Poetry

Twin Fawns, Treats, and Sitting Right in Rooms

I dated a man who didn’t like to be touched when he ate. Never, not by anybody. Not even me. I tried a few times. It didn’t go well. He only liked square rooms, nothing with an angled or curved wall or a cutout of any kind. Cubbies were for sure off-limits. The house he was living in with his band off Gillham Road in Kansas City was one block over from serial killer Bob Berdella’s house, but that’s not what he didn’t like about it. The sitting room had cherry trim, which bothered him because the rest of the trim was oak. It was supposed to be different to indicate that the sitting room was special. That’s what they did in Victorian homes, at least in Kansas City. Architectural history didn’t matter to him. Consistency mattered, order, and not being touched while eating, which I suppose is order-enforcement of a different kind.

I’d say all of this was problematic, but at some point, I stopped being able to sit in rooms without being squared up to them. In bed, I have to lie in perfect alignment with the walls to either side of me or things feel super off. And curved rows of seating in a square or rectangular room? Floating in the space like that, maybe even with seats whose backs are to the entrance? No, thank you. I’ll find a chair against the wall or drag one there if needed, none of this organismic bacteria-esque drifting as if we’re all being observed under a microscope.

I also don’t like to eat treats when anyone’s in the room with me, namely my husband, or when the news is on or I’m reading a shitty anything anywhere from anyone. My treat time is my me time, and it has to be just right. I have a soundtrack I listen to when eating treats. It’s moody music like Eno and Radiohead. Everything I listen to is moody, or maybe I just hear it that way. Barber. Corigliano. Orff. I’m genre-drifting musically now, probably because I have treats nearby, but my fingers insist on typing this before I eat them (the cookies, not my fingers) despite the fact that my husband’s about to return home, which means there will likely be no treat time for me tonight, especially if I start in on editing this post. I also don’t eat treats while writing and editing. My brain won’t register that the eating has occurred, and I’ll get the keyboard all treat-sticky.

The guy I dated also didn’t like to read anything long, so he limited himself to short stories. Say what you will about that, but he introduced me to Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, and Kansas City poet and writer Conger Beasley Jr. I was still a music major then, as was he. I hadn’t drifted from music to literature and ultimately to poetry, where I remain a producer-consumer to this day.

The last thing I’ll say about him is he showed me twin fawns who died in their mother’s womb and had been taxidermied shortly after their death. They were on display with other preserved animal oddities at a toy store in a Kansas City neighborhood called Brookside. Years later, he bought them from the owner and gave them to his new wife, who’s an artist. They’re art now, those fawns. They live in a vitrine. The artist sells prints of a painting of them. I don’t think it was her, actually, who painted them. Someone did. The fawns were on television as part of an art-competition show. I’ve seen pictures of the artist with the twins beside her under their glass. I love them and hope they’re at peace. I hope they are loved in the real way, not any other way.

It’s hard not to feel something for a man who values taxidemied fawns and shows them to all the girls he loves. Their vitrine is round, not square. Nobody touches them when they eat. They don’t eat because they are dead. They don’t read because they are dead but also because they are fawns, and even living fawns don’t read. Somehow, this last fact makes me profoundly sad.

Mary Ruefle’s ‘Lapland’

Mary Ruefle created a powerful moment for the audience here in Tucson when she read at The Poetry Center last fall. I was there and will never forget what she did. She read her poem “Lapland,” which she wrote fifty years ago. Then she read an essay about how the word Lapland is not offensive, but now it is offensive to use the word Lapp to describe the people in Lapland. She ended her essay by saying that although the poem’s title is “Lapland” and it’s set in Lapland and the word Lapp appears twice, it’s not about Lapland. Then she uttered this sentence, which enveloped the room:

“And if you don’t understand that, then I would go so far as to say you don’t understand poetry.”

Then, in the tradition of several poets who’ve come before her, she read the entire poem again without comment. So that we would hear it. So that, with our hearts and minds adjusted, we could hear it or have the hope of hearing it.

It was powerful. It was incredible.

Click on the image below to experience Ruefle reading “Lapland,” then her essay, then “Lapland” again. The recording of the entire video is on the VOCA Audiovisual Archives. I’m just sharing the section that contains “Lapland” so you can have the experience attendees had that night at Ruefle’s reading.

Should You Lose All Reason(s), Justine Chan

I’m reading Justine Chan’s poetry collection, Should You Lose All Reason(s). It’s based on her experience of a Southern Paiute myth she told over and over when she was working as a park ranger in Zion National Park, which is just a few minutes from our Utah home. I found the collection in the Springdale, Utah, library the day Jon and I drove out that way.

Chan lives in Washington state, where we lived for about a decade. Somehow, that makes her work resonate even more deeply for me. I’ve always felt a connection between Eastern Washington and Southern Utah. Where the land is concerned, I mean. The wildlands and the wildlife and how human consciousness is informed by both in ways they might not be elsewhere.

These poems are enveloping. They’re somehow a deep dive that feels like wading slowly into a welcoming body of water. Some parts remind me of Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin. Others remind me of a pillow book, namely the poems Rebecca Lindenberg has written in that spirit.

These poems speak to place, to identity, to what it means to live in a larger, natural world — or to live away from nature. Of who we are and how we become and how we continue. The speaker, I mean. The speaker, but also all of us. Also me, as a reader. (And maybe you if you choose to read this collection.)

Chan writes this place, Southern Utah, in ways that are image- and sound-driven without sacrificing authenticity, vulnerability, or accuracy:

You will get used to never seeing the full red sun as it rises or sets. You will see peregrine falcons and turkey vultures circling overheard, but never the condors.

None of the pictures you take will be quite right. Not in focus. Or the light’s not right. Or there is just too much.

You will bask. You will burn.

The bark of the spruce on the rim will always smell sweet and fresh in between its flaky scales.

The people will forget there was ever blanket poisoning of the public lands. That there are bounties for pairs of hacked off ears. That less, to rescind, must mean more.

Most of Chan’s lines are impressively long, like someone trying to stretch their arms as wide as the mouth of a canyon. The book is actually much wider than it is long to accommodate those lines. (It’s designed to look like an oversized postcard.) Her approach is somewhat experimental: at times bivocal, at times hugging the right margin or drifting cloudlike down the page, at times interspersed with dates and facts, and frequently breaking into song. (She quotes lyrics from sixteen songs throughout the book.)

I hope folks take the time to read this collection. Because. Just because.

Because the air is so hot, full of rasping. The land so full of landmarks and stories you can’t even begin to know.

Because you feel some part of you was / is / will always be secret.

Because the crickets are madness, a roar that fades to silence / if you forget / to listen.

The Writing Life. Parting Words.

I wrote the essay below years ago for a literary organization that ran a series whose focus was on discussing poets whose behavior is inappropriate in an attempt to raise awareness and make poetry spaces safer. The series was also designed to encourage those who’d been harmed to tell their stories. The night before I was going to submit it, someone approached the editor who was handling my submission and told them the name of the poet I was talking about. When I agreed to submit the essay, it was on the condition that the subject not be named or identified. The divulgence made publishing the piece more complicated.

At about the same time, I was made aware of the letter that poet was circulating about me that made libelous statements, as detailed in a previous post. There were also feverish attacks coming from every direction on social media and in private online poetry spaces. One prominent female poet called sexual assault and rape as a whole into question, writing: Definitions have become so blurred and a no-accountability and unassailable victimhood is now the norm. According to today’s definitions of rape I have been raped hundreds of times.

That same poet also called anyone who’d been a victim or was advocating for victims part of a stupid little twat coterie, adding that they need to be sent to bed without their suppers. The fact that she writes for a major publication now brings me no comfort. Someone else used the phrase loathsome creatures to describe victims and advocates. Another called them evil. (That one got hundreds of likes from fellow poets.) Yet another said their efforts felt gratuitous, as if the women were taking pleasure in their pain.

I knew a lot of the poets who were making these kinds of statements. They were editors, publishers, friends, even some of my poetry heroes. Though I wasn’t talking publicly about what had happened to me, and I wasn’t part of the group or groups who were doing so, those attacks were on us all. Every one of us.

I couldn’t see how my essay would have helped at that point. I was unable to tell my story before the chance to do so evaporated. I don’t know what difference it will make now, but I want to share it so I can start to be freed from a horrific experience that began more than a decade ago and affects me to this day.

The last section, “Part 4: The Day You Are Reading This,” was designed for a publication date of more than a decade ago. But it’s still pretty spot on. There’s a timelessness to all of this: both to these kinds of abuses and how these kinds of abuses affect people.

—

The Writing Life: Parting Words

Part 1. Date Withheld

We are in the hotel where a writing conference is taking place, in a restaurant just inside the registration area. Hundreds of poets and writers flit back and forth like gnats. All dutifully wear their conference IDs on lanyards, all carry satchels, backpacks, and bags stuffed with books. They are on their way to and from panels, readings, the book fair, and the public restrooms, some of which have lines that extend all the way down one hall and into another.

He has chosen a seat in the most visible section of the restaurant, an open space near the intersection of two highly trafficked hallways, as opposed to a spot tucked deeper inside the venue. I feel he has selected this spot for a reason. For the entire event, he seems to have choreographed who he will be seen with—and when, where, and how he will be seen with those people. Being “seen” with him seems to be his way of introducing me, of making the statement that I am of some, however modest, worth.

He even orchestrates who he will walk to readings with. I learn this the hard way when, one night before a reading, it becomes apparent that my friend N and I are not allowed to walk with him the two or so blocks from the conference hotel to the reading venue. I realize this when trying to make eye contact with him over and over as he and a clutch of women stand at a small bar just inside the hotel’s entrance. I wave. I make more eye contact. But N and I are both ignored, my gestures shut down.

N and I walk within six feet of his group from the lobby to the reading, but it is clear we’re not walking with his party. Once we all get to the event, however, he makes a point of coming over to talk to me. He stands in front of me, his relative height a statement in a room full of seated poets. He touches me on the arms and shoulders. He asks for a hug. He leaves for a while then comes back, repeating the entire set of requests and gestures. This happens three times.

This is just a gesture, I think. It’s only a gesture. Maybe this is the way things work at this conference—new people make their way “in” based on how others seem to fawn over them. I’ve never attended this conference before, so I wouldn’t know its politics or social dynamics, though there do seem to be many of both in play, with overlap between the two.

At lunch, he tells me how much he loves my poetry and my thoughts about poetry. I go into detail about the panel N and I just came from, where the conversation turned to the notion of “doing violence” to a poem. One panelist’s points during that discussion are of particular interest to me, including his assertion that all acts of writing are violent, that language is intrinsically violent. Another panelist rejects this idea and feels more than uneasy with it. Why all this talk about violence, she asks the audience.

We have been in contact for several months, since I posted a note on Facebook saying I was looking for a poetry mentor. He works at a respected university and takes on many students to mentor, he tells me when he responds to my query.

The conversation pivots from how much he likes my poetry to how much he likes me. I really like you, Dana. I really, really like you.

He leans in and asks, Is N— in love with you, as he reaches out to hold my hand.

Part 2. Date Withheld

I am on my way to the first residency of my master of fine arts program. Because of the program’s check-in time, I had to fly down the night before. The poetry mentor I met through Facebook and with whom I have been interacting for months lives near where I am headed. He has offered to pick me up and drive me from the airport to the destination. He has also suggested we get two rooms at a hotel near the airport. That would give us some time to hang out and talk about poetry, he said. He could then drive me to the residency the next morning. He knew I had anxiety about traveling and being separated from my husband. He said he wanted to support me so I could focus on the residency without having to worry about the logistics of getting there.

His gesture seemed genuine. I talked it over with my husband and agreed to take the mentor up on his offer. He made the arrangements with the hotel and insisted on putting the rooms on his card, saying his school would reimburse him because he would be making an appearance at the residency, which is a form of promotion for his school’s program.

As my mentor and I stand at the hotel’s registration desk the night before the residency, the attendant only hands us key cards for one room, not two. Because of a flight delay, we are checking in several hours later than expected. It’s too late to get another room; they have all been booked for the night.

I’ve already taken one milligram of Ativan to sleep, and it’s starting to kick in. I am confused as we make our way down the long hall to the room. We had talked after the writing conference. I had explicitly stated that I was not interested in any kind of sexual relationship with him. He assured me that he didn’t mean his comment about “really, really” liking me the way it had come across. He was just trying to express how much he liked me as a person and as a friend.

In the following months, he gained my trust as a mentor. He presented himself as looking out for my best interests as a poet. The fact that he was a poetry editor and taught alongside esteemed poets in a creative writing program—as well as his assertion that he was especially interested in supporting the work of women poets because we face so many hurdles within the literary community—further deepened my trust in him.

He also earned my trust on a personal level. Once, when we were discussing my poetry, he said he saw evidence of sexual abuse in the subject matter. He shared that he, too, had been abused. That divulgence, coupled with the concern he showed surrounding my abuse, solidified my trust in him. I was speaking with a fellow survivor, after all, someone who was expressing a depth of concern for my suffering that few have shown. There was no way he would take advantage of my trust. What fellow abuse survivor would even consider doing such a thing?

The fact that he is an abuse survivor informs my thinking as we make our way to the room. I am trying to see the situation from his perspective, as a fellow survivor who feels he’s bonded with me in a way that makes sharing a room with two beds acceptable, like a slumber party between girlfriends. He has a very asexual, childish way about him, and there is a playful energy between us. Nothing in his behavior indicates he has a sexual interest in me. Over the past few months, I have wondered if he had a sexual interest in women at all. I don’t want to jump to conclusions that might be unfounded. I both trust him and want to trust him.

I tell myself, He’s not doing this. He’s not doing this. He’s my mentor. He’s my friend. I must be misreading this. Could he really be doing this?

