We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Lily Rex

In this month’s installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, Franchesca Nicole Lazaro speaks with Lily Rex about their poetry chapbook Little Planes (2024). Little Planes was released as a limited run of 200 handbound copies, some of which are still available for purchase directly from the author. In our current age of digital, digital, digital, Lily Rex’s DIY ethos directed towards physical media produced by human hands is a welcome breath of fresh air, if not a small revolutionary act. Little Planes is a short but powerful collection about “influential musicians who have died in plane crashes, such as Patsy Cline, Otis Redding, and Aaliyah.”

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro: Little Planes is rooted in a very specific kind of American grief: the musician who dies young in a small plane crash. What drew you to this particular lens for exploring loss and legacy?

Lily Rex: The concept for Little Planes started over a decade ago, with the refrain in the title poem. It came to me while I was listening to some Patsy Cline and studying at undergrad. American culture places premiums on youth and celebrity, quickly granting mythic status to people who are perceived as gifted by God, the universe, or another higher power of choice. In my study of American literature and history, I became interested in how this is at odds with the high value our culture also places on work ethic and individualism. There are really two concepts of the American Dream—one where we earn what we want, and another where we are simply born worthy, destined to receive.

FNL: The collection pays close attention to the non-famous people who died alongside stars, such as roadies, bodyguards, and makeup artists. What does it mean to you to center those figures?

LR: One of the questions I set out to answer with these poems was, “Why should we not romanticize our own lives, elevating certain stories to mythic status?” And my answer to that is: we should. The quality of a story is not in its glitz and glamor for me, but how it is told. I have an obsession about challenging my audience to consider the mundane in a different light, which I think is a hallmark both of country music’s influence on my process and my background in journalism. I can be observant to a fault. If you’ve ever happened to drop your fork or hug your waitress at a Waffle House while I was there, it’s in my journal for that day. To center people who work behind the scenes or with a degree of anonymity hopefully means that my readers will reflect on their own work in the world, expand their definition of art, and see the blurred line that I see between art and labor.

FNL: The title poem is written explicitly as a country song, complete with a refrain. What does the choice to open the collection in that form allow you to do that other poetic modes might not?

LR: Opening a poetry collection with a song is more of a soapbox moment for me than a stylistic tool. Though I have a much larger volume of work in poetry and prose, my first genre was songwriting. I started taking guitar lessons and wrote my first song when I was ten, heavily inspired by The Judds. I live in both the world of songwriting, which is more of a pop art, and the world of poetry, which is more niche and sometimes annoyingly pretentious. It brings me joy to stir the pot in the debate about what makes songs and poetry distinct from one another, both to convince self-proclaimed poetry haters that they actually do enjoy poetry through the argument that some songs are poems, and to advocate for the literary merit and historical significance of storytelling through song in academic settings. The beauty of self-publishing is I can do whatever I want.

FNL: The collection moves between Nashville, the Indiana Dunes, rural Mississippi, and the Bahamas. How does geography shape the way these elegies work?

LR: Grief knows no borders, but I believe that places contain multitudes, including grief, just like people do. I aim for the places I write about to feel like characters in and of themselves, to make people curious about the history of whatever ground they stand on, and urge them to consider the entire range of emotions and events that have given that place its personality and its power.

FNL: “Taylor Swift’s Private Jet” builds its argument through repetition and tall tales. What does that poem’s structure allow you to do that a more straightforward elegy wouldn’t?

LR: My approach to elegy is to make something new of memory, not just to rhyme and lament. Assigning a strict form to grief just doesn’t make sense to me. Grief is not manageable, linear, or neat. Why write about it as such? In an unsurprising turn, my favorite elegies are songs, such as Bob Dylan’s “The Death of Emmett Till” or the Indigo Girls’ “Virginia Woolf.” I would argue, and perhaps the poem argues, that that which we decide to repeat has power and gains more power every time it is retold.

FNL: Several poems imagine conversations with or about the inner lives of the deceased. How do you think about the ethics of speaking for or alongside the dead?

LR: I don’t believe in speaking for the dead (unless I knew them very well), but I do believe in speaking about the dead. How else can we preserve history? In this collection, I have focused on documented history, my reverence for the art in question and at times let the artists speak for themselves through their work, such as “Conversation Between Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Texas Flood,” which is a found poem that makes use of phrases from SRV’s own songs.

FNL: The collection closes with the image of dead musicians reincarnated as cardinals in ordinary places like truck stops, backyard swings. What guided your decision to end there, and what drew you specifically to the cardinal as that closing image?

LR: I made a list of artists I wanted to write about when I started this project, and I wanted to present them chronologically. Some of them were old favorites of mine, like Patsy, but some were artists I wanted to learn more about. I found my way into some of the poems through my longstanding connection with the music. With some others, I found my entry point through immersing myself in new music or researching the artists’ lives. Aaliyah was slated to be the focus of the last poem because hers was the most recent death I wanted to write about.

I struggled to find an entry point in her music, in part because I was disturbed by the fact that she was reportedly given sedatives and carried onto the plane because she had been nervous to board. I started and failed to finish a few poems about her, torn between celebrating her art and addressing the violence and predatory truth of her story.

Her name is rarely printed without being attached to her most notorious abuser. A practice that every part of me, but especially the journalist in me, finds really repugnant. I decided that I wouldn’t add to that massive body of work where she is defined by what happened to her. I truly was sitting on my front porch, thinking about the common folklore of cardinals being visitors from another realm. I didn’t know that image would lead me to her when I started writing it, but my observation of the cardinals led me to think of her and took me to a place where I thought of her as vibrant, unburdened, and alive.

FNL: Is there anything else you’d like to speak to, or any upcoming releases, projects, or events you’d like to share?

LR: I plan to take Little Planes on the road eventually in the form of a hybrid show where I will alternate reading poems and covering songs by the artists I’ve researched. I have more plane crash poems, and wouldn’t rule out expanding it into a full-length collection someday. Right now, however, I’m finishing up a full-length collection of poems inspired by restaurant work and overlooked places/people.

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Lily Rex (they/she) is a queer, working-class writer and musician. Their poetry, informed by fascinations with rivers, history, politics, and labor, has been featured by Bareknuckle Press, SALT Weekly, and Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten records. Their first chapbook Rivers Have Friends Too (2021) sold out of its initial run in its first month, and their second chapbook Little Planes (2024) is available now. Rex is an Indiana transplant living in Nashville, Tennessee.

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with interests in developmental editing and book production. Her editorial practice focuses on literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction exploring history, technology, media studies, feminism, and literature. She has worked as an Editorial Intern and Reader at Brink Literary Project and joined Sundress Publications as an intern in January 2026. Based in Seattle, Washington, she is passionate about amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds.