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Behind the Byline

TR Brady

December 9, 2022

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.

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Nico Amador, TR Brady

Behind the Byline

Carmen Giménez

August 29, 2022

Photo by Jason Gardner

Staff reader Nico Amador talks with poet and editor Carmen Giménez about anti-ekphrasis, the sublime, and her exciting new appointment at Graywolf Press.


Nico Amador: In the most recent issue of NER, you have two poems from a longer series entitled, “A Painting I Can’t Remember.” I interpret these poems as a kind of anti-ekphrasis, subverting the form by giving more rigorous attention to the self than the art that may have prompted each piece of writing. What can you share about the genesis of this series? As you worked on it, were there particular conventions that you found yourself engaging or resisting?

Carmen Giménez: Anti-ekphrasis is definitely how I think about it, though I don’t feel it’s an antagonistic relationship to it but rather an expansion or reframing of what it means to experience a work of art. The first poem I wrote began organically from a text conversation about a painting I couldn’t remember with a friend of mine who’s an art historian. I described details of the painting, but I mostly could remember how I felt and where my body was, how my body felt. I remembered the effect the painting had on my consciousness, maybe edges and faces. After that, I mined the archives of paintings or bits of paintings that stayed with me and attempted to conjure circumstances and autobiography. The series has evolved a little more generally to consider what it means to love visual art and to have a life informed by it. I was lucky that my mother took us to museums normalizing access and relation to a world that sometimes feels forbidding or belonging to someone else. I have also written poems that consider what it is to be an admirer and think about the painter as author/creator.

Sometimes ekphrastic poetry is like a transcript of seeing, so that’s always been an active point of resistance. I’ve done a bit of retrospective visiting to museums, but then only captured small sections of paintings that most captured me. Like you see a face that you love, but it’s not just the whole face you love but rather different elements so that the eyes bewitch and the mouth makes you feel at home, so it’s a resistance to that descriptive: there’s a dog in the corner with a carrot in its mouth which represents my desire, etc.

A challenge I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around is the ubiquity of European and American white male artists that inhabit my archive, a consequence that the Guerilla Girls critique at length, and I’m addressing that in a poem about them and about Ana Mendieta. I’m also inviting new experiences of art in different, less conventional spaces, to change that. 

NA: “A Painting I Can’t Remember 11” is animated by a wide range of references that seem to carry equal relevancy in the imagination of the poet. What are your personal habits as a consumer of art and pop culture? What do you give your attention to and how does that inform your creative process?

CG: Like Frank O’Hara, I know the reasons I’m not a painter, but I sure wish I was, so my eyes literally drink art and pop culture. I love the visual world, and to think about how composition is a type of rhetoric. 11 is the first poem of the series that I described earlier, and I guess it represents how my mind works, that I don’t just see what’s there to be seen: I like to see what I hear and taste it. I am a completely uninhibited consumer like the whale who takes giant gulps of ocean to trap whatever fish are in it. I give attention to everything. Besides wanting to have been a painter, I would have loved to have been a collage artist like Jess, or Hannah Höch, which I think is informed by looking at ubiquity as generative. It all can work; it all can fit; it all can generate. I’ve gotten crazy and profound ideas about love from the most elementary cookie-cutter shows. I guess I see that anything can be a portal.

NA: What have you been looking at, listening to, or absorbing lately that’s turning you on?

CG: If there’s a contemporary book that best exemplifies what I just described (shameless Graywolf plug), it’s Predator by Ander Monson. The book is about the movie, which he’s seen 147 times, but it’s also about how we live in the age of the predator, and it’s an autobiography and it’s a lament. I loved Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West), and noted the interesting turn in fiction that seems a bit connected to the lyric essay, a tinge or thread of rigorous historical and scientific research. Another example of that kind of book is Kim Juyoung, Born 1982 written by Korean novelist Cho Nam-Joo (translated by Jamie Chang), which is a biography of a woman and the harrowing challenges of joining the workforce because of misogyny. The book also uses research and data to contextualize her experience. I’m obsessed with Diane Seuss so I’m reading everything she’s written. Listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mallika Vie, and the Alan Parsons Project, and watching Loot, and Physical on AppleTV. 

NA: Both these poems contain a peculiar tension between the impulse toward memory or observation and the “craving” the speaker has for an experience that is more immediate and embodied. They seem to grapple with the gap between what we might seek from art or literature and the limitations of what it can give us. In what ways can that gap be a generative place to write from? 

CG: Craving is such a potent element—hunger—which I think is a vital force in your poems, Nico. This series has taken me back to childhood and adolescence, when I recalled the nameless and ineffable desire I had for what I would later discover was the sublime. It’s why I wrote those tortured poems about the soul and angst; I was describing what being on the edge or outside of sublimity felt like, and those nouns felt like they housed it. Wanting to be a painter or perhaps wanting my writing to have the same effect as painting is generative in this series. Trying to remember particles and sections as opposed to wholesale events is also very generative and freeing. Memory is an illusion after all. We aren’t computers; over time, we shape our histories to suit our wants, so by accessing ambiguous moments with art I’m able to think more about a memory’s affective echo.

NA: In “A Painting I Can’t Remember 47,” you write “…having fallen out of love with humanity, / I outgrew my leather pants, irony, / nuclear rage…” These lines speak to a loss of idealism but perhaps also a mode of performance the speaker lets go of in order to permit more vulnerability. What choices do you find yourself making in relationship to voice and self-presentation in your current work?

Yes, yes, yes. I always have an ambition for each book to do something I haven’t done before. The last book I wrote contained a long poem that really became a universe, sonically and thematically, that I was desperate to move on from, and for a long while I was unable to find that next step. My work can be lyrically mysterious (for lack of a better word), and so that’s what the letting go is about. I’m writing more narratively and hopefully in an autobiographical way that’s new.

I also feel like I’m calmer and the anger that’s propelled my work previously feels less appealing. It’s an enormous amount of work to be angry, and though that rage and anger was propulsive, I’m looking at other ways of moving through the world. The first few poems I wrote that contended with this idea were all about shame, which was so zzzzzzzz, so self-involved. My hope is a gaze that is able to look outward, even when I’m writing about myself. Not coolness, not hot, but I guess Goldilock’s just right.

NA: You’re an editor as well as a writer; how do you turn off your editorial instincts when you sit down to write? What methods do you use to give yourself permission to take risks and make messes as you draft?

CG: It’s hard to turn off those instincts. I’m always weighing the rhetorical implications of each noun, adverb, preposition, etc. An advantage is that I can do this work in fairly quick order, but it can be an obstacle. I often do generative exercises that force me to draw from reserves out of my control. I make dramatic revisions that create new problems for me that force me to go deeper, to delve into the negative capability that the certainty of the editor sometimes blocks, the desire to have ended. I also put my poems in other people’s hands who point me to places I haven’t thought of. That collaborative work is humbling and reminds me I’m not some omniscient practitioner.

NA: Speaking of . . . you just broke some big news that you’ve accepted a position as the new executive director and publisher at Graywolf Press. Anything you want to say about your hopes for this next chapter of your career?

CG: I’m so excited about this opportunity. Different muscles, a different conversation, but also an occasion for me to really apply the wonderful gifts and lessons I garnered as publisher at Noemi Press. I love teaching and thinking about literature as a teacher, but this is going to be a unique portal for me. I also adore Graywolf and everything they do. I have long admired the team, especially after having worked with them on my last book, so jumping into their stream feels like a dream. Life is long, but it’s also short. I don’t know what’s ahead, so I tend to jump into adventure.


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.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Behind the Byline, Carmen Giménez, Nico Amador

Meet the Readers

Nico Amador

July 26, 2021


“I pay attention to what surprises me, what stays with me after I’ve read it once and walked away, and what seems to have a vision beyond generating beautiful language.”


Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER?
My background is in community organizing, primarily on goals for racial justice, ending mass incarceration, and trans justice. For many years I’ve also worked as a facilitator and coach with organizations looking to develop their skills and strategies for building effective grassroots movements. Reading and writing poetry is something that’s always helped me stay agile and creative in how I deal with the pressures and demands of social justice work. Eating tacos, swimming, and hanging out at gay bars help too.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER?
Jennifer Chang was my advisor for the MFA program at Bennington College and I learned so much from our exchanges on decolonial poetics and craft. I have tremendous respect for her as the new poetry editor at NER and her interest in publishing emerging writers and other voices that have historically been marginalized in literary spaces. Getting to be part of this team of readers has already been an energizing collaboration.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication?
Shelley Wong’s “The Winter Forecast” (forthcoming winter 2021) was an immediate standout for how it braids together subtle commentary on gender, language, and culture with such precision and delicacy. I admire how the poem coheres as a whole while each line can be appreciated for its autonomous sentiment and energy. 

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission?
It’s honestly very difficult to be a gatekeeper and to be responsible for having to say no to work I respect but for one reason or another doesn’t rise to the top of the pile. My first read is usually generous and I’ll often return to a submission a second or third time before making a decision about what to move forward or decline. I pay attention to what surprises me, what stays with me after I’ve read it once and walked away, and what seems to have a vision beyond generating beautiful language.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits?
It’s helped me set a higher bar for my own work. I’m much more aware of what it takes to get noticed and while I don’t want that to inhibit my creative process, I like that it pushes me to ask tougher questions as I’m revising. 

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading now that you would recommend?
Recently I’ve enjoyed the challenge of reading more political theory and academic writing that expands how I think about the themes I’m exploring through poetry. I just finished C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity and was so impressed by its breadth of inquiry and the propositions it makes about language, history, and gender identity within the context of racial capitalism. I know it’s a book that will continue to influence how I think about trans representation in art and literature.


NER‘s staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes, Staff Reader Profile Tagged With: Nico Amador


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“On the other hand, Polish society—under cultural pressure from the ‘rotten West’ (as Putin puts it)—is rapidly becoming increasingly tolerant. In short: the Church is losing the battle to Netflix.”

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