I am still picking up on zero sexual energy as we settle into the room. He places all his belongings on his own bed, not the one I will be sleeping in. I am continuing to get more of a slumber party vibe than anything, which is in keeping with his overall childlike energy. I try to write the situation off as his having confusion over the boundaries of our friendship more than anything else. At the same time, my body is telling me a different story. Panic is setting in because I have so many sexual violations in my past. Bedroom spaces are particularly anxiety-provoking. It is difficult for me to sleep in anyone else’s presence, even those I trust.

I step out of the room and call my husband, explaining that it is one room, not two. He is shocked. I tell him that I think it is all OK, that I don’t believe there is anything underhanded going on, and that it feels more like a sleepover than him intentionally overstepping his bounds. My husband asks if I feel safe. I say that I do. I get off the phone and go back into the room, thinking, It’s just one night. Just get through this. You can do it. Everything is fine.

I take another milligram of Ativan, both for my nerves and because I need to make sure I get as much rest as possible to be ready for the next day’s residency. I make sure he knows I have taken two doses of the medicine and that is for sleep. Still not fully aware of the danger I am in—still both trusting him and wanting to trust him—my logic is that he definitely won’t try anything if he knows I am incapacitated. And I am. Two milligrams of Ativan is a sedating dose. The medicine suppresses the central nervous system so anxiety can be overridden and sleep can be induced.

I lie down on my bed. The sedating effects from the first and second doses of the medicine are underway. He asks me questions about my physical and sexual abuse. This seems like a strange topic to bring up at this time, when I am stressed and tired and have said repeatedly that I just want to sleep. Why would I want to explore this territory after I’ve had a very hard and long trip, when I have taken a sedative, and when I need to get some rest for the upcoming residency?

I can’t remember what all he asked and what all I said. My memories of conversations are usually quite clear, but the medicine was functioning as a kind of blur filter. I know he was asking for details about what was done to me and how it made me feel. I know the line of inquiry was invasive. He was asking for too many specifics, almost like he wanted to trigger me into reliving the experiences of abuse. The timing and context felt off. Something else was starting to feel very, very off—not about his questions but about him as a person, his intentions. I was beginning to realize the potential danger I was in.

He asks if he can rub my feet. OK, I say, afraid to say otherwise. At this point, I am trying to think clearly, trying to not pass out despite the sedative in my system, trying to imagine how I am going to get out of this unscathed, and—still—trying to tell myself this can’t really be happening. My “OK” is designed to buy me the time needed to figure out, through the haze, what is going on and how to deal with it. (And to be clear, because of my incapacitation, my “OK” was not effective consent. It also did not justify what he did next or the deception and breach of trust that got me into that room in the first place.)

Everything is getting hazier. I think, There’s no way he’s making some kind of move on me—especially not while he’s asking me to tell him about my sexual abuse. That would be really, really twisted.

He continues to ask about my abuse as he starts making his way up my legs. With a jolt, I suddenly know beyond a doubt what he’s doing. I am scared, terrified. I am paralyzed—both physically because of the medicine and mentally/emotionally. The fear associated with my previous sexual abuse kicks in. When I was molested, I did the same thing: I froze. When I was sexually assaulted as a child by an older child: I froze. When I was raped in high school: I froze. Freezing is related to the fight-or-flight response. It is a third form of automatic response the body can have during a traumatic experience. Because of my previous experiences, because I am isolated in a strange town and in a strange room with this man, and because I am incapacitated by the sedative I have taken, freezing is all my body can do, so that’s what it does.

He keeps moving his hands higher. He is touching my inner thigh. It becomes clear with a shock what he’s doing as his hand grazes my vulva through the long underwear I had put on in an attempt to sleep fully covered up. Overriding the sedative, adrenaline rushes through my body. I am still scared to confront him directly, to call him on what he’s up to. I tell him to stop.

I need to sleep, I need to sleep. I bat him away.

Do you need someone to hold you, he asks.

No, I say.

Are you sure, he says.

Yes, I say.

Where do you want me to sleep, he asks in his cloying, childlike tone.

Over there, I say.

Not here, he asks.

No, I say.

He pushes: Are you sure you don’t need someone to cuddle with.

No, I don’t I insist.

He gets up reluctantly. As he moves to get into his bed, I can see through his clothing that he has an erection. I think he was rubbing my legs with it at one point instead of using his hands.

