I promise this isn’t a piece about chronic illness or my shitty body. It’s about art in a dying world. But I need to start here: I ‘recovered’ from a long bout of Covid-19 and then Epstein-Barr late last fall—after having stayed in bed from late August til about November. It was a time of lethargic, gooey, heady half-slumber. I dripped as honey from room to room, barely real.

I remember unpacking groceries with my husband at one point and getting so tired putting cans away in the cupboard that I slumped across the dining table. Now, I’m no stranger to illness, having lived with an immune-mediated inflammatory disease since my 20s, but this was a void—

—and I never really woke up. And oh, I’ve been to the doctor. I’ve given vials and vials of blood, endless blood, me with my arm splayed open for the phlebotomists who now know me by name. Every time I’m there, I make a fist, and then I let it go, and then we talk about their homes in Egypt. How they miss the sea, how they miss the city. How they yearn for it. Lupus, Lyme disease, MS, perimenopause, vitamin D deficiency, POTs—it’s all been discussed. We’ve landed on post-viral chronic fatigue for now. I’ve been offered stimulants. I’ve been offered steroids.

Yet the languor continued. It continues. And it’s deeper than the body. It can’t win against rest or sleep. Or against my almost-daily swims at my local pool. It’s deeper than the walks I go on to get sunlight and air. Deeper than medicine. Deeper than doing all the right things.

And it’s also inertia. A lack of motivation. That pleasure isn’t pleasurable. It’s all quite boring, really. Or worse than boring, some things don’t even register. I can never decide what to eat, or if I want to eat at all. A limpness that drags me with it. Watching from within myself, willing myself to go forward and hitting a wall.

A want for bed, bed, bed, a want for escape. It doesn’t help that I’ve spent the last three months rewatching Twin Peaks and falling deeper into the Black Lodge. Language goes backwards. Or writing essays that are so vulnerable I want to turn my brain off.

Anhedonia. It must be. Anhedonia dressed in a knight’s suit and armor. A protective, endless shrug.

Subscribe now

And yet. I know. I know that I am not emptied of pleasure or empty at all; I know that beneath this enervation is an ocean of grief for the world; it consumes me, but surfacing it will ruin me. But let’s be honest. The ruin is already at the door.

After asking “what is wrong with me?” a hundred times, I think I figured it out a week ago, after I found a hurt crow in the park. He perched upon a small railing, and as I neared for a photo—his glistening black body so low to the ground I thought, what a rare encounter!—I realized he was hurt.

Unintentionally, I’d scared him, and he fell forward—his feathers splayed, legs struggling to right themselves. He lifted his head but just barely, and he could not fly. I wept and wept and stayed and called animal rescue.

But the weeping was boundless, even if silent, even if I wept while sleeping, while not conscious of the tears. It wasn’t for the bird alone, but for all the damage everywhere: The endless and rewarded indifference. The ease of cruelty. The waking up to a hundred tragedies all caught on camera, served at our fingertips. Heart emojis left at the scene of the world’s greatest crimes.

I wept for the robots and the falseness. The intelligence that we designed to kill us and steal from us. The bodies and bodies of dead children. Starvation. Bunkers.

I wept for exhausted horses fallen in the high heat, & the grubby tourists demanding their fairytale carriage rides. Families without food. Families without doctors. Suicidal airplane pilots. Hating different bodies, different beliefs. Housing crises. Canada burning. Sicily burning. People fighting for the last air conditioner in countries that never knew the heat.

I wept for a young woman starving herself to death in pursuit of love and beauty. And for the faceless men on the internet calling her ugly and gross, telling her the kind of violence they’d love to inflict upon her.

….All of this, just stretched out like a suffocating coverlet over our own lives.

How does it all not crack you, not elicit some kind of fugue state? How can we be expected to stomach this endless nervous system dysregulation? I’ve heard from many writers that they’re feeling the same thing. When I posted about this on FB, some people couldn’t even muster more than a sentence in agreement—a collective “ugh, me too.”

This exhaustion is palpable, especially us sensitive writers who want to process and create, but who are paralyzed, caught in a schism between the collective suffering and the joy of creation. At some point, the schism collapses, and we realize we are one—one body, one endless sigh, one celebration, one death, one beating heart—and so how does art translate this?

How do we perpetually live in and reevaluate “Trump’s America” (I say through gritted teeth) and pandemic bodies and genocide reality? How do we manage an endless livestream of terror against the softness of our poetries and the resilience we’re told to endlessly cultivate as artists?

Because certainly my art cannot be divorced from my grief and my exhaustion—from our grief and our exhaustion? And certainly, I cannot write if I believe in total futility. I cannot write with my eyes closed, but I cannot write with my eyes open.

Maybe I get less soft? Maybe I just fall apart more often? Maybe we sit in the limbo and feel the half-feelings and the no-feelings that mask the real feelings. I choose to believe that even the voidstate knows it is temporary; otherwise it wouldn’t be a void. It wouldn’t have a name.

Eventually the body wakes up. Right? Right? We’re rebooting. We just need a holy minute.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem The Uses of Sorrow. I can’t help but think of the inertia as a container, a strange engine maybe. A horse waiting at the water’s edge before bolting down the shoreline.

There’s also a lot of beauty when we’re ready for it. I still believe that.

Bring me to life. BUY MY BOOK, SAINT OF.

As a writer in my early 20s, I was furious and manic and sloppy and without thought for what would come after I closed out my Word doc. I was a stream-of-consciousness being, full of ease and joy inside the creative process. I was inhabited by something beautiful and divine and bigger than myself. Not to romanticize it, but I was a vessel. We all know that feeling.

“Flow state,” as they call it, was on tap. I drank freely, letting it run down my lips. All my earthly trauma moved through me onto the page, even if I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing—and that was part of magic, the not-knowing. The just-doing. The not getting in the way with reasoning and craft. I never asked myself, “what’s the point? Will anyone read this?”

These were my most clear and honest years, even if the work was likely full of errors and clichés. Writing was enough. God, it was a feast.

Enter 2008, a blur of a year. I’d gotten my first taste of what it felt like to Be a writer, to be more than someone who just writes.

I was a junior in college and had just started submitting my work to literary journals. I was in a deluge of literature and writing classes (shout-out to my professors Ellease Oseye, Mark Hussey, and Charles North) and I knew that I wanted to Be A Writer.

One day, I received an acceptance from the now-defunct Commonline Journal. I believe this was one of my (if not the) first published poems. I was in my Lorca era, god help me, and while this early work absolutely sounds like me, I can’t say it’s any good. (I had to use the Wayback Machine to access this, btw.)

….Already writing about writing, right from the start.

That first poetry acceptance felt as though God himself cracked the ceiling, parted the skies, and levered my body up above the world. I was wholly transfigured. I was given a new body. And my new body was made of light and honey, and it had wings. I was no longer me. I was something else.

Having my work published felt sacred, like a secret between me and the poem itself had been placed into the world.

I then won first place in Pace University’s English Department Awards for some piece of fiction I’d written—and that did something else to me. Suddenly, writing was no longer enough. I wanted more. There was a void that opened in me and could not be sated. I was a want monster, wanting wanting wanting—

Around 2009, I applied to graduate school—thank god for scholarships, even though I also took out never-able-to-pay-back loans—and got in at The New School.

Part of me did all of this to validate myself, to qualify myself, to ensure belonging. That I could be good, could transcend the poverty I’d lived with as a kid from Jersey, could transcend a lack of any real arts or culture access growing up, could transcend my years in foster care being the shameful weirdo, could transcend food stamps and ugly old houses and generational lack.

So over the years, the publications piled up. I was creatively prolific despite working full-time, developing an autoimmune disease, drinking heavily, and surviving toxic relationships. I was inside the wildness of a New York City youth that I’d somehow—how?!—managed to precariously balance.

And underneath it all was a hunger that wanted to chew me up alive.

Prove I’m good. Prove I’m worthy.

Prove I’m someone.

Prove I can transcend my circumstances.

Prove I can make ugliness beautiful. Prove it. Prove it. Prove it.

I was ambitious to a fault, except I was the collateral.

Somewhere along the way, the Writer self split into two—especially with the popularization of social media. I wasn’t just the being who created and loved the process. I was also the promoter, the brand, the object, the editor, the host, the person writing the bio, the submitter, the accumulator of things that never made the Creative in me feel full. They fed the ego. They fed the dark arm. They fed the human aspect. Yet there was no sustenance.

Subscribe now

On its own, earning validation for your hard work and vision isn’t bad. Publication can create representation, community, and meaning. But for many writers I’ve talked to over the years, a switch often gets flipped along the way—and writers begin to feel the albatross of success or visibility.

I’ve talked to writer friends about finding a way BACK to the original love and devotion….before the professional, performative, click-hungry thing our society rewards us for becoming.

We talk about how we must remain, at the core, feral little creatures with our obsessions and our big hearts and our teeth and our devotions. A sort of kingdom of childhood innocence. When we lose that, we become vacant. Elitists. Content creators. And that is so. Fucking. Boring. No risk, no true reward.

I went on a long hiatus from writing, a sort of starvation, somewhere around the start of the pandemic. I can’t tell if this was a totally conscious choice, but I knew my writing life needed a deeper anchor.

I am slower now. I rarely submit my work. And when I do, it’s because I feel truly called to the journal. I speak and read when it feels aligned. I write because I want to. I work on projects that make me feel like I am alive. I say no to opportunities that are extractive and dulling, even if they are shiny.

I spend a lot of days not writing. I read a lot. I live. I celebrate other writers. I write books and pieces that have no intended publisher and no end goal. I am working on a memoir in a time when “no one wants a memoir unless you’re a celebrity,” bla bla bla. And I am doing this because I would rather die than not.

Some of this is also about being tired, older, chronically ill, and overstimulated on social media. Some of this is that my life has expanded, and I am nourished beyond art. But most of it is that I burned myself out on myself.

Writing is a gift. We don’t have to do it. Literally, we don’t have to be here. Like, we can quit. We get to do it. We want to do it, right? We get to be the arbiters of pure and total consciousness. We get to reach into the river and feel the current. And we get to translate it. What a joy to crawl back into the creative self as a joy and not as a form of proof or punishment.

The wound will always be there. My black lodge. There will always be a part of me that wants to palpate that dark organ. I think every writer knows this.

Being visible feels like being seen. But is it? Is it?

I have my doubts.

I welcome thoughts in the comments. Let’s deconstruct and openly discuss this.

In the words of Tori Amos, we want to be primitive; we want to be mangoes.

~ ~ ~

Want to support my darkness? Pick up a copy of SAINT OF (White Stag Publishing, 2025), my newest poetry collection.

I've been in a dream state as of late, thinking back on the art and places that have transported me beyond—or deeper within—myself. I think this might be a niche post, but what the hell.

I have let myself sink deeper, deeper, into the below, into the gauzy haze of what lies beneath the beneath—into the unknowable dark streams trickling through our mundane worlds. My eyes are heavy with it during the day, half of my body in another plane.

Which is to say I have been doing a Twin Peaks & Fire Walk With Me re-watch—nearly two decades after I’d seen it initially. As a David Lynch lover, it seemed strange I hadn’t watched it again in all that time. It was my brother who texted me at midnight recently, writing, “This is crazy. You need to watch it with me,” that spurred me on.

How could I resist an invitation to surrender?

Because any fan of Lynch knows that you must surrender. This is not a question. It is not an option. You must be comfortable with unknowing, with fluidity, with intuiting, with betweenness and dualities, with ‘the sound the wind makes through the vines. The sentience of animals. What we fear in the dark, and what lies beyond the darkness,” as Agent Dale Cooper says.

I yearn for this surrender. I yearned for it before I could articulate it. I probably yearned for it well before I’d even experienced it. The human vessel is inherently mysterious: Where do we come from? Where will we go? The mystery is our womb, yet we spend adulthood chasing a solved Rubik’s Cube. I need a doorway that appears when I stop looking for it.

Perhaps I am allergic to the tidy. I am bored by answers and clarity. If I’m honest, I’m downright fucking offended by art that spoonfeeds the reader/viewer. But that’s for another post.

Oh god, I miss Sleep No More

Watching Twin Peaks’ labyrinthine strangeness dredged up some specific painful grief in me (or, truly, love in me) around the death of Sleep No More (SNM)—Punchdrunk’s iconic, long-running, award-winning immersive theater production. As I watched Audrey Horne move like a ghost behind the walls of the Great Northern Hotel, it got me thinking about Lynch’s incomprable influence on (SNM).

This surveillant lens (and Lynch’s general influence) is no secret. One reviewer wrote that SNM is ‘The closest you’ll get to being in a David Lynch film,” with its nonlinearity, dread, dreaminess, and, of course, Badalamenti’s music flooding the set. References to Lynch’s works, especially Twin Peaks, are also found all over The Punchdrunk Encylopaedia, which is a definitive account of the company’s works and inspirations.

Let me set the scene for those who don’t know: SNM ran for 14 years and closed in 2025. It spanned five floors and 100,000+ square feet in the fictional “McKittrick Hotel” building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. It was described as “Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy through a film noir lens,” and it took place over three hours with very little dialogue.

But for SNM fans, it was more than that. It was another world. It was a transmogrification. A portal that asked you to leave Manhattan behind for a Dream World as much based on what it gave to you as what you took from it.

I’d ‘seen’ SNM about a dozen times (too few if you ask me)…although you don’t really “see” the show so much as become subsumed by it. You become it. You let it eat you alive until you are the ether in its lungs. You become part of a roving collective of ghostly bodies. There is no proscenium; as you enter the building, reality falls away. The fourth wall dissolves. You are you until you are not you.

As you can see, it resists explanation. It seems that it can only be felt. Like a restless slumber from which you wake, the half-remembered dream leaves its palpable transmission, but language fails. Logic fails.

Attending SNM required wearing a sort of Venetian plague, which—as the Encylopaedia says—enables a sense of anonymous immersion. With your face obscured, you could un-you yourself, undress from life, become a thing moving behind the walls.

Although SNM’s scenes were rigorously designed and looped, the audience members were led by our own feelings and intuition.

As not-you, you would have free will to move about and engage with the space. You could spend three hours on one floor. You could run up and down its many stairwells in the glittering darkness, chasing scenes and performers. You could wander down dark corridors, hypnotized by the sound of thumping bass, only to find yourself in a blood-drenched orgiastic offering. You could hold Hecate’s hand as she cast a spell. You could find yourself taken into small rooms, given small trinkets, told small prophecies. You could watch two lovers quarrel. You could wander through chapels and ruins.

Or you could also just as easily fall into the emptiness and silence of spaces where there were no crowds and no performances. I often chose this route—purposefully veering away from the others, falling into a dreadscape, moving through hundreds of rooms full of furniture and coffins and jars and gumball machines and bloodied bathtubs and huts in the woods and bedrooms of satin and low-lit paths and ominous statuettes and rooms filled with crosses and envelopes and notes and babydolls and botanicals and crucifixes and, and, and….

There was no direction. No law. No ‘way’ to experience the art. No ‘final meaning’ that was bigger or more true than the meaning you made on your own in those rooms. It was your dream to live within, your memory to make, your body moving through a timelessness and placelessness.

