Following the release of Kimberly Ann Priest’s full-length poetry collection, Floralia, Tara Rahman spoke with Priest about the collection’s botanical language, hybrid forms, and haunting representations of trauma, survival, and embodiment. Here, they discussed the use of flowers as both medicinal and poisonous symbols, the fragmented formal structures through which grief and dissociation are articulated, and the collection’s intersectional attention to gender-based violence, media spectacle, power, and the difficult work of healing.
Tara Rahman: What is the significance of the recurring botanical terminology (i.e., plant classifications or taxonomy) and rare or toxic flowers in Floralia, such as the poppy and impatiens psittacina (parrot flower)?
Kimberly Ann Priest: Spending time in nature has always been, for me, a balm. I go to nature for refuge. I bring it into my living spaces for solace. I love to have flowers in my home. But nature, in all its expressions, is not a simple metaphor for beauty and good. Nature is fierce, dangerous, and poisonous, while also being tender, vibrant, and medicinal. The flowers in Floralia expose their many personalities. The opium poppy, for instance, “can be dried and used for decorations, boiled in water to produce a bitter tea, or crushed to make a low dose of morphinans.” It is also the source of an illicit drug: opium. Asks the speaker as the primary narrator of the book: “How does one classify a thing useful either living or dead? Useful for both good and ill purposes?” (67). My answer: I don’t know. We are speaking of humans, of course. How each of us make choices to do harm or heal, to do evil or good, and, of course, the gamut of choices in between these poles. How do you classify us? We can’t be pinned down to all bad or all good. We are people living in the throes of others’ choices and absorbing the consequences of those choices ,and this fact alters where we exist on the spectrum of classifications day by day. What I am communicating with these flowers is our worth and the importance of honoring that worth—to not crush, discard, or abuse it. I’m communicating the power of choice and our ability to choose to treat these fragile blooms with absolute respect, tending to their purpose as testimonies of what is beautiful, desirable, and medicinal.
TR: The poems throughout Floralia experiment with various forms and structures, including sedoka, monologue, and prose. How does form influence the articulation of grief in these poems, such as “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips” and “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”?
KAP: Gosh, grief is so incredibly disruptive. It’s not linear or organized. It makes its own decisions about how it will enter our memories and our days. This is especially true with grief from a traumatic experience. The poems in Floralia speak to the fragmentation an individual experiences after trauma and how it disrupts mental processing, emotional regulation, and relational attachment. When writing trauma—not as a narrative fact but as an embodied experience—hybridity typically provides more room for formal play that mimics this experience. With the “City Lights Radio” broadcast, I wanted to show the way sexual trauma splits the mind, fragmenting memory, and how this dissociation can feel like you exist in a body of multiple interpretations of the self. I’m not speaking of a personality disorder, but rather the struggle to integrate identity after what you believed about the world and the self in the world has been shattered by a traumatic experience that challenges your belief. In the sedoka poem, there is a single voice lamenting the fresh wound of assault. That fresh wound is not easy to communicate if one can communicate at all, so the expression is sound and color and metaphors based on feeling as the speaker is trying to connect these expressions in a way that makes some sense. It’s supposed to feel a bit senseless while also being driven by identifiable emotion at intervals.
TR: How do blank spaces and brackets serve as a tool for communicating the complex, often inarticulable experience of sexual abuse in Floralia? In addition, how are these devices a vehicle for reinforcing the motifs of silence and repressed feelings (e.g., guilt, shame, fear) in your collection?
KAP: I think the question answered the question! The blank spaces and brackets are meant to communicate emotional disruption and dysregulation. Reading these poems isn’t a fluid experience. Guilt, shame, fear, grief—it’s all heavy, jarring, overwhelming then numbing. These emotions cycle. They stop and go. They expand and collapse. They can feel illuminating then suddenly spar. So, also the poems in Floralia.
TR: In “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia,” the Alive Young Woman tells the Ghost Woman, “…You may not remember the situation of your death…but your disembodied self still carries the trauma of the events.” In “ghosts,” the speaker states, “It has taken me a long time to realize I am human…I give details about how the past intrudes into the present and how this is scar tissue in my bone and in my veins…” What role does memory, embodied trauma, and dissociation play in the speaker’s relationship to her body?