I lie there stunned. I can’t fall asleep even with the medicine in my system, and I don’t want to. If I do, who knows what might happen. I lie awake, running on adrenaline and resisting the medicine’s effects, until I hear him snoring. As quietly as I can, I get up and attempt to pull pants on over my long underwear so I can sneak out of the room. I stumble, nearly fall. This wakes him up. I tell him I am going to stay in the lobby or that I’ll find another hotel (not that I have a way to get there). I say that I am not comfortable and can’t sleep with him in the same room. He apologizes and says he’ll go sleep in his car. I tell him not to come back. He says he won’t. He leaves the room. I pass out in my bed.

I feel safe, finally. I don’t yet have words for what I have just experienced and won’t for a long time. Phrases like “nonconsensual sexual touching” and “effective consent” are not running through my head that night. What is running through my head is a single thought: At least he didn’t rape me. That is the kind of logic many survivors of rape and child sexual abuse employ when someone revictimizes them in ways that fall short of outright rape. At least he only did x and not y is our way of creating a sense of empowerment and protection in the moment and not allowing the person who has hurt us to strip us of who we are. We feel that as long as it could have been worse, we can still move forward. We can become whole again, or at least we can live with the hope of becoming whole.

About four hours later, I wake up to my alarm. He is back in the room, asleep in his bed. I didn’t hear him come in. I have no idea how long he’s been there. I have no idea what he might have done while I was passed out. My sense—or at least my hope—is that he did nothing. But in reality, I know he’s already done something, even if he did “nothing” when he violated yet another boundary by returning to the room despite my insisting he not do so.

He takes me to my residency the next day. I am still in shock and still processing what has happened as he visits with other poets, lingering for hours before finally leaving the campus. He shakes their hands. He talks to them at length. I am too scared to say anything to any of them and wouldn’t know what to say anyway. They have a relationship with him. They don’t have a relationship with me. He is somebody in poetry. I am nobody. I continue to operate in survival mode, counting down the minutes until he will leave me alone at the residency, all without letting on to anyone that something is amiss.

Part 3. Date Withheld

The day after the mentor drops me off at my residency, he sends me an email. I really, really like you, he writes. He asks if we can take our relationship in a different direction, into the area of physical exploration and play.

Later, I will look at a book he signed for me the day before. In the inscription, he will say that I no longer need a mentor. It appears he’s decided that I do need a lover, and that he should be that lover, no matter what my feelings happen to be on the matter.

It will be months before I tell anyone what happened in that hotel room.

Part 4. The Date You Are Reading This

This poet’s actions had numerous short- and long-term consequences. First, they derailed my poetry studies. I had to take sedatives the entire time I was at that residency and bawled through half my time there, especially after problems cropped up in the program around issues related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transgender discrimination. I barely made it through the first semester both because my mentor in the program was good friends with the poet and because the program’s director lowered my grade for the residency, stating that I did not “demonstrate a passionate commitment to writing.” At the residency, the director privately scolded me for arriving at the program with the poet, purportedly in order to flaunt him in front of my fellow classmates. That statement could not have been more damaging to me, or further from the truth.

Second, the poet’s actions hindered my ability to promote my own work. I was limited in terms of who I could approach and who I could trust. I was also afraid to reach out only to have another poet take advantage of me. I sent my work out infrequently. I didn’t pursue prizes and awards in case he knew or was connected to the judges. The list of ways I turned inward and did not actively and consistently promote my work goes on and on.

Third, the poet’s actions limited my participation in the broader poetry community. What he did—and the way I felt obligated to hide what he did out of fear, shame, and the belief that my concerns would be written off or, worse, that I would be told I was lying—has haunted me for years. I’ve passed the half decade mark at this point, and I still have trouble finding a way to move forward in poetry. I have met several poets who are deeply entwined with this man. I have been triggered in my community when he’s come to town to read. I have been invited to take part in safe, empowering groups of women poets, only to hear them mention this man as if he really is selflessly and genuinely promoting the work of women poets. I have tried to share space with him on social media, even though doing so never felt safe. (At one point, when I unblocked him recently, I saw that he was connected to more than a quarter of my connections on Facebook.) When my work is published in a literary journal, I check the table of contents first thing to make sure his name isn’t listed alongside mine.

In short, there is a hole blown through me, one only I can see. I carry that hole everywhere. It is impossible to be whole in the presence of that hole.

I’ve heard too many stories like mine to remain silent, including additional stories about this particular poet. I am still trying to find a path that will allow me to move forward in poetry. I am listening to the voices that have gone before me. I am being more careful than ever about who I associate with and who I trust. I am putting words to my experience and, regardless of the consequences, I am saying, This happened. This is wrong. It has to stop happening. This is about me, but it isn’t just about me. The issues in play in my story—power, manipulation, deceit, transgression, and the sexual assault that rose out of those issues—are central to other victims’ stories. My hope is to join the voices that are already calling for an end to the systematic subjugation, objectification, exploitation, and manipulation of women who want to be part of poetry. My hope is for stories like mine to be a thing of the past, not par for the course. I want all of this to end.

