Kissing, sucking, chewing, salivating, feasting, fasting. What does the mouth do when we’re thinking, reading poetry, watching or approaching a lover or an enemy, a horror movie or a romcom? I’m curious.
Writing nonfiction . . . you really want to write about the big things that happened in your life, but I like to start from something super tiny or something seemingly inconsequential. . . . I’m always looking for the little, tiny ants in my mind that actually do a lot of the heavy lifting.
With translation, it’s like you can do the one-to-one or you can dive into the semiotic excess and see what happens, and rather than try to order the chaos, it’s more sequencing the chaos.
Over the past years I have given myself increasing permission to write in the scattered, associative way my brain works now. I see my nonfiction as an invitation to conversation more than any kind of argumentation.
I’ve made some bad choices in life, but I really don’t think I’ve done anything personally as bad as fucking Heidegger.
Allowing myself to do this book-length, weird, surreal, glitchy poem opened a whole new world in my poetic practice and praxis. It felt like a carnival.
We can look at a rainbow crosswalk, maybe take a selfie with it, and feel recognized or represented in some way, but it doesn’t actually create a space for queer or trans belonging in any real sense.
I really don’t have a palate for total desolation in books. . . . So maybe as an unconscious decision I worked in these moments of hope or pockets of happiness that saved me from spiraling completely.
We’re all living in a historical moment that we can’t get out of.
You have to stand by your work at the end of the day, and honestly, if this book didn’t make me laugh, I wouldn’t have let it go to print.