from the voice of the lady in the moon (black warrior review)

One of my most favorite journals to read Black Warrior Review invited me to write a craft essay (which ended up being a lyric essay) for my poems “From the Voice of the Lady in the Moon.” The poems are in their latest issue (42.2), from a newer series I am writing based loosely on the Chinese folktale of Chang ‘E. The poems unthread her narrative and have to do with unbuilding a house in order to build it.

Excerpt from the craft essay: “If it is true that every story has a shadow story. If there is always an underbelly to be found. If a woman’s voice is a space that begins boundaried in. If there was something I wanted to speak into the air, the clotted atmosphere, if I thought to myself, The edge of her dress, my fingers in her hair. If it was ruin, and I carried it heavy and spilling in my belly, a breadth too immense for my own. So I wanted to say it to the corner of the room. So I borrowed the shape of her mouth.”

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And belatedly: Thanks to Paul Hoover for soliciting a couple “Letters to Mao” which you can read online at New American Writing. The issue includes gorgeous work from GC Waldrep, Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Tomash, and classmates Aurelia Cortes Peyron and Maxwell Shanley. It was also lovely to be part of Columbia Poetry Review, where a former student and now friend, Jan-Henry Gray, is an editor. This issue includes three of my image-text poems “How to Build an American Home” from my forthcoming book HOUSE A.