Interviews 2022 (25-32):
Compo, Ruiz, Otsuji, Jean-Charles, Emmanuel, Chang, Cure, Cheung

The Shore Interview #25: Lisa Compo

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: In “Exilic Return” the pace is powered by the caesura and the content of the poem, at times as slow as someone pacing a room, at other times as fast as a sprint (though always, in this poem, brought back to the idea of footsteps themselves). How do you decide on the pace of a poem? How effective do you feel pacing is as a craft tool in your work?

LC: I love that you compare the pacing to that of someone pacing a room! The poem itself deals with inherited trauma and the domestic, so the idea that the poem itself feels trapped within a room feels exactly right. I think pacing is incredibly important, especially when the poem is largely lyric. I decide the pacing when I know I want the poem to either sit in a place longer, maybe relish or question an image or idea. And if I want it to move faster, there is usually an urgency involved, maybe even something mimetic happening there with the body and how we process the past, memory and trauma. For me, a poem is sometimes a vehicle, and the lyric a landscape, and if the structure of a poem can craft a specific pacing or movement for the idea(s) that live in the lyric, I believe how the landscape is interpreted becomes either clearer or more ambiguous. These are elements that can become powerful tools for the poem.

TNS: I love the title of “Small Haunts.” Aesthetically, it brings us immediately to the thought of ghosts, which is always a joy. Functionally, it invokes the idea of a place ritualistically visited over and over again, even as the speaker attempts to distance themselves from it, a memory that literally haunts them. What are the ways that you see poetry lending itself to ritualistic work?

LC: I’m so glad you like the title, and I can’t seem to shake ghosts from my poems. They always find their way back… Currently, I think all my work is inherently ritualistic. There is an intent to ritual, versus pattern or habit, which are not always intentional. Everything about poetry has intention. Whether it is consciously or sometimes (surprisingly) subconsciously. I think ritual is integral to being human, the need to return to things and places, memories and ideas, is how we interpret our present and sometimes it is what feeds us spiritually. Adrienne Rich wrote, “Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome… prismatic meanings lit by each other’s light, stained by each other’s shadows.” This quote makes me not only think of the way poems communicate with each other and build from one another, but that the words and images within the poem can do this. The language reveals layers in each of the poem’s elements. When I am writing about something that haunts me, or what I find I always return to, I think that a ritualistic effect helps to illuminate the kind of energy that those things can create. Memory, dreams, loss, wonder, these are things that feed us and move us, whether negatively or positively. There’s something truly remarkable and important in that.

TNS: Both “Small Haunts” and “Postscript” feature the landscape of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. What draws you to write about this place? How has it had a role in your work recently?

LC: When I moved the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I was coming from Arizona, having spent nearly all my life there. My perspective of being an outsider, and then someone who lived there for eight years, created a kind of obsession and curiosity. The desert and the Eastern Shore are incredibly different landscapes, the desert feels endless, the Eastern Shore is fragmented, dotted with marsh and old occupied and abandoned fishing towns. This curiosity has provided a space to meditate in my writing. I am always seeking the landscape to help me understand myself and what I’ve experienced. And this always leads me to more questions, not just about me, but about the place itself. The Eastern Shore is full of mystery: it has a past that I don’t think is often explored, one that deals with ecological wonders and disaster and much of it that has been submerged. I seek to unearth it, to use the unknown to excavate.

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

LC: Oh, so many to choose from! A shout out to The Greensboro Review, who has been publishing truly lovely work. Copper Nickel is consistently putting out remarkable issues and I am currently devouring their newest one. I am also loving the new issue of Nashville Review, which is available online this time!

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

LC: “Still Life at Warp Speed” by Daniel Ruiz oscillates between the irony in mundanity and the cycles of absurdity in life. The poem weaves in and out of dark humor and absurd images, the speaker even admits in the first three lines, “It’s not that I’m not laughing./I am. At nothing. I’m trying/to participate in eternity.” The tone has an undercurrent of vulnerability. The speaker confronts the banality of waiting for life to move forward or shift, though they recognize that it never is still, “the body plugged in/somewhere, whirring.” The stakes of this waiting, the inevitability and strangeness that is promised, reckons with the vulnerability that it strips us of. That to no end, life will continue sling-shotting its way through us and around us, ready or not.

Sarah Fitzpatrick’s poem, “The Promise of Rot,” deals with the cycles we participate in as well, though the tone is different. Here we can see the speaker reckon with the inevitability of time’s effect on the physicality of all things, and in this, the poem moves through brief images that zoom in on the quiet and uncanny chemical reaction and the change things undergo, “Something goes off in a chest,/lace browning back before the antique bleach.” And what is most prevalent in this poem is that it points to the promise of these changes, the decomposition as cycle and our attempt in vain to reverse it. In a turn, the poem’s last two lines reckon with the way these cycles can feed and produce real consequences, “In every north, a war/is sorting out who is right, perpetual as rust.”

