I curated a folio of poems re: devotion for Poet Lore, both nourished and troubled by the idea. I asked in my call for submissions, Does devotion chart our path forward? Can it be a weapon? Does devotion protect us, and what from? How is devotion distinct from desire?

The Poet Lore issue begins with Jane Huffman’s “Devotions”: “I have touched so many things / so many times. What is excess / in me is partial / in the world.” You can read select poems online from the On Devotion folio free here, as well as some only-in-print poems below.

If you want to write together, with devotion as our catalyst/lens, we’re gathering this Saturday 8/8 for Devotion: A Generative Writing Session via Zoom, 11am-12.30pm CT, sliding scale (no one turned away for lack of funds—just reach out with your needs/hopes).

If you are able to support print media, you can order a copy of the issue here.

Writing together: We’re gathering this Saturday 8/8 for Devotion: A Generative Writing Session via Zoom, 11am-12.30pm CT, $30-60 sliding scale.

Sign up by Thursday. <3 I’ll be announcing more course offerings soon, including the return of Water as Method.

This won’t be the last time I curate work at the intersection of devotion & poetry. I’m dreaming up a devotion project. Stay tuned—

<3,

Patrycja

How do I reach for, how do I touch, via writing? And is there touch without purpose?

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire,” wrote Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.

I often teach workshops on my obsessions and what I’m ongoingly learning about (devotion, spirals, rivers & the poetic image, embodiment, etc), to deepen that study alongside others. On one hand, I’ve danced and written for decades, and have taught at these intersections. On the other, this crossing continues to elude me; I’m still refining questions, coming up with new experiments, developing my methodology. You’re invited into the experiment. I’m teaching a workshop on Zoom this Saturday, Embodied Revision, from 11am-12.30pm CT, $40-60 sliding scale. Reach out to me if pricing is a barrier. It’s a cross-genre revision session, incorporating embodied approaches/experiments. Bring a draft to revise!

There’s the fact that I write in a body—seems obvious enough, and yet..how often I relegate that work to just the head. Then there’s writing from a place of inhabiting the strange mess and sensuality of it. There are experiments and practices I turn to/conjure to for this. Some very small: feeling my feet and wiggling my toes while I’m writing. Noticing where my feet touch what surface. Their shape, temperature. Imagining I can bring breath there. Bringing attention also to my back body, along my spine, imagining I can reach back behind me with the breath. Stretching out my arms, so the noticing becomes horizontal. Because language moves in every direction. (If you’re craving devising your own somatic writing ritual/experiment, you might find this exercise from “The poem as Ritualistic Structure” in which poet Maggie Queeney builds on CA Conrad’s work fruitful.)

I don't think this inquiry can, or should, be separated from the sensual, the erotic. “The erotic is a resource within each of us…” wrote Audre Lorde in the oft-quoted “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” And I am thinking about this resource as integral to writing and revising. Isn’t the poem a site of linguistic, visual, sonic, dramatic, sensual, and intellectual pleasure? Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) comes to mind again: “(and yet: what if knowledge itself were? Delicious?)”. Lorde goes on to say: “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”

I return again & again to Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, in which she left imprints of her body in the earth with flowers, branches, gunpowder, moss, fire. Sometimes carving, burning her own form into the earth. Which we do daily. We leave a mark.

In this achy world we inhabit, I’m not sure how to let myself fully feel even a fraction of the time. The attempt seems worthwhile.

It’s been a time of trying to show up better for the people I adore amidst ongoing genocide, despair-inducing news, and how expensive it is to be a person. I’m grateful for the support of brilliant beloveds, and examples across history of devoted people confronting horror and staying in the struggle even without end in sight. Among resources to fortify my spirit in this time (highly recommend making a list like this for yourself/ with loved ones), I’ve added to my listening list Paul Robeson’s testimony before the Senate in 1948 in opposition to the Mundt-Nixon Communist Registration Bill. That link will take you to Another World Archives: “a people’s archive about art and culture in the struggle to build and imagine another world.”

2025 was the year I brought my first book into the world, a dream I’ve had since childhood. I read from We Contain Landscapes in 12 different cities and received notes about my debut that made my head and heart spin. Thank you to every reader.

There’s much to digest & much I want to do better. And while the energy of reinvention has long appealed to me—having inherited many ossified ideas about how to be a person—at the same time, I am moved by what is core in people. Not unchanging, but like a stone in the river. The current leaving its mark after many seasons. Smoothing surfaces, one day to silt. I’m grateful for another year of getting to be here at all.

