Upon the release of her craft chap essay, An Interview with Fear, author Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Rachel Bulman on political memory, the difference between monuments and memorials, the sensitive nature of writing about others’ grief, and what it means to write in community with those you love.
Rachel Bulman: How did you decide the structure of the text and the balance of chronology?
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo: I was on residency at Jentel in Wyoming when I wrote this essay. Being in residency gave me many unobstructed hours to read and think, which allowed me space to excavate my memories differently and to expand beyond one experience in one place and one time. For example, I was reading Melissa Febos’ Body Work. In her essay, “A Big Shitty Party,” she writes, “When I think of narrative truth—the truth that lies beyond the verifiable facts of an event—I picture a prism, with as many facets as there are people affected. When a writer chooses to publish their version, the facet becomes the one visible beyond the scope of people involved… It is hideously unfair.” (95) While I was writing about a residency at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania and the racism and war glorification I experienced there, Febos’ words encouraged me to think beyond Gettysburg to a story about a friend’s grief and Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen. It also allowed me to ask my friend for permission to write about her, which I’d never done before.
RB: The reflections in this piece are not solely from time spent on your residency, so how do they reflect a wider experience of your life as a whole?
XJB: While composing this essay, what came to the surface was the connection of public places for memory and monument. Being a poet in residence at Gettysburg was a strange experience. It’s a battleground and cemetery. Over 50,000 people died over a three-day battle. I was living on hallowed ground, but it’s also a museum. While death changes and transforms all things, Gettysburg is insistent on not changing. That’s kind of what we’ve been facing as a nation. There are people desperate for change. It’s a matter of life and death, but the powers that be want to keep the status quo. While I was in Gettysburg, I felt a lot of fear and confusion. Being able to compare it to another public place of death and memorial helped me better understand why I was there in the first place. In the end, I’ve learned that I grow and change from the experience of knowing the women in my life, from honoring my ancestors, and from honoring the ancestors of my sisters. I’m grateful for the experience gifting me this new understanding of myself and the world.
RB: At what point in the writing process did you reach your conclusion on the purpose of facing fear; not just to understand but to overcome?
XJB: Writing is about process for me. I don’t know where a piece will go when I start it. I have an idea. I have something I want to write about—a lesson, an experience, a memory—but the why presents itself through the writing. I would have never made the connection between death and transformation, or the difference between monuments and memorials, if it weren’t for being in residency at Jentel and having all that time to read and think, and to try something new. It’s what I love about residencies. They let you be brave.
RB: Of the myriad themes and takeaways from this book, why did you decide to conclude on the transformational power of love?
XJB: It’s what I write about. It’s who I am, or who I want to be, at my core. I recently had a near-death experience (sounds dramatic, but true), and rereading this essay made me realize that my work, what I do, prepared me to meet this newest scary moment with some tools, as small as they were. I just hope I can help other people know that love is always there if they need it. There are so many scary things happening in our world, but what matters, I think, at least today, is how we meet the moment and stay open to what’s possible through care, comfort, and love.
RB: As is clear in the opening, you don’t shy away from political commentary in the text. Was there anything you chose to omit from the book, or anything you included but had reservations about? Why?
XJB: I’ve always been outspoken. I don’t know. I was a teen in the ‘90s, and everything I read and watched told me to be outspoken. It’s only recently that I’ve started to think more about how I speak about current events, especially in interviews like this, because interviews are perceived differently, and you don’t always know what parts will be used. But when it comes to my art, when it comes to crafting and composing, I will always be outspoken and say what I want to say in the most beautiful way I can.
RB: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is described as a reason you applied for the residency, but in what ways, if at all, did its contents and message influence this book, or you, as you were writing?
XJB: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was all I knew about Gettysburg when I first went. It’s a marker of my naiveté in the situation. Again, I grew up idolizing Lincoln, King, X. I loved John Lennon. I watched A Different World and The Wonder Years. Newsies was one of my favorite movies. I was either going to be a hippie or a union organizer. My senior year of high school, I was reading books about the Chicano Movement. My freshman year of college at San Francisco State, I attended my first police brutality rallies. I grew up thinking we all wanted a just world, but seeing what’s happened to our country in the last 10 years has been a great shock to my sixteen-year-old self. The Gettysburg Address is a symbol of that tragedy.