For me, both poems recognize the inevitable cycles of human life, the mundane and the grand scale, such as the ineffability in living and the strange predictability found there, and the inevitability of finding ourselves confronting the ways we contribute and face these cycles. Both poems focus on our own participation, above all else, and that where the cycles land us, in the end, have already been promised.

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Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate at UNC - Greensboro. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: The Journal, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Cimarron Review and elsewhere.

The Shore Interview #26: Daniel Ruiz

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: In this issue, we published your poem “Still Life at Warp Speed.” You wrote, “I’m trying/to participate in eternity.” What do you think this line highlights about the heart of this poem?

DR: This poem began as an exploration of time. I’m always fascinated by the difference between the actual and perceived passage of time and all that classical lyrical stuff: the eternity that fits in a metalloid cube; the blip on the color spectrum 10,000 planets war inside; the second hand of the clock so much like Sisyphus it makes you feel ridiculous, frankly, to be in a meeting where people are supposed to be planning a greater meeting and everyone is making a lengthy speech about why that one idea won’t work. In this poem, I wanted to see these different ideas, or expressions, of eternity together, to see what would happen.

I think we all, consciously or not, whether we like it or not, participate in history. Historia in Spanish can be translated as both history and story in English. We’re all a part of this enormous story no one person can finish, so we’re forced to trust each other, depend on strangers to uphold this illustrious system we both benefit from and critique. Part of participating in eternity, to me, is living at the juxtaposition of these different ways of viewing the world, the passage of time, history’s continuous extension into the present, but also what we love, little things we remember, crucial info we forget.

TNS: This poem is full of images of anticipation and stagnation. Birds with songs stuck in their heads, a present that can’t be replaced just yet. What drew you to the idea of stagnation in this poem?

DR: The idea of stagnation comes from my interest in movement. Part of our work as poets is tracing the movements of the world. Images and ideas move, are not locked by circumstance, but they sometimes come to a pause. My old basketball coach used to say, “change speed, change direction,” but to change direction quickly usually requires a complete stop, no matter how brief. Stagnation is part of the process of movement, a demonstration of the convivial nature of most binaries and the nuance holding them together; the same way death is a part of life, air is important to the water cycle, whales have lived in the ocean 50 million years but still need to surface to breathe, etc. As John Ashbery wrote in his amazing poem “The Bungalows:” “standing still means death, and life is moving on,/Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.”

TNS: Beyond poetry, you also work in translation. What are some of the difficulties of translating literature? How do you keep the meaning or intentional craft choices from the original language when translating?

DR: Translation, as my old professor used to say, is the closest form of reading, and often excites me back into writing when I’m in a slump. I am very selfish about this, but also conscious of how little poetry in translation exists in this country, or how hard it is to access. Right now I’m translating the early work of French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret and also Sergio Múñoz Arriagada, a poet I met in Valparaiso, Chile on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2016. His work is so strange to me! But I love its tenderness; its verve; its attention to and rupture from tradition; and how it occasionally makes me feel less hoity-toity about sentimentality in poetry, which, by the way, the Spanish language has a different relationship to.

In Spanish, there is no blend of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate influence, where words like “dirt” coexist with words like “liberty,” which promotes a kind of implicit dualism, no? Physical and conceptual language intersect, are superimposed, overlap in English; in Spanish, they exist on the same plane and part of the physicality highlighted by the juxtaposition of these attributes in English is replaced by a more concrete marriage of sound and sense in Spanish.

I’m getting away from myself a bit. Difficulties of translation vary from poet to poet, your level of comfort with both languages, your understanding of the historical context in which the work originally appears. Some poets, especially more imagistic ones, do really well with “accurate” translations; others require you to inhabit a syntax or mimic a particular energy words alone struggle to elucidate. I translate from French and Spanish. Spanish is easier because I speak it and grew up with it, but French is very fun for me because mine is shakier, so it requires me to double-check things a lot, which takes longer. I like that!

So, to answer the question, finally, I’d say that “keeping the meaning” and “keeping the feeling” are two ways to translate which ideally go together, but in practice a translator often has to choose to sacrifice one or the other to an extent, in part—and I feel it’s almost dishonest not admit it—to make a poem people will enjoy reading, so that the whole system stays alive. Enjoying reading the work so much is what makes me want to translate it, anyway, and part of a translator’s goal is to make wonder more accessible, to add members to the audience.