~

One of my jobs is as a Museum Guide at the Chazen Museum of Art. The tours we create ask visitors to sit with just 3-5 works of art in an hour with us. With each piece, we look closely, make observations, pose questions, discuss. I’ve noticed how challenging it can be for people of all age groups to truly observe and name what they see, before trying to interpret the work or expressing an opinion. The mind seems to jump readily to whether or not we like a thing, or what it might mean. I ask people to look, then look again. To step closer to the work, then step further away.

Art date: I invite you to take yourself on an art date this winter and pick an artwork to sit or stand in front of for at least 10 minutes. You could make a list of things you notice. Maybe step closer to the work and notice a couple more. Then step further away. You might take note of where/how it is displayed (how is it framed or placed? what kind of lighting is in the space?). Look again, closer. You could ask yourself what the work might smell or sound like. What moves or troubles you about it? Let me know how it goes.

Upcoming workshops:

- Generative Drop-in: Spirals on Tuesday, January 20th, 6.30-7.30pm CT via Zoom. One hour to write together, using ~spirals~ as our lens/generative spark. $20-30 sliding scale session. Writers of all genres welcome.

- The next Embodied Revision workshop will be on Saturday, February 6th 11am-12.30pm CT via Zoom. This is a 1.5 hour cross-genre revision session, incorporating embodied approaches/experiments. $40-60 sliding scale. Bring a draft you’re hoping to revise! The strategies we try out can be applied to poetry or prose. Just let me know which you might bring to work with in the sign-up form.

You’re also welcome to reach out about your hopes for Working Together 1:1. My books are open for written feedback on manuscripts, essays, stories, poetry packets, and developing projects, to which we can also add a Zoom session depending on your goals. I also meet with writers 1:1 for tailored workshops and coaching. Just reach out with your specific needs/goals.

Lastly, Join me in signing up for the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network to report or find out about ICE activity in your area.

Til next time,

I’ve been exploring my relationship to devotion through water. You’re invited to take class with me this Sunday, November 9th, 12-3pm CT, 10am-1pm PT, via Tin House’s Online Craft Intensives. More about Water as Method: Image, Subtext, Syntax here.

Devotion Lab. I’m planning to launch a virtual multi-session offering in January/February to gather more regularly with writers, at the request of former students. The generative workshop series will dive deeper into devotion as method—exploring both devoting oneself to a writing/arts practice, as well as the idea of devotion as a lens through which to write. I’m currently considering 3-4 live sessions (recorded, though the hope is writers won’t need to miss more than one; I’d love to grow an intimate, engaged cohort), as well as an included 1:1 chat with me. If this is something you’re interested in, and if you want to weigh in on timing, share your thoughts here.

I recently chatted with Jonny Teklit for his mutual aid fundrai$ing substack WATCH (Writers and Their Cherished Hobbies) about improvised dance, with funds going to Palestine Legal. Highly recommend Jonny’s newsletter! One thing I talked with Jonny about is how improvisation has taught me that we can dance anywhere and everywhere. Even if one’s movement is limited, even in pain, there is dance. You can dance seated or in bed, you can dance with your hand, with a gaze. You can check that out here:

Writers & Their Cherished Hobbies

WATCH! Patrycja Humienik Is Dancing On Her Own

The weather has finally turned in DC. The leaves outside my living room window have all gone orange which has brought me a great deal of delight. Autumn has always been my favorite season, partly because of the colors and the reemergence of fall-specific treats, but also because I am able to wear the largest percentage of my wardrobe during this season…

Read more

10 months ago · 3 likes · jonny teklit

I’m a Visiting Poet with Juniper Institute this summer! I can nominate a few writers to attend, so reach out to me if you're hoping for a nomination, which waives your application fee.

New poem! I’ve been writing poetry and prose outside of We Contain Landscapes, most of which I haven’t been publishing, with the exception of this poem in At What Cost’s Style Catalog—a lovely virtual issue that is free to read.

More to share with you about devotion, water as method, and dance soon.

Take good care, and hold your loves close,

Patrycja

That relentless bombardment continues with U.S. tax dollars, in the effort to decimate an entire people and seize land—a familiar story, upgraded with the latest surveillance technology and chemical warfare—while accelerating climate change for all, our cities increasingly militarized, people punished for calling a genocide a genocide, for attempting to refuse mass death, while administrations abandon working people here year after year—amidst a slew of entangled issues not limited to the dismantling of higher education, defunding of the arts, exorbitant costs of living, and the manufacturing of consent by our so-called free press, that cornerstone of our mythical democracy—is a war also on our very minds, critical thinking abilities, and emotional capacities.

