Upon the release of her new poetry collection, Death Fluorescence, Julia Bouwsma spoke with Sundress Publication editorial intern Annabel Phoel about the soul of the collection, the importance of identity, grief, transformation, and healing, and the impact that Jewish history has left on her writing.
Annabel Phoel: You open the book with two epigraphs. How did you choose them? How do you want them to impact the reading of the book? Do you want the reader to take anything away from the epigraphs on their own?
Julia Bouwsma: The idea of call and response across distance is very important to me in poetry in general. I often think of conversations occurring between disparate poems, of poems coming to life in the space between reader and writer. When I wrote the book, I was worrying about the future while looking toward the past for answers. I felt like the silences of the past and the uncertainties of the future were calling back and forth to one another, that I was just in the middle of their conversation, trying to catch snippets and make sense of them. So placing two epigraphs in conversation with one another—which I did from the very first draft—instinctively felt like a very natural move. It was a way to frame and invite that potential for conversation across time and distance and between two very different voices. And it was also a way to create an opening for the reader, an invitation to enter the space between the two texts and listen.
Although epigraphs ultimately become guides for the reader, I tend to put them into manuscripts early on as a way to guide myself in the writing. I came to the Maurice Blanchot quote first: “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence,” in the very first draft of the manuscript, when it seemed book was mostly a book about disaster, fear, and legacies and consequences of silence. The second quote—though there always was one—changed a few times. But as the book began to expand emotionally, the excerpt from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” felt like the perfect fit.
AP: Throughout the first section you catalogue this inability to shake events of decades past through both lineage and land. Talk to me about feeling that past connection.
JB: As a farmer-poet (I live on an off-the-grid homestead in the mountains of western Maine) I am deeply aware of the histories carried by the land I live on and love. It is present in the rusted scraps of iron I find as I dig in my garden, in the stone walls that run through the woods, in the small 1800’s cemetery a hundred yards from my house. How the labor done by those who worked this land before me informs and feeds the labor I do now. How for every history I know, there are so many histories I don’t know. And, how the reasons I don’t know them—the silences that surround them—are their own lesson. Working a piece of land is a connective process—you shape it, and it shapes you. And over time it becomes a crucial part of your identity, so those histories it carries—even the histories you don’t know about—they become a part of who you are.
AP: The Holocaust and its impacts never really leave the collection. Can you talk us through what makes it so prevalent?
JB: In researching and writing my last book, Midden, a collection of poems about the State of Maine’s 1912 forced eviction and erasure of an interracial community from their home on Malaga Island, I thought a lot about the ways in which historic trauma is passed through families, often in the form of silences. And as someone of Jewish ancestry, these patterns of silence were a thing I recognized in my own family history. For example, I knew my great-grandmother until she passed away when I was in high school, but to this day no one in my family, despite research, has ever been quite clear on what town or even what country she grew up in or what her name was before it was changed upon emigrating.
The Holocaust, as well as the many pogroms and other injustices that preceded it, has both shaped and erased much of my family history. This is what genocides do, the legacies they leave. Destruction and erasure of a people inherently severs descendants from their pasts. It creates silences that are passed through families in lieu of histories. Silences that separate us from ourselves. Silences become a part of our own histories and identities.
I am interested in understanding the wound because I think if we don’t name our wounds—even through silence or absence—don’t learn to see them, then we can’t figure out what to do with them. What can our wounds, our silences and ruptures, give us? How can I ensure that I use the histories and silences carried within my DNA to help me to see, speak against, and fight present and future atrocities? Something in my bones remembers, even if I do not. Something in me understands, on a primal level, what is happening in Palestine and elsewhere. If I can think of it connectively then I can, as Naomi Shihab Nye says, “see the size of the cloth.” It is my job to remember even what I cannot remember, because if we don’t, if we allow ourselves to become separated from the past and from ourselves, we become complicit, or worse.
AP: Tell me about the imagery you’re creating with the visual formatting of poems like “Haunt,” “Study in Epigenetic Memory: A Memory of Warmth,” and “The Thing About Fire.”