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

DR: When I’m not busy teaching high school English or coaching basketball, I usually try and read Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, Poetry, Missouri Review, Diode, Interim and whichever ones I find by chance online whenever I’m scrolling through Twitter.

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

DR: Absolutely! It might be because I was recently rereading Cesar Aira’s novel Ghosts—in which these goofball ghosts tragicomically inhabit an apartment building that is still under construction—but one thing I noticed when I read this issue was a certain attention to spaces where things like ghosts and sickness and death coincide. I would say Lee Potts’s poem “After Hours” is in conversation with Carolyn Oliver’s poem “Horses in the Mist.” Both poems address these abse-present (is that a word? is there a word to say this?) entities and project them onto daily life. The turns “After Hours” takes remind us of the process of engaging with a beloved memory—first reveling in a bliss that rebels against the harsher reality:

If we left them the last
piece of birthday cake
at the end of the day
it was only because
we forgot it.

before falling back to a period of quiet nostalgia, contemplation, accepting that later stage of grief that comes when grief starts to wear off, an admirable “commitment to silence.” This ghostly imagery develops in relief to real life. The introduction of the “you” in the lines that follow (“They know how often/you cry in the last/toilet stall on the left”) is a perfect example of something so familiar to a specific person, we all have an example of it—not a happy place, but a sad place, which reminds us of the paradox of this happening at all: we are happy that there is a place we can be sad in.

Carolyn Oliver’s “Horses in the Mist” explores another kind of ghost (not just “ghost apples”): the lives we could have lived, that other people are living. The second stanza starts:

But I have never risen in the Adirondacks
and it is not morning. There was no ice storm
last night, just a phone call, so I am counting
all the ways boys know how to make ghosts
as I follow the road to school alone.

In just a few lines, the personal looms large, expanding to the size of an “ice storm,” but the response here is not to delve into memory. Desire becomes generative. The imagined world is someone else’s, draped in mist, but the poet gets to visit. The poem invites us to inhabit this imagined reality in mind alone, as does its speaker, much the way that the ghosts in “After Hours” are free to come out once the office is cleared.

Ultimately, poems about imagined worlds are concerned with privacy; they stem from mostly private desires: a “woman who carries/her son’s health insurance card in her pocket;” ghosts who wait all day to roam “miles of dark halls, windows/that never open full of empty/parking lots;” the son who could touch these horses “if the classroom windows dissolved.” In these poems, the real and imagined worlds are on the brink of mixing, of being confused for each other, and the success of these poems is that, through the imagery of each, we experience both.

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Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, his poems can or will be found in POETRY, Crazyhorse, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Meridian and elsewhere.

The Shore Interview #27: Derek N Otsuji

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: “Hunting for Octopus at Night” sets a dark and watery scene within the first couple lines. By the end of the first stanza, the scene is vividly set:

We wade into the black bay
under a whisper of moon, curtain of ink
drawn back by the gas lantern’s
hissing flame to reveal, in clearness,
the seafloor, where we scan,
spears in hand, for red plumes
of the blooming octopus
walking shallow sands.

Quickly setting a scene in a poem, to get in and get out within a couple of lines, is a difficult skill to learn. What kind of details do you focus on when you’re opening a poem?

DNO: When writing about place, I like to imagine that I am a stage director with a very limited budget. I ask, “What props do I need to set the scene?” I choose just those details that are necessary to specify the locale and create the mood. Concrete nouns, a vivid verb, a few carefully chosen adjectives are sufficient to make the images—visual, aural and tactile—that I need.

TNS: This poem takes place in pitch darkness, but our focus is quickly drawn to the constant background of subtle soundwork creating the atmosphere of night on the beach: wavelets lapping at bare skin, the squish of the sand, the constant splashing of bodies moving through water. What sound techniques did you focus on when writing this poem to achieve this effect? How do you tend to use sound in your other work?

DNO: I work by a simple principle: the sound of a word should reinforce its meaning. Likewise, an image can engage multiple senses at once; for example, the aural and the tactile. The setting in a poem is not just a landscape painted with words but a soundscape generated by the sonic qualities of each syllable. A sense of movement, created by rhythm and pacing, is also important.

TNS: In your bio you mention you’re currently living and writing from Oahu, between the Ko'olau Mountains and Kewalo Harbor. How do you feel the environment you write from has influenced your work?

DNO: I am a poet of place. My imagination has been shaped almost entirely by the island where I was born and have lived all my life. The mountains, the ocean, the flora and fauna, both native and introduced, are a part of everything I write.

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

DNO: 32 Poems tops my list of favorite journals. The Sewanee Review also publishes very fine work.