The question of how to refuse all of this cannot be answered alone in a single lifetime, and cannot stay on the page. I think it needs wrestling with through action, however small, ongoingly, by each of us in our particular webs of care. Forgive me if it sounds as though I am writing to you from atop a greasy soapbox, thinking myself scrubbed nice and clean. I write from within the mess and ache of all this, while trying to make this life of writing and art—of writing my books and supporting others in their making—that I have felt called to since childhood, a life that feels increasingly ridiculous to dream toward in my particular material circumstance, in these expensive, exhausting times. But it is a time to draw strength from social movements, autonomous zones, and acts of care worldwide, both ongoing and past. I feel the urgent need to strengthen my knowledge of the undersides of history, to gather fuel and grow my emotional capacities for struggles now and ahead. I know too little, but I recognize devotion, conviction, love enacted when watching people around the world board flotillas setting sail for Palestine. There are countless gorgeous acts of refusal and imagination near and far, which I am trying to better attend to, to really see.

I have been reading, finally, Arundhati Roy’s gorgeous novel The God of Small Things and attending to the author’s way in the world—listening to interviews with her and noting the lush precision of her language within and outside of her fiction. I am moved by her oft-quoted lines: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” The fuller passage reads:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. 

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. 

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. 

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” —Arundhati Roy, War Talk

I am writing new work, poetry and prose(!) , and learning how to be—how I want to be—a writer in the world. In a few weeks, it’ll be the six month mark of my first book out. That people continue to read We Contain Landscapes with such care and thoughtfulness jolts me into gratitude. Among gratitudes: a recent review in Poetry Northwest by Miriam Milena; Livia Meneghin’s review in Colorado Review; this conversation with Swati Sudarsan in The Adroit Journal, excerpted below.

If you’d like to work together, I am freelance editing & teaching, and my books are open! I have upcoming virtual generative classes, including Devotion: A Generative Workshop, on Saturday, September 13th, 11am-12.30pm CT and Lake Effect: A Generative Workshop on Sunday, September 21st, 11am-12.30pm CT, $40-60 sliding scale. More info on course offerings below, and more TBA.

I offer individualized sessions via Zoom and written feedback. I love working with people on their book projects at any stage, be it ideation/generating work, developmental editing and deep revision, or copyediting. While I specialize in poetry, I also edit CNF/essays, fiction, academic work, and more. In addition to helping book projects come to fruition, I also provide feedback on shorter projects. I have a background in dance-based performance and love to support the development of performance and hybrid works.

💌 Get in touch via email or the contact form on my website with your needs/hopes/questions.
🌀 Reach out about coming to your city with We Contain Landscapes! I am still doing class visits and readings. Next up, I’ll be in Houston, TX with the Gulf Coast Reading Series at Lawndale Art Center on Friday, September 27th, 7pm CT.

Upcoming Course Offerings:

If you’re seeking more writing workshops, check out Workshop4Gaza.

Stay hydrated <3,

Patrycja

I’m still reflecting on the whirl of book tour and conversations I’ve been lucky to have about the book (such as this interview on Between the Covers with David Naimon). I’ll share thoughts on debut author life, devotion, and more with you soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share this fundraiser for Nabil S, author of “It Was All Songs: A Letter from Gaza,” as well as drop a note about ways to work together in the coming seasons.

Sarah Aziza, who is collecting the funds, is the author of the recently published book, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, which she spoke about on Democracy Now a couple months ago.

Working together:

One-on-one (editing, feedback, generative sessions, etc):

I work with writers 1:1 on their books at any stage of the writing process, as well as smaller packets of poems, individual essays, Masters’ theses, revision and generative strategies, etc. We can dig in with a Zoom session in addition to written feedback, depending on how you work best. Find out more at my website, or get in touch with me directly via email (humienik@gmail.com) about your needs/hopes.

Virtual workshops/drop-in sessions:

Devotion: A Generative Writing Session, Saturday, August 9th 11am-12:30pm CT / 12-1.30pm ET. This is a drop-in workshop, $40-60 sliding scale, via Zoom.

"Devotion is full of arrows." —Joanna Klink

What is devotion? What are you devoted to? What do you want to be devoted to?

This is a generative session in which we explore the question(s) of devotion. Whether you're just hoping to generate new material to work with; seek to devote yourself more fully to your writing/art; are intrigued by the concept of devotion as a catalyst or lens for writing/art-making; and/or you are suspicious of the word—join me!

I invite you to come read, discuss, and try out a generative writing exercise. Though we will be reading a few poems, you can write in any genre during our hour together.

More information here.

