My mother’s death wrecked me. It also unlocked subjects we struggled to discuss, especially mental health and sexuality. Her reserve was rooted in Englishness, her generation, the introverted temperaments we shared, and in our mutual shame about sex and desire, wherever that comes from. I wish I’d found a better way to answer the question that launched this poem, now that there can be no more answers.
Lesley Wheeler on "Sex Talk" |
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"Ten Questions for Omotara James"
"Each time I felt the book was complete, I would write new poems that felt essential to the text as I understood it. The collection was solicited soon after I finished my MFA program. I was in the midst of processing the death of a loved one while completing my thesis. When the book was accepted the following year, in 2020, as a society we were collectively thrown into grief over losing family members and close friends. The collection became my healing site, my safest place."
viaPOETS & WRITERS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jessica Fisher on Language as Form
"When the voice began, it wasn’t mine, nor did it belong to anyone else in particular—it was instead something like the possibility of speech beginning again, after a period of long silence. Writing often begins for me with this form of potential opening, and the work is to follow the voice as it accrues—or, to follow its underlying rhythm. I love that the I/you relation so central to lyric poetry can accommodate a simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, that there doesn’t have to be any external circumstance to which the poem refers." |
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