New England Review

Introducing NER 43.4

Winter 2022

Cover art by J. P. Terlizzi

A Covid diary by Zoe Valery. Leath Tonino’s defense of the American Outback. A short play by British author Charlotte Turnbull. Multi-page excerpts from poem sequences by Sandra Simonds and Diana Khoi Nguyen. New shorter poems by Kim Addonizio, Aumaine Rose Smith, and Josh Tvrdy. Explorations into the archives by Michelle Peñaloza and Nicky Beer. First English translations of poems by Meret Oppenheim and Daniela Catrileo. New short stories by Yume Kitasei, Megan Staffel, and J. E. Suárez . . . Find these and more in NER 43.4—now shipping from the printer. Catch a preview here on our website and order a copy of the winter issue today.

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Behind the Byline

TR Brady

Staff reader Nico Amador talks with poet TR Brady about activating desire, constraint, queerness as hopefulness, and their “T Daydream” series from NER 43.3.

Nico Amador: Both poems you have out in the most recent issue of NER are titled “T Daydream.” It’s not lost on me that there’s a real significance to the wakeful dreaming happening in these pieces and the role that plays in the self-determination of the speaker . . . but before we go there, I wanted to ask how daydreaming factors into your writing process? Is distraction or the state of being distracted something you value as a poet?

TR Brady: Daydreaming, to me, is where desire lives. In writing both of these “T Daydream” poems, I was saying I’m going to activate my desires. However much I’m writing about lack, I’m writing just as much about want. I’ve written a lot about desire without naming the thing. For a while, especially when I was in grad school, daydreaming was a way to go pick up a feeling and carry it around for a while and write what I was feeling without really writing about it. So many of my daydreams seem like a diversion and sometimes we need that. Sometimes it’s so pleasurable to have that sort of hairpin turn in your imagination, when you’re desiring something or someone, and an image forces you to turn and encounter everything you’ve just seen from a different vantage. I used to utilize daydreaming as a way to have what I never thought I’d have, and recently I feel that I’ve been able to use it more to get lost and take pleasure in that.

NA: Could you also say more about how the titles of these poems correspond to the form they take?

TRB: I’m in a place with my writing right now where I don’t stray with the form so much. A lot of these poems are coming out as charged little squares on the page. These poems are an exercise in appreciating constraint and trying to figure out how much of my hand I want to show. When I sit down to write a poem it’s often because I have a phrase I can’t get out of my head, so I start with writing down whatever that is, which often ends up being the title. I had been on T for about five months when I wrote these. “T Daydream . . . At the house party” is about a house party I went to a few years prior. I don’t remember much else about the party other than what’s in the poem, which is probably why it has more of a narrative bend to it and appears as a sort of prose poem. “T Daydream . . . I was so lonely” is much more about what I was experiencing when I wrote it. I’ve realized that the narrower my poems get on the page, the more I’m trying to figure something out—in that way “T Daydream . . . I was so lonely” is more like a list of notes.

NA: In one poem you write, “Outside, I stood beyond the square of light coming from inside the house,” and that struck me as a possible artist statement or metaphor for your poetics, at least from what I can observe in this series. Is that fair?

TRB: I think that is fair. I feel that it is difficult to explain occupying this outsideness outside of poetry. In a poem I feel confident about pointing toward or poking at this alienation. As a queer person, there’s a point where you realize and grow accustomed to and grow tired of how you’re made to occupy space and how there’s not a lot of choice in it. I think that the hyperawareness one can feel surrounding their queer presentation has implications on capacities for closeness. And I mean in meatspace—keeping physical distance and barriers. My internal life is very vital because of this. And poems are where I’m able to address that distance, by proclamation.

NA: I think of that posture as very queer: one resists conformity or the deficits of their current reality by reaching for the potential beyond it.

TRB: Absolutely. For me, poetry is the act of stretching toward. It activates whatever I’m most desperate for. 

NA: The mainstream discourse on trans experience has largely been shaped by a focus on medical transition and a voyeuristic obsession with trans bodies. I love that these poems sidestep those expectations in order to offer something more textured and true to the interior life of the poet. What have you learned from other writers about writing against or around a dominant narrative?

TRB: Two books that I constantly find myself returning to are Some Animal by Ely Shipley and Crush by Richard Siken. I first encountered Crush when I was about 20 and I just fell in love. The opening of “Dirty Valentine”: “There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you. / I touch myself, I dream” are lines that I’ve carried with me for a decade to put to a feeling I’d been carrying for much longer. Crush gave me a certain measure of assurance when I was first writing. It’s one of the first memories I have of a queer person saying, here’s what I’m not supposed to say, here’s what I’m saying.