Subscribe now

There was no one to ‘explain’ what you were seeing, no guide offered at the entrance. Often, a room or a scene felt as if it weren’t real at all, as if it were all occurring under some great, frenzied spell before dispersing into the fog of the next moment.

This voyeurism—or this permission toward a voyeurism, rather—puts us in communication with our deeper creative hunger. It’s electrifying to be led by our want. It shows us that we can dip into a wild, primal undercurrent where symbols and images and messages live, and engage with them without needing to tie a neat ribbon around them.

To want more from the world around us.

To enter into conversation with the shadow of ourselves.

To feed the parts of ourselves we keep small and tidy and satiated and under control.

Immersive spaces and interpretive art teach us to trust our hunger rather than to push it away. As a human—and as a creative person—engaging in the nonlinear blurriness of Dream Worlds is a way to resist the pressures of a culture that often rewards artistic ease and mass appeal and unthinking—a society that wants to ‘AI-summarize’ everything, that boils things down to its common denominators, that strives for a logic which eats itself and makes no room for nuance.

Mystery as creative mother

Life is too messy and too strange and too full of secrets to be summarized easily; art should explore the mysteries all around us—because Mystery is our Ultimate Mother. At our core, I think we are children wanting to play; this play is found in embracing the mythic and the irreducible, and in embracing duality without needing to solve it. We are at once terrible and capable of good. We are ourselves and simulacra. We rub our individualism up against culture’s pressures daily. Who the fuck are we? We are many, many parts and textures.

When art presents us with the grand opportunity to get lost, to be voracious in our curiosity, to question what it means to attain knowledge through feeling versus knowing, to be allowed to truly set our eyes upon the world around us, to settle into the wild chaos of existence, to watch the disparate strands braid themselves together, to build mythologies—it brings us home to ourselves as creative beings.

It is not comfortable to be lost, but we only grow when we find a way through the deep, dark woods at night. Or perhaps it’s less about the way and more about the woods.

A portal to a beyond-world

When SNM closed last year, I grieved heartily. Oh, I did. I think a lot of us are still grieving. It was a wound on my heart, and I bore its sorrow ~~

~~ that there would be no portal to enter felt like a death. That the doorway had been closed. That the deep, dark hum in the middle of Chelsea had been snuffed out. That whatever strangeness was happening within those walls would no longer be available to me.

I wanted to write a dozen posts, a Substack elegy, a letter to the creators. I wanted to write poems about its rooms, about how it would go on vibrating into the world even in its emptiness. I did not. Grief felt almost antithetical to how the art felt inside me: It felt eternal, like it had changed me and therefore could never be dead.

I think SNM gave many of us—and the performers alike—a second home, a ‘lodge’, a place to explore ourselves and our collective yearning. Yet over the past year—since it closed in NYC, and since re-watching Twin Peaks—I am reminded that nothing truly dies.

What art does for us is not dependent on the art or the creator. It is what it leaves behind—its residue, its atomic shadow, its eternal tremor. How many rooms did it unlock within us? Did it permit us to oscillate into other worlds, to know that there are other worlds, to stretch beyond ourselves? Does the ‘why’ even matter?

I always thought of attending SNM as an exercise in releasing the shackles of identity—reaching a sort of unified field, as Lynch might say. There, you could dip into a shared ocean of consciousness. It’s the same with any art that asks not to think harder but to let go and be taken out to sea by symbol and intuition.

Writing poetry that hasn’t been wrangled to death

As a writer, these works have transmitted clear lessons that I’ve both integrated and failed to integrate over the years. When I have created art that denies my authentic self—whether by erasing my shadow self, over-extending anchors, over-clarifying my interiority, self-questioning my patterns and symbols, or cleaning up language so that it doesn’t feel “too obscure” for the reader—I have felt a primordial sting of shame.

But when I’ve generously translated the creative currents within me without diluting them, I felt an existential, euphoric liberation.

What I have learned is that the writing doesn’t need to come with a map or key. Trust that the human heart will know its way. Indulge the mystery. Bend time. Let blue be green be garnet be gold. Resist the need to hold everyone’s hands, & to have your hands held. Let the underbelly speak. Get lost in the process. Push past the illusory. Relish in the lostness. Quiet the noise. Descend and translate. Look for the big fish in the deepest of waters.

You also never need to explain or justify your process. It’s not really about you or me. It’s bigger and deeper than us all. We are a splendid conduit when we get out of the way.

PS, if you like any of this, maybe you’ll enjoy my book, SAINT OF. It doesn’t want to hold your hand. It just wants to be lush and dreamy and dark and weird.

PSS, I’m co-hosting a Lynchian lit reading June 24 in Brooklyn. Join me and as we welcome a few readers and play Twin Peaks tunes. RSVP here or save the details.

In this Literary Divination series, I employ the ancient divinatory practice of bibliomancy—opening a book at random to see what wants to be said. What reveals itself is ours to interpret or feel through. Perhaps it’s prophetic, but for me it’s a ritual that deepens us into literature’s impact.

Bibliomancy’s roots are textured and global. Texts used in the practice of bibliomancy spanned Ancient Roman poetry to Iran’s Divan of Hafez. Holy texts are often used, though so are literary texts. Want to receive a new divination each week? Subscribe.

This week’s text: Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva

Whenever people ask, “Which poets inspired your own work?” I end up saying that my poetry is largely influenced by prose writers—maybe even more so than the poets. Clarice Lispector is part of my holy trifecta (others include Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras, whose work I also practiced bibliomancy with).

Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose family origins trace back to war-torn Ukraine, lost her mother as a child (I am always interested in writers whose childhoods asked them to raise themselves, in a way—writers who operate through and within a kind of lack). I’m also married to a Brazilian person, so there’s one slightly familiar doorway through which I enter her work.

Despite genre classifications, her work is a poetics of nonlinearity and interiority. On the line level, it is positively delicious. Água Viva—a “meditation on the nature of life and time”—asks you to surrender to a sea of questions, desires, prayers, thoughts, to the very mysteries that make up our world, to the spaces in between. And I fucking love that. If there’s anything I hate in literature, it’s being hand-fed.

Água Viva is an exercise in constructing meaning, but it’s collaborative between author and writer; it feels as though the author is whispering directly to you. Or that you’re watching a prayer as it’s being transmitted to the heavens.

I recently came across this Substack essay devoted to Lispector’s work. The author writes, “Água Viva feels to be an expression of existence….When reading from start to finish, one goes with the stream, one is It. When opening up to a random page, one is sticking in a hand and feeling the flow around their fingertips.” Perfect for bibliomancy.

Another Goodreads reviewer writes, “Like falling into a vein in the earth.”

I mean. I MEAN. Come on.

The divination

....the absense of God is an act of religion. At this very instant I am asking the God to help me. I'm needing. Needing more than human strength. I am strong but also destructive. The God must come to me since I haven't gone to Him. Let the God come: please. Though I don't deserve it. Come. Or perhaps those who least deserve Him need Him most. I'm restless and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside myself. It's just that I don't know how to use love. 

Prompts

• What are you begging for? Write the begging down.

• What can exist within absence and lack? Can beauty, hope, or meaning exist in the blank spaces?

• What does it mean to surrender? How can we surrender on the page? What must be let go of? What programming are we taught? How do we show up in creativity with full sincerity?

• Whose voice must be abandoned that we may hear our own?

• What does God say back? Are we our own Gods?

• What does it look like to straddle death & life at once?

Subscribe now

I saw Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” on a sticky, stormy evening, alongside two of my friends. F sobbed all the way home, and J was unimpressed. Neither had read Wuthering Heights, so they had no idea whether the movie had captured its essence.

On the walk home, I told them it wasn’t a retelling of Emily Brontë’s story (thinking, ‘what would she think of that dog scene!?), but that the book supplied a foundation over which a fantasy had been strewn.

“There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real,” Fennell explained once. “And there’s a version that I wanted stuff to happen in that never happened. And so, it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.”

Before I get to Heathcliff, I want to talk about the film. Put simply, I am not threatened by translation in art. Isn’t everything a translation, in some sense? I am fascinated with how and why we become obsessed with specific parts—pulling on feathers until something naked and new is born, a genetic mutation of the source material.

I studied English Language & Literature in undergraduate school and received a Master’s degree in creative writing. I would consider myself well-read, but I’m not a purist—I fucking loved “Wuthering Heights.” Devoured it. Wanted to pull it down from the screen and bathe in its visual poetics.

I adored the maximalist indulgence of it all: The claustrophobic trompe l’oeil of Thrushcross Grange, the human-haired doll, the absurd tower of liquor bottles, the fever-dream of ominous color palettes and strange adornments. Ribbons and flesh walls and cellophane dresses and bloodred floors.

Though Fennell has always made it explicitly clear (hence the title in quotation marks) that the film is not an adaptation, the sanctimonious mob of admonishment clobbered social media. It all felt a bit tiresome and performative to me; how could something as enduring, influential, and beloved as Wuthering Heights be in any way diluted by 2026’s “Wuthering Heights”?

(Do you need an award for reallllllllly liking the book? Here you go, you win. You like the book a lot.)

Subscribe now

Who gets to police the Wuthering Heights fantasy? Fantasy has never pretended to be anything but itself—amorphous, gossamer, built from daydreams—so why do we demand so much from it? Which version of a version of a version is allowable? And why must something be a replica for it to have value?

Human beings are fucked up. We fuck each other—and we fuck each other up. We are dirty and broken and harmful and cruel and desirous and woefully maladapted. Why not go full hilt into the would-be, could-be of Brontë’s world? Why not have a girl on her knees as a dog yapping? Why not have furtive sex in the back of a carriage?

Are we owed morality and cleanliness? If anything, the privilege of making art in 2026 is that we can explore, subvert, express, and re-engage emotions, ideas, societal expectations, and literary texts.

I understand the very fair criticism of the ongoing whitewashing of Heathcliff. However, the hand-wringing, pedantic reaction (“I’m not even going to watch it!”) toward the film because it wasn’t a straight adaptation was near-Draconian.

Again: It’s not an adaptation. To me, it’s an exploration of shadow. Whose shadow? Fennell’s? Society’s? Heathcliff’s? Cathy’s? All of the above?

‘I am Heathcliff.’

What I’m getting at is that the core of the story—the original text—is dark. At that altar of darkness is a bleak translation of reality: Otherness, isolation, obsession, possession, revenge, the relentless leveraging of emotional and literal control, generational trauma.

It’s Heathcliff’s darkness that has always had me on a leash. I enter the grounds of Wuthering Heights through the doorway of his orphanhood. As a former foster youth, I cannot read the book or watch the films without considering the abandonment and rootlessness that Heathcliff endured.

The orphan, or the fostered child, inhabits the gothic—isolation, otherness, psychological turmoil, and the decay of the life you knew before. And so, I cannot see Heathcliff as only a villain (and he is a villain—let this be stated clearly) or only a lover or only a gothic antihero.

I see Heathcliff’s inner child become monster. I see his terrible treatment of Isabella, his killing the dog (I had to, frankly, skip over this chapter on rereading), his control over the younger generations, and his violation of Cathy’s final resting place. But the wounded heart is a despicable thing, and I must afford him dimension…

….or maybe I want to afford myself dimension? I, too, was ruinous in the years during and after foster care. I was explosive. Cruel, even. I minimized others’ struggles and became viciously competitive in all that I did. In my early 20s, it was a challenge for me to keep friends. I abandoned people who were close to me. I lashed out emotionally. I cheated on lovers despite being jealous and anxious that they’d leave me.

“I have not broken your heart — you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

For me, self-destruction felt instinctual. I’d chase chaos and recreate loss in some attempt to “complete the story” or take control. It took years of being exposed to stability & practicing stability & undergoing therapy to understand that softness and slowness and integrity and intentionality are also safe places.

That obsession was a way to engage a void that tricks you into thinking it can be filled. That love could have boundaries. That my identity could expand. That I had an identity at all. The thing about ruin is that it is deeply seductive until there’s nothing left to destroy. What I’m saying is, there’s a Heathcliff in many of us—one that hopefully has the chance at transmutation.

Subscribe now

So where I see his cruelty, I also see the bodily and psychic violence of unbelonging and dislocation. I see it because I have experienced it.

I see Heathcliff’s erasure. Named after a child who’d died, Heathcliff’s own name is a way his personhood was blotted out. He is a stand-in. A dirty thing brought inside. A half. An other. An exotified, ‘wild,’ ‘dark’ little nobody from nowhere. An “it”—as the book describes him—indebted to an act of vague or debatable charity. Aren’t all orphans made to feel they must be endlessly grateful, keepable, good enough?

Near the end of the book, Nelly ponders Heathcliff’s strange behavior before his death, saying, “But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?” She then questions his origins—“imagining some fit parentage for him.”

She goes on to say that when he died, they knew not his age nor his surname, and so they buried him in the kirkyard "with the single word, Heathcliff” along with the date of his death. He died as he began: Othered, fragmented.

It begs the question: Had no one thought to ask him about his before-life?

That Brontë never addressed Heathcliff’s heritage or parentage directly—leaving it ambiguous at best—is a kind of origin-point erasure. (I also wonder if this lack of narrative only serves to further the trope that foster children are bad, broken, and monstrous).

It’s only through Catherine that Heathcliff becomes actualised; she was his only source of anything tender, a tether to what kept him from being insoluble. One can see why he held on, with all of his vicious, evil might, to his only sense of substantiality.

I see a story of a child unleashed into a violent home who found a single, soft hand to hold. Yet, he could not hold that hand forever, and so he replicated the very violence from which he sought refuge. Is this a love story? I would say no.

Yet while it may not be clean or good or healthy, it is his understanding of love.

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

Contemporary research has consistently shown that foster youth experience high rates of complex PTSD as well as “elevated rates of disorders, including aggression, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, major depressive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, academic issues, difficulties with emotional regulation, and reactive attachment disorder.” If this isn’t textbook Healthcliff, I’m not sure what is.

I can only imagine that children in the mid-1800s, when Heathcliff hypothetically would have been alive, experienced these same mental health issues, on top of living in a disease-ridden, overcrowded, and poverty-plagued society during the time of industrialization.

Parents died and left their children as orphans. Foundlings were abandoned by destitute, living parents and often forced to fend for themselves in cramped, dangerous workhouses. Often, they were malnourished, continuously abused, or disappeared at the hands of men paid to transport them to hospitals. And some orphanages wouldn’t even house children who needed care because both parents hadn’t technically died.

England’s “boarding out” system was set up to address the immense distress so many children were experiencing, but being housed and clothed couldn’t prevent the extreme, lifelong trauma of early life instability.

Orphan bodies have always been a container for society’s sicknesses. If you go down the orphanage rabbit hole, you’ll find theories suggesting that orphanage institutions were set up so the rich could exercise control over the poor—that “punitive conditions and isolation from family made possible by institutionalization would coerce children into obedient labor market behavior.”

For a child like Heathcliff, the threat of Cathy being taken away, or going away, would have felt like total obliteration.