RB: You say “Monuments are men’s work. Memorializing, women’s.” Can you speak further to this end, and the gendered divide you observed during your residency?
XJB: Of course, this is a generalization, but it seems to me that patriarchies only care about keeping power, and often through intimidation. Monuments are not for remembering good works. Monuments are for keeping the populace in line. They are stone examples of “Big Brother,” if you will. On the other end of the spectrum, matriarchies are about mutual aid and community care. Memorials are about honoring those who came before us that made today (and tomorrow) possible. They’re about creating space for care.
RB: In terms of pushing back against fear with comfort and community, could you talk more about how you felt equipped to face the ghosts, so to speak, at the Klingel House?
XJB: For one, I don’t do anything alone. Any story or poem I write, any publication, any award or opportunity, is only made possible by the support I receive from my family and my community. I write in community. I submit in community. Gettysburg was the same way. I was very scared, but thankfully, there were people in my life willing to hold that fear with me. A friend drove me to Gettysburg and stayed the night. Two other friends travelled from New York City on separate weekends. I like to think of myself as an independent person. I like to wander away from the crowd and see what happens when I turn the corner away from everyone, but I can only do that because I know my people are watching me go. I’m never too far out of reach.
RB: The text engages head-on with fear, but what were some of the fears you faced while writing it?
XJB: The biggest fear I had was how to write about other people and the opportunity as a whole. The residency was an award and a gift, so it’s a tricky situation. You don’t want to bite the hand, and all. But I also have to honor my truth, so how do I do that in the most respectful way? And then there are the other people in the story. Usually, when I write, I go tunnel vision into my own perspective. It’s mine after all—don’t I own it? But this time I wanted to practice another tactic. It’s scary to try something new. It was difficult to ask my friend for permission to write about something extremely painful that happened to her. Thankfully, she supports my writing and was grateful for her and her son to be included.
RB: Could you speak to the inclusion of the “Interview with Fear” workbook at the end of the text, and how a reader should approach the tasks?
XJB: Typically, these craft chap series include prompts. I thought it would be fun to include the activities I use in class, and to make it more like a workbook. I encourage writers to try them, and I encourage teachers to think about how to incorporate them in their classes. Writing is scary! One thing I hope this craft chapbook shows is that there are ways of making the act of writing a little more comforting and fun.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and a Chicana poet, educator, and community organizer. She is the author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge. Her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured in Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and in the anthology, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, highlighting her growing national recognition. Inspired by her Chicana identity and her experiences as an activist, Bermejo’s work seeks to cultivate love, resilience, and comfort in chaotic times while amplifying marginalized voices.
Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specialising in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work, from non-fiction to poetry, script and prose, has appeared in Wolf Grove Media’s The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her eclectic portfolio on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.
With the upcoming release of their debut poetry collection, Burns, SG Huerta spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Emma Goss about their poetic choices, pushing the limits of both English and Spanish in their poems, and the significance of memory, humor, and pain, in addition to what decolonialism means to them as a queer, nonbinary writer.
Emma Goss: How is repetition used as a rhetoric for pain in your collection?
SG Huerta: My use of repetition can represent rumination or perhaps wishful thinking, like in the poem “Hurtless.” In this poem, the ending devolves into messy repetitions of the phrase “some day this will hurt less.” Repetition is also familiar, and many of the poems talk about the repetition of toxic cycles. The cover of Burns also repeats the title, which I love. I think it represents these cycles as well.
EG: How does Spanish’s integration with English, such as in “latinxpoética” or “Mi tía texts me,” reflect your cultural narrative or experience with gender?
SGH: I have a complicated relationship with both languages, which the poem “latinxpoética” delves into. Early on in my writing life, I received a lot of pushback for including any Spanish in my poetry. I grew up bilingual so of course I was deeply impacted by that attempt at cultural erasure. Currently in my poetry, I try push the bounds of English and Spanish to make more room for queer multilingual and decolonial ways of being.
EG: Humor is employed very tenderly in many of the poems in Burns; can you speak to why humor was important to include in this collection?
SGH: Humor is a very important cultural value to me! I write about some difficult things I have been through, and I fully believe that sometimes you just have to laugh so you don’t cry. Sometimes tragedy can also lead to the comically absurd.
