KARAN

Emily, thank you for these powerful and deeply moving poems. Your work is rich with imagery and profound observations about love, death, and the human condition. I’m particularly struck by how you blend personal experiences with broader themes. In “Love and Death Speaking at Once,” (love that title so much) you write, “To love someone means to imagine / their death.” This line beautifully encapsulates the intertwining of love and mortality that runs through many of your poems. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry? Or even largely, why poetry?

EMILY

Thank you for your generous reading! I’m grateful to be in community with you. 

Each poem has a different origin story but I do think that these days poetry rises out of language more often than image for me. It may be a word, a term, a phrase, or a line. I write it down and churn it in my mind until I can expand on it — until I can answer why it has stuck with me, what meaning it holds for me. “Love and Death Speaking at Once,” though, came out of an idea, contained in the line you quoted. I can’t bear the fact that the people I love will die. But this fear also feels necessary and useful because it activates more patience and kindness in me. Thoughts like, What if this is the last conversation I have with them? What if I don’t see them again? make me apologize, call back, and express my appreciation more quickly.

I have been saying that poetry made my language free, that it is a space in which the inadequate tongue of my youth as an immigrant did not feel shamed or constricted. Nowadays I think a lot about how poetry is a practice of both love and ethics. Poetry demands heightened precision with language, demands that we deeply investigate our own descriptions and perspectives. How we speak affects the way we think and behave. The poetry writing process helps me treat my subjects and see and react to the world around me with care.

KARAN

Your poems often touch on themes of identity, cultural heritage, and global issues. For instance, in “Related Matters,” you reference typhoons and their names in different languages: “Tomorrow’s typhoon is called Hǎishén, meaning sea god in Mandarin.” How do you navigate the intersection of personal experience and broader cultural or global concerns in your poetry? Do you consciously try to bridge these different aspects in your work?

EMILY

It’s harder for me to not see global events or phenomena as personal experiences. 

Yes, the genocide of Palestinians is personal to me because I am a Korean, because I lived in Canada and the United States, because I live in Hawai‘i now, and thus I can overlay all the colonial atrocities; yes, the flooding and deaths in North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene are personal to me, not only because I have people I care about there, but also because similar weather disasters are happening around the world and nowhere is safe. I don’t advocate for conflating histories or making lazy analogies — it’s important to recognize the different dynamics and consequences depending on various contexts — but it’s harder to not feel or identify connections between the “there” and “here.” But even without considering these connections, just on the basic human level, witnessing the violences of various scales that people enact upon others and the environment enrages and petrifies me. 

So it’s more like, yes, all these experiences are personal to me, because I just can’t believe that we are allowed to be that cruel, that we allow it to happen, and we are all part of this “we.”

KARAN

I’m intrigued by the simplicity of your titles, particularly “Body Of” and “Decency.” They seem to set up a framework for the poems that follow, but also allow for surprising turns because I can’t really tell what to expect. How do you approach titling your poems? Do the titles come to you before, during, or after the writing process? What do you aim to achieve with your titles?

EMILY

Ooh. Titles are so hard. A lot of the time the title comes last. After drafting the poem, I try to see which themes and lines stick out to me. I try to come up with simple but evocative titles, but other times a title just jumps out without much thinking. For the book title, I took from a line in a poem, which is what I had done for my first book, A Cruelty Special to Our Species. In both cases, I felt that it was not only one of the most interesting lines in the book, but also one that conveyed the mood and ideas the best. 

KARAN

In “Related Matters,” (you can tell that poem has really stuck with me) you write, “The name of the wind, Maysak, / means teak tree in Khmer, I learn.” There are many such elements of research in your poems, so I wanted to know how you approach research in your poetry? Does the research precede the poem, or do you find yourself looking things up as you write? How does this factual information interact with the more lyrical aspects of your work?

EMILY

I have a love-hate relationship with research because I am also a scholar. Being a scholar while also being a poet can be a struggle for me because scholarship is so much about contextualization, citations, and factual accuracy, and poetry is very much about letting go of obsessing over those things. I look up a lot of things before and in the middle of writing and winnow out the over-explained or unnecessary parts to let the poem sing, not really educate. I do think and appreciate that whatever remains in the final draft is made possible by everything that came before—the research, the details, the impulse to inform. 

KARAN

Your poem “Elsewhere” touches on the complex subject of animal suicide, using it as a lens to explore human understanding of death and the concept of ‘elsewhere.’ You write, “Theorists have wondered, does animal suicide mean suicide, / meaning, do animals speculate about the future, / meaning, do they understand death.” That is one of the most interesting questions ever, alongside the existence of god etc. Does poetry serve as a way for you to process or explore these complex ideas? Kind of an exercise in philosophy?

EMILY

Yes, I think so. In a poem, I dwell for a very long time on a single concept, person, or truth. As poets, we are not only trying to make sense of a question that interests or haunts us, but also trying to spin beauty out of it; “beauty” meaning a force that makes us unable to look away, not necessarily pleasantness. So in a way, thinking about “complex idea” in a poem feels like looking at a painting in a museum for a long time, studying its features and trying to figure out and articulate what makes it so attractive and powerful to me. 

KARAN

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 evolving in a particular direction?

