KARAN

Maria, thank you for these striking poems! They are powerful, emotionally charged, and endlessly readable. These poems grapple with intense personal experiences and societal issues. In “Light Being Light,” you write, “Of course I screamed. Of course / people didn't hear.” Those lines are haunting. This tension between expression and silence appears in several of your poems. How do you approach giving voice to experiences that are often silenced or overlooked in society? Does poetry serve as a form of testimony for you? I guess I’m asking why do you write? What is it that compels you to begin and finish a poem?

MARIA

Thank you so much, Karan—I’m honored to be featured. I’ve had my eye on ONLY POEMS since its inception, and I’m so impressed with what you all have built in such a short time. The care and time spent on this project are beyond evident, and I’m touched to be part of it. I can’t think of a better home for this set of poems.

Poetry definitely serves as a form of testimony for me. Much of my poetry addresses the futility of memory, especially in traumatic contexts. I struggle with pretty severe post-traumatic stress disorder from both sexual violence and chronic health issues that occurred as a result, and I had to change a lot of my habits and practices to accommodate my sudden limitations and their fluctuations. I could no longer spend hours sitting at a desk. My brain fog was often too dense to read, write, or even think. It was like my gravitational pull was suddenly ten times stronger. I repeated phrases and lines out loud in bed so as not to forget them later, taking voice memos and notes when I felt well enough. Poetry was a means of coming to terms with the liminality of my condition. So the “tension between expression and silence” is very literal for me. Recalibrating my creative identity took some time, but when I emerged from the fog somewhat, I noticed changes in my poems. They made themselves necessary: I felt less like their maker and more like a conduit that allowed them to enter the world. Despite my physical isolation, my poetry became less isolated and more engaged in conversation with other poets and artists.

The great thing about poetry is its emotional and linguistic fluidity. What goes up in a poem does not necessarily come down. Nor are the laws of language fixed in poetry. A good poem is tethered to the world while reaching beyond it. In “A Belief in Ghosts: Poetry and the Shared Imagination,” Dorothea Lasky writes that “the shared imagination engages fully with the material world [...] In a poem we make a haunted land to mimic this haunted one, and [...] we populate this land with physical reality to connect this world to the next.” On the first day of class this spring, Ocean Vuong described poetry as “[y]our imaginary life, made into shareable material.” It’s like virtual reality, but more of a superreality. Poetry is a place where the past, present, and future can be imaginatively and spiritually altered. It rejects linear time, geographical place, the binary of life and death. Poetry follows dream logic. Everything happens now, and everything is possible. The past can be changed in poetry and, as such, it is the only language that allows me to convey something as visceral and personal as sexual violence. I also find myself returning to Audre Lorde’s assertion that “[t]he difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.”

I write in fragments. I have a Google sheet with words and phrases I don’t want to forget—I sit down every couple weeks or so, comb through my notebook and my notes app, and update the sheet with new words and phrases I’ve accrued. A lot of my writing process consists of accumulating these phrases and turning them over in my head over time until I understand how they go together. A phrase can stay on my list for well over a year before it finds its home in a poem. I feel like a bird spinning nests from human hair. Much of the time, the poem comes slowly, then all at once. I try to remember that the writing process is essentially a form of approximation. A single mark on a page can count as a draft if the intent behind it is intact. The next draft of each poem should get you closer to where you want to be, but the mystical perfect, finished poem does not exist. The poem you most want to write will never be written—the poems you write on the way are what matter.

KARAN

I’m very interested in the intersection of the personal and the political — well, I should say I’m interested in its articulation because the personal and the political intersect everywhere whether we see it or not, whether we talk about it or not. “Sea Level” devastatingly intertwines personal loss with environmental concerns. Lines like “It was the year of homemade bombs” and “Soon, / the experts drone, this place will be uninhabitable” sit alongside intimate reflections on absence:

God can’t love you

the way I do, will never know you

like I know you.

How do you see the relationship between personal grief and larger, global issues in your work? Do you find that one informs the other in your writing process? 

MARIA

Absolutely. Personal and collective griefs are symbiotic. I find myself writing outward from personal losses. Many of these poems orbit the suicide of my best friend, Torri Santo Pelletier, which occurred in March 2022. The suicide of a close friend is an immensely personal loss, but no suicide happens in a vacuum, and their death was essentially social murder. I could go on about the different factors — queerness, transness, financial insecurity, mental illness, coronavirus, what have you — but my point is that there is essentially no difference between personal and collective grief. At the end of the day, their death made sense. I want to live in a world where their death doesn’t make sense.

My work on disability is another example. Queerness, sexual violence, patriarchy, rape culture — these are all deeply intertwined with my personal experience with disability and illness. After my assault, my body couldn’t adequately store or process energy — my fight-or-flight response went into overdrive. I was eventually diagnosed with ME/CFS, colloquially known as chronic fatigue syndrome. While it can be triggered by trauma, most cases of ME/CFS are post-viral. A lot of my creative engagement with disability is very gendered, and much of my experience parallels what has historically been considered female hysteria. People hear “chronic fatigue” and go yeah, well, everyone’s tired. It is so much more than being tired. This all happened before the pandemic, but I remember when the pandemic hit I was like oh, fuck, this is going to happen to so many people. I feel like going full Cassandra mode sometimes when I see stuff like people collapsing and being carted away at the Olympics. I feel like the past few years have been a crash course in how far humans will go to maintain their established ways of life—this past year especially. The role of the poet is to disturb the quotidian, and the quotidian needs to be disturbed.

KARAN

I’ll get more specific. Your bio mentions that you are “unconditionally supportive of Palestinian resistance and liberation.” Would you speak about how your political consciousness informs your poetic practice? Do you see your poetry as a form of activism, and if so, in what ways?

MARIA

I’ve been dismayed and disturbed by the silence of so many established artists, particularly American writers, when it comes to the topic of the Palestinian genocide. All Americans are complicit in this genocide to an extent, and we can counteract this complicity with solidarity and action. If we are to take ourselves seriously as cultural workers, it is essential to normalize not only anti-Zionism, but support for material resistance and liberation altogether, both in creative spaces and our everyday lives. We are inundated with pro-Israel propaganda from all directions, have been for generations, and artists must work to counteract this deluge of lies and widen the cracks in Israel’s veneer. 

Utilized as a call to action, the artist biography defies the cultural expectations set for itself, and the reader is prompted to ask why this, why now. Rasha Abdulhadi says it best in Electric Lit’s “Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide”: “Every point of contact is an organizing opportunity and a chance to inoculate against genocidal propaganda.” The whole interview is essential reading, especially the bios at the end. Nobody really needs to know where else my poems are published or where I went to school. They need to know that I support Palestinian liberation, and they should too. Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing a lot of great work, and their New York Crimes publication is another example of this tactic—from a distance, it looks exactly like a copy of the New York Times, and they are very thorough in their examination of the New York Times’ role in manufacturing consent for genocide. A larger organization doing this work is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel — which many literary magazines are now committed to, COUNTERCLOCK included. Obligatory Toni Cade Bombara: the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. I have lost interest in the works of many writers and artists I previously admired because their silence on this genocide is discrediting, no matter how beautiful or successful the art itself may be.

As far as explicit mentions of resistance and liberation — we are so far beyond the need for a ceasefire that it feels imperative to name exactly what is needed. The word “ceasefire” has been diluted and co-opted by the same politicians who greenlight weapons sales. There is no ceasefire without a weapons embargo. Support for a ceasefire is not support for Palestinian liberation, and many supporters of a ceasefire condemn the Palestinian resistance, which is a fundamentally incoherent position if you claim to support Palestinian life. I have never seen the English language butchered and bastardized like I have in the past year. Seriously taking the passive voice to previously unseen heights. In any case, the Palestinian cause is much more important than whatever fellowship I feel is clouted-up enough to name-drop in my professional biography at any given time. It’s about solidarity — if these institutions blacklist everybody expressing support for Palestine and we all take explicitly pro-liberation stances, whose work will they feature and promote? The ongoing boycott of the Poetry Foundation is an example of this. I think the official boycott technically ended, but the demands on which the boycott was established were not met, and an organic boycott is still continuing. I did not apply for the Ruth Lilly this year because of PoFo’s unwillingness to acknowledge the genocide, and I know many young poets who made the same decision.

