An Interview with stevie redwood, Author of D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S

Ahead of the release of their poetry collection D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S, stevie redwood spoke with Editorial Intern Erica Leal about “the relationships between everything and everyone,” the influences of social and political environments, and the incredible dichotomy of extremes in human existence.

Erica Leal: Can you speak about the political and social commentary woven within these poems?

stevie redwood: Hi! Sure. Thank you. Since you started with a question about political & social commentary, I just want to say from the outset that this book was written before the current genocidal escalation on Palestine, so / but: free Palestine. From the river to the sea. Free the people, free the land—there, here, everywhere.

Okay. So I mean, I’m influenced by anarchism & anti-state communism, & I also exist in a particular body at a particular set of coordinates moving through time & space. Allegedly. A lot of my internal landscape is consumed with, occupied by, the socialites & politics of my own world(s), & also of the world. Relationships, right? The relationships between everything and everyone. & the global political era into which I happened to be dumped is one that involves relationships of infinite beauty & extraordinary manufactured violence. And so I write about that. In some parts of the book, it’s there in the details; in other parts it’s pretty explicit.

The art that moves me moves me, & I think that’s what I look for. It’s also what I hope to make. My writing isn’t for everybody, & if it were I would be failing. I don’t want to appeal to as many people as possible; I want my writing to find & connect with the right people for it. Like I write against cops & landlords & profit & war, & about eating the capitalist class with forks, you know? I write, or try, into interdependence against fascism. I wrote a chapbook late last year in support of Palestinian freedom fighters & against imperialism. I write about these things because I want to. I don’t think that is in & of itself a radical act in this moment in the context of modern US poetry, no. But I think that if I can at the very least help to move something inside of people who are in a process of radicalizing, & / or especially if I can do for other intermittently burnt-out radicals what reading about these things does for me—which is to help remind me I’m not alone; to enable me to keep pushing—then that’s what I want to do.

EL: Juxtaposition of images is a common thread throughout D A N G E R O U S  B O D I E S /
A N G E R  O D E S, drawing to the complexity, yet simplicity, of seemingly contradictory ideas. For instance, in “GRACE ROT BASEMENT MUSEUM,” you write “It’s the man spooning mashed bananas between the tender gums of his six-month-old / pocketing his knife / & joining his friends for a Friday night / Proud Boys rally.” What is the larger significance of positioning opposing images like innocence and danger side-by-side?

sr: Mmm. I think one thing I was feeling into while I was writing most of the poems in the book is my own difficulty in navigating or reconciling parts of this world, these worlds—in which humans are capable of incredible tenderness & generative care & profligate cruelty & unfathomable malice & extraordinary selective indifference, among many other extremes. We are all capable of these things, right? Part of being a materialist is understanding that people aren’t intrinsically “bad” or “good,” & that everything happens in relation. Sure, we might have innate predilections or aptitudes or whatever, but how we relate to other people, creatures, lands, elements, ideas, systems, realities, materialities, etc, is contingent on a massive, massively complicated matrix of social & economic forces, both macro & micro. We still have agency. We still have choice(s). But our choices are contingent upon the world(s) in which we live & move.

Depending on how you look at it, “innocence” as a construction is sort of a social & political red herring, & there are different kinds of danger. We all start out “innocent” in one sense of the word, & by the time we’re adults, none of us are “innocent,” & most of us are both in danger in some way & dangerous in some way, because the world under colonialist capitalist order demands that that be so. Like people, “innocence” isn’t inherently “good” & “danger” isn’t automatically “bad,” & that’s something I also aim to explore & expose.

I think in a way, there’s a lot in the book that is me grappling with how those dynamics play out at a scale we can easily see, filtered through a lens that is aware of the architects & architectures of manufactured danger & that wants those architectures obliterated but knows that until that happens, we continue to live in & die in them. How do I interact with people & the world on these terms? How do I treat a stranger I know nothing about? (How) is it possible to remain both open to the world & also alive? How do I, how do we, continue to live in a world in which we are every day confronted with the myriad violences of every kind of warfare? All over the world; within our own towns & cities; within our own communities? How do I, as much as possible, keep from being dangerous to those I want to conspire with or want not to harm, & simultaneously make myself dangerous to the arms & agents of capitalist extraction, exploitation, dispossession, necropolitics, pillage, forever war?

EL: Can you speak to the collection’s relationship with the elements? Each section is named after a different natural icon of the earth, for instance, fire, light, metal, etc., yet is tied to personal journeys. How do these specific icons reflect the themes you touch upon in
D A N G E R O U S  B O D I E S / A N G E R  O D E S?

sr: Thank you for this question! In terms of the relationships between these elements or qualities & the sections of the book they precede, I think I’ll leave it to readers to make their own meaning. But in general, I wanted to remember & honor the elements of land & life that we live among, live by, & to name the book’s relationship to those elements; for them to ground it in a sense of place & scope beyond people, beyond borders.

Section titles also gave me an opportunity to include, as with the title, more juxtapositions of words within words & the overlap or tension (or both) inside them. Also, wordplay is fun!