EMILY

That’s an interesting way to look at it. I’m not even sure if I differentiate among “mind,” “heart,” and “soul” enough to put them into separate categories! Maybe one can say my first book was more “bodily” in a sense that many poems in it centered the history of the “comfort women” and the sexual labor their bodies were forced to endure for the Japanese Imperial Army. I still write about the body though. But my question is, can writing about the body be detached from the mind, heart, and soul? Doesn’t beholding a body, even writing a kind of ekphrasis of it, involve the mind, heart, soul? I don’t think I can describe my own body without meditating on my emotional relationship with it. Maybe I’m getting befuddled, but I guess I am saying that I see my poetry as existing in all those camps.

KARAN

As a Korean-Canadian poet and now an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and an editor who engages with other writers from various cultures so closely, how do your various cultural experiences and academic background inform your poetry? Do you find that these aspects of your identity influence your themes or imagery more and more as you go forward in your career/life as a poet, or is it the other way around? Do we shed parts of ourselves as we grow older? I don’t know if I’m making sense. Forgive me.

EMILY

I received an MFA in creative writing, then, a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. During my MFA program, I familiarized myself with contemporary U.S. poetry and learned the craft of both writing and of constructing my artistic stance. As a PhD student, I mostly studied under scholars in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese studies, across various disciplines and I wrote a critical dissertation on feminist Korean poetry. The MFA helped me build my identity as a writer and the PhD helped me contextualize my writerly identity within both U.S. and Korean lineages, especially in terms of gendered writing practices, traditions, and histories. Just because reading widely enriches writing in general, I do cherish the fact that I am bilingual and have been exposed to texts from multiple cultures/countries. It gives me a beautiful range of case studies I can turn to. For instance, I can examine how femininity is wielded by Choi Seung-ja of South Korea, and by Kim Addonizio of the U.S. — their different flavors of fearlessness. Then I might wonder, How am I similar and how am I different? What is my own approach to the theme? What is my tone? Why?

I’ve also had to translate a lot in my life, linguistically and/or culturally, for daily and scholarly activities. I also came to love literary translation. Training myself in translation, noticing the distances between words in two languages, made me realize that sometimes poetry lives in these gaps. The inexactitude inspires creativity.  

KARAN

Congratulations on your book that was just released this week, Find Me as the Creature I Am! I loved reading it in manuscript form and can’t wait to hold it in my hands. Will you tell us about that book? How did it come into existence? Please be as detailed as you like.

EMILY

Thank you so much. I’m very excited for Find Me as the Creature I Am to find its way to you and readers. For this question, I hope it’s okay to offer the description I had written for Knopf:

Find Me as the Creature I Am imagines love on an increasingly apocalyptic planet, as a necessary means of enacting care and hope. Acute affection for and acknowledgement of everything that is beautiful about the world heightens one’s sense of pain in witnessing devastation and activates a desire for change and conscientious navigation of the world and relationships. 

The manuscript started as an exploration on human relationships with the natural world, in particular animal life; I also had a strong inclination to write about love more centrally, after having published a book driven by suffering and sorrow, and productively struggled with ways to write about love while observing myriad climate disasters and mass extinctions. Writing this book helped me realize that my first book was also born out of love; that love and pain are intimately intertwined. I felt the “suffering and sorrow” because I loved the subjects I was writing about, and poetry is a way of carefully considering how to honor them in language. My discomfort and anxiety about forgetfulness—whether it be about historical truths or disappearing people and animals—continue to prompt me to write. 

When we are living in the “age of goodbyes,” the age of mass destructions, what can we do? I wrote this book thinking that we can start by filling our perspective with love, at the risk of sounding maudlin. Poetry is one way of doing so, for me, and thus is an ethical methodology. Poetry is my meditation on how I should remember everything and everyone I care for, and this process allows me to change my thoughts and actions.

KARAN

As someone who’s been writing a long time and as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, what insights have you gained about contemporary poetry that you’d like to share with our readers, as way of advice or caveats? 

EMILY

Nowadays, rather than trying to appeal to a faceless “general audience” (often interpreted as a mainstream white American reader), I write toward real and trusted friends and family. I want to write poems that they will find meaningful; I find that much more comforting and practical. If you have a poet or reader in your community who shares your taste, and for whom you do not have to translate yourself for, devote the time and energy to show up for each other and share poems with genuine enthusiasm and honesty. I think I’ve sent all the early versions of the poems in Find Me to Kien Lam. If he says a poem is good, I trust that. If he says it needs revision, I punch him. Just kidding! It makes me reconsider and work to turn the poem get to where I really need it to go.

KARAN

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

EMILY

Think of an overused expression (e.g. “cut like a knife,” “think outside the box,” “raining cats and dogs”). 

Keep extending it to make it new and see where it takes you (e.g. “cut / like a knife so sharpened it / slices clean and the surprised flesh doesn't know for a moment / how to bleed,” from Rosanna Warren’s poem “Moment”).

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, especially in the context of the themes you explore in your poetry.

EMILY

The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki). A film about journeying through love and grief as the world burns and crumbles. 

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most?

EMILY

There are so many authors I love reading and am inspired by, but I give the most credit to poets who directly had a hand in shaping my earlier poems: Terence Young, from high school; Greg Djanikian, Taije Silverman, and Lynn Levin, from undergrad; Kimiko Hahn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Eileen Myles, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, from my MFA. I am a fan of their writing, yes, but I feel extremely fortunate that they were also kind and caring. Both their expertise and warmth truly helped me grow and tend to my poems.