Earlier this year, I was invited to join SUNHOUSE Literary’s inaugural summer mentorship program as part of their cohort of poetry mentors. As part of the program, we did a mentor reading over Zoom. There were so many fantastic poets among the pool of mentors, and several of them structured their biographies this way, including Yi Wei and Kelly X. Hui. Kelly publicly turned down a PEN America short story prize earlier this year because of the organization’s genocide apologia. I will say it was very powerful to be part of a reading where a good portion of the artists expressed explicit support for the Palestinian cause. Many of the graduating poets at this spring’s NYU MFA reading also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, opening with poems by Palestinian poets, wearing keffiyehs, taking advantage of the eyes and ears in the room. If older, more established writers aren’t pulling their weight, I have faith the upcoming generation of writers can disturb the mindless acceptance of Zionism in our field. Again, Rasha Abdulhadi: “[T]here are many who might be ready to do something or know something, who might already suspect what they understand and could do, and will take a leap if that validation is reflected back to them by even one person: that their instincts toward life are correct.” This applies with masking, too: sometimes, I’m the only person in the room wearing a mask, but people see my mask as permission to put theirs on.

All poetry is political, especially poetry understood as apolitical. In Kyle Carrero Lopez’s “A Future that Doesn’t End: An Interview with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal,” Villarreal refers to poetry as an “insurgent language,” one that “resists emptying by design.” In an age of impersonality, advertisement, and enshittification where we are fed a constant diet of soulless slop meant to dull our senses and empty our bank accounts, poetry is the anti-AI — emotional, personal, human, capable of holding multiple truths simultaneously. Poetry exists for its own sake, with its own stakes. AI poetry is fundamentally boring because it has nothing to say. Villarreal refers to artificial intelligence as the “apocalyptic imagination,” positioning poetry as its antithesis. Especially under fascism, poetry is a tool with which to imagine and enact alternative futures. Fascists are threatened by poets — just look at Israel. The IDF kidnapped Mosab Abu Toha and murdered Refaat al-Areer. There are countless examples of this throughout history. Baldwin’s exile from the United States to Paris, Lorca’s murder by Spanish nationalists, I could go on.

I’m not sure if I see my poetry as a form of activism. My form of activism, maybe. But “activist” is not a word I’d use to describe myself. I’m a person who does things for causes I care about. If that makes me an activist, okay, but I would prefer for that to make me a human being..

KARAN

In “[Years of pelvic floor therapy],” you confront physical trauma and its lasting impacts with stark honesty, all while being self-aware of what you’re doing and also breaking the fourth wall “I do not want / to inspire pity so much as revulsion” to challenge the reader’s response. How do you approach writing about bodily experiences, particularly those related to trauma? What role does vulnerability play in your creative process?

MARIA

I’ve always gravitated towards writing about heavier experiences, but it’s taken me years to figure out how to do it well. It’s also hard to write about these things when you’re in the thick of them. If I’m writing a poem about a past experience, I sometimes find the notebook I kept at the time, go through it, and lift some words and phrases directly. I know trauma is kind of a hot topic right now in a weird way. Everyone’s reading The Body Keeps the Score, stuff like that. Writing about trauma always feels like a kind of pastiche. It takes a lot of time and patience and a lot of personal work completely unrelated to poetry or any kind of creative output. I highly recommend waiting before publishing work on trauma, because if you haven’t at least started working on healing from it when it’s published, it will harm you. Only you know what’s best for yourself, but you cannot rush stuff like that. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little exhibitionistic and masochistic whenever I publish work on sexual violence, but it’s important to talk about, and this is my way of doing it.

Addressing chronic illness and disability in my work feels equally vital, because there’s so much denial around the topic of chronic post-viral illness, specifically within the context of COVID. Disabled people are shut out of society en masse — just look at the mask bans, prevailing cultural construction of “post-pandemic” life, etc. Of course my case of ME/CFS is not primarily post-viral and started before the pandemic, but I would be far from surprised if a virus ended up being a contributing factor. I will never know, but I do know I probably had a better chance of improvement because so much of my neurological dysfunction was due to being in an ongoing freeze state, i.e., trauma recovery was and is part of my physical recovery. A novel virus that attacks multiple organs is another beast entirely. Post-viral illness is so misunderstood and underestimated. It breaks my heart to see stories of people whose loved ones don’t believe that light or noise can worsen their symptoms, or who get put on a psychiatric hold because it’s assumed they’re mentally ill. So much of it is just denial. People don’t want to believe it can happen to them or anyone. I promise it can. Bodies are really, really weird.

KARAN

In “Bad Nostalgia,” you explore the complex nature of memory and loss. “Like a dead language, I want to be known / but I don't know how” — I resonate with this and it makes me sad. Would you speak about how you navigate the desire for connection and the challenges of articulating trauma in your poems? I see a lot of young poets struggle with this. We published Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong, who I think is a master at this, and your poetry is reminiscent of hers. How do you balance revealing and concealing in your work?

MARIA

Kaylee and I have an inside joke about how every chapbook is titled Blood Knife now. I live in constant fear of accidentally writing a Blood Knife book. I think the big thing is getting a sense of what to share and what to withhold. The poem is not “about you” unless you make it about you. You can do whatever you want. Traumatic and physically violent imagery is exhausting, so it’s important to ensure the violence isn’t gratuitous. Trauma does not make a poem good or meaningful. Knowing when to pull back is just as important as knowing when to lean in. It’s important to zero in on why you feel the need to write about whatever you write about. Ninety-five percent of my writing is for me and me alone, because a) it sucks, and b) it’s practice. It takes a long time to learn how to articulate traumatic experiences creatively in a way that’s meant to be shared with others. I do get a little resentful sometimes that I don’t get a lot of space from the “speaker of the poem.” There’s a Julien Baker interview out there somewhere where she talks about how when women make art about trauma, they aren’t granted the same artistic license and narrative distance from their work as their male counterparts. That resonated with me a lot. At the end of the day, it’s not autobiography, it’s art. Everything in every poem is there for a reason. All of it is intentional. Even if the work is largely autobiographical or otherwise rooted in the artist’s personal experience, entering with that assumption really narrows the scope of the work. 

KARAN

The voice of “Sewer Slide” really grabs my attention. It begins hilariously. I mean: “Fuck being a poet I wanna be a TikTok chick / who never says what she means.” You grapple with the role of the poet in today’s digital age and then compare it with sex-work “like prostitution but worse, cheaper, / unsolicited—” But soon the voice and subject shifts and turns sinister. I love how your poems move, Maria! How do you see your role as a poet in our current social and cultural landscape? Has your perspective on this changed over time?

MARIA

Thank you so much! I was re-reading Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets when I wrote this poem, so the sassiness and sudden turns are definitely influenced by her. I also feel like there’s a lot of Natalie Shapero influence in this piece — I’m obsessed with the sardonic tone of her work. She’s so funny and her stuff is like standup comedy. Standup tragicomedy, maybe. But she’s brilliant. The volta of her poem “Duplex” is a masterclass.

This is a big question, and I’m not sure I have an answer. Roger Reeves has a fantastic article on POETRY called “Parrhesia in a Post-Fact Epoch, or ‘Poetry isn’t revolutionary but it is a way of knowing why it must come’.” Ultimately, the role of the poet is to tell the truth, an obligation troubled by the fact that we live in a post-truth era. We have to wade through so much crap now to get to anything meaningful. You know how news sites are impossible now because of all the popup ads? It’s that, but with everything. Poetry is the opposite of the apocalyptic imagination: it brings the future into the present, clarifies and distills your vision. Our culture is obsessed with short-term gratification and seamless resolution, and poetry challenges this. Reeves notes that, ironically, the success of the poem lies in its failure:

One might say that the word on the poetic line has an asymptotic relationship to meaning—that it comes unbearably close to meaning while simultaneously exploiting and pronouncing its inability to land on the stable territory of it. Quite simply, it never arrives, but that never arriving is its success.

I suppose the role of the poet is to trouble the stability of the word and, in turn, trouble people’s understanding of their interpretations of said words. Poetry exists on the edge of language. This is part of my targeted advertisement series: troubling the rhetoric of diagnostic digital marketing. I’ve also done this with medical documents. Another example is Philip Metres’ brilliant book Sand Opera, the title being an erasure of the phrase “standard operating procedure.” Basically, a poet uses language against itself.