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

DNO: Meghan Sterling’s “The Sea That Has Become Known” and Michael Lauchlan’s “A Moment Awake” are contrasting meditations on the body and the way memories, their chronicles of pleasure and pain, are imprinted in flesh, recorded in bone. Sterling’s meditation takes place in the nostalgic cast of moonlight, Lauchlan’s under the clinical lights of the hospital room, but the tug of mortality can be felt in both.

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Derek N Otsuji lives and writes on the southern shore of Oahu, between the Ko'olau Mountains and Kewalo Harbor. He is the author of The Kitchen of Small Hours (SIU Press, 2021). Recent work has appeared in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, The Southern Review and The Threepenny Review. New poems are forthcoming in Crazyhorse and Cincinnati Review.

The Shore Interview #28: Siobhan Jean-Charles

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: “Dysania” is one of my favorites from this issue, a subtle meditation that opens with what is now my favorite line. You wrote, “I want to give you a Haitian goodbye…” Why did you choose this as your opening? What do you feel it sets up for the way we read the poem?

SJC: The opening line came from a day spent with my mother, siblings and an extended family member my mother was close with. My mother announced her decision to head home hours ago, but loitered in the dining room, the foyer, the doorway, then the driveway before sitting in her car with the windows down to talk. My family member joked that this was called a “Haitian goodbye.” I had loved ones such as my mom in mind with this opening line and I wanted to set up the poem with a reflection on the habits I have inherited from my family, not only culturally, but also how we communicate with one another. I think it sets up a slow and bittersweet tone for the poem and the couplets are lingering on the page like my mother lingered in the doorway.

TNS: Your work in this issue deals with breakups, which can be a difficult subject to tackle in poetry. What was your process like when working on “Fingers without Hands”?

SJC: “Fingers without Hands” was an outlier compared to “Dysania" and my other poems, because it began as an exercise from a creative writing class. We were given a list of titles, epigraphs and words, including “imago.” Despite the fact that the process was more structured compared to my other poems, I generally try to begin breakup/romantic poems with memories that are significant to any relationship I have with a person. This could be something I cherish. For example: a day spent at a museum together. In the case of “Fingers without Hands,” it was heavily influenced by a physically and emotionally abusive relationship I was in. A particularly painful exchange happened during an evening at the beach. This memory was initially difficult for me to dwell on, but, with time. I was drawn to connecting my title, epigraph and words to the themes of nighttime and nature.

TNS: What advice do you have for poets that want to write about romantic relationships and what aspects of them do you find most intriguing to address when writing?

SJC: In general, I recommend reading other love poems to get a sense of how poets break away from romantic cliches. When I first started writing poetry, I often used cliches because this language is so familiar and I hardly realized I was doing it. Through my creative writing classes I have read Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed and Elizabeth Bradfield’s Approaching Ice. Both mainly address other subjects, such as grief and scientific exploration. Since their image pools are so specific, the few love poems are written in creative and unconventional ways. Every relationship is unique in its own way, so beginning a poem with these personal memories challenges me to make the poem equally unique. Personally, I have written many poems based on my abusive relationship, so I will speak to that. For any poets who wish to write about a past abusive relationship, I would advise writing poetry as a secondary coping mechanism. Writing poetry has been extremely healing for me to retake control of the narrative and make sense of the abuse. However, I wrote poetry in addition to spending time with my support system, journaling and therapy. Immediately following the breakup, I did not have a balance between these coping mechanisms, and as a result, I wrote plenty of cliche, melodramatic poems. Regardless of the type of relationship that ended, allowing time to pass for healing is crucial for emotional health, which also improves the quality of work.

After any breakup, it can be difficult to reconcile the person you thought you knew versus who they really were. I enjoy focusing on this contrast, which is further complicated in abusive relationships where there is a power dynamic in which the abuser is able to present an image as a loving, attentive partner in public, but simultaneously subjects their significant other to hurtful actions and unrelenting criticism in private. This is especially evident in the line, “Do I tell/my friends how you laid my rabbit across your thighs? She was/belly up, eyes wide. You touched/her as if you were slipping a child’s sweater over their head/gently, as if you worried about shattering something.” I was stunned that my ex was able to treat my pet rabbit so gently but subject me to physical abuse. I wanted to juxtapose these two ideas, that someone can be both gentle and terrifying.

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

SJC: 32 Poems and Hippocampus Magazine, the latter of which publishes many LGBTQ nonfiction pieces.