KAP: It’s everything. This is sort of the question of the whole book: what role do these experiences play after trauma? I think my answer to this question is multi-faceted. Working through this dissociation, painful memories, and how trauma lives in the body (as does the women in the prose poems that head each section) is what allows us to survive these traumas. So many people don’t work through, so they continue to manifest harm to the self and others. But many also do work through and, as a product of working through, become wise. They extract medicine from the pain and offer this medicine to others. I hope that this is the enduring legacy of my own work, that all these poems I’ve written in Floralia and other books provide a roadmap for others to travel who also require healing from painful traumas. I don’t think I answered your question directly, perhaps because it is difficult for me to separate what we might consider the body and soul and all the things that fracture the soul. The body holds this fracture. It is the container. Trauma moves through the veins, rewires the brain, and physically manifests the pain we carry in our spiritual parts. It’s all one. To care for any part of the human is to care for all parts.
TR: Tell me more about your choice of language and syntax in the linked sedoka poem, “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips,” such as the repetition of “his body, not mine” and rhythmic enjambment (e.g., lines “…good blood drum be good / little orange-beat-beat-good-should…”).
KAP: This poem is an attempt for a freshly assaulted woman to make sense of her experience. I imagine this as an internal dialogue that doesn’t make clear sense. Her repeated attempts to clarify distinction of bodies is a desperate attempt to place a separation between herself and her assailant. But the poem communicates a lot of sound and color as you have noted, that feeling of trauma throbbing in the veins. She can’t make sense of everything. The body is overwhelmed with feeling. The mind moves in and out of reality.
TR: In “His mother”, the speaker states: “…after he slipped / into the room to feel her soft nourishing breasts and be her / little white begonia three more times…” How does this poem complicate attitudes toward gender and survivors of sexual abuse? How does the portrayal of the mother figure as “nourishing” subvert these expectations (and the expectations of relationships between abuse survivors and perpetrators)?
KAP: This poem and elements of Parrot Flower was inspired by the story of a man who became a serial rapist. His early childhood was marked by intense trauma: his mother sexually abused him repeatedly. Culturally, we cannot escape the reality that women and girls are more frequently sexually harassed and abused at the hands of men, but boys are abused, too. Typically, they are also abused by men, but in the story I was examining, this boy (who became a rapist) was abused by his mother. Naturally, this shaped his psyche and corrupted his desire. The cultural narrative that we live inside, in our case a patriarchal narrative, determines which gender is freer to perpetrate harm without consequence. Here in America, men are freer to perpetrate harm, and they are more beholden to maintain the power balance that patriarchy demands. This maintenance can be so subconscious, with all of us participating in major and minor ways and not even realizing we are doing so. But I think it’s important to contemplate our origins—we were all small children once. We were all poised for any possibility. Both boys and girls are recipients of cultural narratives and whatever harms they embody. While I don’t think we will ever live in a world where these harms completely discontinue, I wonder how much good it would do each of us to contemplate the fragile genesis of every person we meet and how we can tend this genesis with greater wisdom and care. For Brent Brents, the serial rapist, the power and control dynamic of using women was also his source of nourishing himself. He needed to both hurt his mother for abusing him and receive her sexual/emotional tending. How devastating is that? And how devasting the choices he made to perpetuate this harmful narrative. But like all of us, and like Parrot Flower demonstrates, he did have a choice.
TR: Another line in “His mother” that I’d like you to speak more on is, “…he extinguished his cigarette on her twiggy arms—that’s what young boys do—then left.” What are you hoping to have readers contend with in this last statement?
KAP: Simply the power and control narrative that men are often introduced to from a young age that positions them as the ones entitled to have power over another. This power narrative, sadly, usually manifests most clearly in their relationships to intimate partners even if it doesn’t to the rest of their social circle. And this power dynamic is a form of coping. Culturally, we have often invited boys and men to cope with their pain through bullying—typically bullying their intimate partner or other people, like children, who are dependent on them for survival. Men, more than anyone, need to change this narrative by doing deep inner healing themselves and teaching boys that power and control tactics are not an alternative to doing the work of healing their wounds. Culturally, we do possess better medicine. It’s available. Men and boys can engage with this medicine, too.
TR: In “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”, the Male Announcer refers to the media phenomenon of “Missing White Woman Syndrome” in his dialogue, stating: “Telegenic, photogenic, the young woman memorialized in the center photo was… the most ideal progenitor of terror in the American imagination…” and that “It [e.g., sexual abuse, kidnapping, murder] could be any girl, any white girl—a pretty one.” Speak about the need for an intersectional lens in better understanding and calling attention to the issues of gender-based violence, exploitation, and drug addiction.