KARAN

Many of your poems deal with heavy themes, yet there’s often a thread of resilience running through them. In “Road to Joy,” you write, “Yes, I'm / learning to live again.” How do you balance the weight of difficult experiences with moments of hope or perseverance in your poetry? Are you invested in hope? I’ll be silly and go ahead and ask if you’re a pessimist or an optimist?

MARIA

I don’t think any of these poems would exist if I wasn’t invested in hope. The creation of poetry is a hope-driven act. It’s like Sandra Cisneros says: “Poets are in the profession of transforming grief to light.” There’s no point in writing about the past without gesturing towards the future. Writing poetry is an act that demonstrates investment in some sort of horizon.

I honestly have no idea if I’m a pessimist or an optimist. Can I say pessimistic optimist?

KARAN

The form and structure of your poems vary, from the abecedarian “Light Being Light” to the more fragmented style of “Targeted Advertisement #1.” How do you approach form in your work? Do you find that certain forms lend themselves better to particular themes or emotions you're exploring? How important is it for you to marry the form with the content?

MARIA

I’ve been making an effort to experiment more with form. I tend to write free-verse stichic poems, which is all well and good, but intention and variety is better. I find splitting drafts into couplets and tercets helpful when it comes to drafting and tracking potential movement within a poem. Indenting every other line can also be fruitful. One of the things that really got hammered into me at NYU was the importance of form and function. I feel like my poems also got stranger, syntactically speaking. As an example, “Light Being Light” originally ended with the phrase “Even then I knew.” Ocean suggested cutting the word “then”: “Even I knew.” That one suggestion recolored the entire poem. It kind of shocked me.

When form is used well, it feels like the opposite of a constraint. I’ve been experimenting a lot with found text the past couple years. I have a poem in my manuscript written from the text of a pelvic floor therapy intake assessment, for example. My undergraduate thesis advisor, Myronn Hardy, always talked about how the reader should not be able to see the “stitches” of the form while reading the poem. The form should not announce itself. It takes a lot of practice, but familiarizing yourself with different poetic forms is incredibly helpful and opens up new poetic registers for your work.

I’m excited about the targeted advertisement series, even if I feel like the poems themselves aren’t entirely where they want to be yet. The text of this series is taken from screenshots of targeted advertisements I received during the worst periods of my illness. Many of these advertisements were diagnostic, and it was incredibly sinister, especially before I was diagnosed and just knew that I felt like shit and something was wrong. Again with the machine and Villarreal’s “apocalyptic imagination” — knowing I was being surveilled in such an intimate way messed with me a lot. Trying to piece together poetry about an immensely personal and painful topic using stone-cold predictive marketing rhetoric is a fascinating exercise.

I’ve also spent the past few years intermittently working on a found poem series created from the last year of Santo and I’s text messages. My last exchange with them occurred the day before their death, and when I learned of their death, I took a screen recording of our texts, knowing my phone auto-deletes them after a year. I started this project by physically cutting up and collaging the messages, eventually moving to GIMP (poor man’s Photoshop, for the uninitiated). The more I cut the text up, the freer I was to do what I wanted with it, but the further I was from the original subject matter and, by extension, what Santo was actually saying to me at the time. I imposed different restraints on myself: could I cut words into different words, or should I keep the words intact? Should the green versus gray aspect of the text messages play into the physical read of the poem? How do the different colors complicate notions of authorship, contribution, and the “speaker of the poem”? I’ve even tried playing with vellum paper. I’d love to make a chapbook from these poems someday, but I think they’ll take awhile.

KARAN

This next question has become a staple for us and I’m always delighted by the variation in the answers. So, there’s a school of poetry that believes 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. I can, of course, see all these elements in your poems, as one would expect in any good poet. But I’d love to know where you feel you're writing from. And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

MARIA

I feel like the obvious answer is poetry of the body, but I honestly don’t know if that’s true—I think that’s been more circumstantial because of the stuff I’ve dealt with over the past five years. I’m tempted to say poetry of the heart. People are sometimes surprised by the openness of my poetry, because I can come off as pretty standoffish in person, but I don’t think that’s necessarily contradictory. Frank O’Hara: “my heart— / you can't plan on the heart, but / the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”

KARAN

As the Managing Editor of COUNTERCLOCK Journal and an MFA candidate at NYU, you’re deeply immersed in the contemporary poetry scene. How has your editorial work influenced your own writing? And how do you see your poetry in conversation with current trends or movements in the field?