Water as Method: Rivers & the Poetic Image, Saturday, October 11th 11am-2pm CT / 12-3pm ET, $90-105, virtually with Poets House.

Rivers mirror the poetic image at its best: at once grounding, inextricable from the sensuous material of life, and transporting. Image is where the senses through which we read the world, the sensuous material of our days, meet the emotional and psychic material. River is at once myth and irrigation, transportation and border—grounding and destabilize questions of time, movement, scale, interiority and collectivity. I return again and again to rivers, real and imagined.

In this single-session, generative in-person workshop we’ll discuss what rivers can teach us about poetic image. We’ll read poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Jenny George, Natasha Trethewey, and Jean Valentine and write our own using generative exercises. Writers of all experience levels are welcome. More information here.

More course offerings TBA.

If you’re looking for additional course offerings from a range of brilliant writers, check out Workshops 4 Gaza.

Testimonials:

“Patrycja read my book with depth and clarity. She encouraged me to lean into my strengths, and she pushed me towards what was not yet on the page with rigor, curiosity, and care. She brings precision and honesty to the editing process– you can trust her to tell you what's working and not working, on the level of individual poems and a manuscript as a whole, and to support you towards the strongest version of your work. Patrycja is a phenomenal editor, who cares deeply about poets and our craft. I highly recommend working with her, your poems will thank you!!”

—Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, and recent winner of the Helena Whitehill Book Award for her forthcoming third collection

“Patrycja's poetry workshops are the perfect mix of intellectual stimulation and body knowledge. She helps me get into my head and subconscious, yes, but more importantly, back out again, with new images and connections to explore.”

—Allie Rigby, Poet

“I can’t imagine my book without Patrycja’s feedback. Her insights, observations, questions, encouragements, and revision suggestions challenged and empowered me to push my poems in the most crucial ways. Generous and wise, with brilliant instincts for both line-level and structural aspects of a manuscript, Patrycja is one of the best consultants I’ve ever known. Worth every cent and then some!”

—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat

More on my website (and updates there coming soon)

<3,

I’m immensely grateful for the readers the book has found already, and for readers to come. The publishing industry can give a false sense of urgency about books—I want to be sure to say: it means a lot to me if you’ve read WCL already and it will continue to mean a lot to me if you read it another season, or years from now! You can buy a copy at your local bookstore. Or order from one of my favorite bookstores, Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle—while you’re on that page, consider supporting the Gaza Poets Society.

I’ve been lucky to be in conversation about WCL with thoughtful readers and brilliant writers. Most recently, this interview with poet Sarah Ghazal Ali, one of the daughters of immigrants addressed in the letter series in book, came out in BOMB.

If you want in-depth listening, this interview with David Naimon on Between the Covers, wherever you listen to podcasts, was extra special to me as a longtime fan of the show. BTC has a stunning archive of conversations with writers I admire from around the world. For a shorter conversation, I had the pleasure of being interviewed alongside my artwife, the brilliant poet Gabrielle Bates, for Montserrat Andrée Carty’s podcast, Musings of the Artist.

You’ll find a few signed copies left at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, Powell’s in Portland, Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Women & Children First in Chicago, and A Room of One’s Own in Madison. Thank you to everyone who has attended and been part of events on this book tour! Details on upcoming events in NYC & Philly below. If you want to bring me to your university/lit center/classroom/dance studio/gallery space/bonfire/etc in the coming seasons, email me or reach out through my website (patrycjasara.com). Travel as a debut author is costly—paid invitations very much appreciated!

Tomorrow is the last day to enroll in a generative workshop I’m teaching in person in New York at Brooklyn Poets on Sunday 6/15 10:30am EST, open to writers of all experience levels; more info here. You can also catch me virtually as a Visiting Artist for Shira Erlichman’s July session of In Surreal Life. Or, you can reach out via my website to work together 1:1.

Upcoming events:

Friday, June 13th @7pm EST—New York City, NY
Brooklyn Poets Reading Series
with Ariana Reines & t’ai freedom ford

Monday, June 16th @7pm EST— New York City, NY
KGB Monday Night Reading Series - 85 E 45th Street
with Gabrielle Bates & Jimin Seo

Tuesday, June 17th @7pm EST— Philadelphia, PA
5-3-5 Reading Series - RSVP for address - Fundraiser for Gaza
with Tamiko Beyer & Mia Kang

More ways to support: buy the book; request WCL from your local library; write a review (a quick Goodreads review, or pitch something more in-depth to your favorite outlet), your-idea-here. If you’re hoping I make it to your city, please reach out via my website. In addition to readings/events, I love visiting classes and teaching workshops. All my gratitude,

xx,

Patrycja

Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of very few poetry-focused bookstores in the U.S., ships free on orders over $50. You can also request WCL from your local library (or put in a request for your library to purchase the book). If you can’t buy the book, please know that libraries mean the world to me; ensuring your local library has the book is a lovely way to support a debut author. Another free way to support is to leave a review on Goodreads when you’ve read it.