Ely Shipley’s book Some Animal is such an interesting experiment. It combines trans history and lyric essay in such remarkable and surprising ways. I’m really interested in how Some Animal uses frame narratives to broadly explain some of the issues that trans men face, while honing in on an internal experience of transition. The book is composed of four sections, rather than individually titled poems, which allows you to experience the histories, the essays, and the poems as indistinguishable. There are moments where the narrative scope widens just a bit and really invites the reader to bear witness. A question I always have after rereading this book is how to balance vulnerability and lyricism and narrative. And I’m not sure I want an answer as much I like to consider it.

NA: What other examples or experiments from contemporary trans and non-binary writers are you interested in right now?

TRB: I love Ari Banias. I’m always interested in what K. Iver is doing and I’m very excited about their forthcoming book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco. I’m also interested in Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Samuel Ace, Anaïs Duplan, and S. Yarberry.

NA: What are your plans for this series? Are these part of a manuscript you’re working on?

TRB: I don’t believe that I’ve ever written a poem with the intent of working it into a series, but it seems to happen often! I think, in part, it has something to do with the need to reside in whatever I’m hung-up on. Currently, there are six poems in this series and there could very well be more. They are part of the manuscript that I’m currently sending out! I feel that they’ve really filled out what I’ve been working on for the last few years.

Nico Amador’s writing has been published in Bettering American Poetry, Vol. 3, Poem-a-Day, PANK, Pleiades, The Cortland Review, Hypertext Review, The Visible Poetry Project and featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast. His chapbook, Flower Wars, won the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press. He holds an MFA from Bennington College, is a grant recipient of the Vermont Arts Council and an alumni of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writers Retreat.

Behind the Byline

Lindsay Bernal

Staff reader Sabrina Islam talks with NER 43.3 contributor Lindsay Bernal about mystics, the reflexivity of poetry, and the ekphrastic inspiration behind her poem “Visions.”

Sabrina Islam: “Visions” is inspired by your favorite mystic, St. Bridget, the patron saint of Sweden, whose revelations were influential during the Middle Ages. After her husband’s death, St. Bridget retired to a life of penance and prayer. What moved you to write this poem about her?

Lindsay Bernal: I was raised in the Catholic Church, attending parochial schools from pre-K until college when I began to reject Catholicism. My initial interest in Bridget stemmed from the fact that she was a writer. She was born in the 14th century and her revelations shaped decisions in Rome and established the revolutionary Brigittine Order for women with an abbess at the helm. I first learned about Bridget when I was preparing for Confirmation: before choosing the name that would seal my Baptism, I had to research the saints and write a paper justifying my choice. Ultimately, I went with Catherine, the Tuscan visionary, whose teenage life was darker and more rebellious.

I’m still fascinated by Bridget, Catherine, and other medieval women whose visions set them apart, gave them power, authority, and influence, and, in many cases, saved them from the potential violence of marriage, maternal morbidity/death, etc. I should admit, too, that within the context of writing the poem “Visions,” pure error led me back to Bridget. I misread Celia Paul’s 2015 abstract painting, St. Brigid’s Vision (featured in the spectacular 2016 exhibition, No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection) as an allusion to my beloved Bridget. Paul’s painting, however, references the Irish Saint Brigid, who I don’t find as compelling. I brought my own autobiography, my long obsession with Saint Bridget of Sweden, into her canvas. Because I saw the sea in the painting, I assumed it had to be about my Bridget, who, in utero, had saved her shipwrecked mother and thus, herself. A supernatural miracle-worker from the womb.

SI: St. Bridget exercised a wide apostolate and sheltered the homeless and sinners. In “Visions” you write, “only after she became suffering / an abstraction unfamiliar / yellowed at the center / even more hollowed out / what Bridget saw / in her mind’s eye was dangerous.” Is the poem directing us to what comes after suffering?

LB: That’s a tough one: I have so much trouble with directives. I’m thinking about what can come through suffering.  Bridget eventually gave up worldly possessions, desire, friendship, pleasure, to get as close to God as possible—to experience the ecstasy of a vision, many visions throughout her life. I’m deeply interested in the relationship between vision and imagination, vision and art: the artist as visionary.

