This interview was conducted by william katharine blair between the 31st or March and the 21th of April, 2024 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

His face is a cup.
Pain sloshes from his eyes.

I have rearranged the furniture
three times this week.
Something just feels wrong.

Who is hurting who
and why keep doing this
if no one is having any fun.

I Can Never Put a Bird in a Poem because my Name is Robin and that is NOT Fair

I think a lot about how most people are fear shaped like people ping ponging their way against other fears shaped like people as they move through the world. Reckless and hapless and doing their best in the face of inevitable force. The silent ‘who hurt you’ behind every question, the discomfort of knowing you want to hurt more. “A bird could go right here/in the cave of my cupped hands.” But who would survive?

I agree with you that we're mostly squishy bags of fear. We're sort of trained to notice the moments of discomfort, but we're all hoping to find connection and understanding. Who would survive? I guess the lucky ones. Or the rich ones. 

There’s so much discussion of the freedom and defiance of hitting your thirties childless and single but on the ground in a society that assumes paired adult households, it so often lacks. If you’re single and thirty or older, you’re making your own fun and holding your own hair when you’re sick. You’re quarantining and trying to reintegrate to the outside all on your own. And all in the presence of other people who we’re told are living fuller, better, more joyful lives. ‘On Watching my Friend Chase her Son across the Yard by the Pool’ & ‘All caves Speak’ both touch on this idea. What do we do with the grief of self fulfillment? How do we hold ourselves whole and do we have to? What could a fifth wave of feminism build in here that the rest have left out?

Single is such a funny way we've been taught to think about ourselves, seeing as every part of our lives involves complex systems of social networks. It's a tax code, really, and not much else. bell hooks says that friendships are the idealized expressions of love we should be persuing, not romantic coupling. I think friendships teach us a lot about fulfillment. It's easy to lose your boundaries and identities and goals and dreams in a partnership. It's so much more obvious in a friendship that each person has to sustain themselves to sustain the relationship. At least that's been my experience.

In ‘Imprecision of the Inner Life’ you have this beautiful line about a salamander, “With one eye it sees the past./With one eye it sees only/the other eye.” What of all this interiority? What does it mean to emerge from a 20 year sleep “awake and ready”? Why am I still thinking about the body as “robbed and raw”?

Thanks. That's one of the oldest poems in the book. I was thinking about how cause and effect are wrapped up together in the same act. How we make and remake our own sense of self over and over, and it kind of sucks every time.

I’m so tired of pretending at horror, of keeping up the pretense that atrocities are aberrations and not the actions of the most average of men.  In ‘Halloween: Ends’ you give us Michael Myers as banal assailants, monstrousness as reductive as tasks on a list. There’s a sad inevitably in turning the page to ‘Esther on Vashti’ and the too common warning from woman to woman about the risks of trusting our lives to a man. Everyday we meet a new monster and paint him as an exception. What are we protecting? What happens if we admit that in this world, as women, fear is the rule?

I love horror movies, even though they’re obviously problematic. I watched all the Halloween movies in a row a couple of Octobers ago. He always dies at the end, but doesn’t. Nothing on a screen is as scary as real life. No problem ever really gets solved. It just morphs into behaviors, affecting you forever. 

My whole raw body ached for them
to do what I don’t know.
Not to cook them and eat them.
Nothing this holy should be consumed.
I suppose just hold them and stare
forever at them to protect them
[...]
or wait until I was alone and hold them
in the nest of my bare belly and pretend
I could create anything beautiful enough to be loved.

Quail Eggs at the Farmer’s Market

Something about the frailty of nature when faced with nurture. Something about there not being enough copies of Childfree by Choice in print to make us forget we are born vacant and wanting into the world. Something about how even eight times a mother I’m still drawn to cradle each fragile soul. What do we do with this want when it’s unwanted? When the will exists and the option does not? What’s to be found in the creations of others? Have you found any solace or answers in others or their words?

I don’t know. What do you do when you feel incapable of giving or receiving love? I guess I go to the farmer’s market and buy exotic things I won’t eat. 

We’ve talked so much about the birthright of ‘women’ a word that I, in my trans body, must hold in quotes. The fear and vault of it, the thoroughness with which we’ve been broken to want what we were ‘made for’. I’m curious here, at the end, if we’ve learned anything, or if we’ve sat in communion, and if that’s enough. We’ve been screaming forever, it stands to reason we have been heard. And still, and still. In ‘Esther on Vashti’ you say “Fire is inevitable. Things will find a way to ignite themselves.” How do you feel now? In or out of our lifetimes, will we see a day when this ‘womanhood’ burns?

It’s cyclical. If there’s no name for who we are or what we feel, we name ourselves, and as soon as we do, we are limited by the name.

Most of our readers are fellow writers and, within those, mostly of those poets. Tell me a bit about how Inside Out Egg came together. Did you set out with the goal of this collection or did the book build itself piece by piece? 

No, there was no goal. I feel weird that it’s even a book now. It’s my first one, so there are poems in it from last year and 10 years ago. It’s hard to make an arc with that sort of timeframe. I’m not the same person or writer anymore. I don’t know what that all means except I hope the book shows a kind of process of changing. 

Through the first half of the collection you have small pieces, all titled ‘Breaking News’ that serve as interjections of plain stated truth. How do you imagine these function? Is there any significance to their absence in the second half?

Those are trying to capture both the absurdity of contemporary life and the chaotic feeling of constant information interruption. Doom scrolling while trying to have meaningful interactions with other humans. I wanted them to taper off as the book settles into its confidence and clarity of emotion.

Finally, tell us something of the path to production? How did you settle on Variant? What was your level of involvement in the process of making your manuscript into a physical book? Is there anything you were surprised by or wish you had known going in?

I’d been sending this current version of the manuscript out for about six months, when Variant picked it up. I liked their catalog, and their books looked good, so I agreed. Tyler has been pretty hands off, which has been nice, but also scary. If the book sucks, it’s nobody’s fault but mine. I wasn’t ready for the overwhelming sense of embarrassment I’d have. I wanted the object of the book, but I don’t really want people to read it. I don’t know how to reconcile what that means for being a writer. This is not everyone’s experience, of course. Some people must feel good when they publish a book, or else why are we all still trying to do it.