EG: Many of these poems utilize footnotes to contextualize and interrogate the beliefs society holds about gender and trans identities; how does including footnotes extend or inflate the pathos of these poems?
SGH: Footnotes are always fun to play around with. I think it adds another layer to the poem and complicates the reading experience. In “trans poetica” specifically, the footnotes show the hidden undercurrent of what’s happening to the speaker within the poem. The speaker can feel one way about their gender, but often other people have something to say. The footnotes are a way to contend with these different voices.
EG: Colonization is one of the most potent motifs in Burns. Can you speak to the myriad ways this motif strengthens many of your poems such as “My Phone Alerts Me About Queen Elizabeth IIʼs Platinum Jubilee” and “arte poética”?
SGH: Decolonialism is a lifelong ever-present commitment. These ideas appear in so many of my poems because I’m always considering its impact on our society broadly and my culture specifically. I can’t talk about Latinx heritage without talking about colonialism.
EG:Burns does not abide by a singular poetic form. How does playing with parentheses and experimenting with form allow certain poems, including “necropoetica,” “anthropoetica,” “ignorant american,” and “Some Issues,” to complicate issues of gender?
SGH: As a nonbinary person and poet, I definitely approach gender and poetic form the same way. I work with whatever fits the occasion, which usually involves queering language in some way. I’m a firm believer in trying different forms and presentations until you find what’s right, and what’s right can always change.
EG: Many of the most emotional and vulnerable poems in this collection delve into memories of your father and childhood. Can you speak to memories’ role in the collection?
SGH: Memory is my book’s best friend. A lot of these poems felt urgent to write and record; there are many memories that only I hold since my father has passed. However, these memories get complicated, because I don’t have anyone to corroborate them. I’m able to take poetic liberty and think of what works best in the world of the poem. The line between poetry and memory is there, but it is faint at times.
SG Huerta, a Xicanx writer, is the poetry editor of Abode Press, a Roots.Wounds.Words. fellow, and a Tin House alum. The author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press, 2025), their work has appeared in Honey Literary and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com.
Emma Goss (she/her/hers) is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.
summonings by Raena Shirali is a poetry collection with prismatic points of view, all screaming for society’s scapegoats to be seen as human again, for their blood—shed in the name of fear—to be seen at all. One of the poems, “at first, trying to reach those accused” describes the author researching the stories of the accused witches and trying to embody them, so much so that she swallows matchsticks, pages, wax, desire, and inevitably herself. The last lines are “i mouthed a name i’d never heard & felt her / like my own ghost. there was no magic: it was not profound.” This interview is a conversation on craft, but really it is an extension of this searing poem. It is about the horror Shirali swallowed in order to utter summonings.
Marah Hoffman: You say in the foreword that your book must be “grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.” Readers can see this grounding in phrases like, “i’m too young / to be telling your story, & privileged.” Can you describe your understanding of ethos in telling these stories and explain how you sought to suffuse this ethos into your speakers?
Raena Shirali: Yeah, absolutely. Such a good question to start off on, and thank you so much for asking it. Ethos is a good word to start thinking about this. I think of it as credibility outside of only writing what you intimately know. That was a nice framework to go into these questions with. I think of the “write what you know” adage to be really limiting, and that is not how I approached the subject matter of this book. So, I modified it. I think ethos is not writing only what you know but speaking truthfully about what you can and cannot know. Letting those gaps in your ability to understand a phenomenon as grave and dire and horrific as this one exist—maybe those gaps are where the ethos comes in.
MH: I love your understanding of the word and what it implies. If we only wrote what we knew, the stories of those without the ability to share them would be lost. That’s why docu-poetry is so important.
RS: It’s so true. Every time I talk to someone about this, they ask, “How does fiction writing play in here?” I don’t think the artistic imagination should stop with only what you experience yourself. Whole genres would get demolished by a narrow understanding of ethos.
MH: You are so honest about what you are seeking to accomplish with your collection. You make it clear all the points of view you are using, and that the book doesn’t necessarily contain answers to the tragedies. Just summonings. Hence the title.
RS: Thank you for saying that. I’m glad it’s working. Always good to hear.
MH: Of course. My second question is about one of my favorite poems, “ghazal against [declining to name the subject].” In this poem, the title, punctuation, and use of brackets subvert the expectations associated with formal verse. The piece is emblematic of the entire collection’s refusal to express in shackles. There is intentionality in the way you utilize formal elements. Would you care to speak about your process for integrating (and extracting) formal elements?