The Letter

Several years ago, the poet who sexually assaulted me circulated a letter about me within the poetry community. In it, he made defamatory statements about me, including stating that I was expelled from my MFA program for behavioral health issues. That’s not the case. I withdrew after my first semester of study. It was too difficult to continue there because the sexual assault happened en route to that program’s first residency, the poet who assaulted me was friends with instructors there, and the director lowered my grade for the residency, calling into question my commitment to poetry.

That letter was terrifying. I’d just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening disease that affects my immune system. I had thyrotoxicosis, which is also a serious medical condition. And I had follicular thyroid cancer. The letter was circulating among poets when I was too ill to defend myself. It was me against everyone who adored him and believed him and had already been online making statements about victims being spineless or taking pleasure in our own pain. The poet who assaulted me successfully silenced me by lying about me, intimidating me, publicly shaming me, and using my trauma history against me, one he knew well and used as a way to connect with me and earn my trust.

It was too much for me to withstand, so I stopped writing and buried most of myself to salvage whatever remnants I could in an effort to create some kind of life outside poetry. Birding helped me get through it. Weaving helped, too. But when I had a suite of serious medical issues in 2022 followed by serious mental-health issues in 2023, I knew I needed words again. I needed poetry, so I started writing, and I slowly began to connect and reconnect with other poets, even knowing that doing so could lead me back into pain, into misunderstandings, into being labeled and shunned, into being formally and informally blacklisted and, perhaps, right into the arms of cruelty.

If anyone has any concerns or hears any murmurings about me, I hope they’ll talk to me directly and not make assumptions about me based on defamatory, inaccurate, incomplete, or decontextualized information. I’m terrified all over again because my work is appearing in literary journals, and I’m bracing for attacks. That’s why I’m writing this: not to set any record straight, but rather to make my fear transparent, as well as my genuine desire to respond to anything folks may have heard about me.

Justine Chan’s ‘Should You Lose All Reason(s)’

Should You Lose All Reason(s), by Justine Chan

I’m reading Justine Chan’s poetry collection, Should You Lose All Reason(s). It’s based on her experience of a Southern Paiute myth she told over and over when she was working as a park ranger in Zion National Park, which is just a few minutes from our Utah home. I found the collection in the Springdale, Utah, library the day Jon and I drove out that way.

Chan lives in Washington state, where we lived for about a decade. Somehow, that makes her work resonate even more deeply for me. I’ve always felt a connection between Eastern Washington and Southern Utah. Where the land is concerned, I mean. The wildlands and the wildlife and how human consciousness is informed by both in ways they might not be elsewhere.

These poems are enveloping. They’re somehow a deep dive that feels like wading slowly into a welcoming body of water. Some parts remind me of Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin. Others remind me of a pillow book, namely the poems Rebecca Lindenberg has written in that spirit.

These poems speak to place, to identity, to what it means to live in a larger, natural world—or to live away from nature. Of who we are and how we become and how we continue. The speaker, I mean. The speaker, but also all of us. Also me, as a reader. (And maybe you if you choose to read this collection.)

Chan writes this place, Southern Utah, in ways that are image- and sound-driven without sacrificing authenticity, vulnerability, or accuracy:

You will get used to never seeing the full red sun as it rises or sets. You will see peregrine falcons and turkey vultures circling overheard, but never the condors.

None of the pictures you take will be quite right. Not in focus. Or the light’s not right. Or there is just too much.

You will bask. You will burn.

The bark of the spruce on the rim will always smell sweet and fresh in between its flaky scales.

The people will forget there was ever blanket poisoning of the public lands. That there are bounties for pairs of hacked off ears. That less, to rescind, must mean more.

Most of Chan’s lines are impressively long, like someone trying to stretch their arms as wide as the mouth of a canyon. The book is actually much wider than it is long to accommodate those lines. (It’s designed to look like an oversized postcard.) Her approach is somewhat experimental: at times bivocal, at times hugging the right margin or drifting cloudlike down the page, at times interspersed with dates and facts, and frequently breaking into song. (She quotes lyrics from sixteen songs throughout the book.)

I hope folks take the time to read this collection. Because. Just because.

Because the air is so hot, full of rasping. The land so full of landmarks and stories you can’t even begin to know.

Because you feel some part of you was / is / will always be secret.

Because the crickets are madness, a roar that fades to silence / if you forget / to listen.

Five Things Addendum

I want to add to my November 16 post about five things that have happened to me as a female-bodied poet. Poets #1 and #4 are misogynists. Poet #5 is deeply disturbed. But poets #2 and #3 live in a different space.

