Photo courtesy of Esther Lin
NER managing editor Leslie Sainz talks with poet Esther Lin about poems as private conversations, her forthcoming debut Cold Thief Place, undocupoetics, and her two poems from issue 44.3.
Leslie Sainz: You have two piercing poems in the most recent issue of New England Review (44.3). Your poem “French Sentence” has an epigraph that reads: “for Marcelo and Janine,” and on Instagram you shared that your other poem from the issue, “Early Gothic,” was written for your father. Could you talk about your relationship to a poetics of address, or, perhaps more accurately, a poetics of dedication?
Esther Lin: Being undocumented is a challenge to write about. What is the image of a bureaucratic status? Everything about it—from passport stamps to which letters and numbers a person appends to their name—is abstract. Most Americans do not know that if you are undocumented and leave the U.S., you are not permitted to return for a minimum of ten years. This policy is called the 10-year Unlawful Presence Ground of Inadmissibility.
What a turbid few sentences! “French Sentence” would not have its energy if I explained all this. I knew my readers would be my people—the undocumented, who would understand immediately. And I wrote thinking about Marcelo and Janine, my fellow Undocupoets organizers, whom I confide so many undocumented thoughts, and who have been poetic pathfinders for me. So, like many poems, this poem was part of an ongoing private conversation. Poets who showed me—yes, you may write about this subject matter!
LS: There’s a revelatory quality to “French Sentence,” which is mediated by your use of exclamation marks in lines like: “the Virgin a lover, finally!” and “For I have left America. / I have left America!”, with the latter example intensified by your use of repetition. In thinking about these flourishes and their impact, I immediately thought of the traditional workshop model—which might have prompted you to remove the exclamation marks—and then of Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World. Do the intuitive textures of your poetic voice ever feel at odds with the historical and cultural aspects of “craft”?
EL: It’s fascinating to me that the workshop aesthetic wouldn’t have yet caught up with the exclamations of Twitter or meme culture. Surely our skills in decoding and reading sentences in the exclamatory mood have only increased in sophistication. Now that I’ve mentioned Twitter, I feel I should apologize . . .
In “French Sentence,” I press those exclamation points to work twofold: Signal to the more typical American reader that, indeed, she is encountering insider information; and to reflect the scale of excitement we, the undocumented Americans, feel when leaving the U.S. for the first time. The exclamation points are not hyperbolic. Leaving is genuinely a rite of passage. All at once dazzling, galling, furious, despairing. If the reader doesn’t understand, that’s OK too.
For me there’s a loss of agency in the exclamation point. The emoji would be of a writer throwing up her hands—I give up. I submit to this cascade of emotion. Whereas the period suggests action is possible. Certainly it must; no laws were ever written with exclamation points and without periods.
LS: It was announced earlier this year that your debut poetry collection, Cold Thief Place, won the 2023 Alice James Award and will be published by Alice James Books in 2025. Congratulations! I can’t wait to read it. Do “French Sentence” and “Early Gothic” appear in the collection? How are they thematically or aesthetically similar or different to the poems that make up Cold Thief Place?
EL: Thank you! “French Sentence” and “Early Gothic” do not appear in Cold Thief Place. For me, the poems stand as after my first significant trip outside the U.S., and the book stands as the before. Cold Thief Place is more concerned with what led my parents to hop from China to Brazil to the U.S., in two more emigrations than most people make. The book is my way of trying to understand why and how they deliberately chose such audacious journeys, and why they were so much more at ease at being undocumented than me. My parents had already experienced the kind of unrest the United States is experiencing today but to the extreme of civil war and the toppling of government.
Aesthetically I’d say I’ve grown terser in my more recent poems. “French Sentence” is a better example of that, of course. In Cold Thief Place and “Early Gothic,” I indulge much more in telling the story. Which is one of the great draws of poetry—it’s a form that is so fabulously suited to telling a story with unexpected or bizarre turns.
LS: Reading and rereading “Early Gothic,” I was struck by the vivid juxtaposition of lush, classically French imagery (palaces and cathedrals, “a thousand bells,” a Madame Bovary allusion) against the speaker’s experience of lack as an isolated “green traveler” who is reckoning with the many reverberations of diaspora. The emotional core of this poem is hefty enough to support humor and irony, grief, and awe, with unfussy sentences like “They were / enough,” and “I felt alone” cutting through the pitfalls of potential sentimentality. Could you talk about the process of writing and revising “Early Gothic”? Generally speaking, do you tend to revise towards clarity or complication?
EL: If I’m not misunderstanding what you mean, probably complication. I write my first drafts blindly, usually with little idea of what kind of creature the poem wishes to be. I visited Rouen because I love Flaubert and felt as green as Emma. My life as an undocumented non-traveler feels akin to her desperate, incompetent flailings for sophistication. So, Rouen was already an emotionally charged place for me. The Cathedral intensified that emotion. I tried to trace the reasons why looking at saints made me the daughter, the reader, and the writer so effusive. I traced blindly, and there it is—the utter strangeness of claiming a homeland that is not my ancestors’, that Western culture is my homeland because I love it, warts and all.
Perhaps following the trail of associations leads me astray. I’m not sure. I didn’t expect to go from Emma to the saints to my great-grandfather. Certainly a poet can give her reader whiplash. But if I worked hard on being honest with my feelings and the imagination they live in, hopefully I haven’t.
LS: I want to thank you for all the vital work you do as a co-organizer for Undocupoets, an organization founded to “protest the immigration status-based, discriminatory practices of many poetry book contests.” Recently, Undocupoets successfully campaigned for the Pulitzer Prize to accept submissions by noncitizens in the categories of Fiction, Biography, Memoir, Poetry, and General Nonfiction. This is a major win worth celebrating, and I’d like to give you the space to discuss other corrective projects that Undocupoets is advocating for, in the hopes that our readers can help support your mission.
EL: Thank you kindly! With Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Jose Antonio Vargas, and the incredible staff at Define American, the Undocupoets are moving toward changing the citizenship requirements of other major awards. I should say that my brilliant colleagues, Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, are spearheading the cause on the behalf of the Undocupoets.
We are in the depths of editing an anthology of poetry by undocumented, formerly undocumented, and undocumented-adjacent poets. It is titled Undocupoetics: An Introduction and includes a mix of short manifestos and statements by the poets on how their art and their lived experiences interact. Marcelo, Janine, and I are incredibly excited about this anthology—as it argues that we undocumented have our own poetic, what it is, and how it may shift in the future. The anthology will be published by HarperCollins/Harper Perennial in fall 2024.
Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023). The daughter of Cuban exiles, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. Originally from Miami, she lives in Vermont and works as the managing editor of New England Review.
Esther Lin is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, and of the chapbook The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2018). Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2022 and 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which raises consciousness about the structural barriers facing undocumented poets.