RS: I love the phrasing in this question of “refusing to express in shackles.” One of the beautiful things about being interviewed is that people will say to you the things you have been trying so hard to express but haven’t found the clearest language for. This was one of those moments.
Your question speaks to me for a couple of reasons. It taps into the tension at the heart of writing the book—making these decisions around what formal components are and are not included and subverted. I decided I can’t do this without being extremely honest, extremely forthcoming. This is a huge preoccupation in the writing.
There are a few things to point out in your question. One is the use of brackets. Throughout the collection, brackets refer to research being included from anthropological sources. In this poem, it refers to a part of a quote from Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others. Here, by virtue of brackets being a formal component, it’s explicitly commenting on the theory of looking at violence that is not occurring to you. For me, brackets were an interesting way of showing my work but not to get credit for showing my work, more like showing my work as a way to bring the reader into the web of research I was living in. That formal choice came pretty late actually. I wasn’t sure I was going to use brackets or include this more theoretical language. But it became necessary. There was too much in my head that was not clear in a given poem.
Another important thing to point out is capitalization. Only the names of women who’ve been accused of being witches are capitalized here. That was a very intentional decision to make it clear that they are given more respect. They are real, brave, absolutely vulnerable voices. Everything that came from me felt like it needed to be lowercase.
There’s that play between formal cohesion and experiment throughout the book. The last thing that I’ll say about the ghazal is that it’s one of only a few poems in traditional form included in this text, and that’s because I tend to focus on form more through rhyme and music and sound, rather than through formal constraint. That goes back to ethos. The form itself imposes a constraint, but it only holds briefly. This poem is also a rare example where the subject, women who have been accused and tortured, is named. So the constraint exists, fleetingly, and it, too, is a failure that must necessarily be followed by its dissolution.
MH: Thank you for answering so many parts of that question. It’s clear that your thinking was expansive. Even the capitalizing of letters, it all speaks to the way you are amplifying these women.
RS: A lot of that is where the power of revision comes in. I think that’s so important to say in interviews. This is a very intimidating book. It’s intimidating for me to look at, and it was intimidating for me to revise. There was so much intentionality. Everything has some philosophical meaning behind it. Hopefully, that comes across. But I just want to reiterate that this comes from relentless revision.
MH: I can attest that it does come across. My next question also highlights your intentionality.
Point of view is an element that contributes to the power of the text. Considering the varying POVs that summonings adopts, I kept having one word come to mind—alchemic. The frequent yet fluctuating use of the first person plural strikes the root of the collection, which is that we must see ourselves as “we.” We must believe “Any woman’s death diminishes me,” the Adrienne Rich quote that set the scene for the collection. One of my favorite instances of this POV is, “they’ll think by us i mean daayans but you know i mean us : women : mistaken for all kinds of foliage. grasping root. wilting petals. Gentle weed.” Can you explain your goals/motives in using POV?
RS: I think it’s important to say that the first poems I wrote for this collection were personal poems, from the perspectives of daayans, the witch hunter and village priest, the villagers, and the mountains. That came from a prompt that I gave myself to write a personal poem from every part of the landscape that I was encountering in the research. I asked myself, “What does this act of violence look like from in the distance, from above?” I was doing a lot of kaleidoscopic thinking: painting a scene, trying to tell all sides of the story. In terms of why women are hunted, it’s not just misogyny. There are these long-standing inequities that people are desperate to justify. I didn’t want to write a book that was just surface-level. The first way that I thought I would go deeper was point of view.
Once I started doing that, it became clear to me that it’s impossible to access every single part of this landscape. That is where the inevitable failure entered into the project more broadly. Then POVs closer to my own came in as well as poems that are highly lyrical. Thinking about the different speakers isn’t the only method for coming to understand what I’m talking about, and it’s not all I’m talking about. I’m not just discussing India. The poems are cross-cultural.
The shifting POVs felt like the best way for me to encapsulate for a reader what it felt like to write the book, to dip in and out of research. You know how it is. You read something horrible, and then you carry it with you for the rest of your day. It affects the way you interpret the imagery around you, and then of course it’s there with you when you sit down to write.