Some poems from WCL recently made available online: “Saint Hyacinth Basilica” in The New Yorker, “Eros and Sorrow” at Poetry Northwest, “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter (for Malvika)” at Only Poems, “On Belonging” at The Hopkins Review.

I’m grateful for the thoughtfulness and care of interviewers and reviewers. More conversations drop this week in Electric Literature, Liminal Transit Review, and elsewhere, if you’re looking to learn more about the making of this project. And if you’re in the region, you can catch me at upcoming events this week: 3/18 7pm at North Street Cabaret in Madison with Chessy Normile, Taymour Soomro & Paul Tran; 3/21 7pm Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago with Sarah Ghazal Ali. I’ll be in Los Angeles for AWP next week, signing the book at the Tin House Booth on Thursday 3/27 at 11am + offsite events (more on that below).

[Some generous things said about We Contain Landscapes]

“Raw and intimate, these are refreshingly candid poems.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A moving, cohesive work animated by questions of diaspora, agency, language, and borders.”
—Electric Lit, A Most Anticipated Debut Poetry Collection of 2025

“Patrycja Humienik picks up where the great Polish poets of the twentieth century left off, writing of exile, war, fragmented families, and grief for a ruined environment. And yet, her mind is utterly contemporary and new. . . . Wondrous. . . We Contain Landscapes introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry.”
—Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

“Shot through with radiance and self-possession, Humienik’s poems are reminders that life at the edge of exorbitant longing can feel more free, more alive.”
—Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields

“Sensual, ephemeral, dream-like. . . . Humienik’s is a powerful debut, a conundrum as rich and arresting as it is sorrowful and celebratory and nuanced.”
—The Associated Press

“Illuminates to us the sticky insides of longing, and the crisis of returning to ourselves in the process of returning home.”
—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia

“Here are intensely beautiful poems that arrange perception and then rearrange it, in the way that identity and memory do.”
—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

At the risk of sounding grandiose, I hope this book invites readers to imagine beyond dominant paradigms—of borders, of ownership, of shame. This is a book full of questions, among them: What do you long for? How do we get somewhere more loving and more free? Who is we? How might we widen the boundaries of our love, of what we imagine for our lives and for future generations?

<3,

Patrycja

Since I last wrote to you, my life has entirely changed. There’s much I want to share, and much I don’t know yet how to say. I live alone for the first time. I’m back in the region of my childhood.

I’m not sure I know what devotion means. Not in practice.

I’ve avoided writing this newsletter; I’m not as consistent a person as I hope to be. Obsessed with the idea of devotion and with getting nearer to it, I’m an aspiring devotee. I want to love more deeply in every relationship and area of my life, and I’m trying to learn how to love better, more honestly. To show up to all that I do with both rigor and play. I think this is what devotion is about. But to think it is different than to live it.

I’m learning about rigor, play, and showing up in a Making Comics class with the legendary Lynda Barry. Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and teacher who devotes her life to a question shared also by many poets: “What is an image?”

Lynda believes she can teach anyone to make comics and it doesn’t matter if, like me, you don’t know how to draw. She is an extremely generous teacher—probably the best teacher I’ve ever had. Already I am drawing and seeing, noticing, differently. She laughs heartily, fills the room with perfect, enlivening playlists, feeds us candy (her only flaw might be intensifying my sugar addiction), and says deceivingly simple, brilliant things like, “The function of these things we call art is a biological one… art persists.” & “I don’t need to understand poetry because poetry understands me.” She has us draw with eyes closed, with our non-dominant hand, drawing ourselves as animals, vegetables, astronauts. She’s playful, but she’s for real—the class requires much, daily, work. This semester we call her Professor Capybara, largest rodent in the world!, and we’ve each taken on other names in her class. I go by Verve.

I’ve been contemplating the word verve for more than a few seasons—what feels to me an embodied, deep kind of enthusiasm. It’s visceral, and of the spirit. It’s got nerve. At the beginning of the year I wrote down: More tenderness, verve, grace, bite.