Now, I’ve said a lot about Heathcliff. I should mention there is just as much to say about Cathy. One cannot deny that Cathy, in a way, has been exiled, too. Her mother dies. Her brother is a tyrant. And she is left to reconcile a split identity. You can see why Heathcliff and Cathy haunt one another so. But this is about my relationship with Heathcliff.

“Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

…only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!

Stories of orphans and foundlings endure in literature and film because people want to root for an underdog—the hero’s journey archetype and all that, and because the rootless child is a powerful reminder of the need for belonging, identity, and resiliency (as well as the consequences of going without).

There’s Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Cosette, Oliver Twist, Harry Potter, Batman, Cinderella, and on and on. There’s a romantic gloss often painted over their trauma. But I think people often forget that orphans, adoptees, and foster children are real people—removed from their parents for one reason or another, often forcibly cut off from their culture and identity.

There are currently 328,000 children in the foster care system (previous years saw 100,000+ more), living in limbo. Many report feeling as though they were kidnapped—taken from everything and everyone they know, only to be placed with strangers.

While some foster youth are put into stable, loving homes (whether permanently or temporarily), others are moved from home to home or are abused. Foster care isn’t a happy, magical fast-track toward adoption, either. Only about a quarter of foster youth are legally ‘available’ for adoption (not that adoption is the trauma-free experience people make it to be).

Many foster youth are in limbo waiting for reunification—living in strange homes in new schools in new cities, often without any of their belongings from their ‘before life.’ Many age out in the process, as I did.

There are thousands more children separated from their detained or deported parents and put into the American foster care system. It is reported that as many as 1,360 children have never been reunited with their parents years after the United States government forcibly separated them at the US border.

I know it’s uncomfortable to know this. I know you feel powerless. I know it’s just one of those terrible things, like war. Like poverty. Like murder. Or, you know, maybe you don’t even care. But many of us know what it feels like to be othered, to be discarded. This is pervasive and drives deep terror in society.

Not everyone who is traumatized traumatizes others. Not everyone who has experienced pain inflicts pain on others. Not everyone who commits abuse is worthy of redemption.

But Heathcliff’s story functions as a mirror, reflecting back to us our own failures: First, the avoidance of personal accountability and personal growth in many men. Also, the normalization of abusers in power. The lack of systemic resources available to parents and children in need. The lack of protection of women and children. The trauma compulsions we risk perpetuating when we are harmed, abused, and forgotten. The harm we cause as a society when we neglect at-risk populations. The lack of access to mental health care. The list goes on.

I believe literature has the capacity to deepen our empathy and broaden our scope of understanding. What if everyone had the chance to get the devil off their back? What if everyone were loved from the start? What can literature teach us about the world around us? About ourselves? What can film show us about the shadow? Why are we obsessed with this story, in its many iterations? Why do we defend the book so intensely? Because we all want to be loved, we want to belong, and we want to be seen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

~

NB; My newest book, SAINT OF, directly explores some of these themes—abandonment, obsessiveness, and monstrousness. Please do check it out.

Bibliomancy’s roots are textured and global. Texts used in Bibliomancy spanned Ancient Roman poetry to Iran’s Divan of Hafez. Holy texts are often used, though so are literary texts. Want to receive a new divination each week? Subscribe.

This week’s text: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

I visited Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum this past weekend to attend a vampirism pop-up that explored the fascinating connective tissues between medical history, social and cultural fear, and the vampire in literature (I’m working on an essay; stay tuned). Here, I picked up this delicious bright yellow copy—made to resemble the 1897 British first edition — complete with a yellow cloth cover and dramatic red lettering to indicate that this book was indeed very SMUTTY.

How could I not pull a line from it for this series?

***

Some context: I was a strange young girl, I just was—there’s no other way to say it. I wasn’t very social, and when I was with others, I felt quite alone within myself. Connecting with the other children didn’t come naturally to me, so I was often shy and even ashamed. To overcompensate for this, I was deliberately standoffish and sometimes downright rude. A girl-monster.

But books were a place I felt safe and real. I could soften into a book. The more fucked up the narrator or the darker the monster, the more contained I felt. I also felt a great empathy for certain creatures and villains—Frankenstein’s monster, for one, and Dracula for another. Why must we hunt them? Punish them? Maybe they were misunderstood? Who gets to decide what is good and what is evil—truly? The alluring premise of the Other is ever-present—presenting us with a mirror that is both comforting and revolting.

I remember hearing the line, “Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make” sometime in the 90s. Some iteration of Dracula was playing from a 90s box TV set—with the wolves and their nightsong pouring through the room. I was entranced.

I yearned for these dangerous, hungry worlds. When I was older and able to read the book, it set off a perpetual obsession with vampirism that has simply never been exsanguinated. See: I am an appetite: The Poetics of Nosferatu & Chasing Dracula through Transylvania.

The divination

It is a wild adventure we are on. Here, as we are rushing along through the darkness, with the cold from the river seeming to rise up and strike us; with all the muysterious voices of the night around us, it all comes home. We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways. Into a whole world of dark and dreadful things...

Prompts

How does it feel in the body to be seduced by the unknown?

What darkness are you avoiding in your creative work?

In the Venn diagram of fear and desire, where do you fall?

What are your monster aspects? How might you share language with the beast?

Subscribe now

Bibliomancy’s roots are textured and global. Texts used in Bibliomancy spanned Ancient Roman poetry to Iran’s Divan of Hafez. Holy texts are often used, though so are literary texts. Want to receive a new divination each week? Subscribe.

Subscribe now

This week’s text: Marguerite Duras’ The Sailor from Gibraltar.

I’ve read this book every few years, usually during the summer—as the book’s contents are hot and sticky and suffocating and erotic and hypnotic—and now, the book’s pages are tattered and stained. I have two copies, but this Pantheon Modern Writers copy is my favorite, with its butter-yellow cover and its retro font. It’s been carried in my bag—as you can see from its ripped spine—everywhere from Miami to Sicily, where I like to read it in dripping heat.

Duras has had a profound impact on my own work. Her prose is deeply human, vulnerable, and deliciously lyrical, even when largely minimalist (as in The Lover). But mostly I turn to her because she is unafraid to embrace lyricism and mood over tightly-wound plot. This book might be about a man’s travels around the world, but it’s also a study in interiority—thinking about one’s desires and existence, idling away in hot Italian cafes, obsession, sailboats as a metaphor for freedom from the workaday repetition, the eroticism of body and place.

The divination

The heat made the wine go to my head again, and I felt myself getting drunk once more. Once I stopped and made a conscientious effort to bring it all up. But I couldn't. I've never been able to vomit, or to moderate my desires – it's something that's always been missing from my education and has gotten me into no end of trouble. I tried again, but it was no good. So I dragged myself a bit further. I walked with difficulty, very slowly; the free man was as heavy as a corpse. 

Prompts

What desires are bursting within you?

What does openness and spaciousness feel like in your body?

Write a scene of being dizzied and hypnotized by heat, drunkenness, or some other state.

In the midst of my many-week convalescence with mononucleosis—during which I lived in a perpetual silent malaise, walking no further than from bed to kitchen sink and back again, as though I’d vanished from the world itself—I woke up to a delight:

The Poetry Vessel video podcast, a true gem, featured one of my poems, SAINT OF THE QUIET ENDLESS BURN from my book, SAINT OF.

Subscribe now

Let me tell you about the podcast itself, as it’s a wondrous thing. It’s hosted by Nathan Hassall, the Poet Laureate of Malibu. Episodes cover topics like Carl Jung and poetry, struggling with creative doubt, the neuroscience of poetics (aka, the “intuitive capabilities held within the vessels of our bodies”— yes, please), a poem for the LA wildfires, and so much more. Nathan is also a tip-top reader, which is the bonus of all bonuses.

In the episode covering my poetry, “Did We Summon a GHOST with a Poem?” Nathan and his wife, co-host Rachael Hassall, deep dive into my poem (they ask questions like, “Is this a poet’s love story?” I won’t ever tell!), while exploring its language, interrogations, and use of punctuation. They also made a gorgeous video out of the poem itself (huge thanks!).

They also tell spectral stories of their visit to England (where Nathan was raised). They visit a graveyard and bring home a ghost. They discuss Duende, how poetry changes our brains, Shelley, Romanticism, and the strangeness and mystery of poetry.

“The best poetry defies full explanation,” Nathan says.

I agree. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of the poet these days—and where strangeness fits into it all. (PS, The Poetry Vessell devoted an episode to strangeness in poetry, and the “numinous dark”).

I wonder, what is poetry expected to do for people? These days, we must be more than ourselves; we must also be avatars. We have to contend with the nonstop provocations and pressures: numbers, likes, self as brand, platform as proof of concept.

Poets especially feel a pressure to produce content—short poems, shareable lines, 20 slides that mix the profound with the irreverent; we must be professional enough to be taken seriously but aloof enough to seem cool. Our poems have to fit on screen, too, because fuck the lineation, right?

And preferably, the poems must be digestable by the masses. They must elicit cheap emotional responses. They must performatively tap into a zeitgeist or adhere to an aesthetic. They must be written with virality in mind.

But I want to be messy, to disappear sometimes, to be a fucking weirdo, to take up the whole page, to write rambling pieces like this one, to not be platform-perfect.

I don’t want to write a poem while thinking, “This is the kind of line Tumblr will get their hands on” (although it’s happened to me, and it’s very bizarre).

Of course, it’s not inherently bad (although I can already hear the “you’re an elitist” peanut gallery marching in). I am not a traditionalist. I am not a purist by any stretch. Culture shifts, and people come to art for different reasons. But what do we sacrifice when we write toward clicks and not toward the occult experience of it all?

I don’t believe poetry should perform mystery or deny clarity; rather, it simply shouldn’t force itself to accommodate mass appeal.

In a world where information is a click away, where AI threatens creative industry, and where instant gratification is the norm, I crave madness and weirdness. I crave big fucking language with a thousand doorways but no way out. Give me baroque or give me death! I want it bad. I want to read it and write it.

I want trickery, mystery, the unexplainable. I want poems that aren’t Instagrammable. I want to be bathed in blood. I don’t need poets to explain themselves, to write easy, to give me the keys, or to give me consolation. I am not even sure I come to poetry for consolation.

I think I come to poetry for the ineffable, really. The feeling that I’ve been splintered but can’t quite pull it out. I love the mental glitch, my mind a record skipping: What does this mean? I want, like Nathan says, to be haunted. I want to be able to excavate my own sapphires.

Maybe that’s the consolation? That we keep coming back, writing, reading, asking questions, hoping for a deeper and longer glimpse into the dark numinous, the endless well. The muddy stuff that isn’t made for tractable consumption.

Love your work, poets. Love it as it is, not as a molded thing.

Fortunately, as an editor, I read hundreds of submissions every month for Luna Luna. And for every handful of poems that dip me into the well only to explain I’ve been dipped into the well, there are dozens more that embrace an addictive haze. (There are so many great poets out there).

I think of a 2017 essay To Vibrebrate: In Defense of Strangeness by Johannes Göransson (whose poetry is among my very favorites) written in response to Matthew Zapruder’s essay, Understanding Poetry is More Straightforward Than You Think.

In it, Göransson tackles the dominant dismissal of the excessive and the strange:

“If we can leave behind the constant injunction of our gatekeepers and tastemakers to comply with aesthetics of the “straightforward,” we can embrace intense meadows and ecstatic riddles. Jäderlund, Hopkins, Zurita, Lynch, Jefferson all offer a different route, an ecstatic, visionary route that says: poetry is a strange force that can take over your minds and bodies, transport you out of what you think you know and take you into a new kind of mysterious knowledge.

Write what you don’t know.”

Now, please watch the episode and enjoy the podcast (ps, you can submit your own poems to be featured at The Poetry Vessel). And thanks again to Nathan and Rachael:

Every so often, a poet asks about self-indulgent poetry in a Facebook or Substack post. Most recently, opened a dialogue: “What makes a poem feel too self-indulgent?” I clicked, even though I knew I’d be annoyed at the responses. Goddamnit, I couldn’t stop myself. I am compelled by a heaven full of dead, self-indulgent poets. I love self-indulgence and find the rage against it silly (at best) and elitist (at worst).

My response?

“I like an indulgent poem. I am a fond of big feelings, big self-masturbatory language, and navel gazing — things people tend to find self-indulgent.

But like literally any other poem, the writing has to be good. You can be self-pitying and overwrought all you want (sometimes this is on purpose or is subversive), but if the voice is there and the lineation is good and the word choice is delicious, that's what matters.”

A lot of people agreed with me. Others defined “self-indulgence” as self-pity, over-emotionality, or self-focus in poetry. Oh, the HORROR.

Where Danowsky posed a fair question, others who’ve asked about self-indulgent poetry (usually, this just means confessional) over the years tend to be recruiting folks to join them in their open disdain, as if there’s safety in numbers. As if you aren’t an elitist if everyone else agrees with you, or something like that.

The message is: You’re a lazy, brooding idiot who doesn’t have the skill or expansiveness to look outside yourself! In many circles, there’s a caution against the navel gaze, a recoiling against the translation of the self. It’s self-obsessed. Sloppy. Juvenile, jejune, cringy. They just fucking hate it.

And they’re all obsessed with deciding whose poetry is real enough, serious enough, intellectual enough.

It reminds me of one 2009 piece on self-indulgence in poetry. The writer starts by mentioning Plath and Sexton’s ‘anguish’, rather condescendingly proclaiming, “Perhaps poets, more than others, are more prone to despair and depression. But if poetry is a form of self-therapy, then those who write therapeutic personal poetry theoretically should be healthier than the average person, right? Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work that way.”

(Imagine clicking publish on that.)

The writer says a poet’s “emotional exhibitionism” edges into “self-obsession,” which the author says isn’t “healthy” for poets, for it only “exacerbates our self-pity, and self-pity is a deadly disease.” Since when was poetry supposed to be “healthy” for poets?

So, what exactly is this writer’s lazy definition of self-indulgence? “Poets who write only and exhaustively about the minutiae of their daily lives — their precious memories of the suits their dead husbands wore, or the fluctuations of their consciousness while watching the breeze tip the heads of their backyard tulips.” He calls it a bore. Says poets need to be trained in “intense emotion and passion while avoiding egocentrism.”

They also say, “I am certain there was a tragic connection between the type of poetry they were writing, which might be called poetry of self-indulgence, and their psychological disorders.”

It’s almost as if people don’t want to hear from people who live at the margins.

A 2010 piece in Brevity by Lisa Gill explored the power of the navel gaze (especially when it comes to illness)—and the disdain that critics have against it. “I firmly believe that those of us who have experienced disability or trauma, dysfunction or simple oddities, possess knowledge that, no matter how particular to the individual, speaks to the larger human condition.” She also writes, “In my readings and experience as a student, it’s not unusual to find critique of bad memoir muddied with implied critique of difficult and even taboo subjects, as if the content of the life were the issue, as if an experience can be too marginal.”

And that’s usually what it’s about, right? The poetry I’ve seen called self-indulgent is often about those marginalized experiences. It makes me wonder why it’s so bad to see through someone else’s eyes? To find yourself in someone else’s dialect? Is a poem only worthy when you can extract something of yourself from it?