You also had a great observation about the collective. There is an arc in the book intentionally toward using collective pronouns more, toward the spirit of that quote from Adrienne Rich. The last line of the last poem is that “no one follows us home.” It’s a prayer for all women or anyone who identifies as a woman or anyone who doesn’t feel safe in public, frankly. It’s for us and by us collectively.
MH: As a reader, I noticed the arc of the collective really shifting my thinking. I think it disrupts the reader’s ability to compartmentalize. As you said, the horror sits with you. For the daayans, the pain is constant. The pain we get from reading is only temporary, so the least we can do is feel it.
RS: I completely agree.
MH: My next question gets at the specific symbolism you use to highlight the themes of the text. There are many recurring symbols throughout the collection; my favorite among them is blood. A woman’s blood, specifically menstrual blood, is often a source of shame. Yet you embed strength and identity within it. Can you speak to your choice to use blood as a dominant symbol?
RS: The first thing with blood has to be menstruation. There’s a lot of fear of women’s sexuality and menstruation within the mythologies that inform the cultures where this takes place. There are ideologies I read about that quite explicitly say, “A woman is considered impure if she is menstruating near an image of the gods.” Women are not supposed to go near, into, or around temples on their period. There’s the notion that a woman who is naked and bleeding in public is suspicious and could be a witch. There are those specific and necessitated mentions of the word blood because it is part of the research. But also, I think blood is really important because it is part of what renders the subject of this book more real. I think about Salem first when I’m thinking about a Western audience for this book, which is very different than thinking about an Indian audience. I’m initially considering what kinds of tropes and rumors we have culturally about witches and how often is the visceral reality that someone’s skin is being punctured part of that. There are common myths that will feel familiar to readers. There’s a line that says, “If we float, if we float” which literally refers to a tradition, both in Indian and Western witch hunting, of filling a woman’s pockets with stones and putting her in a body of water and if she sinks, she’s not a witch, but she’s dead; and if she floats, she’s a witch, so you kill her. Those mythologies cover up the reality of the person underneath them. They’re being drowned. There’s a submersion that becomes almost figurative in lore, and not a lot of addressing the true horror. A lot of Indian women who are tortured for this are beheaded. There is a bloodletting and a lynching and a very real violence inflicted on these people. Including blood so often was probably me being a bit heavy-handed, but with a set of realism-fueled intentions.
MH: The subject matter demands there be bloodshed on the pages.
RS: I think so too. There are stories in the back matter of the book. Like the story of a 63-year-old woman who was dragged from her home and tortured and beheaded. These stories do not exist within a Western author’s mythic imagination, and that felt like something to take advantage of. They do exist within some Indian writer’s and reader’s imaginations, and that too felt like something to take advantage of. I wanted to remind people that it’s not some woman whose feet are facing backward, whose braid is wrapped around her waist, who ate husband’s heart. It was an old, innocent woman who was defenseless and was murdered. A big part of me pushing against the idea of witchiness being cool was me using the word blood so often.
MH: Your language definitely encourages readers to see the subjects as women, not witches.
RS: Our position as women is to live in a state of constant shame, in India and in America. That is a reality in both places. There is a defiance in the naming of it as opposed to owning it or claiming blood is sexy—some sort of positive affirmation version of it. There is power even in acknowledging blood is part of our reality, and we exist in a state of constant shame. That’s part of why we are not safe.
MH: Yes, blood needed to have a presence in the collection. This conversation actually leads us into my next question about how gender exists within the text. Because your collection is concerned with the very real issue of witch-hunting, gender is an important topic. One standout quote about gender is, “here, there is no archetype ungendered.” How did you grapple with notions of gender while composing the collection?
RS: The context within which the word “woman” is being wielded points to a series of Indian and American archetypes, myths, rumors, hierarchies, all of which result in women being victimized. And I want it to be clear that my intention in using the word “woman” is absolutely not to exclude anyone—whether that’s folks who identify with the word, or folks who don’t. In the later poems of the book—when my point of view enters more explicitly and so, too, does the Empire as a setting—I’m referring to anyone who does not feel safe in public spaces. I mean it to be an encompassing word.