I’m a perpetual student in this life, of what it means to get more free. Together. In deep study, the embodied kind. I’m grateful for beloveds with nerve, heart, conscience, spine. For everyone getting into the streets, making calls to spineless representatives, saying a clear NO to genocide with our tax dollars, disrupting business as usual. In the words of Aracelis Girmay, “YOU ARE WHO I LOVE.”

I long for public spaces of grief, rage, celebration, refusal, imagination.

It’s hard to be a person. In office hours the other day, a student shared with me their fear of not knowing how to be a person. I decided not to pretend I had a solution. I told them—I’m not sure not sure how comforting or alarming it was—that I haven't figured out how to be a person either.

I can’t yet say when I’ll write to you next. I’m trying to only make promises I can keep. But I will share something I’ve drawn soon, as much as it mortifies me. It’s gorgeous to be a beginner.

A few writing things:

• ICYMI, you’re invited to sit with the On Rivers folio I curated for The Seventh Wave:

  • Excerpt from my editor’s note for the issue:

    “What rivers do you visit, on foot or in memory? What rivers do you invent?

    The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in ‘XV’ (translated by Antoon): ‘You said: I used to invent love when necessary. When I walked alone on the riverbank. Or whenever the level of salt would rise in my body, I would invent the river.’

    In this issue, eight writers across genre take us to real and speculative rivers, where we are confronted with questions of lineage, longing, history, and the question of crossing. ‘There are so many prayers/ knifing through the blue,’ writes Laura Da’. What is on the other side?”

    

• I’ve got a book of poems, We Contain Landscapes, coming out with Tin House in early 2025, in case you haven’t heard me geek out about that yet. More updates coming soon.

  

You can find a rotating list of targeted urgent fundraisers for Gazans HERE.

Til soon, <3

“One part of me/ is disappointed in another part,/ like rowers on the lake.”

—Hua Xi, “Going (Guest House)”

A couple years ago, I read a poem called “Going (Guest House)” in American Poetry Review by a poet named Hua Xi. I loved it so much I cut it out of the issue.

Hua quickly became one of my favorite poets, and a friend I’m grateful to get to know. Recently Hua tweeted, “i wish more people would draw a frog and send it to me,” and I still need to draw them a frog.

I asked Hua a few questions about devotion & flowers & sustenance & dreams below. You can read more about Devotion Chats & past interviews here:

Devotion Chat: Hua Xi

Hua Xi (she/they) is a writer and artist. Their work has appeared in the New Republic, the Nation, the Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, the Margins, and elsewhere. They help edit interviews at Guernica and read poetry for the Drift. They also spend some time running workshops with the Spatial Poetry Project. They love large clouds.

What does devotion mean to you? What, if anything, are you devoted to?

Recently, I read the Yiyun Li short story, “A Flawless Silence”. There is a woman in the story who usually is conflict-avoidant and when she disagrees with something or something bothers her, she doesn’t voice her opinion. At the end of the story, she has this realization that silence is not the same thing as dignity. 

I’ve been thinking lately about when to speak and when to not. Your question about devotion makes me think of what it means to devote ourselves to the things we believe in. I don’t know if I have an answer to that. But I’ve been thinking, alongside reading this story, about the value of believing in things and speaking up with your beliefs even when it’s impossible to have a perfect opinion. 

What is helping you feel connected to your body lately?  

I was telling a friend just yesterday that I feel completely disembodied, like a floating head.

How do you sustain or nourish your writing?

I really enjoy eating breakfast and lunch. I like to make myself a little plate with different vegetables and bread and butter and jams and cheese. Or I like to make steel-cut oatmeal and put different berries and preserves on it. I feel like we were put on this earth to have a fancy little lunch everyday. 

What most often gets in the way of your writing/artmaking?  

I get very easily addicted to other hobbies like playing video games, then I spend all my time doing that instead. But that’s okay because I enjoy that too.

Sometimes I can’t write if it’s too hot outside. So, probably global warming also will get in the way of that. 

What is a dream that scares you?  

I used to have a lot of lucid dreams and they probably stemmed from my anxiety. People think it’s a lot of fun but I really didn’t enjoy having them because I would wake up feeling so tired the next day and often the dreams were filled with anxiety. I used to have this dream where I woke up on top of a very large stone head statue and then I looked around me and saw all these other stone head statues buried in the sand. I had that dream over and over again. 

If your creativity resided in a particular landscape, what would that look like?  

Maybe a desert. I spent a lot of time in the deserts in California growing up and I think they’re very beautiful, and I find them sort of centering. They’re very colorful. They have a lot going on but at the extremes, being either very large or very small. 

A song that's on repeat in your life this week/lately?

I left my headphones on a bus somewhere so I feel like I’ve just been listening to my own thoughts.

