My whole life I’ve wrestled with gender and gendered desire: what I want, what I’m “supposed” to want, what my body signals to others about me that it doesn’t always signal to itself. What does it mean for desire when I’m bisexual and nonbinary—two identities which are deeply misunderstood, and which often feel inconsistent and oppositional even within me? I’m still not sure I know. “Bottomfeeder” is a meditation on that unknowability and the frustration that often accompanies it.
Raye Hendrix on "Bottomfeeder" |
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A Conversation with Rae Armantrout & Parker Menzimer
"I want my poems to be responsive, permeable. When something seems to just present itself to me—whether a striking sight or an image in a dream, I have to take note. There’s something thrilling about a thing that comes to you spontaneously as if from somewhere else. For me that 'somewhere else' doesn’t have to be the Martians in my radio (though it could be), it could also be what the crows are doing out in the street. I don’t want the poem to be just me. I don’t think top-down planning works—or at least it has limited possibilities. I want to leave room for the unexpected."
via POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA |
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What Sparks Poetry: Luisa A. Igloria on "Caulbearer"
"It is believed that the child, this caulbearer, is marked with a kind of otherworldly protection; some say, even second sight—because for no matter how short a time, it knew what it’s like to inhabit a space in its transit from one world to another. For me, what we bring into poems as well as the poem itself lives in this same kind of liminal territory. It’s as if in the poem we are allowed a veiled glimpse of visions and insights from feeling and remembrance, mingled with the facts of our real and imagined lives and circumstances." |
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