Language is not perfect. I think that is one of the tropes of the book. We are so limited in our abilities to understand the highly complex phenomena that dictate the way we move through space and live our lives and write and read and research and have empathy or resist empathy. The word woman is just one word. I’ve encouraged listeners on tour to replace this with a word that they feel most seen by. In some poems, the word woman is very important, and in some poems the word woman is there for cohesion. Who is safe and who is not safe is different in each of these contexts. It’s part of steeping the reader in the discomfort of the research. It’s not pleasant to read how women are seen as less than, to track an evolution of their knowledge being suspicious rather than connected to the environment. The word woman is the word in the research, and so it’s the word here.
MH: I love listening to you discuss language because as I said earlier, intentionality was a word that kept coming to mind while reading. The voices in the poems make the diverse forms of oppression clear. I think that is unifying. Everyone will be alarmed by the suffering. You can’t read the book and not see that it is bringing everyone to the same understanding of pain.
RS: I think that the word alarm is really important. I thought the book had to be as alarming to a reader as it was for me to be a reader of the research. That was why I decided to include research itself. I thought, “Oh, I have to replicate this.” Research needs to be part of it, or the stories would only be artifice and nothing would point to the way we talk about these phenomena culturally. These are stories that we trade in, so the language that we use to even trade in them is really important to replicate and eventually interrogate. But first I had to replicate it.
It is important to note too that this isn’t isolated to India in modern day, in our moment. There are countries in Africa that still have a practice of witch hunting. In some cultures, they are more suspicious of children than women. It’s not always the same. Each place creates its own culture of suspicion, fear, and accusation. It is a way to make peace with living. There is a collective need for a scapegoat, something to explain why life is so awful. How that looks different in different cultures is such a fascinating apparatus to engage with. This book touches on so little of that. It’s a far more widespread, current phenomena than this book could ever hope to address.
MH: There are myriad searing images of female suffering throughout summonings. I personally felt haunted by these images as a reader. What was your emotional journey with this book?
RS: Searing is a good word. I felt seared. I feel seared, perpetually. I think that researching it was a really complicated emotional rollercoaster to go on daily, to pull myself out of whatever otherwise pleasant day I was having and sit with a 400-page book on the social hierarchies in tea plantations in West Bengal. Outside of the research being mentally taxing, it was emotionally searing.
The trick for me is that I write best when I am so enraged or disgusted with an inequality that I cannot possibly move on. That is the most surefire way to get a poem to come out of me. That was true in my first book too. In this book, my struggle was staying focused when I wanted so badly to look away. To get asked, “What’s for dinner?” in the middle of reading and then have to come back to a passage about a woman being killed as part of a land dispute was difficult. The research process, as a result, felt incredibly active. Every word felt like a decision, a decision to continue. Putting the books down felt like how dare I, because I can walk away from this and they can’t. I resisted the need for a break because of exactly what we’ve been talking about, because it feels wrong to complain that reading about a phenomenon is grueling when the phenomenon itself is someone on Earth being tortured.
In many ways, it being grueling is what kept my compass pointing North in terms of ethos, because the ethos was there in the research the entire time. That made certain poems have to exist, like “lucky inhabitant.” The more I researched, the more I realized the experience of the research is part of what the book is trying to capture for readers. I want readers to feel forever altered by what they learned in the text, because it has forever altered me.
Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and her second, summonings (Black Lawrence Press, 2022), won the 2021 Hudson Prize. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. Formerly a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine, Shirali now serves as Faculty Advisor for Folio—a literary magazine dedicated to publishing works by undergraduate students at the national level. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University and is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University. The Indian American poet was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Philadelphia.
Marah Hoffman is a 2022 graduate with a bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Lebanon Valley College. In college, she served as co-poetry editor of Green Blotter Literary Magazine and Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society president. From the LVC English department, she won The Green Blotter Writer Award. She has been featured in journals including Green Blotter, LURe Journal, Oakland Arts Review, Beyond Thought, and Asterism. Now, she works for the Sundress Academy for the Arts, where she enjoys immersing herself in a new and radiant literary community. Marah loves creative nonfiction, intertextuality, whimsicality, cats, lattes, distance running, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her favorite word changes nearly every week.