It makes me wonder where exactly the line between self and self-obsession occurs. Who decides? I also have to wonder if it’s the reader’s shortcoming. Do they not contain the empathy, curiosity, and hunger needed to feast on someone else’s inner landscape?

It’s often men who take issue with the navel-gazing and the confessional. A 2017 Lit Hub piece examined the sexist backlash against confessional poetry. Author Sarah Gerard said, “I spent many years of my life feeling ashamed for having feelings, and I’ve always felt like I just feel things more than other people. Which is to say, it’s a myth that I carried around about myself for many years, and now I realize that everyone probably feels these things just as intensely…”

And that’s the point, right? We’re writing ourselves, but we are also mirrors, even when that's not our intent. We’re writing to let others know they have permission to feel things. That we’re not alone in our obsessions and the hugeness of feelings and the volatility and the immense ecstasies and the great romances of the moment.

Melissa Febos added, “The next time you’re in a fucking MFA workshop or standing outside of a reading and some dude is just talking and talking and uses the word “navel-gazing,” can you just be like, “Shut the fuck up?”

I’m getting to maybe the most important question here:

BUT IS IT A GOOD POEM?

I would argue that execution is always more important than content. If a poem about your dead husband’s suit and your backyard tulips (which sounds GREAT to me, btw) is well-written, with clever imagery and thoughtful lineation, is that not enough? Or is its content the very thing that degrades it? Even the most basic of poetry workshops tells us not to judge a poem because you don’t like what it’s about.

If the language is great (let’s consider Sexton or Plath), I do not buy the idea that a poem written from within the eye of the navel gaze itself undoes itself. You can master a poetry of self-expression and excavation just as you can master stanzas about the natural world.

You can shape and chisel the interior gilding. You can also let the poem be extravagantly of the self, fuck concision. Both poems can work when done well. There is no one kind of poem that works or doesn’t work. There’s really just bad writing. This should be obvious.

Taking self-obsession off the table would also be dreadfully boring, no?

TLDR; I do think poems should be a photograph of the interior, a space to express the liminality of being alive, of being a complex human on a complex planet. I do think a poet should feel free to get their hands dirty with themselves. I have never met a confessional poem that wasn’t also universal, and to some extent, political.

Even the most outward-facing poem is strained through the poet’s voice. That’s the beauty of poetry. Every poet comes to the page naked. They can’t help it. They are left behind.

Not for nothing, but there are other poems to take issue with. So many bone-tired, insipid lumps of dead poetry out there. Oh, god. There are so many saccharine Hallmark card quotes dressing themselves up in poetry’s clothing. There’s the poem that does nothing, says nothing, goes nowhere. There’s the poem that takes no risk. There’s the poem that spoon-feeds the reader into oblivion, relatable to the point of utter banality—its algorithmic shareability as hackneyed as a corporate slogan.

I’d much rather the poem that spills its messy, fucked up guts. I’d much rather poetry be a place where poets (or their narrators) can show up as themselves, where women can scream into the abyss, where readers can be shown an epicurean world where obsessions and emotions and secrets aren’t inherently ugly, where ugliness is beautiful. Where the self is elevated to the baroque.

I’d argue that just one poem has the ability to witness—and even honor—the ugliness of the collective.

The point is the truth. The point is the loudness and the gilding and the stickiness. The point is the rose garden. The point is the belly ache. The point is what broke you, what hurts you, what haunts you. The point is the self on a pedestal, the self in repose, the self as fallen angel. Because the self is the house is the community is the country is the world.

But you know, I’m biased. My last book, SAINT OF, is a series of oracular poems to the saints of the self. I guess I’m self-indulgent. I do not apologize.

I am not sorry.

Today, Courtney Leigh’s poetry debut, Courtney & the Haunted Bong, is out for preorder. And what a book it is. As some readers may know, Courtney edited and published my book, SAINT OF (through White Stag Publishing), so it’s an honor to interview her about her work. This poetry collection feels downright oracular. It is unexpected and visceral and deeply vulnerable, all through its haze of green, mythic smoke.

Courtney, tell us everything about the book.

Courtney & The Haunted Bong is a visceral, surreal, & multisensory descent into the hazy thresholds of consciousness, where the veil between dimensions is as thin as smoke. This euphoric poetry collection follows Courtney as a seeker, stoner, & vessel who embarks on a kaleidoscopic odyssey sparked by the mysterious relic she inherits: a mercurial glass bong, etched with sigils & vibrating with ghostly presence. When I wrote this book, I was coming out of a transformative period in my life.

Each poem is like hindsight, harkening to the banished memories & the ones I’ve embraced. In the process of unwinding my tale, I came to realize that I was embarking on a psychotropic journey that was surreal & exciting, even in its most heartbreaking moments. I wanted to take readers on a similar, evocative journey that would stick with them—skin to blood, bone to spirit.

You can summon the spirit of your work by throwing three objects into the fire. What are they?

• Haunted Bong

• Blood Lemons

• Astral Sea

Subscribe now

As part of Ruminations, I always want to know what writers are obsessing on—literary or otherwise. What is influencing, inspiring, or driving you to create, to think, to feel?

Recently, I’ve been inspired by psychedelic experiences that dissolve ego & perception, opening portals to new ways of seeing the world. I also draw creative fuel from horror films led by complex female protagonists who challenge traditional gender roles not because they "act like men," but because they break the mold entirely, embodying power, tenderness, intuition, & rebellion in equal measure. That intersection between altered states and subverted archetypes is what inspired a lot in the creation of this book.

I am interested in how writers are showing up to themselves, the world, or their communities. How does your writing intersect with, critique, or reflect current realities and the cultural landscape?

I like to think of my work as an act of reclamation & rebellion, a way to untangle generational trauma & name what has gone unnamed. I search for the patterns within me, the systems around me, & the strange, aching beauty that lives between them. I write a ceremony for truth, transformation, & liberation. I write to imagine better worlds, to evoke feelings where numbness has settled, to remind someone they are not alone (sometimes, to remind myself that I am not alone).

These poems, at their core, are about resistance against erasure, authoritarian control, & the slow violence of conformity.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the barriers or challenges of the writing life: Are there experiences you've had that make writing harder? Or, do you have a perspective on writing and publishing that doesn’t get much airtime?

I think being an editor sometimes makes it difficult to write because I am always focusing on other writing & editing books & by the time I get to my own writing, I feel drained. To combat this, I find other creative outlets or build rituals to create space for writing. Inspiration is also something that, when it comes to me, it nags at me until I act on it. I literally cannot ignore the call.

I would also like to mention the box that poetry tends to put us all in via academia, theory, rule-making, etc. This book was about breaking those norms or expectations in poetry. I went through all the "traditional" academic routes of Poetry, getting a BA in Poetry & my MFA in Poetry, but I am anything but a traditional writer & editor. I built an entire press around this idea because I was sick of tired, traditional methods of writing & means of publishing. In my undergrad, Sean Nevin gave us a list of "what-not-to-dos" in poetry, then told us to break all those rules. So, to me, poetry has always been about breaking the rules, not adhering to someone else's whiskey-induced academic epiphany.

Academia is another conditioning I had to break from. After my MFA, I read something Donald Dunbar said on the lines of unlearning all that you learned in your MFA—to learn those things is to learn how to break the mold of tradition & theory. That stuck with me too. I will always be a rule breaker, a poetic rebel with such a cause.

So what are you reading right now?

I've been reading a lot of fiction recently, so here are three recent books that took a piece of me with them & left something behind: I Who Have Never Known Men, The Last Unicorn, & Wicked.

As I ask everyone, what’s your sun sign, and how does it show up in your writing life?

I think being a cancer, I am constantly processing emotions, so a lot of times I am working them out in my writing by deconstructing certain feelings or experiences in order for me to—in turn—learn something new about myself. That’s why a lot of my writing seems dramatic or deeply felt—because it is a deconstruction process of the emotional body, & that can be hella messy.

Readers can get a glimpse into Courtney’s work by reading “Girl Dinner” at Villain Era Lit. Also, preorder a copy of Courtney & the Haunted Bong. You can also pick up a “Sing along with the Green Chorus,” soy wax candle (made by Marvel + Moon). It blends bright, citrusy bergamot with earthy hemp, evoking the astral hazes of Courtney & the Haunted Bong.

Courtney Leigh is Editor at White Stag Publishing & the author of the chapbook the unrequited <3<3 of red riding hood & her lycan lover from Dancing Girl Press. Her favorite revenge stories are the fuck around & find out kind, like Becky or Ready or Not. If she’s not head to toe covered in blood at the end, it’s not revenge enough.

I have never figured out how to live a life I can tolerate with my mental health that also gives me ample writing time. But I try, and I do my best. I am allowing myself to be a slow writer with the goal of writing the kind of book I want to read. — Letitia Trent

Tell us all about Summer Girls, your newest novel out with Agape Editions (who publishes such wonderful work, like your own!).

Summer Girls is a kind of adult problem novel/family drama/dark psychological character study of two young women who cross paths with a bohemian family that changes the trajectory of their lives forever.

I wanted to write something that could be a 'page turner,' but that's also emotionally engaging, a kind of book club novel with a lot of thorny "issues" but also something alive and ambiguous. I wrote it because I just got very curious about how something can change the trajectory of a life.

Can one connection change a person so much that they become unrecognizable to themselves, to the people they love? The idea that this could happen is terrifying to me, so I had to write about it.

In a way, this is more a horror novel than any of the other supposedly horror things I've written. I'm currently working on a book about the sole survivor of a serial killer who happens on a body and becomes obsessed with solving the crime. In this book, I'm curious about true crime, how we consume it, and the effect it has on survivors to see your own story fictionalized and made into entertainment. I also just love a novel about a woman who is losing her mind due to an obsession—absolutely my favorite genre.

“Can one connection change a person so much that they become unrecognizable to themselves, to the people they love? The idea that this could happen is terrifying to me, so I had to write about it.” — Letitia Trent

You can summon the spirit of your work with three things or objects. Name those objects.

Ooh, I like this question.

• A mud puddle that reflects a tangle of electrical wires and a cloudy sky beyond.

• The film Stealing Beauty (in the form of a VHS tape.)

• Chipped black nail polish.

As Ruminations is the name of this literary interview series, I want to know: What are you obsessed with right now—literary or otherwise? What is influencing, inspiring, or driving you to create, to think, to feel?

I am reading the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, years later than everyone else, and I am astounded by these books. I've never read anything that describes what it feels like to be a smart kid who comes from poverty. These novels take place in a completely foreign place and time, but still, I relate so much to Elena, the watcher, who gets out of her neighborhood but can never get the neighborhood out of her.

Obsessed with the album Luminescent Creatures by Ichiko Aoba and Sincerely, by Kali Uchis.

Also obsessed with watercolor and painting the most basic bitch wildflowers. I am loving having a pre-teen - my son is 11 and getting to share art, literature, and FILM with him as been an enormous joy in my life. Having a child is an insane experiment that it still feels strange that somebody let me do. How did they let me walk out of that hospital with this baby, as weird and incompetent as I am? What a miracle.

I am doing Morning Pages and trying my best to actually complete The Artist's Way and damn, it actually works.

I am always interested in how writers are showing up to themselves or the world or their communities. How does your writing intersect with, critique, or reflect current realities and the cultural landscape?

I am really trying to connect with writers who I admire more. I have so little time, but I want to make sure I let people who are alive and writing know how much their work inspires me.

I am exchanging work with other writers and trying my best to not lose those connections, as much as I sometimes want to fall off the face of the earth. I do love Substack and how many authors I've discovered there. Community is something I'm working on and struggle with, but I am so grateful for the people who can hang with me despite my limitations (being a weirdo who struggles with believing anyone actually wants to hear from me).

What are some of your thoughts on the barriers or challenges of the writing life: Are there experiences you've had that make writing harder? I'm interested in platforming complex thoughts on MFA, money, gender, race, parenting, disability, access, time, mental health, etc.

I grew up extremely poor in rural Vermont (Bennington) and Oklahoma. When I was a preteen and teenager, I already had a passion for literature and secretly wanted to a be a writer, though that was not a desire I told anyone about. It felt embarrassing to want something that I knew was not meant for me, who came from a family of housekeepers and factory workers.

My mother didn't graduate from high school and I barely knew anyone who had gone to college. When I graduated from high school and got married, I got serious about writing. I wasn't home anymore, I didn't have to hide my writing (my mom did not let me have a private life, so I didn't start writing until I had a home of my own), and I immediately got serious about poetry. I took a year off between graduating and going to college, a year where I worked as a nanny for a very dysfunctional family and spent most of my time reading and writing and posting my poems to a discussion board called The Critical Poet, where I learned so much.

“When I was a preteen and teenager, I already had a passion for literature and secretly wanted to a be a writer, though that was not a desire I told anyone about. It felt embarrassing to want something that I knew was not meant for me, who came from a family of housekeepers and factory workers.” — Letitia Trent

By the time I got to college, I was writing and reading poetry like it was my job. I did well in college and applied to 20+ MFA programs. I got into a few and picked Ohio State University, where I got a full ride with a stipend teaching position. I loved the MFA experience, I am so grateful for it and for my instructors and am so grateful for the space I had to write so early in my life, but I did constantly feel the class differences between me and my peers.

I recognized that so many people already lived in this world of possibility that I felt I had just now clawed myself into. I worried that my work was derivative, clumsy, that I would reveal my lack of education when I didn't know when to use "were" versus "was," for example, or that I didn't quite know how to use commas at all (I figured it out just in time to teach Comp 101, ha!). I felt that my poetry revealed me as a hick, backwards, some girl from Oklahoma who got married at 17 and had only recently learned that you are supposed to have sheets on your bed (as a teenager, I slept on three old couch cushions on the floor) or how to do laundry or open a bank account.

I think some of my "failure to launch" as a writer was psychological — I felt a lot of invisible barriers. I shut down opportunities before they could even occur because I assumed certain things just were not for me, but many of them were material. I did not enter the job market in academia right after the MFA, as many of my peers did, because I knew I was limited by where I could live. I couldn't live in a major city; I couldn't imagine us being able to get an apartment anywhere that wasn't absolutely podunk.

We had a shitty car and my husband managed a videogame store. I also just couldn't see myself in that role — I didn't trust my education, felt acutely that I just wasn't ready for it. I also had a lot of undiagnosed mental illness at the time - intense social anxiety that kept me from connecting to my peers or taking advantage of opportunities I should have taken. I was so consumed by anxiety that I would make myself sick after many of my classes.

I sought out therapy for the first time during this time, I was distressed by one of my instructors so much so that I remember breaking down in tears in a session, unable to speak, absolutely blubbering. I cannot, for the life of me, remember what he said or did, but it killed my confidence in my writing and myself for years.

I didn't trust myself as a writer, and I had no cushion and no family in my life to support me or tell me that whatever happened, it was not the only judgment of who I was. So my husband applied to grad school and got in and we lived off of his student loan money and what I could make adjunct teaching and working part-time for the Town Manager's office in Brattleboro, Vermont.

