AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (RACHEL ABRAMOWITZ)
Bio: Rachel Abramowitz is the author of the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York.
Book Title: The Birthday of the Dead
Press: Conduit Books & Ephemera
1. What is something that surprised you during the writing, editing, or publishing process for The Birthday of the Dead?
As the writing of these poems spans the last 15 years, I was surprised to find several throughlines; I’m certainly not now the person I was when I wrote the oldest poem, and yet in putting together this collection, I can trace the evolution of certain concerns, obsessions, and crutches, and identify them in my current work. I can also hear the echoes of whomever I was reading at the time—here’s the Mary Ruefle era, the Jack Gilbert stage, the Dean Young imitation. The editing, then, required revisiting these selves, trying to both access the feeling of discovery and the years of integrating lessons from other poets. It’s also been wild to see what emerges from setting a manuscript in order! Poems talking to each other—in this order the conversation dies, in this sequence they won’t stop yammering. I hadn’t given enough credence to the activity of sequencing before. Never again.
2. How might you describe the “experiment” or challenge of this book? What form, procedure, sound, or mystery enlivened your mind while writing?
I didn’t set out to write a “project” book, but that being said, there’s a lot of death in this book, and I don’t know what it’s like to be dead. That sounds flippant, but death is a state of both being and not-being, and is totally transformative on an atomic level (in death one is passively transformed by bacteria, animals, oxygen, etc., while in life our living bodies actively transform themselves!). It also makes up, I would argue, the majority of our living thoughts, incentives, and behaviors (conscious and subconscious). And we living know nothing about it! It’s a cliché to say that all art is really about sex and death, but I certainly can’t name anything else that looms as large in our psyches.
3. Can you discuss an edit, idea, response, or interaction with another person that helped this book find its way in the world—aesthetically, materially, visually, structurally, spiritually…?
My sister Michele is a brilliant painter and, though she won’t admit it, writer and editor. While her paintings themselves are profoundly inspiring, it has been the conversations I have had with her about them, about poetry, and—surprise!—about phenomenology in science fiction (I wager she is the top reader of science fiction on the planet) that have sparked many poems and revisions. I love our conversations about the strangeness of the human experience, about sensory perception and how our senses literally shape our world. She is the first reader of most of my work, and is annoyingly consistent at zeroing in on moments I’ve tried to “get away with”—she always pushes me to be more precise, more strange.
4. Is there a physical place or space you associate with the poems in The Birthday of the Dead?
Not as a whole, but each poem certainly takes place in its own mental setting. “Your Life in Art,” for example, looks a lot like Manderley, while “Dead-Color” is a turreted artist’s studio with wooden shutters on the windows. I love wandering into a new setting at the beginning of a poem: what’s under this rock? Behind this doorway? Through these weird twisted trees?
5. What do you appreciate about the press (Conduit Books & Ephemera) that published this book?
No one starts a poetry press for wealth and glory, so I already admire all editors of such presses! Conduit especially, however, has a wonderful eye for the slightly weird that I very much appreciate. