When I wrote “Flo Milli Shit," I was thinking about the role that audacity plays in my life as a Black, queer femme. This poem explores this idea; in it, I describe buying lingerie while experiencing postpartum depression; the notion that I deserve “sheer panties, to splurge—/as I step over the bills/pooled at the front door” felt radical to think, let alone write about.
Brittany Rogers on "Flo Milli Shit" |
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A Conversation with Li-Young Lee & April Yee
"The most I can do is demonstrate my openness and ready assimilation of the divine. It’s the same thing a shaman does. That’s what they do for the community. They enact possession by the divine. But the third party, I’m not looking at the third party. That poem 'Call a Body' is a dialogue between the lover and the beloved. All of my poems are a dialogue between lover and beloved. Sometimes that dialogue is full of love. Sometimes that dialogue is inflected with stress, and maybe even strife. Both the lover and the beloved, I think, is the founding paradigm of all my work. "
via ELECTRIC LITERATURE |
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What Sparks Poetry: Karen An-hwei Lee on "Dear Millennium, a Jade Rabbit on the Far Side of the Moon”
"About a year or so before the global pandemic of 2020, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon. The rover’s name was 'Jade Rabbit,' a robot that was part of the series of Chang’E missions. This mixture of facts and metaphors inspired me to reflect on our relationships to dead metaphors and their intricate web of mythologies and cultural stories leading to these metaphors—for instance, the moon as green cheese, the man in the moon, the rabbit under a cassia tree in the moon, and the lady who drank the elixir of immortality and floated there." |
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