I have since gotten treatment for my mental health and work in the mental health field, but I do really feel that the need for money and fear of losing security has restrained me in both small and big ways, ways I feel I am only just now understanding. I did a lot of editing of what was possible for me early on, I didn't even know I was doing it. I reduced my hopes and goals, I always settled, and I did not aim big or high because that felt like a silly thing to do: What if I failed? Then there would be nothing and I'd live in poverty, something I was determined to never do.

So I've always worked multiple jobs, often for less pay than I should have, due to desperation. I often wonder what my life would look like if I'd actually tried to get an academic job or even trusted my passion for writing early on, if I'd been more aggressive about publishing, if I'd trusted myself enough early on to believe that I could be a "real" writer. But I also know myself well enough to know that if I'd gotten a position at a university at 26, I would have been far too mentally ill to hold that job.

This is a long story to say that I think there are some inherent struggles for people who come from a poor background in writing, barriers that have been written about more thoroughly than I could, but the biggest one for me is that I've never been able to trust myself or my talent or even my hard work enough to take a chance on myself and let go of the security of always having multiple jobs.

I have always had the spectre of my aging, animal-hoarding parents and their inevitable decline that I'm going to somehow have to take care of in the back of my mind. I also have the challenge of my Complex PTSD brain. I am so much better than I was, and I have worked hard on it, but that time it took to get well was most of my 20s and 30s. I have a child now, responsibilities, a house payment that eats up most of my paycheck every month.

I have never figured out how to live a life I can tolerate with my mental health that also gives me ample writing time. But I try, and I do my best. I am allowing myself to be a slow writer with the goal of writing the kind of book I want to read. I am okay with no longer being a young, sexy writer on the rise. That idea of success does not work for me. I'm not an emerging writer anymore, though I feel like I finally am emerging into the kind of person who can write the books I truly want to.

“I am allowing myself to be a slow writer with the goal of writing the kind of book I want to read. I am okay with no longer being a young, sexy writer on the rise. That idea of success does not work for me. I'm not an emerging writer anymore, though I feel like I finally am emerging into the kind of person who can write the books I truly want to.” — Letitia Trent

What are you reading and loving right now?

I just finished Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay, one of my favorite contemporary horror writers. Have also been reading the online journals Ergot. and Hex and am currently obsessed with short fiction/flash fiction and the flexibility of that form. I am reading C.D. Wright's old poetry collections—a fellow Arkansas poet (I've lived here for eight years, officially feel like I can say I love Arkansas, despite some of the downsides). Alice Notley's recent death made me revisit her work; she's a genius. And of course, the Neopolitan novels!

As I ask in every interview, what is your astrological sun sign, and how do you think this shows up in your work?

Libra! So, I go in phases with how I feel about being a Libra. I am very vain and beauty-obsessed. But I also am very much not a social butterly, not particularly social at all. I do love some balance, though.

Read an excerpt of Letitia’s writing over at her Substack, where she writes about her friend and family member Cyndi, who died in late January of 2025, and pick up a copy of Summer Girls.

Letitia Trent is the author of three novels, including Summer Girls and Almost Dark, and two full-length poetry collections. Her poetry and short stories have most recently appeared in Biscuit Hill, Figure 1, Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself, and Smartish Pace. Her short story “Wilderness” was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and later appeared in Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8. She lives in a haunted Ozark mountain town with her family and works in the mental health field. She can be reached via her substack Tell Me Something Good or Bluesky.

Rot.

My first home was on Church Street in Rahway, New Jersey. My grandparents were still alive, just about. They lived downstairs in a small apartment; we lived above them. My bedroom looked into a powder-blue Victorian where an old woman could be seen, passing through the rooms. She was real, but she became a ghost.

These were the years when a year felt like a thousand, stretching on; nothing could be lost. My parents were still together. Everything hadn’t fallen apart yet. Summer was all mine, and it was eternal. My mother would put a plastic wading pool out front on the lawn; she could watch me from the window. In my sparkly purple bathing suit, I’d pretend I was a mermaid. I’m still a mermaid. Then I’d go into my grandparents’ house, feet all wet, and ask for potato chips and tomato juice. “I think I can arrange that,” my grandmother would say. It would be arranged. I was loved.

The Victorian had a wrap-around porch, long windows, chipped frame paint. When the old woman living there died, the city removed her belongings. The front doors were flung open as the men carried her life out to the curb. Tubes of paint and books and frilly cushions, I remember. I wanted to rummage through her life, but my mother wouldn’t let me. The scent that bled from the doorways was of rot, of mildew, of mold—a life that was old and sick and tired and lonely, and without fresh air. Nowadays, that smell is the smell of childhood, and first knowing death, the way a life can be so easily discarded. The way a house can last forever in memory.

Subscribe now

Medicine.

As a child, I was severely allergic to poison ivy. I spent many nights in the hospital, where my mother happened to work as a nurse’s assistant. The first time I had an allergic reaction, I’d gone fishing with my father deep deep deep in the woods. By the time I returned home, what started as one red, itchy welt became full-body hives—everywhere. I had a problem breathing. I was also frightened of needles, so it took nurses and doctors and my parents to wrangle me down—screaming, exorcism-like, twisting in the ER’s white sheets—so they could give me a steroid IV. I am still that girl today; I loathe the feeling of powerlessness.

This all happened many times over the years, until the allergy sort of disappeared with age. When I was a bit older, around adolescence, I played often in the woods with friends, making elixirs for magic spells, plucking unknown plants and flowers from shrubs. These were the days when I was young enough not to fear the consequences.

I loved being outdoors, making rituals, standing under the gaping moon, threading the dandelions through my hair. I did not have a childhood of computers. Again: Giant, weeping welts formed across my face and body. Brown, peeling strips of skin would come off if I itched myself. My face was two times its size. My mother had to apply steroid cream to my whole body—but this time I was near adolescence and more aware of my body. It was the first time I felt like I had to “cover up,” and yet I was so struck with pain that I had to let her apply the lotion to my back and neck and armpits.

In bed, I asked her, “Mom, am I still pretty?”

Today, she tells me she answered yes, but she wept for me in the bathroom as my eyes were sewn shut by ivy.

The scent was clinical, sharp, intoxicating. Unforgettable. There must have been a fragrance included in the mix, because sometimes I’ll catch it on the street. Maybe it’s an additive in soap or detergent, but I when catch it on the wind I’m suddenly I’m a child again and I’m playing in the woods and I’m being loved and I’m wailing in the emergency room. It’s strangely comforting when I find the scent in the wild. It’s like time is a circle.

Acqua di Giò.

It was the year 2003. I was 17 and in foster care in a new town in a new house with new foster parents. Somehow, my then-best friend, X, and her rich family invited me to join them on their cruise to Bermuda. It was generous and dreamy and incredible. I’d never left the country, and rarely left New Jersey.

We somehow had convinced my foster parents to let me go, too, with the permission of my social worker. I still wonder how this all worked.

We sailed through darkness and emerged somewhere bright and turquoise and far away from my sorrow.

X had a brother. He was very tall and very skinny and painfully emo; I loved his long hair and his forearms as he drove his jeep and his record collection. He was broken by his neglectful but wealthy mother, and I was broken by family seperation. I found a sort of mirror in him. And then the inevitable happened. X’s brother and I snuck shots from the many cruise bars and we laid out on the deck and we danced in the ballrooms and we ate at the all-night sushi lounges and we told long stories. And then we ended up together through my first year of college.

I broke his heart.

During dinners on the cruise, X’s brother would wear Acqua di Giò. In my memory, it’s that scent and those big dining halls with the panoramic windows. All of us watching the ocean waves move us like ribbons, the expanse of dark blue like a womb. The cologne smelled like sea salt and fresh linen and sex appeal then. There was a rumor that it was formulated with pheromones; I believed it. When it lingered in the air, I felt a longing in my throat.

Today, that cologne just smells like drunken frat boys on a night out in Long Island, but for me it’s also ships at sea and winding Bermuda car rides and the long years of foster care and a boy who loved me through my darkness.

Tell me about your forever-scents in the comments below.

I've been here four summers now. Last summer, I married the love of my life here. Four summers of fever-dream heat and the clobbering of bodies and retreating into quiet sidestreet bars or vaulted cathedrals. Four summers of trying to understand why I'm so hungrily drawn to this place. What does it want to tell me? What is it that I want to hear? What is it I haven't heard yet?

Even my husband says, “You keep running back to the island. One day you’ll want to go somewhere else, right?” And I do. I do want to go somewhere else. But there’s something here I just can’t ever be done with.

Some people hate Palermo, viscerally. They really hate it here. It’s the garbage, the graffiti, the chaos, the screaming markets. Whatever, I get it. But I see past all of that. I see the beauty in the decay and wildness. I see myself in its grit.

Where else do you see an ancient temple turned basilica turned mosque turned cathedral, or find the waters of Isis?

And I see my family, my face, my names: Basile, Lipari, Mastroianni, Di Marco. Somewhere in the streets along the port, in Kalsa, the ghost of my grandmother trods along, alongside all of her people who led to this moment by making me. People who left only for me to return. Time like an ouroboros.

The ghosts are perhaps what lure me back, with their outstretched, salty hands, with the same love of ancient waters and those rituals which compel me and always have—something that is cellular and inherent in me—the strange things I do and always done and have never named before. They come from this island.

Maybe this is what it is? I am looking for a reflection. I am seeking an origin point.

But I also feel comfortable in the unknowableness, that the mystery of it all is enough. That the search is the process, and the process is the lifeblood of meaning. That I am not at the center of the mystery at all.

But I am not only of the island, with its Saharan winds, Lo Sirocco, and its weeping saints and prehistoric grottoes of ritual dance and sacrifice, and its mountain secrets.

My grandfather was from Calabria, on the mainland, from a small comune with ancient Greek roots, destroyed at least once by an earthquake. Recently, I was given documents from a distant cousin about my grandfather's family:

My paternal great-grandfather, Domenico, was a man of the earth. He was a gardener, a man of soil and flowers. I've been told he was kind and loving.

He and my great-grandmother secretly married against the will of the family (which was rare in those days!). When they emigrated to the US, they lived on cemetery grounds. I imagine him pruning tombstone flowers and trimming hedges, making pathways. Speaking a dialect of dirt that spans the sea.

Those records say he would make my great-grandmother garlands of love, strung together from graveyard flowers. (She wasn't a fan, it seems; too macabre). And yet, he did so because that was the language in which he shared his love.

I suppose I inherited a heart that could find beauty in the flowers of the dead. I suppose I am here to pluck the flowers of the dead, to wear them as garlands, to channel them into language.

Fittingly, I am here co-leading a writing immersion with @radicisiciliane. I am here to write about life and death and the sensuality of time, the eroticism of decay, the gorgeousness of memento mori. My bloodline is but a blip in time, yet it is time itself. As we all are. I find comfort in this.

Maybe I will write an answer toward myself. Maybe I’ll find a bit more of the answer.

My Substack began as a way to reject the literary pathways we’re taught to take.: Everything must be polished. Everything must be submitted to a literary journal. Everything must have a why. But that doesn’t feel sincere to me in the way it used to. These days, I am called confess my strangest and most compulsive thoughts and nostalgias and pinings. But I also wanted to share other voices, especially as my magazine, Luna Luna, remains on hiatus.

So begins the author interview series I’ve titled Ruminations—which explores the literary things we obsess on, the barriers we face as creatives, and a hint of the magical. We’ll begin today with Kailey Tedesco, who is a friend, who I’ve worked with at Luna Luna, and who I’m proud to call my press sibling at White Stag.

Kailey’s work offers the lyrical and the mystical. Her poems are superbly incantatory and lush. I am always interested in the intersection between the Otherworld and our physical realities—and hers is a poetry that explores that threshold: motherhood and mental illness are woven alongside the lore of the woods—and the strangeness of the Jersey Devil.

I grew up in New Jersey and spent long, hot summer days at my grandparents’ house in Egg Harbor. At one point, they lived on the edge of the Pine Barrens, the dark, eerie, and dense expanse that is home to many legends, and whose strange call somehow still lives within me. I urge you to read about these legends—and to order Kailey’s book MOTHERDEVIL.

Tell us all about your newest book, MOTHERDEVIL (White Stag Publishing). I adore your work and want to hear all about what inspired this collection.

Kailey Tedesco: MOTHERDEVIL is my most recent full-length poetry collection. I grew up in Burlington County, NJ—right in the heart of the Pine Barrens. The Jersey Devil legend was not legend to me as a child, but a complete truth. I referenced it constantly and it is one of those stories that would shape my identity my whole entire life long. I've wanted to write about it for years and years and years. And I tried! No matter how much I researched its origins or ruminated on its implications, I couldn't find an access point that felt right.

That changed immediately after I found out I was pregnant. I was struggling with pretty severe antepartum anxiety and I was feeling so much shame around that. I wrote a poem from the POV of Mrs. Leeds—the Jersey Devil's mother—and it was, in every way, a liberation. It gave me the permission I needed to more openly explore the anxiety and shame I was feeling during my pregnancy. I wrote more and more from her POV, all through my pregnancy and well into my postpartum period. I'm a big fan of persona poetry, but this experience allowed me to explore, with compassion, all of the fear and confusion that comes with parenthood.

Through Mrs. Leeds, I could say what I thought I wasn't supposed to say. It was an exercise in complete understanding and empathy—with Mrs. Leeds and also with myself. From this, I gained support and learned how to better offer it. It was, as a whole, one of the most powerful writing experiences of my life.

What are you obsessed with right now—literary or otherwise? What is influencing, inspiring, or driving you to create, to think, to feel?

Kailey Tedesco: Last year, I was lucky to get the opportunity to teach a course on the discourse surrounding horror cinema to college freshmen. I've always loved horror films, but getting to teach them has been a whole new level of inspiration. I love watching and unpacking Texas Chainsaw Massacre at 9:30ish in the morning with a group of brilliant and optimistic students. It's truly the best.

I'm also obsessed with the taboo as it's communicated through the Gothic, twee-horror as a mini-movement, the abject and its limitations, Spiritualism (always and forever), and all the world's kitschiest destinations (love hotels, weird theme parks, waterbed stores hanging on for dear life, etc. etc.)

You can summon the spirit of your work in three objects. What are they?

Kailey Tedesco: I think every collection would be slightly different, but MOTHERDEVIL would be:

• A pine needle (of course)

• a Frozen Charlotte dol

• a death's head gravestone.

I am always interested in why writers show up to themselves and the world around us. How does your writing intersect with, critique, or reflect on current realities and the cultural landscape? Are you writing to address a bigger issue? Are you writing as a form of resistance? Are you writing to simply bring beauty back to the world? Are you bringing awareness to something? Or, are you writing to get through something?

Kailey Tedesco: I have pure-OCD, GAD, and PMDD—I am in a constantly going through it to varying degrees, haha. Writing has always been a way for me to work through and negotiate unwanted intrusive thoughts. I love horror cinema for similar reasons. Through these fictions, I can engage with the unwanted in ways that feel safe and empowering.

Talk to me about your thoughts on the challenges of the writing life—what do you think are the barriers to your craft or to a fulfilling literary life in general? Are there experiences you've had that make writing nearly impossible? How are you working through them?

