Upon the release of her debut poetry collection, Hound Triptych, Dani Janae spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Reina Maiden-Navarro. Here, they discussed navigating the intersections of girlhood and motherhood as a Black adoptee, the legacies of trauma, loss, and grief, the process of rebuilding and reclaiming chosen identities, and the importance of love and forgiveness.

Reina Maiden-Navarro: Why did you choose to separate your collection into three sections, a “triptych”? How is it significant to the construction of a larger narrative?

Dani Janae: I’m not one to necessarily believe in numerology but the number three kept coming up as I was writing the poems in this book. There are three “Go Ask” poems and three sonnets. My mother’s birthday is in the third month of the year. Things just kept coming to me in threes, and I took that as a sign. I also think there was a temptation to divide the book into beginning, middle, and end, which I resisted. The three parts aren’t totally chronological, they are more divided by a theme.

The first section of the book is where I introduce the hound narrative. The second part is about inhabiting that narrative, and the third part seeks to deconstruct it.

RMN: Can you speak to the significance of hounds in your work?

DJ: When I realized that the poems I was writing were becoming a book, I started thinking about the title more seriously. I knew I wanted it to be “X Triptych” but thought “Dog Triptych” seemed lacking in specificity and didn’t quite capture the theme. Hound came to me as I was working through the physical search for my mother. Hounds are hunting dogs, they have sharp senses, some sight, some smell. In a sense, I was hunting for my mother, hunting for the truth of what her life was like and why she gave me up. Furthermore, because I had never met her, never seen her, my sense of her was entirely constructed out of myth. I imagined what she looked like, what her voice sounded like, what she would say when we met. I had built a whole sensory world for her by the time I found out her name.

Hounds are also quite physically striking, and one of the things I learned about my mother when looking for her was that she was a striking woman with “expressive eyes” as the poem in the book documents.

I spent my childhood hoping that I looked like her, that my features were hers, that I would grow into the beauty I imagined she was known for. This also informed how hounds came into the poems.

RMN: How does sobriety affect your approach to the subject of addiction?

DJ: First and most obvious is that if I wasn’t sober, I wouldn’t have been able to write these poems. I started writing loosely about my mother in college, when I first started looking for her. Those poems were frantic and often veered off topic because my heart was broken and I couldn’t face what I perceived as her rejecting me. I also was becoming a career drunk in college, and I was less concerned about writing beautiful poems and more concerned about my next high.

Being in active addiction takes a lot from you. Not only physically but mentally; I truly don’t think I had the mental or emotional capacity to write about my addiction while I was in the muck of it.

Secondly, I personally am firmly in the camp of only writing about addiction if you have experienced it yourself. If someone loves an addict, I think they can write about just that, but I wouldn’t want to read a book about addiction from a non-addict.

In the book, I say the corner tenet of my sobriety now is forgiveness, and forgiveness plays a big part in the book overall. When I was in active addiction, I wasn’t able to forgive anyone. Not my mother, not even myself. I was hellbent on the “get-back.” On suffering and making my pain plain to those around me. I wanted my mother to see how her giving me up for adoption had hurt me when I started searching for her at 18. When I revisited my search as a sober 31-year-old, I came to it with grace.

I also talk about grace a lot in the book. I think I had to give my mother grace in order to see her and myself clearly. I couldn’t hold on to the narrative that I had been abandoned without love any longer if I wanted to open my heart to knowing who she was.

RMN: How do naming dedications, individual poems, and a collection serve as a reclamation of chosen identity?

DJ: Wow this is a great question. My personal experience (and some readers may also have this experience) was one of having my identity imposed upon me. My adoptive mother told me who I was, and what she had to say was mostly negative. I was worthless, ugly, too emotional, too much in general.

In the poem “Call” I discuss this, how even despite years and distance, I still struggled to see myself outside of her vision of me. Writing this book brought me closer to full and flawed woman that was my biological mother, which brought me closer to the self I have been building all these years.

I had to teach my inner monologue to approach the self with loving kindness, and part of that is also having a spiritual life. I don’t believe in a Christian God, or any capital G God of organized religion anymore, but I do believe in a guiding force, a light, that moves through me. That light was covered when I was a child, and this book, this life I’ve built has kind of served as a great uncovering.

I also have had so many lovely people who have reflected back to me a loved version of myself. My brothers David and Dakota, my best friend Shanai, my friends and writing group members Cale and Diehl. If I didn’t have these things I would still be the abused, admonished child I knew growing up. She still lives inside of me, I don’t think that hurt will ever disappear, but I’ve become someone else around her, a protective force.