They’re both sensitive, talented male poets. They embody poetry in ways few do these days. There’s a kindness to them that’s rare, a generosity that can feel unparalleled. But they struggle in different ways, perhaps not unlike the ways in which we all struggle. Those struggles may be part of why poetry is so important to them and why they need it to be central to their lives.

I get it. But when those struggles have a gendered component, that dynamic can draw some poets closer while leading others to be excluded, marginalized, and othered. That othering tends to happen more to female-bodied poets than to non-female-bodied poets.

A female-bodied poet’s kindness can be taken for something it isn’t. A male poet’s expectations can get in the way of reality. A poet who feels snubbed or hurt or like he’s the one who never gets the girl can cut all ties to a talented female-bodied poet in order to avoid those feelings without thinking about the consequences of doing so, let alone the role they’re playing alongside countless other male poets, which is removing support from, blocking opportunities for, and silencing that poet’s voice and personhood over and over during her/their writing career.

That’s why I included poets #2 and #3 in my list alongside two misogynists and a poet who sexually assaulted me. They may be different from those men, but they still did harm. And this body keeps the score, which means other bodies are also keeping the score. It’s time to talk about the damage being done to our work and to our physical and mental health.

The House

The house has been doused with gasoline. (You’re welcome in it.) The floor of the house is littered with matches. (Take your shoes off.) The house has no fire alarms. (Have a seat.) The cops don’t respond to house fires in these parts. (Kick your feet up.) The house is on fire now. (Be a love and close the door to save the rest of us.) The house burned down. (We wrote you a loving obituary.)

The loving obituary: We adored them. For some reason, they always looked uncomfortable around us. We did everything we could to make them feel right at home. They died before their time. Sometimes, [insert adjective here] people aren’t meant for this world. We will always remember them fondly.

—

I wrote this July 12, 2023. It’s about how we treat people we want to exclude while they’re alive versus how we talk about them once they’ve died. I was thinking specifically about how queer folks and those living with trauma and/or mental health issues are treated—and the ways in which the very people who exclude those folks from their homes, lives, families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, communities, and societies take no responsibility for their eventual, often untimely, deaths. There wasn’t anything we could have done is a common refrain. Really? Nothing. Not one thing?

I was also thinking about how it felt for me to live as a queer non-Mormon person with trauma and mental health issues here in Southern Utah, where I was routinely excluded and reviled even in literary communities. The poets who run two separate chapters of the Utah State Poetry Society told me they’d close their chapters down if I ever attended them because my work was inappropriate. I was a member of the USPS at the time and had every right to attend any chapter meeting in the state. Their issue was with my gender and sexuality, not my writing, which they hadn’t read.

I’ve thought about this post a few times since the election, so I decided to share it again. We need to bring the way we talk about the dead and the way we treat the living into alignment.

Five Things That Have Happened to Me as a Female-Bodied Poet

  1. 2009. A prominent poet in Seattle agreed to work with me on my poetry. Before the appointment, he googled (from his IP address) the words “married” and “naked” in combination with my name. He then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. But he didn’t stop there. He created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems. He later told folks associated with a book publisher in the area to ignore and disregard me.

  2. 2015. In front of a large group of poets, a prominent Kansas City poet screamed that I wanted to take him behind a dumpster and fuck him. This occurred after months of what I thought was meaningful friendship and seemed to be spurred, at least in part, by the fact that I was close friends with a more prominent Kansas City poet. The outburst occurred in front of that poet. Eight years later, he would tell me that I’m the one who harmed him because I’m a reminder of who he was at that time, and he doesn’t want to think about being that person.

  3. 2023. A talented poet who’s part of a tight network of poets outside Kansas City interacted with me for months as he was healing from a serious health issue. I was going to be in the area, and he asked if we could meet. I planned to give him the rare Japanese printing press I’d recently purchased so he and his friends could use it to make chapbooks. Before I left for the trip, he sent me a postcard with a poem of his on the back about how he never gets the girl, then he blocked me on Facebook. I still don’t understand what the hell happened there, but I know it’s bullshit.

  4. 2024. A Seattle poet I’ve known since 2009 decided to attack and threaten me yesterday after fifteen years of friendship and poetry camaraderie. We both lived in Seattle for years and spent time together in person on numerous occasions. Yesterday, he told me (and many others) that I’m cheating on my husband with him. That is not the case. I’ve posted screenshots of his accusations and the conversation he’s referring to because he threatened to out me publicly. For what, praytell? There’s nothing to out other than his unacceptable behavior.

