what I’m getting at. That if poetry is (among other things) in the business of telling stories, I think it should also be in the business of paying attention to the engine driving them—what is motivating them, their purpose. I’m reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message right now—he quotes Audre Lorde, who says, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live…”

KARAN

I’m struck by how your poems often build through accumulation, as in “Window Installation” or “Advent Calendar.” Tell us about your relationship with form. How do you decide when a poem needs this kind of layered structure versus a more contained one? I’m also heavily invested in prose poems and would love to know your thoughts on them!

ELIZABETH

I don’t know if I “decide” on a layered structure or a contained one. I don’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what a given poem will look like or do until it’s already “looking like” and already “doing.”

The prose poem feels right for this project/set of poems in a lot of ways. The prose block becomes a kind of container, a boxy sort of room that echoes domestic enclosure. A single stanza (“room”), a single line—that is, a single unit of meaning that encompasses a sometimes dizzying vastness seems to formally mirror domestic dailiness. And creates also an important tension with and order to what is otherwise poetry that leans into an imaginative and associative impulse—and yes, sometimes therefore an “accumulative” impulse. Gretchen Marquette put me on to Gregory Orr, who talks about four temperaments in poetry, and that you need a limiting impulse alongside a limitless impulse for a poem to be both approachable and interesting. So the prose poem is the limit. The imagination is the limitlessness.

KARAN

Living in southern Minnesota, how does place inform your work? I’m thinking particularly of poems like “Poem for October” where the landscape feels so present. I’m also generally intrigued by how geography shapes our ideologies/ways of thinking. 

ELIZABETH

Minnesota is a place where the seasons are very distinct, and one thing I found myself doing as I wrote the poems for this project was leaning into the seasonal context of any given poem. As I’ve been arranging them, it’s been interesting to see a kind of meditative arc emerge alongside that seasonal rhythm, that some of the “darker” poems also coincide with the end of autumn as it moves into the darkest days of the year. 

I mentioned earlier that there’s a lot I just don’t know about the natural world, so I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what’s around me—the names of its rocks, its grasses—not least of all because my kids ask me what they’re called. In addition to dictional richness, some of that impulse is perhaps related to the ways I myself am changing, as I try to be content to care for what I can care for: my people, my own community, my own yard, etc. Some of it is a growing sense that place is in fact actively made, and so I’m trying to pay more attention to how I’m part of that making. 

Minnesota too is home to a lot of farming, and the American farmer has its own place in our national nostalgia (think Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer). And not to keep coming back to momfluencers, but this in no small part the imagery they use (think @ballerinafarm and her cows) and are nostalgic for. So to a degree, integrating the landscape was also self-conscious.

KARAN

Elizabeth, what is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received so far?

ELIZABETH

It’s hard to know what the best advice I’ve received is, but I can tell you what I’ve been thinking about lately. I don’t know where I heard this first, but I’ve heard variations of it—that poetry is a form of attention, and attention is a form of love. We’re living in a time where our attention is literally being bought and sold, and it feels important to be aware and intentional about what we give our attention to. Poetry is a way of extending love.

But it’s also just one way. I mentioned earlier the hybrid workshop I took with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, but I didn’t mention perhaps one of the biggest takeaways I had from a one-on-one with her. I don’t remember exactly what she said or how we reached this point in the conversation—I was probably complaining about how hard it was to find time to write with my toddlers—but she more or less told me it was ok not to write, and to just love my kids for a while. I needed to hear that, though I don’t know if the advice would have resonated so well coming from anyone else. I do know she told me low-stakes writing is the way to go. So what I told myself when I went home was that I would only write if I felt it was fueling me to be better for those around me. Otherwise it wasn’t worth it. 

It’s funny, in retrospect, that this was the mindset that ended up unlocking everything, and the next few months I wrote more than I’d written in years. 

So, writing can wait. Poetry can wait. Which is not to “give up,” since curiosity and paying attention to the world is half of the work of poetry anyway. And which is not to trivialize its importance, but just to acknowledge the fullness of a life, of lives, the way our attention is needed in different places at different times. The stakes are high.

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?

ELIZABETH

Choose a public event you’ve lived through, or witnessed. The sort of thing that makes the news. Name it directly in the title of your poem. 

Then, write a poem that intentionally doesn’t engage with the event at all, but rather dwells on other, personal (specific!) images from that day/time. 

The idea is to create some tension between the public and the private, consider how one impacts the other, to think about what we pay attention to, and what is worthy of notice or remembrance.

Shout out to Erica Trabold, who shared a prompt this one is loosely based on.

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.

ELIZABETH

Bluey, Season 2, Episode 26: “Sleepytime.”

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most throughout your journey as a writer.

ELIZABETH

Sure, and thanks again for such thoughtful questions.

I’m coming out of a background in nonfiction, but I find a lot of the prose writers I return to also write poetry or have a background in poetry… Hanif Abdurraqib, Maggie Nelson, Eula Biss. I was also reading a lot of Diane Seuss and Analicia Sotelo when I was working on these poems. If we’re talking about influence, I also credit my husband, Michael Torres, who is always ready to talk craft, who prioritizes my poems sometimes more than I do.