As a child, teenager and young adult, I didn’t feel like I was good or blessed or worthy of God’s salvation. I prayed and prayed but whatever connection I should have created with God wasn’t happening. Unlike Bridget and the other saints I studied, I wasn’t able to communicate with God or Mary in a meaningful way. I was ashamed of myself for faking my faith at school, at church, at home. When I finally abandoned Catholicism, I found poetry: I don’t believe in God but I do believe in art, in language, in the imagination. Maybe in those rare moments when I forget myself entirely, when I get lost inside the reading or writing of a poem, I’m also experiencing something divine, something extraordinary. 

SI: You’ve said you have been writing and rewriting “Visions” for several years. Could you speak about your writing process?

LB: My process is exhausting and involves a lot of drafts. I can blame Catholicism for the slowness, the ongoing rewriting.

“Visions” is the first poem I committed to from my in-progress second collection of poems, tentatively titled “Misreading the Precipice.” It began as a study of Celia Paul’s painting that I didn’t trust would be a poem until I discovered (through revision) its fragmented, anaphoric form. The first versions of “Visions” were terrible—to which Kara Candito and Liz Countryman will attest. I kept setting it aside, ignoring it, but it kept calling me back.

SI: In her review of your collection What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, Claire Denson writes how embarrassing and painful it is to grow up and become. She writes, “The speaker of her collection absorbs art and place then presents them back within her own context, transformed.” In “Visions” I see how becoming still holds a strong place in your poetry. Is becoming a kind of transformation?

LB: Claire is such a generous and careful reader, as are you, Sabrina, and you’re both astonishing writers. I know that poem-making is transformative. What is metaphor but a luminous transformation: one thing becoming another and deepening our understanding.

My second collection is even more focused on my childhood, matrilineage, my struggle with religion, the sexual violence that was normalized in the Catholic communities where I came of age.

SI: In a blurb for the collection, Jericho Brown noted how What It Doesn’t Have to Do With is disinterested in self-involvement or melodrama. You write, “Darkness doesn’t descend suddenly at all.” What role does self-reflection play in your thinking and writing process?

LB: Poems are inherently reflexive, “memories recollected in tranquility,” and opportunities to connect with history, with the dead, to communicate something that in real life you were too shy, too afraid, too embarrassed, too rushed, to say.

Many of the poems in my first book as well as in the second manuscript are elegies, engaged with the act of honoring—and resuscitating—a place, a loved one, a past self from whom I’ve grown apart.

Writing, as we all know, requires solitude, which I have to believe is different from loneliness: writers need no materials beyond our imagination. As painter Joan Mitchell states so astutely, “When you are really involved in writing or painting you are someone else . . . You are what I call, ‘no hands,’ the riding a bicycle. You do not exist.” Mitchell’s quote brings to mind Keats’s annihilated self.

SI: In your exceptional poem “Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid” the speaker asks, “Does a child ever recover / from losing the vessel who bore her, / pushed her out of one watery world into this? / Is it an image of damnation?” How does poetry provide narratives for our own wounds and healing?

LB: In that moment, I’m thinking literally about my sister-in-law who committed suicide—after her death, we all lived inside our many questions. As a child she lost her mother: I’m wondering throughout that poem about that primal loss and how we can’t always survive grief. What It Doesn’t Have to Do With radiates around Oko’s narrative for which there is no healing. There’s no end to my brother’s grieving, there’s just time passing.

I don’t choose narratives or subjects: they choose me, as cheesy or unbelievable as that sounds, and then when I can no longer resist them, I shape them into poems.

Honestly, I long for poems that escape narrative, and I don’t turn to poems for healing. Rather, I read poetry to learn more about the world, to be moved, to be surprised, to remember.

SI: Are there poems or poets you return to often? How do they influence your work?

LB: Yes, of course. “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath is a perfect poem to which I return, without which I wouldn’t have been able to write “Visions.” In “Blackberrying,” Plath’s in Devon, where Celia Paul also lived, and the sea is everything (despite its nothingness). It’s literal and the objective correlative, where the self disappears when the imagination takes over: “ . . . nothing but a great space / Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths / Beating and beating at an intractable metal.”

I’ve encountered few sentences as aurally and visually supreme as Plath’s throughout “Blackberrying.” Stanley Plumly, quoting Eliot, refers to this effect as the “aural imagination.”