  5. 2009. A poet who was my mentor sexually assaulted me en route to my MFA program in 2009. I’ve discussed that situation at length, including in a fifty-thousand-word essay on my website that was published for more than five years. I managed to stay in poetry until 2015—through my fear and my shame and my lost faith in poets and poetry—then I left for seven years.

I returned to poetry in 2022 with one vow: to never let anyone silence me again, threaten me again, terrify me again, or defame me again. This is a hard commitment to make, but I’m doing it. My responses will be swift when abuses occur, like the one that happened yesterday.

May nothing like any of the above happen again. May poets live up to what they are attempting to do in and through poetry. May poets who are women, female-bodied, queer, and otherwise marginalized find safety in poetry and among poets. May poets stand up for each other when it matters rather than adding ha-ha emoticons to posts in which poets are harassing and threatening other poets. May we find ourselves. May all these things come to pass.

Poems as Places

During the Southern Utah Book Festival, poets Paisley Rekdal, Danielle Dubrasky, and Simmons Buntin led the workshop “Real Locations, Imagined Selves,” whose focus was on defining a sense of place through words and documenting a place through poetry.

The conversation was much more far-reaching than expected. Poetry of place tends to focus on physical places, as in Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town or Wendell Berry’s poetry, which is closely tied to the specific farms he’s played in and worked on over the course of his life. Both Hugo and Berry’s approaches to place seem to be consistent with James Galvin’s notion of what a poet of place is, which is someone who situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it.

Rekdal discussed something similar to Galvin’s concept in the workshop, but she also talked about many other layers of writing about place—ones that augment and challenge the notion of place itself. She used the term palimpsest to describe places and our experiences of them, noting that places are layered in terms of their geographies, histories, uses, cultures, and more. Other layers include the ways in which places inform us psychologically, mentally, and politically.

The question implicit in this discussion is this: How can we begin to examine the layers of a place in order to more deeply know it, each other, and ourselves?

Partway through the workshop, an attendee said his body feels like a place, one that’s being politicized and treated like a territory. This was a powerful moment. The idea of the body as a place, one that can not only be inhabited by the self but also invaded, in a sense, by others, is disconcerting. When that type of invasion occurs in a physical space (someone’s community, their school, their place of worship, and so forth), body and space intersect, making both feel less safe. Here, we see layers of place building up and around the human body within the social, political, and physical elements of a place.

Rekdal says much of how place is defined is through bodies, and much of how bodies are being called into or excluded from a place is racial. She then discussed how the Chinese in the West could become white or reject becoming white depending on whether they wanted to be part of the United States. The idea she touched on is that, like places, race isn’t static. Bodies aren’t static. They’re all processes that are in flux and that meld into or layer over one another—and that sometimes collide with each other.

(I want to add that bodies are also excluded from places because of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, age, national origin, and sex.)

Place is not just where you inhabit. It inhabits you, too, Rekdal said as the conversation began reaching toward the ineffable. I sometimes think about places as hauntings, she added.

She notes that we can be drawn to places we’ve never been before, perhaps because something inside us may be encoded to seek out a place and call it home. Or perhaps we seek out a place and immediately feel the atrocities and suffering that occurred there, such as at the Topaz Internment Camp Museum in Delta, Utah, where Rekdal gives tours as the director of the American West Center.

Whatever the reason, humans seem to have the capacity to carry a sense of place within us that’s larger than life and longer than the human lifecycle.

             Nothing natural but made
             in the beauty of this place. To create a home,
             we imported trees and water, we slashed
             and burned to excavate a state where nothing
             lived, nothing ruled us, and yet in all this nothing
             we were subject to the rules nothingness demande

Those lines are from Rekdal’s poem “Soil,” which appears in West: A Translation. She says places create relationships and help us develop empathy for each other. The forging of community from hardship is evident in the lines above and is part of the universal human experience.

The takeaway is that places can’t be places in any human way of understanding and experiencing them without our presence in them: the communities we build, the bonds we create within and because of place, and the ways in which we come to know place.

Wendell Berry says we’re losing our connection with place because our use of our places is greatly reduced from what it was in the past. Of course, he means literal places and a very specific type of past use of those places.

Perhaps Berry’s not imagining place as broadly as possible. As Buntin pointed out at the end of the workshop, imagination itself is a place. Imagine that. If what we imagine is a place, then the products of those imaginings, such as poems, are places. We really can create worlds out of words.

I wonder what you all think about where we are with regard to our relationships with places in any or all senses of the term? Is our understanding of places—like places themselves—a multidimensional process rather than a half-static relationship in which only human understanding changes, not the very idea of what constitutes a place?

Asked another way, are we as deeply connected with place as ever, even if we haven’t quite identified all our places as places: interior, exterior, past, present, analog, digital, elemental, philosophical, built, imagined, and so forth?