Kailey Tedesco: Oof. I think the barriers, unfortunately, multiply as I get older. Or perhaps they are just multiplied in this particular phase of my life. I feel that things like this--this interview, our conversations, conversing with and supporting other writers--are the ways through it. I wish I had better answers, but when it comes to creating and publishing, I've learned to prioritize community above all else. The rest is something I'm still working to figure out.

What are 3 books or authors you'd recommend or that you’re loving right now?

Kailey Tedesco: Sick Houses by Leila Taylor, Model Home by Rivers Soloman, The Lamb by Lucy Rose, Childgrave by Ken Greenhall, Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, and Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix are all very recent faves. Also, not a book, but I'm entirely invested in the Hell House LLC movies these days. I can't wait for the new theatrical release!

What is your astrological sun sign (and how do you think this shows up in your work?)

Kailey Tedesco: Aries! I've learned to embrace and make space for anger in my work in the past few years. This has to be the Aries showing up more explicitly than it ever has in the past.

Read an excerpt from Kailey’s newest work at Hunger Mountain.

I am weeks away from trailing ‘Dracula’s’ ghost through Romania’s Carpathian Mountains when my father calls to tell me he’d been diagnosed with polycythemia vera (PV), a blood cancer marked by the overproduction of red blood cells.

My father must be bloodletted regularly, he says; his oncologist siphons the cells from his body in a procedure meant to keep his very life force from killing him. PV is rare; the cause is unknown, although it’s believed to stem from a malignant transformation in the DNA itself.

The word Cancer, like a slap to the face. The dark hovering thing. As a poet, I made the obvious connections: The blood is the life. And the death.

I ask my father if he will be ok. He says he has so much more living he wants to do. He craves aliveness; even over the phone from Kentucky I can hear that. I spent so much of my time being awful, he says. Now that I’m finally doing the right things, I don’t want to be cheated of that time. I want as much time as I can get.

My father has carried a darkness in him since he was born—and he passed that darkness to me. I wield it like a trophy when it isn’t ruining me.

I remember him telling me at his father’s funeral—a stained glass-drenched, New Jersey Italian affair—that he just couldn’t understand death. It’s not that I’m afraid to die, he says. It’s that I’m afraid of not being here. I am his daughter, and this, of course, translates perfectly.

I wish we could live forever, I tell him over the phone. And I mean it. I want it with a viciousness. I’d kill for it. I would. I would circumvent the natural world for it.

Oh, perilous, wild, heady Bucharest! I fly to Romania with N, my friend who is equally as obsessed with vampirism. This first night is a fever dream of palinka and hookah. We explore the nightlife first, finding ourselves moving through alleyways of roving bodies and clinking glasses as if we are being pulled forward by an unseen force.

I am in a black dress. I see myself being watched. I see N being watched. I am aware of our presence, of the presence of others, of all of us in this strange city on the edge of the continent. It’s easy to let yourself be a body, a desirous thing, in this sort of city. Its chthonic tendency is palpable: beautiful people, grit and delirium, music and madness, the old wounds still showing in the edifice, in the hungriness of culture.

The echoes of time fold over me as wings. The buildings breathe us in and out, with golden light flung onto Byzantine structures. And then, here I am, smoking a cigarette outside some Communist monstrosity—a whole city block blanked out by ugly block buildings, windows like eyes.

All of this, enveloped between the Black Sea and the rest of Europe. I am disoriented. Everything, everything, everything could make you cry—standing inside of time, inside this very moment, in this very city, wondering how infinity stretches on, and how it will stretch on without you.

I think of the years between my father and I, how he might be sitting in his Kentucky backyard playing acoustic guitar right now, the porch light swinging behind him, his dogs and cats and pigs settled in for the evening. Him leaning into softness after a wild, hard life.

And then there’s me, across the world, sitting inside my aliveness, feeling my lips curl around the pipe, with my goblets of black maiden wine. The already-oppressive heat of early Romanian summer is caught in the ribbons of my hair. Yes, I am here, pulsing through the oceans of time, chasing death.

I think of how Jonathan Harker’s trip is depicted—especially in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—how he reaches a place that suddenly undoes him, assaults his senses, frightens his heart. But unlike Jonathan, I welcome it. I don’t grip my crosses.

Subscribe now

The next day, leaving the city is a blood rush—a crush of cars all speeding toward one another. The side mirror was struck three times as we whirled past the towering monuments like the oddly emotionless Memorial of Rebirth, which represents the 1989 toppling of communism.

As we get further away from Bucharest’s center, the long straight roads unfurl under an overcast sky. Stretches go on without much of anything, save the odd car rental shop or vacant buildings—relics of time. As N drives us further from Bucharest, we move through abandoned villages. We slow the car down. I count house upon house, whose closed shutters keep out any light. Silence warbles around us. Home after home of stillness peers back at us. Are they home? I ask N. Where did they all go? The sun was so bright and so high. Maybe it was just too hot to open the windows?

I think of the Italian concept of La Controra—the feverish, high noon hour during which malicious long shadows creep out. Everyone goes home for food and to sleep through the crush of heat. It’s heavy and melancholy.

Our Romanian guide, Mioara, would later tell us that there simply are no people left in these semi-remote villages, only the ghosts of what once was. Everyone was forced to leave their homes over the years: Dictatorship, no work, no access, no food, no hope. We passed so many of these villages.

Consider Gherdeal, Romania, or St. Gertruda: As Abandoned America describes, “By 1926, Gherdeal’s inhabitants consisted of Romanians, Saxons, and Roma. The reason it was abandoned likely lies in Romanian President/dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s program in the 1980s to systematically destroy small towns and villages across Romania, forcing the inhabitants to move to apartments near state-run farms and factories in cities to ‘improve efficiency’. This was a period of immense suffering and much of the country’s history was destroyed.”

We pass forlorn hitchhikers without so much as a backpack, or women in neon pumps standing at scarily remote truck stops. Dark flowers of the country’s chaotic past pop up everywhere, abandoned this, vacant that. In every country, some people are simply forgotten, lost to the despair of it all.

We drive first to Snagov Monastery, which stands just beside the deep blue waters of Lake Snagov. The water is high enough to touch your toes as you stand on the monastery’s splintered wooden dock.

Vlad the Impaler—or Vlad Tepes—the 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, is said to rest here, somewhere behind the church in its green grassy meadow—although this maybe-truth is tangled up in history’s murky waters.

We feel we are crawling slowly toward something sacred, or at least something that has haunted (hunted?) humanity for hundreds of years. We first have to drive down a long dirt road. Dogs splay idly in the streets, breathing slow and languid in the wobbly heat. Some of them simply remain in the middle of the road so that we have to slow down to drive around them; kids run toward the windows with their palms out, their eyes widening toward us, our eyes widening toward them.

We park our car on the other end of a long, thin bridge leading toward Snagov; the sun is suddenly high and oppressive, white-blinding and dense. It is ominous, that’s the feeling. We cross the bridge by foot from the people-world to the otherworld: The Monastery islet. Being there happened suddenly; my body drops into place before my heart, which is struggling to catch up.

Many people call him by his literary sobriquet: Dracula. Really, he is named Vlad Țepeș—the second son of Vlad Dracul, a la Order of the Dragon, a society of powerful men fighting against the non-Christian world. He really has nothing to do with our modern-day understanding of Dracula, and he’s not truly connected to the character in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, either.

Like his father, Vlad was a prince of Wallachia, which he protected by bloody rule. Romanians, our guide told us, do not think of Vlad as a vampire; it is mostly Bram Stoker who collapsed history and the folk belief, ribboning the bloodshed of war with everlasting life.

In films, Vlad is depicted as something between an undead, blood-loving monstrosity and a tyrannical, bloodthirsty warrior who’d impale his enemies. But in Dracula the novel—which largely informs modern thought—he is a sort of desirable anti-hero. In all the other iterations, he’s almost good.

But as Mioara told us, Vlad is often seen as a national hero. His particular brutality, she says, may be terrifying—especially when used on his own people to send a message of obedience—but it was a testament to his love.

History says Vlad and his brother Radu were taken hostage by the Ottoman Empire in 1442, where Radu found a new home. He converted to Islam and got close to the sultan’s son, Mehmet II. Vlad was only more enraged by this experience, and he vowed to get back to where he came and protect his status and his land at all costs.

Subscribe now

The 14th-century Orthodox monastery is decked in rich saffron. Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory, and Saint Nicholas eye me from the walls. An old woman stands at the entrance and kindly but pointedly asks for money before you take photos. It’s hot and silent and there is a golden velvet curtain that I cannot see behind.

I return, in the cellular memory of my body, to the early 90s when I was a child. There is my father, my dark predecessor, reading to me in our little New Jersey apartment, all full of mid-century wood and brown carpeting. This was well before foster care and all the sadness, when everything was bejeweled in the idea of permanence, when the kingdom of childhood seemed to reach out interminably. Immortal.

My father read Dracula to me, his voice deepening around the edges as he conjured The Count. I felt it then, probably for the first time—that itch, that quiet temptation toward the unknowable. A reluctant empathy toward characters who were bound by some blood-loving disease.

Could we live without sunlight? Can we really drink blood? Could I? Are there castles far away, full of men who never die?

For me, loving Dracula meant seeing myself in the other, the antagonist, the sinner; it meant knowing that grief can do horrific things to us. It is not having to say goodbye.

I never wanted to be the hunter. I never understood the impulse. I only wanted to be the vampire. Because the hunter is only led by fear, and the vampire is led by something else. What is it?

I wander the grounds and kneel down to pet a pack of small dogs who sleep lazily beneath a tank of holy water. The dogs are everywhere. Dozens of them live here, wandering through the tall grass of the meadow, living and dying and staying.

N and I stay at a kitschy, if rundown, hotel, Acasă la Dracula. It is high in the Carpathian Mountains. We have to stay here, I tell N back in New Jersey. It is full of sconces and lanterns and old red carpets and winding staircases and knives bolted to the wall.

At night when we get in, rarely is anyone ever there, and if someone is there, they’re asleep at the front desk. There are no other guests, so we tromp up the stairs alone, giggling, drunk, and scare ourselves in the echoing darkness of this hotel-on-the-brink. We watch Twilight on the sofa.

And we drink black wine on the balcony, looking out over the dense forest, where bats swoop in the dusk light, and a white crucifix looms far in the distance. We want so badly to hear the wolves howl as the night cools down and we put our sweaters on. I feel the quiet, small sadness creep up—the desire, almost an obsession, to make everything last forever. Moments. Places. People.

That night, I sleep with the curtains parted so the moonlight pours in over me.

We wake early for Sighisoara, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes. But to get out the Carpathians we must wind ourselves down the mountain. N drives fast and free, and it’s exhilarating, but I’m afraid. I imagine my body dead in the lush green remoteness of this country — the girl who died in search of death. It’s the endless preoccupation that this could all end at any moment.

We play music off a system that perpetually stops working, so we have to keep plugging the cords back in, which cracks us up because it’s as perfectly weird as our trip has been. Sometimes we play cinematic and spooky classical music and become the main character.

Yet we are our own Jonathan Harker. We’re not on a journey to sell a castle to an immortal, but we are exploring the dark aspects that live within us.

As we wind down the mountain, I see a black dog wander out from the trees. He just stands there, looking, looking, unmoving. I make eye contact as we pass. I ask N if we should get out and give him water.

A few days later, I see the same black dog again, like a mirage, this time somewhere else on the mountain. I think he must know where a water source is. He must know these mountains well. He haunts me—even now, even years later as I write this. Where was he going? Where could he go?

We drive again through abandoned villages, and past hand-built settlements and tents. The land stretches out, and mountains and fog loom in the distance, even as the sun bears down.

When we get to Sighisoara, Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace, we are greeted with colorful buildings and bustling pubs and cobbled roads. We go to a Restaurant, Casa Vlad Dracul, Vlad’s actual birthplace, where we eat polenta and meat and order large goblets of wine. Sitting inside an enduring mythology eating lunch feels both surreal and perfect.

Upstairs, in the attic, is a claustrophobic room decked out in red strobe light, smoke machine, and creaking coffins. It’s pure and total camp, honestly, with goofy muah-ha-ha sound effects echoing as Dracula pops out of his coffin.

It’s about 120 degrees in there, and we are all, even Dracula, drenched in sweat. I can’t help but to enjoy the nonsense of it all—the fact that after all this time, a tyrant was turned into an economy, and where we can, together, indulge our enduring fear of death.

Eventually, after more wine, we wind up in the Saxon graveyard high above the village. We get there through an enclosed wooden staircase that would protect the village children from the elements. It’s laughably high, and tourists are resting on the landings. It is also hot enough to make you feel faint.

The graveyard is lush and green and full of birdsong. There are statues and winding alleys, and vines outstretched over the tombs. The graveyard’s church was built around 1345. I am here, I think. I’m alive right now. I am looking back on time and witnessing it. I am a girl from New Jersey, and now I’m standing in a graveyard in Transylvania.

In the coming days, we see Peleș Castle in medieval Transylvania, Brasov and its Black Church, and Bran Castle (widely billed as Vlad’s castle but isn’t).

What have I learned, I wonder? I want to wrap Romania up, to come to a writer’s bow-tie ending. I want to fly back to England on that bumpy little propeller jet and figure it all out as I stare out the window.

I want to say that I’ve come to accept death. I want to say that people I love are sick, and I’ve accepted this. And that I, too, am a fleeting thing.

But no. Instead, I say death is for everyone else. I’m exempt. That a creature will come to me and show me that nothing has to end. If I run away far enough to the mountains, to the graveyard, to the crumbling cities of old, won’t I find the proof?

Yet there are times when you peer right into the void, and it peers right back into you.

I started working on the full manuscript for what would become SAINT OF last year, though it truly took shape during the sweaty malaise of summer. I’d just returned from a month in Sicily and Malta—my head swimming with mosaic and volcanic wine, ancient ruins and sleepy fishing villages. It was a strange whirlwind of a summer, the kind that feels like a temporal ghost.

I got married in Palermo and felt clobbered by heady and euphoric post-wedding blues. I felt a holiness had happened to and through me—and then slipped right through my fingers, like a lightning bug. I could still see the light, but it was fading into summer’s death.

When I returned to the states, I found out that my spine was broken, and so began an interior journey into writing. I was home more and moving less. Our AC broke a dozen times, the heat was suffocating, and there were ongoing forest fires here in New Jersey and New York. The air always smelled, and there was a deep sense of urgency and fear as we prepped for election season.

I retreated into the murky, hot otherworld of memory and daydream, splayed out in cotton dresses on my bed—translating the anxiety, fear, obsession, and madness of my life and that strange summer into these poems.

I wrote endless invocations to the saints—saints as aspects of self, saints as emotions, saints as memories. And every poem was suffused with this muggy, carnal summer energy—as if the poems were themselves sticky and ripe, gilded by rotten fruits and sea salt.

Here are three of them. The last two are intended to look like fully-justified prose-poems, but Substack doesn’t have that option.

saint of abandon

The summer follows me 
into the confessional
as shadow. 

In this ornate and muggy house of god, 
I am crowded by wood and transgression. 