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

SJC: Abdulkareem Abdulkareem’s “Every Song Falls from Our Mouths like Glass” and Anne Taylor’s “What Will You Do with Yours?” both deal with grief, but Abdulkareem focuses on how emotional turmoil manifests in the body. Taylor’s "What Will You Do with Yours?" centers on the tendency to objectify grief into something tangible to mourn over, and the visceral pain of loss is present in both poems.

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Siobhan Jean-Charles is an English major at Salisbury University. She is a reader for the University's literary magazine, Scarab, and a writing consultant for the writing center. She enjoys writing poetry that explores nature, power dynamics and internalized oppression.

The Shore Interview #29: Michael Emmanuel

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: In your poems from this issue, you tend to write towards the people around you. Would you say this is a common pattern in your work? Why?

ME: I wouldn’t call it a pattern. I have only written poetry for a few years, and more than creating a template or pattern, whether stylistic or structural, I am eager to experiment and try new things. “the first lesson—names” began as a contemplation on a previous poem I had written. In that poem, I was exploring what it means to worry from the lens of a family in need, one I knew so well, albeit fictional, having had numerous unmet needs myself. It didn’t feel strange to write about this kind of family—I found much tenderness in voicing their story. Writing “the first lesson—names” was an attempt to further poke at this family’s story, this time by inserting myself into their narrative.

I think that poetry is a journey from known to unfamiliar. Recently, I found something Lucille Clifton said about how poetry aided her self-discovery: “And still my way of expressing myself, I discovered, was through poems.” Perhaps when I write about the people around me, the stories I have absorbed through repeated occurrences, it’s my journey from what I know to what I can discover.

TNS: “the first lesson— names” is my favorite from this issue, especially the last lines: “i recall my mother, who/…pulled me at both ears and sentenced me to squats/for assuming the world assembled at my feet.” What was the impetus for this poem? Why was it important to you to have this as the closing line?

ME: Writing “the first lesson—names” was a fun experience for a couple of reasons: I wanted to poke, ever slightly, at grief. I had also read Theresa Lola’s “her name is her house” and loved it, so I thought I could write a poem about my name, though I couldn’t come up with a striking starting point, unlike Lola’s experience with her work. There I was, writing about a boy and the conflict his name creates, but also writing about a family working through grief, which when compared to being name-teased is certainly more critical. However, I think that writing affords us opportunities to amplify every story at the same wavelength. Stories, whether in poetry or prose, aren’t less significant than one another. The urgency may vary with climate, environment, or even audience, but none should be quietened. Arguably, the mother of the poet persona in “the first lesson—names” disagrees with this, believing that some troubles are of greater consequence than others. Why make a fuss about the error in your name while a neighbor mourns their partner? With the closing line, I was juxtaposing two conflicting ideas: accepting that everyone is entitled to empathy and accepting that sometimes we need to extend empathy despite our personal challenges. Finding that balance often becomes a challenge, for who doesn’t assume that they, or their issues, are the most important in the world?

TNS: “morning with tea” and “the night holds no love” both employ lyric strategies—can you speak on how the lyric features in your work?

ME: When I started writing, I wrote and read a lot of prose. An early piece of writing advice I got was that cliches are dreadful. I avoided cliched statements like they were some virus and constantly invented (or tried to invent) new similes and metaphors. I think that spills over, somewhat, into my poetry. Generally, I consider lyrical features as tools to create a delightful experience, both for myself and for the reader. Whether that happens by using alliteration, as in, “my mother is lull and longing,” or imagery as in “...the promise of roses by your pillow,” the desire is to spark a joyous encounter with the work.

TNS: Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

ME: I recently started reading Anomaly and Poetry Online. I often return to Granta or The New Yorker whenever I perceive that my fiction needs to be refreshed. I am also anticipating the next issue of Lolwe.

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

ME: In Jeanna Paden’s succinct poem, “Where do we go from here?” I am reminded of the mutual relationship between love and loneliness, between loving something/someone and embracing the reality of letting them go, or longing for them. Amy Wang’s “Summer Fire” treats love as a strange thing that happens without warning, leaving the human in a constant state of longing. I think both poems are gentle, quick tributes to love and loving, albeit from different approaches.

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Michael Emmanuel is a creative writer from Lagos. He was a semifinalist for the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Contest, a honorable mention for the 2022 Stephen A DiBiase Poetry Contest and was on the longlist for the 2021 Ake Creative Trust Award. His works have appeared in Ake Review, Jalada Mag, Twelve Mile Review, perhappened mag and other places. He is on Twitter @mikey_emmanuel

The Shore Interview #30: Abigail Chang

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: Your poem in this issue emphasizes the space between — day and night, two siblings, what is whole and
what is broken. What made you want to access this liminal space and what strategies did you use to create our sense of space in this poem?