Favorite flower?

I love a random, weedy flower on the side of the road that is unidentifiable. Especially if you see it from the window of a car passing by really fast. I feel like we live in a time where everything gets documented and categorized but it doesn’t really add any value and only makes beautiful things feel more mundane, so I love a flower that is just passing by, unnamed and unremembered and unexpected. Like, who put it there? Why is the universe like this? Et cetera. 

Thank you so much to everyone who subscribes. You can read past newsletters, like the most recent one on “Reading & Rereading” here. As a working artist, I appreciate any contributions if you are able to $upport:

And I love your love

freed from itself and its signs”

—Mahmoud Darwish, Mural, transl by Berger & Hammami

It doesn’t take reading much poetry for lines to start floating back to you, casting their eerie, gorgeous glow on a deceivingly mundane moment. Before I’d had a traceable thought about two strangers parting near an exit sign, Darwish’s words were echoing in my mind: “And I love your love/ freed from itself and its signs.” What is a love freed from itself? What signs bind love? 

I’m not sure, but for a second I fell in love with two strangers and their prolonged goodbye. What if I had shouted at them: “I LOVE YOUR LOVE/ FREED FROM ITSELF AND ITS SIGNS”?? Ok, I held back—it wasn’t the time to cause a scene. But the lines burrow, forming a rope I am following into a cave in myself. 

I’ve been reading and rereading Darwish’s “Mural,” alone and alongside other poets I adore. Last month, a small group of us got together on Zoom and read the whole long poem aloud. When was the last time you read aloud with someone? Before that, I had mostly done this in workshops, like a workshop I taught on Devotion & Play where we read Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love” together. But I rarely read this way with beloveds, gorgeous range of voices filling the space, and I want to change that. Reading aloud, alone and together, is a practice that also feeds the dancer and musician in me—it makes an instrument of language, of my body.

Rereading can feel absurd when I have stacks of unread books from bookstores and libraries and people I adore. But poetry in particular invites, even demands, rereading, and I’ve been leaning into that. Whether it’s obsession, or an act of devotion, it’s a deepening. There are books I return to again & again—among them Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song, Sandra Lim’s The Wilderness, Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness transl by Yvette Siegert, Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria, Jenny Xie’s Eye Level, Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, Linda Gregg’s All of It Singing—and poems like Joanna Klink’s “On Kingdoms,” Carl Phillips’ “And If I Fall,” Adam Zagajewski’s “Self-Portrait,” Lucille Clifton’s “cutting greens,” Natasha Oladokun’s “I Asked God for the Moon,” Czesław Miłosz’ “Encounter,” Julio Cortázar’s “To Be Read in the Interrogative” transl by Kessler &&&..

Rereading, looking again, feel like a necessary refusal amidst the pace and scroll of to-do lists & what’s next & the myth that forward is the only available direction. My poem “On Self-Deceit” in Shenandoah’s latest issue (note: best viewed on web rather than mobile) emerged in part from my fascination with this photograph by Francesca Woodman that I’ve returned to over the years:

What do you re-read? or what work(s) of art do you return to?

(I’d love to know, if you want to share in the comments<3)

I recently had a phone call about “On Self-Deceit,” & more, with Shenandoah’s brilliant guest editor Siew David Hii. In this unique interview format, questions were removed. I’m still learning how to talk about my first-book-in-progress. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

My first book—not yet published—is called Anchor Baby. I’ve been grappling with place, including bodies of water, and ideas of home and belonging. Questions about belonging, even to oneself, and how to reckon with imposed scripts for women, good daughterhood, sexuality.
 

How we might betray ourselves…
 

I have an obsession with landscapes and ideas of the landscapes inside of us. In the book I’m also thinking through inheritance, specifically Catholicism, and how religious tradition can discipline us into obedience.

You can read the full interview here.

& ICYMI, my poem “The Last Anchoress” from the latest beautiful issue of Gulf Coast:

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Next week I’ll drop the first of the Devotion Chats (more on that monthly offering here), ft. Hua Xi. <3

& If you’re in the PNW, I’m reading with poet & essayist Jane Wong (whose stunning memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City just came out) this Sunday 5/28 in the Green Room @ The Castle (651 Cleveland St., Port Townsend, WA) 6.30pm

“Being yourself... you wind up realizing you are a planet.” —Joy Harjo

I love when a conversation, or a piece of art, or a conversation about art, returns me to myself. Or maybe it isn’t a return, which implies something lost, but more like turning up the volume. Do you ever feel like that, how a friend reaches for something in you, a dial on a car stereo, and just turns it up?