MARIA

Being on the editorial side of things really moves the needle when it comes to taking rejection less personally. It’s so subjective, and there are so many factors outside the poet’s control. You might write a brilliant poem about a subject we’ve already accepted another piece on, for example. I have written poems that were rejected from countless publications only to later win a prize. Especially with paid publications, there really are only so many slots, and poetry is generally ridiculously competitive. As another example, I work for the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, the organization that runs the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. I assist with coordinating the National Student Poets Program, and each year, we assemble a cohort of five high school poets for a “year of service” as regional arts ambassadors throughout the United States. This was my first year helping comb through the finalist application pool, and there are so, so many factors beyond the poet’s control. If we’ve had past national student poets from a given city, for example, we might be reluctant to choose another poet from the same city, since the whole region has to be represented. We have to consider the gender and overall demographic balance of the group, ensure a blend of different styles, subject matter, experience level—if you’re an NSPP finalist, there are really only a handful of variables you can account for. It felt like assembling a K-Pop group.

KARAN

What is some of the best writerly advice you’ve received so far, whether it be via your MFA at NYU or as an editor, or even outside of institutions that you’d like to share with other young writers?

MARIA

A favorite Oceanism of mine is “Estrange the cliche.” Cliches are cliches because they gesture towards larger, shared truths. If you find yourself leaning into or engaging with a cliche, ask yourself how to estrange or transpose it into something elevated. The exact wording in my notebook is “Displace cliche into different code system—nothing is exhausted.” Working with Sharon [Olds] and Ocean will always be one of the foremost privileges of my life—I learned so much from their workshops. It was fascinating having my first with Sharon and my second with Ocean, because Sharon’s approach is very focused on oral delivery. She insists people read their work out loud, and she will interrupt you and make you start over if she can’t hear you or thinks you could do better. Happened to me many times. Apparently young people mumble a lot. Ocean was also Sharon’s student at one point, so it was cool seeing her influence in his teaching style. Workshop is fascinating because you get a sense of everybody else’s poetic inclinations and obsessions—I had to withdraw from NYU for reasons related to the administrative response to last spring’s solidarity encampment and that’s something I’m really going to miss this year, getting to know other people through their poetry like that.

Some of the best writerly advice I’ve received is about the importance of taking your time. This applies with publication, individual poems, longer projects. Especially with the college application hustle, I feel like there’s a glut of teenagers publishing chapbooks and sending their stuff to journals. Which is all well and good, I don’t want to knock these kids for expressing themselves whatsoever. But if I had had a chapbook published at 16, I would hate myself for it now. And there’s way too much emphasis on frequency of publication. Kids should be posting their poems on Tumblr or writing them in their journals, not sending them to Threepenny or whatever. I don’t blame anyone individually, it’s the culture, but I discourage teenage poets from publishing chapbooks for that reason. Teenage poets are still absorbing different works and finding their influences, and a lot of their work heavily mimics said influences. I did this in high school, too — it’s how you learn in creative fields like this. But I barely knew online literary magazines existed for most of high school. Submit to contests for teenagers! I probably earned more money from my creative writing as a teenager than I do now. I read a lot of teenage poetry now where I’m like oh, yeah, you fucking love Ocean Vuong. Which is fine—I can relate. I spent middle and high school reading Ocean and Richard Siken on Tumblr and ruining my eyesight. But you know. Take your time with your own work.

Ocean’s personal “rule” is eight years for your first full-length. It’s more of a guideline than a rule, obviously, but I do subscribe to the general ethos that taking your time is one of the best things you can do for yourself as a young poet. This is definitely something I’m still working on, too. Let the work come without rushing. Easier said than done for sure, but the work will thank you for it. The project announces itself at the right time. It’s so strange to suddenly realize you’ve been writing a book for the past few years. I just recently started sending my chapbook to presses (she’s up for grabs if anyone wants her) and I’m so glad I waited to publish one until now.

Poet’s postscript: I am donating my Poet of the Week honorarium to the Alghorah family in Gaza, whose GoFundMe I am helping maintain. If you enjoyed this interview, please consider chipping in and even adopting a fundraiser yourself.