AC: I’m always toying with liminality. I’m very much an atmosphere-based writer and I love playing with the abstract and at times the surreal—I want the upside-down cyprus tree in the middle of a lake, but also the rooftops, the late-night talks, stained blankets and filched wine. I love rooftops, they are such a thick setting (sinuous). They do so much heavy lifting.

But I think with this piece I added in extra suspension, again, sinew; I wanted it sloggy and viscuous, like it was in a liquid suspension, pulled through with glue. That’s probably enough synonyms. Like you were walking on top of a suite of rooms, each with skylights arranged in a row, and as you walked past each lit up and you got a glimpse of a different scene—all these fragments, these vignettes—that were these key moments and out of them emerged, somehow, a narrative. Ink, olives, cheese, marbles, terracotta, (a) mother’s hat. Your mother and her hat and you, you are in a car, together, you’re wormed into the backseat and the air feels dry, staticky, you are all of a sudden struck with this jittery feeling of wrongness and maybe also a weird burst of guilt. It could be anything: anything at all.

For me, it's all about giving enough (physical) detail for the reader to feel, really feel but still have the space to self-insert and maybe puzzle over certain subjects a little. Some words are like spandrels, like flowerpots: for building the aesthetic. By existing they create necessary distance.

TNS: At face value, 7-11, olives, and tattoos might be a strange combination of images. What links the imagery in this poem for you? How would you describe the aesthetic sensibility of “How I Live” and your other work?

AC: The way my writing works, I go through life at any given time with some very specific ideas floating around my head—a mixture of objects, events and ideas I’m reading about— and sometimes they mix and slot together in this very specific way and become a poem. At the time, I was thinking a lot about tattoos, but also permanence, regret, change—all those pesky things that come along with ink (I ended up getting one, impulsively) and tradition /modernism (different tattoo styles, those who cling onto the past/chase trends). When I spend a lot of time thinking about and researching something it tends to manifest in a very visceral way (in this case, action). As for olives, they are a motif I can’t seem to help but come back to—probably because of all the Greek myths I read as a kid, but recently because I was reading lots of Carson while writing this. I love Anne Carson, I love Plainwater, she does liminality so well. There is rarely setting in her prose and verse—or it is quickly glossed over—but when reading her it's like someone puts these lenses over my eyes and suddenly I am seeing exactly what she wants me to see. As for 7-11s, I live in Taipei and they are everywhere. I can stand just about anywhere and see at least one (minimum). They’ve always been a curious, very much culturally specific thing that inextricably make up a lot of my identity; the red, green and mustard signage, the dependability (always the chocolate and peanut m&ms, + another flavor that’s constantly switched out). Ultimately, I think there’s an odd poeticness in the combination of these three. They are random but poised.

TNS: How have you personally created or maintained a network of writers? What advice would you give to writers who want to build their writing communities?

AC: Writing, at least to me, is at the end of the day a solitary activity. I can get territorial over it—and though I love reading other people’s work (there is beauty in every stage of the process, rough or hewn enough to dazzle), it's hard for me to trust people with my own. I would say, however, having just one or two people whose opinions you trust can make a drastic difference, even just mentally. It's a mental game. Writing is lonely, messy. More often than not things don’t work (or you think they don’t). Someone who can gently tell you, hey, you’re being stupid. I think this is pretty great, is very valuable and very comforting. They don’t have to be in the literary community or really even have a comprehensive grasp on writing. Sometimes reassurance is enough.

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

AC: I’ve been really enjoying Peach Mag, SOFTBLOW and HAD recently, but I will always appreciate Smokelong for essentially being my introduction to the literary scene. Overall, though, my all-time favorites are probably Split Lip and The Puritan, the latter of which I read for.

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

AC: I love love poems; quiet, intimate ones like Amy Wang’s “Summer fire”—a plea, laid out like you’re the addressee, filled with a quiet desperation—and broad, sweeping ones like Ali Wood’s “Fable,” overarching, a complete and powerful narrative in itself, almost a cautionary tale. Exploring different kinds of want—sharp and bruising, carrying all the weight of a history filled with longing—and a more fleeting kind, hesitant, brimming with possibility. “Fable” almost seems like a prerequisite to “Summer fire”—a taste of the initial spark that can lead to something far more complicated, a warning against falling into the kind of love that crushes, hurts.