Some conversations feel like windows down, wind in our hair on the road. Art and friendship sustain me. How a sustain pedal holds the notes, allows them to ring out longer, even after the keys have been let go.

Once a month, I’ll share an interview/chat with another writer/artist/thinker I adore. May’s conversation will be with the writer & artist Hua Xi. I’m moved by their incredible poems, investigations in spatial history through poetry, and love of clouds. Here’s one of their poems I love, “Everything Lies in All Directions”:

I’ll drop interviews with brilliant writer/artists/thinkers monthly, for the Devotion Chats part of this newsletter. Today, I’m looking back and sharing excerpts from a few short interviews from 2020. Those of you who subscribed to my blossomwilt tinyletter back in the day might remember these:

You can experience some of Marjorie’s gorgeous paintings, oil on canvas, in person at Woodwalk Gallery in Door County, Wisconsin on view May 28-July 25th, or enjoy a glimpse online. Marjorie’s relationship to color and texture and landscapes, that intimacy and depth, is felt on the canvas and when she plays the piano. Here’s Across the Road #1:

Nanya has since dug into that “I of the underbrush,” and taken up the invitation and challenge of “I,” like in these four poems in Waxwing.

From “10am on Market Street”:

Walking to the bus stop, you feel your categories
close in, encircle, when what you want
is their convergence.
 —Nanya Jhingran

I love the way the speaker of these poems lets us in on their thinking and questions about self, the city, and looking, and what they see.

Alishya has a gorgeous diptych of paintings, “THICKET OF THE HEART,” on view at RedLine Denver starting this weekend, April 29th though May 11th. I’m really moved by Alishya’s art and thinking on grief, somatic memory and the physicality of making art, and liberation.

These are just a few of the brilliant artists/writers I admire and adore, and I’m excited to share chats with more in the coming seasons. For one last look back on thought&heart-provoking conversations, I had the gorgeous, bewildering experience also in fall 2020 of interviewing the former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, just days before the election. You can watch that here. I love what she had to say about art-making, change, unknowing, and being human. In that conversation, I reference a different interview, in TIME, in which Joy Harjo said, re: what advice she’d give to poets, advice that applies, also, to living:

“It’s about learning to listen, much like in music. You can train your ears to history. You can train your ears to the earth. You can train your ears to the wind.”

One of my favorite podcasts for great conversations/interviews is Between the Covers. Do you have a favorite interview? Drop it in the comments.

Whew. If you haven’t seen this list of questions before—or if like me upon every re-read you’re struck by their gorgeous, incisive fervor—you might want to take a moment to stare out a window or touch grass or get your journal or voicememo a beloved or just put them in your back pocket for when the time is right.

I am beginning again. I was intimidated to begin the experiment of this newsletter because amidst noise and beauty, much to read & do & respond to, I had doubts about contributing to the cacophony. Because language fails me, or I fail language. Because as obsessed as I am with the idea of devotion, I have no definitions or answers for you, only questions and ongoing arguments with myself, a growing list of images and associations, experiments. Because to begin with one idea is to blow out imagined candles of other possible beginnings. But every beginning, as Wisława Szymborska puts it in “Love at First Sight,” “is only a sequel, after all.” A continuation. How where a river begins, confluence or headwater, its source, contains its own beginning, and on &..

So I begin, with beginnings, with rivers. Rivers, ones I’ve visited and imagined, come up often in my poems. There is something I am learning about devotion from rivers. How they move toward a larger body. Their pursuit of sea. I think devotion, whether to God or a beloved or an art practice or an idea, &&&, has to do with something bigger than us. Even if we are just practicing devotion to ourselves, isn’t it a more expansive idea of self? Can it be a way of making room for past and future selves, a widening? How does it feel to spread your arms out and feel your wingspan? What does it feel like to gently stretch that reach? to wiggle your fingertips?

Upcoming: I’ve got an hourlong offering coming up on the last day of this month (National Poetry Month!)—join me in writing, reading & discussing poems re: rivers on 4/30 11am PT. More info on this drop-in session via Zoom ($20-30 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds) here. Join whether you're new to writing poems or have been writing for decades.

Readings: If you live in the midwest, I’m reading poems in Chicago this weekend at Haymarket House on 4/14 & the Sunday Reading Series at Hungry Brain on 4/16 in celebration of Gabrielle Bates’ JUDAS GOAT alongside brilliant poets.

I’m glad you’re here! Thank you to everyone who subscribes. I’m going to try out sharing an offering here weekly. If you want to support my writing & art, please share and/or upgrade your subscription:

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