JB: This is a book that is very interested in the idea of transformation and adaptation—both in terms of using the familiar as a guide for navigating the unknown, and in finding the unfamiliar within what we already know. Can the old wounds somehow help us find our way through a world that feels increasingly strange? Can we stare at the familiar long enough to see in it something we have never seen before, to find some new sense of possibility? The visual poems included in this collection are a new direction for me, but they are an organic evolution of the questions I was asking. Unexpected shapes emerged, glaring ruptures formed, doorways opened up inside the poems, and I did my best to step through them to see what would happen.
AP: In “I’m Okay but the Country Is Not,” you blend grief for familial loss with the grief of a more ideological loss––the loss of the idea of a perfect America. Why did you put the two together? For such different kinds of grief, how does each inform the other?
JB: Grief has a way of naturally spiraling and compounding because it simultaneously expands and constricts our minds, our vision. We cannot see beyond our grief, which isolates us, and yet it also seems that our grief has no bounds, and that boundlessness is somehow connective. It ties our griefs to one another, often in unexpected ways, and it ties us to others who are also grieving—across physical distances and perhaps even across time and generations. That sense of constriction and expansion and spilling over is embodied in the form of the poem itself, which began as a four-page rant and ultimately took shape as sort of hybrid heroic sonnet crown (the first eight sonnets are Petrarchan, but they break into free-form sonnets after the octet).
When my grandmother died at the end of January 2017, I was already experiencing a great deal of sociopolitical grief and rage. And she was as well, as evidenced by her words near the end of her life: “I’m okay, but the country isn’t.” Certainly, it was/is a grief for democracy, which feels even more precarious now than when I wrote the sequence. It is the grief of watching history actively forget itself, of watching the people forget what they should have learned from history. But I do want to clarify that it is not a grief for “the idea of a perfect America.” I find it impossible to unwind the idea of America from the immeasurable cruelty and harm embedded at its center since inception, a fact which carries its own grief and which I acknowledge in the poem itself: “America is its own damaged DNA. / It circles in on itself until the throat catches inside the throat…”
Anyway, when my grandmother died, I felt that her grief over the direction America was taking had broken her heart, that it was partially to blame for her death. And I felt both an anger over that and a sense of responsibility. It seemed to me that her grief was a necessary labor that needed to be continued and that it was my job to carry it—and find a way to express it—for her. As I believe she, being the first of her family born in the U.S., carried the grief of her ancestors who perished in Europe. So, I was carrying both her larger historic grief along with my own personal grief at losing her, and the two naturally informed one another and then perhaps fused, becoming a sort of double helix that guided the sonnet sequence.
AP: Preceding “A Meditation on Parasitic Infection,” you state “C. elegans is notable for the singular blue light it emits at expiry, a phenomenon also known as ‘death fluorescence.’” Why this term for the collection? What is expiring? Or is it the species’ inability to let go of the past?
JB: I began researching the idea of epigenetic memory, the theory that trauma alters our DNA and is subsequently passed down through generations. As part of this research, I read a number of studies involving the C. elegans nematode, an organism that is scientifically significant for a whole range of reasons, including its “death fluorescence.” The blue light emitted by the worm as it dies fascinates me both on a literal level—scientists have actually been able to map its death in live time, watching each cell turn blue one after another—and metaphorically. Between the climate crisis and social and political unrest, modern human civilization feels increasingly unstable to me. When I began the book, one of the questions I was asking was: how do we navigate a dying world? As I wrote further, I began to be comforted by the idea of geologic time, by thinking that it’s not the planet that is expiring but the humans who have done it so much harm. I don’t think it’s our inability to let go of the past that’s destroying us, but our inability to learn from the past and adapt. Either way, our capacity for beauty is still somehow embedded inside of profound loss and change, inside of fear and uncertainty. And I do want to celebrate that—in all its complicated and damaged precariousness—while I can.
AP: Explain your intentions behind the shifts in formatting from page to page over the course of “Muscle Memory: A Surgery.” What do you want the reader to glean from these shifts?