Celia Paul’s “St. Brigid’s Vision,” is an elegy to her mother, who died the year before Paul completed it. Only as her mother is dying does Paul begin painting the sea. Her recent “memoirs” about painting, Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John, have influenced my second book. She’s an incredible painter and writer.

SI: How does teaching inform your writing life?

LB: It remains an unending balancing act, but teaching and writing and reading are all indelibly connected. I definitely learn as much from my students as they learn from me. And whenever I contemplate a break from teaching, I remember the teachers who encouraged and challenged me and how awful my poems would be without their mentorship.

SI: Your poems are often inspired by other art forms including music, paintings, and sculptures. We’ve touched on how “Visions” is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Celia Paul’s St Brigid’s Vision, and I understand Louise Bourgeois’s “Femme Maison” series influenced your exploration of the feminist imagination in What It Doesn’t Have to Do With. How does visual art shape your understanding of language and poetry?

LB: While writing What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, I tried to discover in paintings and sculpture other ways to imagine my own lived experience, to simultaneously establish distance and a deeper connection between the speaker and the subjects that subsume her: heartbreak, grief, self-doubt, estrangement, and suicide. Ekphrasis as metaphor.

The “Femme Maison” drawings, in particular, provided another angle into my sister-in-law’s struggles and my own, as they imagine domesticity and motherhood as physical burdens or barriers, the house, no longer a place of comfort or rest, swallowing the mind.

SI: What obsessions are you entertaining now?

LB: I’m obsessively trying to finish my second collection, filling in the gaps between poems. This past month I’ve been working on a long poem about species collapse and the postmortem attentive behavior (grief) of North Atlantic right whales. My typical uplifting themes.

Thank you, Sabrina, for spending time with me and my poems.

SI: Thank you so much for your time too, Lindsay.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Washington, DC. 

Behind the Byline

Jack Gain

Staff reader Chris Feeney talks with Jack Gain, author of the short story “Pollard Trees” (NER 43.3), about memory, first person point of view, and how fiction can unfamiliarize the familiar.

CF: “Pollard Trees,” and its narrator, immediately introduces a struggle of memory, beginning with “I have forgotten nearly all of it,” before delving into the final week of a relationship, spent on vacation in Germany. The narrator also seems to remember, sometimes in great detail, what he had once forgotten, so his telling can read less as a concentrated act and more a rumination on memory itself. A balancing act of “I have forgotten” and “I remember” spans the story. Besides offering a delicate picture of an ostensibly doomed relationship, what is the narrator trying to do with this catalogue of remembrance? What force is driving this meticulous look at something that has passed?

JG: There is an anecdote in Kristin Ross’s book about the uprisings in France during May 1968. Ross is giving a talk about the événements, as they’re called, when she is interrupted by a German sociologist who says something to the effect of, “Nothing happened in Paris in 1968. Everything happened in Prague.”

What he meant was that the events in Paris didn’t matter because they didn’t lead to any clear political change, whereas the uprising in Prague ultimately led to the fall of communism. In fact, not just that they didn’t matter, but that they didn’t even happen.

Ross tells the anecdote because it reflects a very prevalent way of conceiving of history: The only things worth remembering are the things that led teleologically to the current state of affairs, not those which pointed towards other possible futures.

I was interested in how this way of thinking applies to personal histories. We may remember all the ways that a relationship seemed doomed because it ultimately ended and, in fact, it’s hard not to think that way. But it’s a very limited view.

In the story, the narrator is taking an inventory of what he can and can’t remember about those few days in Berlin. It’s an imaginary exercise because, naturally, you can’t recount things that you don’t remember.

But that conceit lets us see what actually happened. It allows the likelihood that the relationship was doomed to live for a few scenes alongside the possibility that it wasn’t.

CF: The title of your story refers to a landscaping technique where trees are cut back to promote growth, and these trees become a central component of the narrative. Of course, “growth” is something we quickly associate with romantic relationships. The narrator, through a game he plays with his girlfriend, is essentially tasked with remembering the name of this practice, something he is unable to do. It becomes a sort of quest. What is the narrator grappling with as he tries to remember the peculiar name of these trees?

JG: It is a peculiar name. They’re peculiar looking things as well. You can somehow tell, just by looking at them, that they’re the result of some weird medieval practice.

In the story, the name of the trees is one of those things which is on the tip of your tongue. You can look at it a thousand different ways but you just can’t remember the word.

They’re also the subject of a rule he agrees to follow in that guessing game he’s playing with his girlfriend: you’re allowed to look up something you don’t know but not something you do know but can’t remember.