EL: Tell me more about your choice of syntax and language in poems like “DEAR BABY” and “[& WHEN THE FOREST IS LEVELED, IF THE SAW WAILS THE LOUDEST SOUND: HALLOW THE TREES & GO AFTER THE BLADE]”?

sr: Sure! [& WHEN …] is one of the oldest poems in the book. I used to write like that a lot more often—more metaphor, surreality, more abstraction. It’s just what I was doing at the time. I haven’t really been able to find my way back into that state for awhile, & I’m not sure why. I think writing from that place was really deeply rooted in feeling & sense: less the work of cognition or something cerebral; more the yields of unprocessed visceral life. It felt almost hypnagogic even though it generally wasn’t. & I’m pretty sure I miss the experience of being able to inhabit & write from that place than I do the writing that experience tended to produce.
dear baby, too, is something maybe less cerebral than most of the other poems in the book, though it’s very different from [& WHEN …]. I think that one is almost like a spell. I think of disambiguation that way, too—as sort of an incantation, or at least incantation-adjacent. dear baby is part spell, part letter, part dirge, part prayer, part affirmation, part condemnation, & maybe other things as well, & I think the language just kinda needed to be lyrical, but also sort of prosaic & raw.

EL: In “DELIVERANCE,” you speak of the inevitability of death and the dichotomy between those with and without wealth through Jeff Bezos’ 11-minute space flight. How does the syntax of this poem denote the spiral that the speaker goes down during those 11 minutes?

sr: In terms of the writing, it starts out a little more language-y & manicured; there are flashes of the evidence of various crises, kind of how a news show will begin by running through headline synopses. The first long stanza is kinda punchy; there are a lot of fricatives & hard sounds. & then it turns into almost a sort of heinous lullaby, mind-numbing in its deference to numbers & figures, both list & listless. Maybe akin to the way we (“we”) can sometimes become lulled (or seduced, or compelled) into apathy or adaptation or self-protective dissociation once a horrific thing becomes familiar enough.

On the page, the poem has sort of a weird chaotic rhythm to it. It starts out in one long stanza & then starts to wing out into space. There’s a system—or a few— but it’s dizzying & it starts to break down. & yeah, as you indicated in your question, there is perhaps a parallel there to what’s happening for the speaker from beginning to (end?).

EL: How does the perception of time and environment, such as in “IN FRISCO THREE DAYS AFTER THE IPCC REPORT DOES NOT SAY TOO LATE,” influence the way we react to violence and approach the future?

sr: Ooh, this is a cool question. God … how to speak to this without writing pages & pages?!

Immediately, a question of “the” perception of time begs a pronoun, or a possessive proper noun, or some subject, right? For me, anyway. Because perception is deeply subjective—as, some would argue, is time. And yet, we also have had time quantified for us in rigid, life-defining ways that are now inextricable from & essentially in service of capitalist operation. Sixty seconds is a minute among sixty in an hour is one of eight (plus) in a day of selling your capacity to labor—to “earn,” hopefully, maybe, the following things: the title of contributing member of society; enough cash for four walls to live inside; the calories to help you reproduce yourself tomorrow morning so you can do it again; & most importantly, a profit for someone else. We learn early & always to live inside of this construction, lest we be punished in a panoply of ways. There is a way in which time, in its current administration, is itself an instrument of violence.

In terms of environment—if we are talking about “the environment,” so to speak, then the dimension of time takes on an additional threat. There is a leash on habitability of the so-called natural environment as it is—as it has been ravaged by colonialism, industrial capitalism, globalization—& plenty of people know this intimately from being the primary direct targets of colonialist violence. Other people know this & are deeply troubled by it & put that knowledge & that trouble away somewhere they don’t have to look at it, wherever the painful terrifying overwhelming things go. Or often people will focus on individual responsibility or policy or greenwashing at the expense of taking a broader approach rooted in the knowledge that an imminently uninhabitable planet is unavoidable as long as the structures that oversee life & death & order are colonialism & racial capitalism; as long as imperialism reigns. So how we contend with violence can’t be just about perception, but about trying to continually hew that perception & engage (with) it, & to mobilize it toward a different vision & actualization of collective futurity that is actually livable, generative, & abundant; one that demands & engenders relations built not on theft, extraction, individualism, commodification, & violence, but on kinship, mutuality, curiosity, & care. And one thing I hope this book does is to say loudly that whether “we” like it or don’t: in order to defeat a world system that has been & continues to be forged by such massive, unfathomable violence, we too—those of us who dream a world without it—will need to be angry & dangerous together.

D A N G E R O U S  B O D I E S / A N G E R  O D E S is available to purchase on the Sundress website

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stevie redwood is a neuroinsurgent toisanese jewish writer, poet, and activist born and raised in the bay area. they were a resident at Prelinger Library in 2022, as well as a resident of Sundress Publications in 2023. they currently serve as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine. their writing has appeared in underblong, Protean Magazine, Prolit Magazine, TRIPWIRE 19, Stone of Madness Press, Vagabond City, and Midnight Sun Magazine, and they have a previously published chapbook, Intifada, out from Deadwood Press. they write about liberation and finding ways to survive in an ecologically, socially, and politically unjust society, bringing a communal and deeply human understanding to the unsteady world we all find ourselves in.

Erica Leal is a student writer and journalist at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently enrolled in the Literary Journalism B.A. program and is also pursuing a minor in English. With a passion for both fictional writing and journalism, Erica seeks to create works that spark the imagination as well as inform and inspire. Her diverse writing experience includes both short and long-form narratives, magazine articles, and poetry as well as experience in radio and podcasting.