The impulse lives latent within me. 
	Something like ruin. 

Repentance has taken up shape within me. 
I have amassed a thousand shapes.

I don’t want to get rid of the thing. 
	I want to go on feeding it while I am still beautiful. 
		I want the perpetuity of starless night. 

At least without light you have purpose. 
Without light you are always in a state of seeking— 
or is darkness light waiting to be born?

I fear absolution would erase me.
          I interpret god as an invitation for sin. 
                   I stand at the black hole and look down.

saint of salvage

In July I spoke only Italiano, come una principessa, and danced only on terraces, somersaulting through the depravity and rose bud. It was libidinal, deepthroating beauty to ease the grief. Yet the earth knew. Swimming in Isola Bella I met the dolor of the sea. I clung to the shore with my hands wretched in the air, consumed of my wound. I contained such lack. 

When black smoke filled my bedroom I left only with what I could carry and felt the sovereignty of loss. My body with its bare hands contorted, or in prayer, touching the ligaments between having and not-having, and the kingdom where everything that was taken could be given back. 

Incredulous, divine; this ruin — the mother of wholeness.

saint of sepulture

It’s the summer again. It wants me. How overgrown of ivy, how empty and full of longing. My memories of it are daisy chain; honey-like, and looming through the years. As eave, as curtain, as decanter. One day it is a summer day, and then it 10 summers ago. The summer takes me hard by hand, watches me from the other room. How it took me from me, made my body into a cavity, wringing the wet from my lips. What gash it left me tending.


The summer was always waiting, a waiting, 


		a wait, 

				  wait, 

						    wait. 


It wanted me, hunted me. And when the hunt found me it was still hungry. How I heaved my loaded heart. I walked into the wood and never came out; a too-long sort of night. It was the kind that sends you back in fragments. Which fragments? It could have been daylight. It should have been daylight. It could have been. It could have been me in the window, and then me in the lake, and then me in the rose grove and then yesterday.

Notes & thanks to the editors below (please read the poems over at their sites!).

Saint of Sepulture was published by Lover’s Eye Press.
Saint of Salvage was published by Moria Magazine of Woodbury University
SAINT OF (the book) was published by White Stag Publishing.

I watched Egger’s 2024 Nosferatu late last night, curled up in bed by the glow of candlelight. My initial reluctance to see it felt dissonant; it kept it swirling in my head for months until I finally gave in.

It was an image of Lily Rose Depp—the white of her eyes contorted up into her head, mouth dripping with foam—that lured me in. Or was it the promise of a frightening, lurking vampire? That in this film Count Orlok had again taken up the archetype of a gruesome thing, not the glittering anti-hero we’re used to (and that I, too, have loved).

The film isn’t a massive departure from the original Nosferatu, although there are differences. In both, Ellen—Nosferatu’s protagonist and subject of Count Orlok’s obsession—sacrifices herself to Death, to him, to save those around her from a literal or metaphorical plague of darkness. But it was also her fate. She was meant for the darkness. For it was the maiden’s deep plea—come to me—that Death could not resist.

Why? After Ellen’s mother’s death during childhood, she fell into a well of lack. She wanted for touch, for love, for companionship. In childhood, she suffered seizures and nights of somnambulism, which, at the time, was a condition thought to have some connection to the beyond.

Nosferatu was shot on 35 mm film, thank-goodness, so it was hazy and dreamy, like the magnificent aesthetics of the 90s, when everything felt as though it were captured through a golden scrim. The muted tones and visual shadow play—like an overhead shot of long hands as silken shadows spanning across a city’s rooftops—were so delicious and meticulously gothic, I wanted to throw open my windows and scream into the night.

I could not stop thinking on Lily Rose Depp’s shifting facial expressions as she confessed to her husband that she, in a dream, had married death instead, and how she adored it—I was so happy, so very happy.

In her marriage to Death himself, everyone she had loved was dead, and the stench of their bodies was horrible—but fuck, she had never been so happy. In her face, an ecstatic catastrophe, an orgiastic grief. I think at this early point in the film, she was standing at the altar of her impending death.

The film kept me awake, thinking, thinking, until the wee hours. And in the darkness, I felt as if the Count’s spindly fingers were outstretched toward me, groping for me in my sheets. I’d give myself to him, I would—even with Benjamin my husband beside me, I thought.

I felt a kinship with Ellen, whose utter desperation for touch, for love, for companionship fell outside of the norms of her restrained society. She is a woman of incessant romantic protestations. A woman with a connection to the otherworld. A woman of fathomless hunger, who walks out naked into the dead of night. She is a representation of many things—a repressed woman, a weirdo, a die-hard romantic. But it was her poetic energy that struck me.

I think poets are the seers, the dreamers, the shamans of our everyday reality. It may be a romantic notion, but of course, I am prone to romantic notions. I am dripping in notions of notions. I am fits of fancy. I am an appetite.

Who else is paying such attention to the sea, the afternoon light, the desire, the emptiness, the ardor, the presque vu, the portents of things to come—and translating it all, as if channeling it from beyond?

Most people don’t get poetry. Most people don’t want to be bothered with poetry. And yet we poets continue on, channeling, writing, seeking, getting our hands dirty with the things that don’t fit easily into everyday reality.

Who, beyond the poet, finds themselves regularly split in parts, squeezing into the mundane, pushing against the social expectations around expressions of grief and ecstasy? Who captures the blurriness between longing and repulsion better than the poet? Who wants to break social norms, even if only in lineation?

Who, other than the poet, wants to lace themselves to their obsessions?

Who lives in constant relationship with what is seldom noticed?

What can better give shape to the eroticism of restraint than a poem?

Ellen’s imprisonment is not subtle. She is without social power; she is told that she is ill, that she mustn’t think of the dreams and desires and feelings that scratch from deep within her. She writhes in pain—or is it pleasure? The want in her perforates her from within.

The Poet within me has always been intrigued by what exists beyond the light. Or beyond what we can see. Or beyond what we should be looking for. By what we’re too not to want. What is beyond the performance of our own lives? What have we tethered ourselves to that keeps us from the truth? Are we restrained in some way?

Ellen is told to be quiet, to be good, not to wake the children. She is at some point bound by a corset and tied to the bed, and snuffed to sleep with a poison-soaked rag by the hand of some man-doctor. It’s all too much. It’s just an endless drama. It’s unbecoming. And she’s keeping everyone awake, goddamnit. So they try to control her.

But no man can control her darkness. If you are born with it, it will sit inside you like an organ, and it will metabolize your life. If you are a poet, you pick at it. You pluck it. You become bloated with it. You give it space inside you, and on the page. You let it haunt you, hunt you. You downright feast on it until your chin is dripping with the flesh and fruit of the night.

Society wants to contort itself around the repression of shadow—politicians who pretend the suffering isn’t happening, billionaires who would rather live on Mars than confront their own abandonment, wine-moms who would rather become smaller and quieter and pettier than admit their unhappiness, men who’d rather silence woman than deal with their loneliness.

Whatever your darkness is—longing, fear, insatiable horniness, abandonment, sorrow, rage—you can’t deny it, lest it will eat you. You will be subsumed by it either way— I am an appetite—so walk into the garden at night. Make peace with it before it controls you.

He is my melancholy. He is my shame, says Ellen; there is a sense that she has long made peace with this.

Some see her death as by the hands of man, and there is certainly an argument I could make here. But I see this her death as a bid for her own freedom, that she would rather give in to death than live a life of such restraint. That the vampire was the doorway through which she could attain some freedom.

The vampire isn’t just a monster—it’s our monster. It is a container for that truth. It wants to be acknowledged. You might fear it, but oh, you also want it. It is the thing that wants you to stick your neck out into the darkness, on some balcony come midnight, and let yourself be taken.

I think about one of the last shots in the film—death, broken to bone, splayed out over Ellen’s bloody body. Death & the maiden, entwined in decay and flower. I think on how a thousand poets would find comfort in this image, while others gag, suppressing a faint, nearly-erotic inner voice.

I also keep finding myself thinking about my recent book, SAINT OF, how at its core is a devastating, absolute hunger—for more, for so much more than the world as we know it can give. To be ruinous. To give in to the impulses we were told were too dark. To not ignore the call.

The poet is the somnambulist, and the poem is the dream.

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

— "Question" by May Swenson

I’ve been breaking for years, but I finally came apart last summer—my summer of rupture.

It all started with inflammatory arthritis—axial spondyloarthritis—which I’ve had for over a decade. I was diagnosed by experts at NYU and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City after years of eye inflammation, fatigue, and spinal pain.

For years I was the youngest body in the waiting room. In the ophthalmologist’s waiting room—years before my diagnosis, when the first symptoms began in my eyes—I felt myself looked at by the other patients: She’s too young to be here. The others were older patients with glaucoma, all shaking hands and walkers.

At that point, I was still endowed with ableist programming that—when I think back on it—came from both ignorance and immature apathy. I am just passing through a sickness, I thought. I’m not a sick person. Just give me the medicine and let’s be done with it. At that age, I still saw the world as a stage. I was the main character. And I was untouchable.

Over the years, the disease moved from my eyes down into the rest of my body, as if it were a silent bleed-out. I began to feel things I’d never felt before.

As a child, invisible pain had always eluded me. When my grandmother talked about her arthritis, I thought pain must be like a god. If I couldn’t see it, was it truly there?

I contained the pain long before I became the pain. It was, for so long, just an abstract, a construct. It was happening to me, rather than within me. Of me.

2011

In my mid-20s, still without a diagnosis, I was performing regularly at The Poetry Brothel in a glitzy speakeasy on the Lower East Side. I was dressed up in lingerie and lace, reading poems to strangers in dark rooms by candlelight. But sometimes I’d feel something: An ache, a stiffness. I was inhabited by something I could not name. I never said anything.

I was drunk on the romance of it all, I’ll be honest. I so longed to be the ingenue. I wanted to get fucked up on cheap dive bar wine and paw at my lovers and smoke cigarettes in the rain and show up late to my classes and do whatever people do when they’re human and very young and the wild expanse hadn’t yet been dashed to bits.

Eventually, the renderings of myself in this world of glamour began to deflate. It got dirty with Regular Human Realities. The archetype was dethroned. It got lonely like the lights had been snuffed out at the end of the party. Eventually, the candles hurt my eyes, and bending down to pull up my stockings felt painful. Yet I was poor and clueless and mostly ignored it.

Pain followed me around the world. Pain was me in my birthday dress and me on some Borrommean island full of peacocks and me graduating from my Master’s program on the Javitz Center stage. For so long I couldn’t articulate it, could hardly believe it was real.

Is this pain mine? Is it mine forever? Like a child?

Subscribe now

There were some nights when it was just the knees, and then it was the hips, and then it was the sacrum, and then it was like I hadn’t slept a day in my life. So, I persisted. I danced even though it hurt. I swam, my arms outstretched before me in salty seas, body long and open.

In those mid-2000s years, there wasn’t as much awareness around chronic illness or invisible illness. I had one friend who had an inflammatory disease, and everyone treated her like she was either a walking corpse or a wellspring for inspiration porn. Or they ignored it entirely. I mostly ignored it too.

Why couldn’t I have just asked, “How are you feeling today?” I have now learned that those few words are like gemstones glinting through dense wood. How it kicks the heart abuzz. How it alights with visibility. It’s so small, so humanizing.

For a long time, I mostly wrote poems around the pain, for it was still the beast in the stable. I hadn’t quite figured out how to make the ugly into something beautiful—as if the ill body was undeserving of the poetic. By the end of graduate school, I tried to work the body and pain into my thesis. I suppose this was the first time I started coming to terms with it.

When I finally got good health insurance and an autoimmune diagnosis, I felt like I’d been given the demon’s name. I could say it and shame it and conquer it, as exorcism. Yet over the years, the demon could not be conquered, even when I shouted its name into the dark.

For years, I tried to make the hurt stop with back-bending asanas. If I become flexible. If I become fluid. If I become strong. I let myself think I could find a doorway out of pain.

2024

I got married in June in Sicily last summer. It was sticky and stunning and audacious.

I recall my dress’s three layers of satin stuck to my thighs. My baby hair curled around my ears. Benjamin’s pale pink suit. The blue ceremony salon with its balcony doors flung open. I also recall the pain I brought with me to the Mediterranean.

Pain and I wore an ivory-colored gown with a boned corset. We drank a small glass of white wine before the ceremony, and we held orange fiori in our hands and we processed in the street—the colors of our guests’ dresses and linens like a trail of blooming flowers: Francesca in blue, Andrea in green, Elli-Rose in shell-pink. Me and my pain and my husband leading the way.

At the restaurant where we hosted our reception, there hung a dedication to Santa Rosalia—the patron saint of Palermo. Born in 1130, Rosalia followed the ascetic path, living as a hermit in a cave grotto on Mount Pellegrino. She is often depicted with lilies and a crown of roses.

I am nothing like Rosalia. I have desire and lust and a great big hunger for more, and yet I stood below her shrine with a huge heavy longing heart, asking, please let me experience my wedding without pain. Just give me this.

I came to all the gods and saints with feverish want. The night before, I begged Saint Michael at a nearby piazza for a pain-free wedding. And I begged La Madonna. And the sad, blue-eyed Jesus in the dark corner of Cattedrale di Palermo.

And I mostly got what I wanted that night. I danced past midnight until my feet bled. And afterward, I slipped into a bathtub as Benjamin smoked a joint, and I let myself be full of the great everything.

The palazzo we stayed in on our wedding night was silent except for the sound of me swishing around the water. Afterward, I pranced barefoot through the rooms, adorned in dancing shadows, light glinting off ancient golden frames hung in the parlors. I caught myself in the mirror. The concept of me looked back at me.

I wondered what it would be like if all of this could come easily, without the worry that one day my body would stop allowing me joy and mobility. I wonder what it’s like to worry about a paycheck and parents and human suffering without pain as the cherry on top.

Everything is so much heavier, including the self-awareness of my own relentless, boring, bullshit pity party.

We left Sicily for Malta, and my body mostly lasted through Malta, through its ancient rubbled walls, known as Ħitan tas-Sejjieħ, and through its salt pans, which I dipped my fingers into. Through its tiny fishing villages peddling handmade lace wares. Through its cafes where I stuffed my lips with pastizzi in the boiling light. And through the fortified city of Mdina, where I wandered for hours come day’s end when all the tourists had left and I had the city to myself.

I came upon a small gathering, women chant-praying in a chapel, and I watched fans blow on their bodies in the divine heat.

This was my life. This was my aliveness. I was here. And I made a point to acknowledge that, even as my body slowed down.

Today.

God, summer destroyed me.

By July, by the time I’d gotten home from my wedding, I could no longer walk. Tongues of fire licked down my legs and feet. Or like stepping into an ice bath. Shocks that immobilized me. Electric zaps that felt like contractions, endless, seismic, moving from my spine down.

My rheumatologist told me my inflammation had impinged my nerves. We try medicine after medicine. Oxaprozin, meloxicam, steroids.

I moved and swam and tried to push it away. It got worse.