RMN: The poem “To Unlearn the Narrative of the Dog” has a direct address to the reader. What are you hoping to have readers contend with by giving them a name?

DJ: This is linked to question four, but I brought the reader into the poem at that moment because it is easy for me to let other people tell me who I am. In a sense, to perform for others approval and recognition. In “Adoptee Log #9” I talk about decentering the mother, and while having grace and respect for my mother was important for me and this book, I had to also let go of the idea that only she could tell me who I am.

“To Unlearn the Narrative of the Dog” is about just that, literally piecing myself together without worrying about how my mothers or my readers would perceive me.

RMN: What is the significance of Rita Dove as an influence in your writing, namely in Section III?

DJ: What Rita Dove does in her poems “Adolescences I” and “II” is capture this essence of not just girlhood, but Black girlhood, that I also wanted to bring into my work. I wanted to be able to do that without big red arrows pointing saying “THIS POEM IS ABOUT RACE.” I do have poems that are more directly about race in the book, but I loved the subtlety with which Dove approaches the subject in her poems.

I started reading her in college, specifically around the time I was writing my senior thesis, and I was immediately smitten and in awe of her work. The sharpness and expansiveness of the language she uses, especially in II were so important and influential for me.

RMN: How does the use of white space serve as its own vessel for communication and a reverberation of the theme of absence throughout your collection?

DJ: Having spent years not knowing my mother was, in a sense, a white space that permeated throughout my life. Sometimes it was apt to fill that white space with words, other times I had to let the starkness, the silence, speak for itself.

When I was little, I had a recurring dream where my biological mother showed up at my childhood home and demanded my adoptive mother unhand me and return me to my rightful home. In the dream, my mothers are yelling at each other, and I open my mouth, and nothing comes out.

The white space is this too, the things I could not say and the things I never said. To either of my mothers. I never got to tell Sarah I love her. I never got to tell my mom that raised me how she broke my heart. So much lives in that. It was important for me stylistically and emotionally to have that white space be a part of the collection.

RMN: Section II is entirely comprised of poems entitled “Adoptee Log [#1-10].” Tell us about your development in contending with the intersections of girlhood and motherhood as an adoptee.

DJ: For me, this section was vital. I wanted to describe the day to day yearning I experienced as a daughter, while also working through my thoughts on what it meant to be a mother. I am not a mother myself, but I knew I had to say what I had to say, and then leave room for compassion to flow through. I do have poems that express frustration, sadness, and heartache, but at the center of those poems too is a profound love for my mother, and an understanding of the difficulty in the decision she made.

Through therapy, I learned that adoptees especially tend to be more preoccupied with the mother figure than the father. There is a biological reasoning for this but also a social one. Mothers tend to take on most of the work of child rearing. There’s a popular video segment on a late-night television program where street interviewers ask fathers “who is your child’s pediatrician?” “What is the name of your daughter’s best friend?” These fathers can’t answer or get the answer wildly incorrect, even birthdays or other important milestones in a child’s life. Then, the mother comes on screen and gets a perfect score.

Yes, these interviews are cherry-picked and edited, but they also speak to something true. We put the brunt of the weight on mothers to know it all and do it all. So, when I was searching for my mother, I put the onus on her to heal the wounds that had been foisted upon me in my girlhood. This, of course, was very unfair. A big part of the collection is coming to admit that to myself and starting to see my mother as a full, realized human being who is not just the woman who gave birth to me, then let me go.

RMN: If your birth mother could read one poem from this collection, which one would you want it to be and why?

DJ: “Poem as Motherless” not only because it is a direct address, but also because it is a true love poem for her. It doesn’t paint me in this bucolic light either, I admit to blaming her for things that just aren’t her fault, but I admit to it, and this poem in a way, serves as an apology.

The love I have for her is not uncomplicated, but it drives this collection. I wouldn’t be on this earth if it wasn’t for her. I wouldn’t be alive. Despite the abuse I experienced as a girl, I still grew up in a place where I always had clean clothes, food, a roof over my head. She made a sacrifice for what she thought was best for me, and who is to say if it was truly best, but I believe her decision was heart-forward and selfless, and I have to thank her for that.

There was some discussion with my editor about changing the last poem in the book, but I really fought for the last poem to stay in its place. I wanted the last thing in the book to be a gesture toward my mother, not a meditation on myself or addiction or abuse. I wanted to have one final declaration of love.

Hound Triptych is available to order now!

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Dani Janae is a Black lesbian poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been published by Longleaf Review, SWWIM, RHINO Poetry, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She posts on Substack at “No Skips,” “Fig Widow,” and “Ask a Queer Doctor,” and she can be found at https://danijanae.com/.

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.