JB: You know, I don’t think poets talk enough about how writing a book changes us. About how sometimes we have to change in order to become the necessary person to write a book the way it wants to be written. To write and unwrite and rewrite ourselves, to dissemble and reinvent ourselves both on and off the page. The rawness of that work, the vulnerability of it. I was going through a lot of growing pains during the time I wrote this book, learning how to adapt in the face of family losses and hard change. Change can be a hard-won process for me. I learn best through failure, and tend to cling to habits or thought processes that aren’t serving me until I reach a tipping point. We often say that healing is messy, that it’s not linear. I was looking for a way to lay that messiness of change out on the page, to visually embody it in the poem.
AP: Talk to me more about having conversations with the pain and connecting the wellness of the body and mind. How can we heal the body with the mind?
JB: This is an interesting question for me because I went into this book with a lot of resistance toward the idea of healing. I wrote many of the poems, especially many of the poems that occur in the earlier sections of the book from a place of pain, both mental and physical. But I have always been more focused on the idea of holding rather than healing. So the question I was asking around pain wasn’t How do I get rid of this pain?, which I think is the question we are generally trained and expected to ask. Instead, it was more like: How do I acknowledge and honor this pain, which is after all a part of me? What can I do with it that might be useful? How might a source of shame instead become a superpower for me? What messages is my pain carrying, and what does it have to tell me? I remember Aracelis Girmay telling me, when I was working on my last book, that it was the poet’s—the poem’s—job to have a conversation with silence. So, I wanted to take a similar approach to the idea of pain, to have a conversation with it, as my acupuncturist suggested to me at one point. Because I think that’s a lot of what poetry really is—listening for the words inside things we don’t normally think of as having language, learning to have conversations with them. And entering a dynamic process like that, a conversation, it changes everything because it gives you agency, which changes the power balance, breaks things up in unexpected ways, like ice-out on the river in spring.
AP: Can you talk to me about the constant appearance of water throughout the collection?
JB: To be honest, the prevalence of water took me by surprise in this book. It wasn’t even something I really noticed until readers started pointing it out to me. It just kind crept into the poems one by one until it became a kind of character in the book, much the way the color blue did as well. Some of it, I think, was simply the fact that the environment in which I’m writing tends to worm its way in. I wrote many of the poems and assembled the first draft of this book during a writing residency in Monson, Maine during the month of February, and I used to take daily walks out onto the frozen lake that abuts the center of town. So the lake became a presence in a number of the poems—a surface that was both ground and not ground. We also experienced several summers of extreme drought during the time I was writing the book, as well as one summer of endless rain. And I love the rivers near my home—kayaking them, thinking of the way they function as a kind of artery for the land I know and love. And of course, as a homesteader, it often seems I am endlessly carrying buckets of water to some animal or another, a labor which also finds its way into the poems. But I think water also carries a great deal of symbolic power for me. In its permeability, its ability to shift form—changing from something solid and immobile to something fluid and dynamic, and then back again. In the fact that it is simultaneously both a burden to carry and a life force we all rely on and need. That it is both internal and external. That it connects us to one another in myriad ways.
AP: Your poems play with humanity’s innovation and how it has impacted the rest of the natural world––in both good ways and bad. How do we move towards the good?
JB: That feels like the million-dollar question I wish I had the answer to! It’s certainly one of the biggest questions I was trying to write into in this book. The truth is that when I think of the future, I have a lot of fear. And when I am afraid, I try to remember something my very wise dog trainer once told me: Don’t be afraid, be curious. So, I think the best answer I have is that we move toward the good by keeping ourselves open. By taking the invitations that come and rising to meet them as best we can. The poem tends to be a place where I go to figure out who I want to be in the world. Which is someone who listens, who is willing to enter into messiness or discomfort, who sees and navigates the world in a way that is connected. I strive to be my bravest self on the page and then hope to live up to that off the page. Recently I have been trying to give myself more grace when I fail to do so. And to remember, even in the thick of it, to play.
Death Fluorescence is available to pre-order now
Julia Bouwsma is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate. In 2024 she received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the acclaimed author of Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017) and serves as Director for Webster Library in Kingsfield, Maine.
Annabel Phoel is a junior studying English and Government/International Relations between William & Mary and the University of St Andrews, where she currently resides. She is a staff writer on St Andrews’ Not Applicable Magazine and helps on their editorial board. When not writing or studying, Annabel is rowing on various lochs in Scotland. You can check out some of her writing at https://xoxoirisalder.substack.com/.
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