But it wasn’t that at all. An emergency room visit—and a later MRI—determined that I’d broken my back (bilateral pars breaks at L5-S1), that I’d herniated a disc, bulged a disc, and that my L5 vertebrae had a stage-2 slip forward (known as spondylolisthesis). off of my S1 vertebrae. My nerves were compressed due to spinal stenosis.

The why is unknown. There was no single trauma (I'd taken a few falls over the years, but who knows), just a slowly degrading spine over time, possibly due to a small congenital fracture that gradually led to an entire downfall. The why almost doesn’t matter. It’s here now.

I thought about how I pushed myself in Sicily. How I pushed past the pain in some attempt to live in the beauty and the joy. But also all the times over the years when my body gave out: On my birthday in New Orleans when I had to crawl home. In Budapest when I had to give up a night out. Me at my mom’s house, on her floor crying in pain.

I told the doctor I hadn’t known a day without pain in over a decade.

Degenerative chronic illness forces you to be in a place of loss, perpetually. You lose money, for one. And time. Hiking without pain or swimming in full extension. Or dancing in your favorite heels. Or standing on a subway car for just a few stops. Or carrying a backpack through the airport. Saying no to amusement park rides. Saying no to a long car ride with friends.

Not knowing if the restaurant you’re going to will be good because of the chairs. Not knowing if you can keep up with your friends. Not knowing. Not knowing.

Then you lose weird things, like the ability to sleep on your left side, or twisting to grab something behind you. It’s the mundane things. The things no one acknowledges. The things we take for granted.

Here’s the part where I skip the grief cycle, because that deserves its own story.

But in the loss, I have tried to acknowledge what hasn’t left yet. The memories of summer, the body’s ligature holding me together when its bones are broken. The people who remain patient. Access to care. The wherewithal to know that even in degeneration, there are peaks and valleys—and ways to stave off the beast.

Since last summer, daily physical therapy has helped. Modification of literally everyday movement. Medication. Injections. Walking daily has helped me stay strong and teach my body both its abilities and limits. Taking everything away and then reintegrating activities one by one has slowed me down and taught me what works. Writing about it helps. I even found a way to work it into my new book, Saint of.

Yet the pain remains. It’s been tempered, yes. But it can be triggered. Even after a future surgery, the neurosurgeon warns that the pain could remain. Or it could disappear.

And that makes me wonder, who am I now, with my pain? And who might I be without it? Who could I be? Will I be returned to my younger self—this time, with a sense of empathy? Will I still notice the beauty if I don’t have to slow down? Will I still invoke the saints? If the pain goes away, will that also be a kind of loss?

And will I still be me—whoever I am?

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. 
— Anaïs Nin

The night before last, I fell into an Anaïs Nin void, and in doing so came across the same song and dance I’d seen and heard before—commenters (usually men) who have some pathetic hostility toward her work. They say Nin has a “tendency to intellectualize, philosophize, and justify her impulsive decisions.”

She’s also “maximalist” (god forbid!) and “self-aggrandizing.” And her desire to “create glamorous narratives” versus “making simple narratives sound glamorous with her language” reads as “juvenile.”

If you’ve read any of my work, you’ll assume I do not agree with these assessments. You’d be right. First, I am always drawn toward glamour. What is so wrong with beauty and glamour? Everything in life has a glamour, even death. Even grief. Sex, longing, architecture, loneliness. I am not interested in the uncomplicated. And efficient work usually bores me. It is so heavy with its own restraint.

How shall I tell you about dinner with a friend without also kneeling at the altar of gilded detail? How the light bounced, how his body stooped over his plate with a ferociousness that reminded me of sex, how the silent moments felt like a precipice. Too fussy?

As a poet, I love and lean into the maximalist. Poetry is about noticing, after all. It’s about using the language that decorates the human condition. And even if you do wrangle poetry to its barest of bones, isn’t the very impulse to write a poem at all somehow maximalist in its desire to articulate existence? It’s so very unnecessary. So outside the confines of how society operates. Why not pour gold all over it?

All of this is to say that Nin, to me, works in poetics. She embraced a life of appetite (even when the times shunned her for it)—for the erotic, for a deeper understanding of psychology, for human relationship, for self-relationship, for interiority, for a kind of decadence—and that appetite spoke to me when I first read her work.

As a woman and as a poet whose work has been called “confessional” (especially my newest book, SAINT OF), I thank Nin for the permission, for the doorway, for the invitation to both seek and drench myself in glamour, detail, and the ecstasy and agony of this life. I confess I am always in a state of hunger, searching for magnificence. I don’t care if you find it pretentious or fanciful or bloated!

It was Nin’s birthday just a few days ago. I happened to spend it at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Gardner was a wealthy society woman and patron of arts whose 1891 inheritance from her father allowed her the means to travel the world and recreate a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, Palazzo Barbaro, in the US. She filled every inch of it with art and other treasures from across the globe. (It is also the site of a major art heist in 1990, leading to a $500 million loss).

At the center of the palace is a sun-drenched cloistered courtyard, filled with lush greens and flowers and pathways and statuettes. It is entirely enclosed by the palace’s many arabesque arches and balconettes. It was so delicious I could hear audible gasps escape the lips of the visitors. The many themed rooms (the early Italian room or the gothic room) and corridors—all stacked above and arranged around that Eden-like courtyard—are adorned with paintings and tapestries, rare books and candelabras. You’ll find so much here, even major works like The Rape of Europa by Titian, Vermeer’s The Concert, and John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo.

Wandering through, I felt a dizzying buzz—that same lust for life I find in Nin’s work. The same buzz I come to poetry to translate. Garnder’s obsession with curating works of beauty, for telling humanity’s tale room by room and tapestry by sarcophagi, felt apropos for Nin’s birthday. In that space, I sensed that same dauntless appetite—to be surrounded by the marvelous.

In these dark days, when we are contending with forces that aim to suppress and crush us, what better resistance than beauty and wildness? Why not stuff this life down our throats?

ps,

You should read Kim Krizan's Spy in the House of Anaïs Nin.
You should also vist the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

It is all ornate and dilapidated, and that’s what I find so sincere about it. The first time I traveled to Palermo, my friend remarked lovingly on its grandiose decrepitude.

Everyone will be drinking wine and dancing and swaying by night, right beneath my balcony. Midnight will feel early, like a doorway to somewhere else. Somewhen.

And there will be that familiar cthonic swoon—recognized within the palace of my own body; I was born with it—and I will greet it, and it will greet me in return.

Hello, shadow. Hello, life. Hello, great dark ecstacy.

Everything here appears to be adorned with, of, and by the cycle. The city is a reminder of time’s claws. It is a testimony of the resilience and survival of a people and a place and an ecosystem that emerges from the layers—yet is distinctly of itself, bursting through the relentless pentimento of conquerers and cultures.

My grandmother Concetta Maria Lipari was born in Palermo. She was a child in the streets of La Kalsa—or, al Khalesa, Palermo’s Arabic district—which is said to have once been entirely underwater.

I feel that watery history in my bones. The feeling of being comfortable with(in) the depths—the desire to go underneath the underneath. And then underneath even that. I suppose a poet is always pushing past where the light ends.

I felt this numinousness when I stood at the water’s edge at the Palermo Port, looking at all the little swaying boats framed by the island’s mountains in the background, like a maternal eye watching.

I feel it at the street shrines. I feel it in the gritty dark back streets winding behind cathedrals or the backs of restaurants or where people live and hang their laundry and tend to plants. I feel it when I drunkenly climb the interior courtyard stairwells to my apartment, under the sharp-eyed glare of the Madonna hanging on a cracked hallway wall. I feel it when I eat cannoli at a former convent, adorned in crucifix and memento.

From the family stories told of my “crazy” grandmother, I think she felt it all, too, even if she couldn’t articulate it within the context of her life. I think she carried the island’s story with her as she crossed the Atlantic ocean to emigrate.

I think there was always a heaviness in her—a place-grief, the weight of huge cultural shift, the stamp of poverty, and the relics of war. And then there were mental health issues—many innate, and some that came with the era, her intense devotion to God, and the expectations of the domestic. Seven children.

I was told by a family member that she yearned for things, that she even contained a deep envy—that she had given herself to a life that didn’t bear the fruits of her own desires.

I am not here to answer those questions nor to mythologize and romanticize it all, as I used to do when I was younger.

I am only here to ask and to listen. I am in acknowledgment of my privileges. I am embodied of a curiosity, hunger, indulgence, and devotion that was never available to the women before me. To her.

Even in my lack and limitations, I am a Life that my ancestors could never be permitted to daydream. I return to the places they left. Why? To excavate what? Them? Myself? Something even bigger? To heal? Sometimes I don’t know what I am looking for. But I know that I have only just arrived at the doorway. And I have walked through it.

I feel the salty, sticky hands of its lure on me. I have written about this pull in my book SAINT OF—this reckoning with inarticulable hunger, the need to let the fruits of this wild life drip from my lips.

***

Now I am in Palermo for the second time, and it’s over 100 degrees and I am sweating through my white dress. I am drinking an espresso in a port-side cafe. And then I am pinning up my hair and covering my shoulders and walking alone through the baroque Chiesa del Gesu to visit an idea of god and find respite from the sun. I pray for illumination, even in my chaotic, messy, half-belief.

In 1943, during the war, a bomb destroyed the church's dome—and all of its art and walls and bones—leading to replacement and restoration work in 2009. I feel that I am standing in the palm of time—rewritten or salvaged or reclaimed.

Then a summer later, I’m again in Palermo. I am staying at the childhood home of famous writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (the author of The Leopard—a must-must read about Sicily and Palermo during the Risorgimento).

The home was also destroyed in the war and then rebuilt into the small for-rent apartment it is today, with its bee-buzzy back garden. I think of the poets and writers before me. And the poets, writers, and artists here today. How so much of this city serves as a muse.

I sit in the stillness of its little sundrenched patio and I write poems and let the sun fuck me up until it goes down and the insects change all their songs. I feel completely at home. I run through Italian verbs in the shower as the cool water falls over my golden shoulders. And then I clam up in restaurants even though I know what to say.

I wonder if I am a bad representation of my bloodline. I then wonder if I’m just trying to honor it. I see Sicily in my face.

I find my name etched into the groundwork, & etched into street names.

I am always here for the dark underneath, for the messages, for the shadow.

At the Chiesa San Giovanni Degli Eremiti, the echoes of time persist; it was once a Byzantine chapel and later a mosque. I lay my hands upon the walls and let myself be pulled down and in and under everything. I think of the many cultures who left their imprint here: The Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, the Spanish. And many others.

At the Vucciria market, I visit Saint Michael in a square, standing at the statue’s base, gazing up at him, asking for him to wrap his wings around my whole life. To help relieve my dark desires and prevent me from the delectable temptations of ruinousness.

There’s the 150-year-old ficus tree at Giardino Garibaldi, with its enormous underground roots clinging to the earth. He looks solemn; he has seen so much; he has seen bloodshed. I trust his resolve; I ask for a message.

***

I am married in Palermo at Palazzo Pantelleria in a heady June wedding. On my wedding trip, there is another great ficus tree right at my bedroom window. I would turn to the tree—jutt before my wedding and again afterward—as an anchor and as a friend, its great depth a soft hand. In its presence, I felt its quiet blessing—that I am fortunate to be a blip in this heavy dirge of time.

During our ceremony, everyone was crammed into a great blue room sitting on white wooden chairs. The balcony doors are swung open for an ungenerous breeze and everyone is sweating through linen suits and waving tiny white paper fans. I peered through a keyhole in a door and watched them all. Not once did I feel surreal or out of place. The room felt like I’d been there a thousand years ago.

The summer before then, Ben and I met Francesco, the wonderful, kind gentleman who hosted our wedding in his family home (which is not a wedding venue). We asked if he’d allow us to marry there, and if he could also be present for the ceremony. Si. The building felt like an old friend. So did he. Something in me knew the way, even without ever stepping foot into its rooms. Ah yes, I thought, the yellow parlor. And the terrace. And the way the light falls. I know you.

During our ceremony, I could feel the generations watching me through the windows in my white dress. I could feel them alongside me in the streets as we processed. I could feel my body at the cellular level be returned to some essence of my blood-home, even if Palermo truly could never be home. Even if I will always be foreign, always be a body to-be-returned-to the island but never of it.

Which is enough for me.

I found that my poetry written in Palermo encountered this strange borderland of unbelonging. And I found that it was an honor to love this city, to ask for it to welcome me. To tend to this city of blood and ghosts by learning about it, by returning to it, by creating within it, by buying from its people, by understanding its limitations, its sorrows, its multitudes, by asking questions.

Palermo wasn’t Paris or Prague or Amsterdam or Mexico City or Rio. I have been to those cities, and they are beautiful and full of everything, but I don’t come from them. In Palermo, I feel the tether. I feel its teeth. I feel its hands on me.

***

It’s easy to wander through churches and look for the old gods and talk to my dead in Palermo. I think, even for those who aren’t Sicilian, that this would feel easy. The city bends itself to introspection; it welcomes the dizzying devotion to darkness. It is normal to put your feet on the dark underground, to venture into tombs and visit the saints.

I think this tuning-into the darkness is a wound and a gift. The inherited longing. The grief. The knowledge that this life is short and painful. The want for answers and reconciliation and resolution. The perpetual desire to get into collaboration with God and the creative force and ancestral knowledge.

But Palermo also wants you to indulge. To celebrate. To live.

In this city, I am reminded of this great gift of life—of enjoying the nectars, of family and friends and this ticking body. I drink the volcanic Etna rosso in the streets and I wear little cotton dresses with nothing underneath. I eat arancine, and I eat pasta even in the heat, and I cover everything in pistachio. I talk for hours, I ask people about their lives, I laugh when I fuck up the language, I flirt, I make a romance of everything. I indulge in the aliveness. In the levity. I let myself glitter on the surface of it all. I loom myself into the bacchanalia. I put myself into the beauty and I watch and I breath and I adorn and I laugh. I watch the beautiful men. I watch the beautiful women. I long and I speak Italian and I kiss and I touch.

Palermo holds us in this bottomless, glorious place of asking, of longing, of returning-to, of exploration, of reconciliation, of death and life and celebration.

This summer I’ll be returning to Palermo with the immensely talented and deeply devoted MaryBeth Bonfiglio, whose many Radici Siciliane immersions embrace the magic, history, and culture of Sicily.

I’ve been to Sicily with her for an Ancestral Arts immersion, deep in the Madonie region, surrounded by hills and valleys. I’ve witnessed the beauty of seeing Sicily through respectful, enchanted, immersed eyes—not through the sometimes-aggressive and disconnected tourism tactics we often see when away from home.

I am honored to co-guide SOTTERRANEA, a writing immersion, with her in Palermo—our beloved city of cities. Together, we will weave a unique experiential journey that allows us time to reflect on the spectrum: darkness, death, decay, life, and indulgence.

From June 5—June 11, 2025 we will gather as an intimate group in the subterranean & poetic city of Palermo, Sicily to explore, experience, and write the sensuality of life and death. If you want to be in this magical space with us, you can find out more here.

Maybe you will find yourself adoring Palermo as I do. And taking its lessons to heart as a writer: Explore every layer.