That rule is like the commitment of being in a relationship in the sense that you could, in theory, break it whenever you wanted to. Your phone is in your pocket the whole time.

And that’s something that the narrator is struggling with. This is a guy who maybe hasn’t been this far into a relationship before and he’s itching to know the answers to everything.

CF: I thought there was a remarkable level of authorial control in choosing what your narrator discussed and for how long. The story contains a lot of different photographs, buildings, street names, letters, and other artifacts. We move from The Bauhaus Archive to the Berlin U-Bahn to “the museum of the SS,” but the tone of the narration remains level and feels true to the protagonist. What are your thoughts on the relationship that exists between a writer and the first-person point of view they’ve created? Is it difficult to decide what a narrator will notice and what they might miss?

JG: In first person, you can be absorbed by the more immediate details of a character’s experience.

The narrator in this story is feeling out the shape of things that he is part of, but which are much larger than him—his relationship, the city they’re in, a certain juncture in history.

By way of analogy, writers are also constantly sorting through details, trying to make them add up to a coherent whole. I find fiction really satisfying when it deals with ideas which you can only partially comprehend because they’re at the limits of your verbal understanding. The medium allows you to communicate something which you wouldn’t be able to just say outright. 

You might have a feeling about something you’ve experienced (an interaction with someone, an encounter with a painting or whatever) which is crude and inchoate but nonetheless insightful. And this is one thing I have in mind when I’m thinking of the details that would constitute a character’s point of view.

CF: Yes, the feelings of the narrator, however “inchoate,” are still insightful and feel as if they are building into a larger whole—a mosaic of a person confronted by decision. In my reading, I hung on the line “I have forgotten the word gestalt.” Is there a “gestalt” quality in what the narrator is relaying to us, something we can discern but he cannot?

JG: Yeah, definitely.

Strictly speaking, in the story, he is trying to imagine what gestalt means purely because the word doesn’t have an English translation.

But you’re right. There’s a larger irony, I think. To those of us who grew up at the “end of history,” the radical ideas of the 20th century—ideas about the mind, or art, or new forms of society—seem inconceivable now, even though we live among constant reminders of them.

We are living among the sum of their parts without being able to conceive of the imaginary whole.

CF: A couple years ago, you published the story “Communism Doesn’t Work.” This story also centers around a relationship, and although its underlying themes are different, both stories take care to invest their readers in the rocky emotional lives of their characters. In your opinion, what makes a good relationship story? How do we get a reader to care about the bond between two fictional people and its consequences, and is there a particular benefit in exploring relationships through short fiction?

JG: My friend, Mike, who is a screenwriter, once told me that if you’re writing a horror film, you should make it about something that genuinely scares you. I think that applies to all types of fiction, mutatis mutandis. There needs to be some true feeling that you start from.

To your last question, I think romantic relationships are well-suited to short fiction because they tend to entail a lot of feelings which are universal. And short stories rely on that kind of emotional shorthand because they have to set the rules of their own telling really quickly.

“Pollard Trees” starts with the narrator telling you that he intends to break up with his girlfriend. That’s a situation anyone can imagine. You accept it as a given, partly because it comes at the start of the story, and then, follow it from there as that intention becomes complicated.

The other story you mentioned, “Communism Doesn’t Work,” starts with the fact that a lady from the Jobcentre is visiting the flat of the narrator and his ex, who are still temporarily living together. She’s visiting to establish when exactly they broke up, which will determine the outcome of the narrator’s benefits claim. It’s a bureaucratic premise, but it has very intimate implications that anyone could recognize, because nearly everyone has been through a break up. 

CF: You referenced a line from your story earlier, that “You can look up something you don’t know. But not something you don’t remember.” In the context of the story, it’s a ground rule for the game the characters play. It may also introduce the outside force of the Digital Age just as “Communism Doesn’t Work” introduces the outside force of bureaucracy. If so, is it important to include these larger realities in some way? Can a writer use them to their benefit?

JG: I don’t know if I could say that those are important to include, necessarily, since they’re such large abstract things.

But maybe fiction can make some of the social forces that we take for granted visible in a particular light, by giving us an “unfamiliar image of a familiar thing.”

I generally try to remember something I’ve forgotten rather than googling it, but usually I cave.

Chris Feeney is a fiction writer from upstate New York and recent graduate of Middlebury College. He currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he reads submissions for the New England Review and works as a writing advisor.

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