The title of Teow Lim Goh’s Faraway Places(Diode Editions, 2021) is at once truthful and misleading—a collection concerning intimate natural places and the profound emotional memories that accompany them, it honestly, heartbreakingly reflects on how our man-made creations have distanced us from said places and ourselves. Goh’s deliberate, attentive poetry asks us to reckon with our current notions of the natural world as a thing to control, while also relating these notions to womanhood and more broadly to love itself. In Faraway Places, the world is imbued with an aching sense of loss, but not one that is irreparable, as Goh simply and beautifully shows us how to cherish the world with wonder again.
The collection almost immediately begins with the radical reimagination of the natural world that we find time and time again in Goh’s work. In “Black Orchid,” for instance, she states that “We look at flowers as a way to know / where we are.” Flowers, which we might perceive as purely aesthetic additions to land, are here imbued with deeper meaning: they exist to provide intimate insight into the landscape itself. Everything in nature has a significant message for us, Goh implies, if we take the time to look, to pay attention. Another natural space the collection frequently meditates on—the sea—is also repeatedly reimagined, beginning with the poem “Borders,” which declares, “The sea is the edge of land / and the beginning of another world.” Rather than allowing the sea to be a definitive end to explorable territory, Goh eagerly enters it: “the water will hold me— / I learn to swim.” Here, she reminds us that no border is impermeable, that even the most intimidating of natural spaces can welcome us as long as we learn its ways.
But while Faraway Places loves to show us the rich meaning natural spaces are saturated with and their wild openness to those who truly seek to understand them, it also depicts the painful reality of man-made spaces—gardens, houses, fences—and their accompanying sense of profound loss. These spaces all have one thing in common: they are created to divide, to control, to tame the natural world. Goh shows us that it is this human compulsion to force partitions where they would not naturally occur that utterly obscures our understanding of nature itself. “Stars” is where she first mourns the loss of shared memory and experience, plaintively reflecting that “Those / who know the lore can use [stars] / to find their way / in the world. But I cannot seem / to remember.” This absence, this want, is more explicitly linked to man-made space in “Split,” where she tells us that in her memory, “I can see the house I lived in, the schools / I went to, the gardens I walked in the evenings. / What I don’t remember is how it all felt, / the textures of the sea and sky.” Artificial spaces—the house, the school, the gardens—are able to be visually remembered at the surface level, but Goh emphasizes their destruction of the deeper emotional connection with sea and sky.
However, Goh is not without hope, acknowledging the ways in which nature is not a passive victim of man-made creation but a quietly resistant force. Her poem “Island” describes the garden of the speaker’s childhood as “overgrown,” subtly implying the ways nature continues to evolve despite the limits we place around it, and it concludes with the lines “The coconut / fell and bobbed in the waves, too dry / and hard to eat, the shell broken / only by a knife,” which give even the coconut a semblance of agency, refusing to allow itself to be harvested and broken as humans perhaps intended to do with it. In “Birdsong,” too, Goh demonstrates the wordless resistance of nature with the opening lines “At the tropical aviary, I wanted to listen / to the birds, look / at their splendid feathers. / I find instead silence. Macaws / hang their heads.” The power of the birds is their very silence, denying the human onlookers their voice, refusing to serve as captive entertainment. Towards the end of Faraway Places, we see Goh bring to light a parallel we might have subconsciously picked up on: the way the experience of nature, captured and controlled, uncannily resembles the experience of being a woman. “Wings” explicitly makes this comparison, opening with “Maybe she is a dancer, or a bird—,” and, similar to “Birdsong,” Goh suggests that the main form of female power is the power to withhold, stating that “She never reveals her silhouette.”
More broadly, the collection bears a universal message about love: that to love is to release the compulsion to control. “January,” one of the collection’s concluding poems, ends with the speaker’s reflection that perhaps “bearing / witness is the deepest form of love.” Goh shows us the ways we lose our intimacy with nature through our addiction to dominion and the ways nature silently but forcefully pushes back, but she also illuminates a solution through which we can live in harmony: by allowing nature to do what it wants. Through Goh’s words, then, we see the world as a friend, a lover—constantly evolving, calling us to reimagine it with wonder, and most importantly, to let it be.
Kaylee Jeong is a Korean American writer, currently studying English at Columbia University. She edits for Quarto, Columbia’s official undergraduate literary magazine, and serves as a poetry reader for the Columbia Journal’s Incarcerated Writers Initiative. A 2019 Sundress Best of the Net finalist in poetry, her work has been featured in diode, BOAAT, and Hyphen, among others.
