This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair between the 20th and 23rd of November, 2022 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

Take me to a place where
everything burns. Take me to a place beyond
where bodies can go. Take me, god, take me
anywhere.

Ari Lohr, Falling

When Ari Lohr first approached me with the offer of an early peek into what would be Gravity, I jumped. Lohr’s work is equal parts come wallow me in this yearning and queer defiance. These are the poles of my own personal oscillation as well and, having read and loved xe previous effort Ejay, I knew at the very least I was in for one exquisite evening of intermingled beauty and pain. What I was not expecting was to spend much of it scribbling in the margins and jotting down line after deliciously heart piercing line. The poems in Gravity serve as love letter and plea. To Adam; to a love that isn’t, wasn’t, and can no longer be; to to the queer among us still loving and yearning, still mourning in a world that wakes daily to wish we wouldn’t be.

So many poets try to distance themselves from the *I* of their work, just as many claim to write to an ambiguous 'you'. Gravity is very much a collection of poems with a single recipient in mind. It is, to me, the difference between 'love you' and 'I love you'. A named crack in the armor. A profession of need that doubles the fear. What was your thinking in writing to Adam? What did you want the reader to feel?

I don't believe in anonymity; like all art, my work is a mirror of human life, a series of threads strung together from the ebbs and flows of experience. That's really it -- I just want people to feel the complete ethos of human experience in my work, and hence, to me so many of these poems feel like nothing more than reflections of the difficult emotions and memories which they evoke. I worry that if I generalize my art with a generic subject, or object, it will lose its intimacy in this abstraction. Although these poems express common struggles among queer youth, they are nonetheless grounded in my own experiences, a real, tangible self from which the language and narrative of this work arises. This is all to say that Gravity, like any tragic love story, is incomplete without making it painfully clear to the reader who the characters are.

I don't think we can talk about this book without talking about fear. We can parse it–fear of dying, of persecution, of hatred, of living too little, or too much–when you get right down to it, aren't these all just ways to be left?

I appreciate this insight a lot. Inasmuch as the book is about fear, I would really say that the book is about despair. I use the word "nothing" as a motif everywhere in this book, not just to express fear but to expose it for what it really is. All these fears are forms of leaving, yes, but what does leaving leave you with? When writing Gravity, I wanted to highlight the fear of abandonment (in all its forms) in tandem with the existential, spiritual anxiety -- indeed, the despair, the nothingness -- from which suffering really arises and is a reflection of. In making this book explicit, and at times histrionic even, I want to wear my reader out until they, too, feel and perhaps fear the nothing on which the final part of the book remarks. After all: This is death before death.

As someone who grew up in and around Toronto's gay village during the HIV epidemic it's been interesting to watch your generation process the atrocity we all watched play out at Pulse. The singular nameability of it. Meanwhile black trans women are dying; meanwhile queer kids suffer quietly in dangerous homes, schools, and hospitals; meanwhile our humanity is debated and found wanting; meanwhile and meanwhile and meanwhile still. You evoke that night over and over again and to me it reads like a dam break for everything. I'm wondering, as a poet and person, what function your focus on Pulse serves for you.

Alongside Gravity's most personal elements, I wanted to include explicitly political poems to indicate the undeniable intersections between individual queer lives and the oppressive systems of power which permeate our cuture, relationships, and even our own sense of self. I chose Pulse less because of the event itself and more because of what it represents: rather than going away, oppression against queer individuals has merely transformed, and in many cases remains exactly the same. And even though reports show that Pulse itself might not have been a hate crime (the shooter was apparently confused why there 'weren't any women' in the club), its effects on our community have transcended the actual event itself. Just as I write about the alienation that queer hookup culture and apps such as Grindr make us feel, and just as I write about extremely difficult topics such as rape, I want to demonstrate that the dividing line between these experiences and our community's most explicit, violent trauma is not a line, or a division, but a rope, a thread, a connection.

I recently listened to a great episode of Dead Darlings Podcast where poet and publisher K.Blair was interviewed about the challenges in formatting poetry collections as ebooks. Their advice was to write what you need to but try always to think of the page. As someone who incorporates a lot of white space in your poems, is the unpredictable nature of the screen/page/socially shared screengrab something you're thinking about as you write?

Ugh, yes. I get really anal about my art, so much so that I asked Gutslut Press if I could do the book and cover design on my own (thanks Ami and Patrick!). Any time I send someone a poem of mine, I urge them to read it on a computer rather than a phone, precisely because of the fact that I want my poetry to be read exactly as it was written. I try to make every line break, and all the white space, have purpose, hence why I went through three or four proofs of this book before I was finally ready to release it. In terms of Gravity, all I can really do to absolve this tension is ask people to buy the print version rather than the digital -- which has the added benefit of making me more money. ( :

Tell me a bit about Gravity's path from page to publication. Your audience is other writers and editors so what worked and what didn't? What would you run back and tell yourself to (not) do? This is the part where you give everyone the inside on Gutslut while I mine your answer for ways to improve at kith. (ed. note: the question posits that the audience for the interview is writers and editors but Ari’s answer is so good that we’re letting that lie)

Honestly, my audience for most of these poems was myself. I wrote the first drafts of many of these poems at 16 or 17 or 18 years old -- aka when I was experiencing the most spiritual despair and romantic trauma -- and although the language is more sophisticated than at that time, the sheer drama of some of these poems reflects a younger version of myself which I've thankfully outgrown. First and foremost, publishing this book was a gift to that person, a somewhat cathartic way to validate and move on from all that trauma and teen angst. It was a love letter, both to my younger self who had very little self esteem and also to all the queer boys who feel what I've felt, who use apps like Grindr to soothe their ever-growing sense of isolation and touch starvation.

The publication process for Gravity took a lot of twists and turns. I originally submitted it to Gutslut in 2021 as a chapbook; then, in March 2022, I had a prolonged hospital stay (I was doing a sleep-deprivation study) which for some reason motivated me to write, write, and write, until I realized that Gravity had become a full-length book. You can imagine the look on my publishers' faces when I sent them that email! I'm deeply grateful for their adaptability, because this book went through many, MANY revisions; there are probably dozens of versions of it swimming around in Gutslut's inbox at this point. If I could do it all again, I honestly would just take more time with it. Not only would it have been less costly if I got the proof right the first time (instead of the third or fourth), but I think I'll sit on my next book for a while before I submit it anywhere, just because I know that (like all artists) I'm perpetually dissatisfied and am always changing things around. Moreover, I would take the time to come up with a marketing plan beforehand, because although this book has been a complete success so far, I had quite a frantic couple weeks before publication!

What's next? What's interesting? Who's a poet I should know? Whose brain would you pick?

My primary inspiration is Michael Lee, the author of The Only Two Worlds We Know. If you landed an interview with him, I would drop whatever I was doing to read it.