KAP: In this piece, I’m highlighting the voyeuring aspect of news media in relation to stories of sexual harm against women and how, culturally, white women are the focus of media attention to the dismissal of crimes done against women of color and even boys. In highlighting this, I am not saying that this is beneficial to white women. I am revealing a cultural obsession. This obsession is not beneficial to anyone because it is not about care and concern for women of any color, including white women. It is more about what provides good entertainment in media and will capture the minds of viewers. There are certainly other lenses we could consider; for instance, the fact that those with wealth receive more positive media attention than those in poverty. The point is that news media and other medias are agenda-driven, needing viewers and ratings that translate to dollars to survive, and this media agenda manifests as incomplete or one-sided information about the world we live in. It also encourages us to observe the world from an easy distance on a screen and perhaps miss the stories and needs of the people around us. I don’t know how to solve this dilemma. It is likely unsolvable. I do my best to avoid news media, not to be avoidant of happenings in the world, but rather to focus my attention on research that expands my worldview as well as the stories of individual people in my community that need direct care. Not an easy thing to do in the present historical moment.
TR: In “On bluelight.org,” the speaker observes: “People do you know. [Survive.] Mostly women.” How does this (often disproportionately) precarious struggle of women to survive, especially from marginalized backgrounds related to race and class, intersect with your own views and reflections on survival throughout the collection?
KAP: I think it’s just that—the fact that survival is disproportionate. We can pretend it’s not, but it is. And its disproportionate in a variety of ways. It’s not a simple narrative of straight white men having more power than anyone else. It’s also a story of which straight white men have this right and who they are willing to share power with at any given time. Money matters. Fame matters. Family background matters. Religious affiliation matters, etc. But the fact that any of these elements matter when it comes to who survives and maintains control is the problem at the heart of all of this. Perhaps our lingering questions should not be centered on what intersectional elements place a person at the bottom of society with little hope of survival, but what intersects to place someone at the top? And when someone finds themselves at the top, how can they quickly begin to disseminate and relinquish this strong hold on exceptional power? What can they give up? What can I give up when I have too much right to power? This is the ultimate question. The poem you refer to is simply referring to the fact that, in the narrative of gender, women are more often caught in the throes of survival than men, doing more work to maybe someday enjoy thriving.
TR: You open each key poem (“City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”, “Parrot Flower”, and “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips”) with epitaphs quoted from other poetic works, including Kimiko Hahn’s “Toxic Flora”, Song of Songs in the Holy Bible, and Patti Smith’s poem “rape.” Why did you choose them? How are they significant to the larger narrative of the collection? What should the readers take away from these epitaphs?
KAP: In this collection, each epitaph is setting up the drama that will unfold in the next section. Firstly, I love the book Toxic Flora, the poem that is Song of Songs has informed so much of my worldview about desire, pleasure, and the dedicated fierceness of love, and anything Patti Smith writes is an education in excellent writing craft. Altogether, the lines I chose from these writings highlight our fragile natures, how we can be broken and discarded, altered by toxicity, and filled with questions about how we will be seen and understood after harm. They resonate with Who am I now? and How do you see me? I have carried these questions myself, hence all the poetry to unravel my own stories of harm and what these harms communicate to me about my value in the world. As the woman classifying flowers in this book dedicates herself to discovering the medicinal wisdom of her experiences, however painful this excavation may be, I hope my reader will understand that these fragile blooms are worth tender cultivation. If they have been damaged, they are no less worthy, but cultivation is not all about gentle caresses and sunlight, it also requires eradication of toxins and predators, PH balance and good soil. The work is difficult, intentional, and takes time, but in the end, you will have welcomed and restored a beautiful bloom.
Floralia is available for pre-order now!
Kimberly Ann Priest is a writer, visual artist, and author of Wolves in Shells, winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry, as well as tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her writing is deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, eco-poetics, eco-spirituality, ecofeminism, women’s studies, neurodivergence studies, classic film studies, narrative justice, arts-based research, and writing for therapeutic purposes. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
Tara Rahman (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MSc in Global Development from SOAS, University of London. She is also a recent graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing often focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities. In her free time, she enjoys reading literary and YA fiction, watching anime, and spending time with her tripod cat, Tuntuni.