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Abigail Chang is a writer based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cortland Review, Citron Review, Gone Lawn, Gulf Stream, Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. Find her at twitter @honeybutterball

The Shore Interview #31: Monica Cure

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: From the first line, “A Country of My Mother” plays with the orientation and tension between place and time: “These narrow streets are the hallway / to the kitchen. Sarmale — steam / from ground pork wrapped in / cabbage, the scent mixed with lemon-/ bleach and the feeling of grownups / I was told to come downstairs to meet…” We are deftly set in multiple places and times at once: in the mother’s kitchen, in the streets of the old Eastern European city, in childhood and adulthood all at once. Can you elaborate on this choice and the tension you hoped to explore in the poem?

MC: I think we often, or maybe even usually, experience place and time in these overlapping layers, but representing that was especially important to me in this semi-autobiographical poem. Like the speaker, I returned to my mother’s country of origin, Romania, which wasn’t the country I grew up in. I had experienced it indirectly, in the U.S., through her cooking and her language. One of the catalysts for this poem was the moment I smelled something familiar cooking while walking through my neighborhood and felt the strangeness of being able to smell it out in public because the ingredients were common here, rather than only in the privacy of our Romanian-American home. This poem, rather than leaning into the comfort of the familiar, leans into the discomfort of liminality, being neither this nor that, neither here nor there. Moreover, familiar doesn’t always mean good either. We may wish to honor certain traditions of our family/culture but let go of others, though actually doing so may be difficult even as adults.

TNS: Do you often write about food and cooking in your work? How do you see food functioning in “Country of My Mother”?

MC: Food has a way of showing up in my work, especially in defamiliarized form, but the process of cooking less so. Perhaps because my poetry tends to be set outside (as is also true of “A Country of My Mother”) rather than a domestic space. But I like that cooking implies a relationship—you’re always cooking for someone, even if it’s for yourself. What does your choice of dish communicate? How will it be received? I feel there’s a level of intentionality in cooking that lends itself well to drama in poetry.

“A Country of My Mother” first and foremost explores that primary parent-child relationship through its depiction of food and cooking. As children, we’re dependent on our parents for food and it exemplifies their care for us, but refusing to eat something is also an early opportunity to assert independence. The speaker of the poem “regresses” by means of food but it’s in order to be able to explore what moving forward as an individual might mean. Food is also shorthand for culture—it’s common for heritage language speakers to have a specialized food vocabulary even if other language areas are less developed. The relationship to a culture parallels the relationship to a parent in many ways.

TNS: This poem really accomplishes creating a feeling of a place via sensory experience, contextualizing with not just visuals and scents but taste and the orientation of the body. I especially love the image of “I squeeze past cars parked on the uneven sidewalk.” What do you tend to consider when incorporating the senses in poetry?

MC: My poems tend to be in first person, focused on the speaker’s experiences and emotional state. I try to choose and describe sensory details that might express what the speaker is feeling in their body, but in external form, as a way of mirroring it. The feeling of compression and awkwardness, of trying to figure out how the speaker “fits,” gets increasingly more personal and acute—from the cramped, chaotic space of the office-supply store, to the envelope that is too big or too small for the speaker’s card, to having to physically squeeze past cars (or implicitly walk out onto the street). At the same time, I try to create an ecosystem of the senses where there’s not too much of any one thing, and the elements work together. Our emotional states are complex—we’re almost never feeling just one thing in any given moment.

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

MC: Living abroad, I’m especially grateful for online journals such as The Offing and Barren Magazine. I’m also enjoying exploring newer UK journals like Bad Lilies.

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

MC: I love how Martha Silano’s “Why I Want to Be a Noble Gas” and Margaret M Kelly’s “Fact Patterns Supporting the Existence of Dragons” both play around with knowing and mystery, and center on a relationship to a man in their family. The speaker in Silano’s poem seems to have fun punning with the different chemical properties of noble gases, as if having recently learned them in a high school chemistry class. Underneath the humor, though, is a desire for relational stability and closeness, particularly with the closing image of the speaker wishing to be “…the fluorescent light in my father’s workroom,/ the one he studied under/ long into the night.” The speaker of Kelly’s poem, too, at first seems to be concerned with science, contrasting what mankind has achieved so far to a litany of unsolved mysteries that seem to come from an anthology picked up at a Scholastic book fair. In the third section of the poem, the speaker shifts from first-person plural to first-person singular: “…My grandfather still swims/
past the breakers. I can see tomorrow in the creek-beds of his hands.” Whatever other mysteries exist in the world, he is ultimately what occupies the speaker’s thoughts.

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Monica Cure is a Romanian-American poet, writer and translator currently based in Bucharest. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee and her poems have appeared in Plume, RHINO, Rust + Moth, UCity Review and elsewhere. Her poetry translations have appeared in journals such as Modern Poetry in Translation and Asymptote, and her translation of Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook was published by Seven Stories Press. She can be found on Twitter @MonicaCure or www.monicacure.com.

The Shore Interview #32: M. Cynthia Cheung

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: A beautiful example of tone and balance, “Forms of Water” moves through shifts in the poem as easily as water. When writing, how do you manage shifts in tone, scene and mood? Are there any techniques you tend to keep in mind?

MCC: Thank you for the kind words! I often find shifts in scene or mood a good way to propel the poem toward its “discovery moment.” When I sit down for a first draft, I tend to write a lot that gets thrown out eventually. For a poem that’s loosely narrative like this one, I try to save the fragments that speak to a common theme and write again from there as a launching point. Sometimes, there are topics I’ve been thinking about for several months, or even years—anything from events reported in the news, to details of human histories or cultures, to scientific phenomena—that I’ll put side by side with experiences from my own life, just to see what they look like together. I do find it difficult to manage multiple leaps within a poem like this. It’s taken a lot of practice and I tend to need more time away from each revision to see whether the elements truly work in concert.

TNS: I love the ending you chose for this poem—“The trees on our street haven’t recovered/ from the winter freeze. It’s possible/ they won’t.” This is such a poignant, suggestive image. Can you speak to how endings fit into your writing process? Are there styles or techniques you prefer when ending a poem?

MCC: In about half the poems I’m writing, I have some idea how they will end and actively write toward that. In the other half, I don’t know where the poems will go. This poem was of the second sort. I’ve been lucky to learn under Mag Gabbert and she taught me that sometimes I’ve already written a good closing line—it’s just not located at the end of the piece! I tend to “over write” and now when I can’t feel my way forward to the last line, I take a step back and look at what I’ve written so far—is my last line hiding somewhere there? Or maybe in the middle there’s a “take off” for a new ending? In other instances, I’ve found that the first line in a draft is actually the last line. Personally, I like endings that either give me sense of completeness or leave me hanging a bit—variations on opposite sides of the spectrum! For example, the last two tercets of “Anonymity” by Eavan Boland leave you unsettled:

Powerless queens; stock still, enslaved
girls at the entryway to anonymity.
Women without a country 

assembled from the treasure of a country:
A finger of silver. A mineral breast.
An ear poured out in bronze.

TNS: So many writers find their art while working in another field, and this is true for you with your career in medicine. Can you talk more about how educational and professional experience influence your writing?

MCC: Before I went into medicine, my undergraduate degree was in zoology; I thought I was going to be an evolutionary biologist. I had wonderful experiences at my university and at institutions like the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, all of which left me with an abiding love for the natural world. I cannot help but write from that perspective of respect and wonder. As far as medical practice goes, there’s an incredible amount of human emotion compressed into any day—fear, joy, relief, anger, grief. Just the intensity of it can encourage you into exploring your own feelings about a particular circumstance. For me, I’d read poetry on and off for years, but I didn’t really start writing until the pandemic hit. I’m in a front line specialty and it’s almost impossible for me to describe those days of fear and anxiety. The only way to cope was to start writing.

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

MCC: Yes! Not to sound tongue-in-cheek, but I always love reading the journals that have accepted my own pieces. I wouldn’t submit to them if I didn’t. I’ve also enjoyed recent work from Puerto del Sol and the Los Angeles Review, and I’m reading the latest issue of Pleiades. Bear Review is always dependable for amazing poems; they publish work that really makes me pause and take a breath. I tend to dip into The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry and Waxwing for a gem or two to read after a long day.

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

MCC: Both Brandon Hanson’s “Earth Yet Again” and Maggie Boyd Hare’s “In the Shuttle Leaving Earth” address humankind’s complex relationship with our planet. In “Earth Yet Again,” the speaker, narrating with a sort of resigned surprise, appears to wander a post-apocalyptic world while discovering beauty on a planet without people. It is an acknowledgement that other life forms have (and will continue to have) an existence where humans have no positive relevance. “In the Shuttle Leaving Earth Again” strikes a more nostalgic and elegiac tone in describing the speaker’s memory of things that were once probably taken for granted. There are references to climate change as the reason they must flee to space, specifically the earth becoming hotter. The speaker does not explicitly specify whether the anaphora of “I miss….” (for example, “I miss//tangerines, peaches—anything orange with nectar”) refers to loss as a consequence of environmental destruction versus loss simply as a characteristic of human life in outer space, but because the two factors are linked, the implication is that the speaker is referring to both. These poems almost read as auguries, while simultaneously investigating the emotions that created them.

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M Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing can be found in The Baltimore Review, RHINO, Salamander, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly and others. Currently, she serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards. Find out more at www.mcynthiacheung.com.