The Shore Interview #48: Ammara Younas

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: In your poem, “a paleontologist discovers my father’s fossil,” there are a couple of details that haunt me as a reader: One is the sparse mention of the speaker. My or me occur only three times, one of which is in the title. Can you speak to the importance of this minimized I and what meaning hinges on the presence of that I? And an optional addendum to this question: how is the story of Lot in conversation with that I?

AY: Thank you for such a wonderful question! I tend to minimize the first person when writing about something personal. This poem is about the absence of a father figure, an absence so complete it extends even beyond death. I was a child when my father died, yet even in life, he felt distant, almost spectral. We occupied the same space, but he was never fully there. This poem stretches that absence further, mythologizing it to the point where, even ages later, when time should have fossilized him, there is still nothing—just a hollow where he should’ve been, a space within space.

The minimized I reflects this mythology. If my father had truly become a fossil, I wouldn’t exist to unearth him. And yet, I do exist—small, almost negligible, in the face of this absurd, larger-than-life narrative. My presence is not central because, in the end, this absence does not revolve around me. I am only here to witness its shape.

The story of Lot has always unsettled me. A man willing to offer up his daughters to the wickedness of Sodom. A man who could flee, but whose wife—human enough to look back—became salt. When my father died, he left behind his wife and daughters. My mother is brilliant, ambitious. She could have fled too. But instead, she chose to stay, to turn back, to calcify into responsibility. And isn’t that the most human thing? To look back, knowing full well what it will cost? She became a pillar of salt not because she was weak, but because she was willing. That choice, that sacrifice haunts me still.

EF: One of my favorite moments in your poem is the line, “an ampersand without the words it joins,” which makes an explicit connection between the process of fossilization and how language is preserved, it made me even consider the work of etymologies, semiotics, etc., shares certain qualities with paleontology. In hindsight, how do you now see this line working within the broader stakes of the poem and, more broadly, what attracted you to the topics of this poem?

AY: Thank you so much for this thoughtful reading of my poem. I love your connection to etymology and semiotics—both fields, in a way, involve excavating buried meanings, much like paleontology uncovers what time has attempted to erase. The poem fails to fossilize the father because his language couldn't be preserved. To become a fossil, a body must not decompose completely. To become a memory, the language must not decay.

It’s not that I don’t remember anything my father said—I do recall a few sentences. And he spoke a lot. I remember his mouth moving, but not the words. Maybe I’ve forgotten things. But if he were forgotten completely, there would be no memory at all. The memory exists, but it’s hollow. So I’m trying to reconstruct him from the visible spaces he left behind rather than from his material form. There’s either a fossil or utter decay, but in the mythology of the poem, he evades both preservation and decomposition by not being there at all. That he's the ampersand, linking the past to the future, but there's a lack of words, of answers, on both sides.

I was drawn to the theme of this poem because of its speculative nature. There are things I can't understand, so speculative poetry helps me shape them into something concrete—something I can picture. I’m learning to know characters I don’t fully know, like my father, through poetry. I’ve written a chapbook of poems on the same theme and this poem was the last I wrote in the series.

EF: Your poem contains so many formal and mechanical choices, including almost all lowercase letters, almost no punctuation, varying longer and shorter line lengths and occasional horizontal movement in a mostly single stanza, which particularly emphasizes the gap before the last two lines. What can you tell us about your process to arriving at these decisions and what you hoped they would add to the layers of the poem?

AY: Form is very important to me. It's also something I don’t consciously stress over while writing. I usually start with an idea and let it guide me toward whatever shape it takes, both in structure and meaning. I sat with the idea for this poem for weeks before writing it. When I finally did, it took only 20 minutes and I didn’t edit anything. What you see is exactly what emerged in the first draft. I think the choice to leave it untouched came from the fact that I don’t quite know how to write about my father’s absence. So, I let the poem tell me what I can’t tell myself. Looking back now, I can see all the things you pointed out and how so many choices reflect a portrait of his absence.

The poem exists in a perpetual state of motion. Just when I think I can grasp it, it slips away, disappearing through the many gaps between my fingers. It’s breathless, restless, unanchored, fractured—always fleeting, as reflected in the final two lines. It’s escapist: when I begin to see something take shape, it quickly dissolves, replaced by something equally mercurial, fickle and intangible before vanishing into smoke. Just when I begin to construct a portrait of my father, the poem tells me, “Hold on, not yet,” before plunging me face-first into the reality of it: that he is a space within space.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

AY: Aside from The Shore, I absolutely adore Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Every poem there is so different, so imaginative, so passionate—I have yet to read something I didn’t enjoy. I also love the vibrant poems in Palette Poetry. Rattle is an all-time favorite. Only Poems is another journal that’s always open in one of my browser tabs. I love that writers have more space there compared to other literary journals—that as a reader, you’re constantly aware of whose work you’re engaging with and, by the end, you have a concrete sense of the writer’s body of work.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

AY: This issue features stunning work, and the way it begins sets the tone for what follows. I want to focus on the two opening poems: “Children Jumping into Deep Fryers” by Sagar Nair and “Elegy for a Dress, Broken” by Sierra Hixon. While Nair’s poem explores the act of wanting, Hixon’s examines the experience of being wanted.

In Nair’s poem, there’s a restless, almost reckless hunger for desire itself—“we want to want.” The speaker and their companions long to throw themselves into deep fryers, to sizzle, to learn pain as a language, to seek out addiction. Their desire is an active force, self-inflicted and consuming. Hixon’s poem, by contrast, turns this idea inside out, questioning the nature of being desired: “And to be loved is to be swallowed, and to be wanted / is to be real, because how can you want something that doesn’t exist?” If Nair’s speaker craves the burn, Hixon’s warns that to be consumed is to be devoured, reduced to something chewed and swallowed.

Both poems suggest that desire—whether it’s the longing to feel or the longing to be seen—demands something from us. Nair’s characters are willing to be singed into holiness, while Hixon’s speaker is apprehensive about eventually becoming “forgotten flesh.” In the end, both poems reveal the same truth: we allow ourselves to be consumed so that we don’t disappear, so that “we are holy.”

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Ammara Younas is a poet and writer from Gujranwala, Pakistan. Her work has found a home, or is soon to, in spaces like Rattle, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, wildscape. literary journal, Gabby & Min's Literary Review, The Imagist, Small World City, Lakeer and Resonance.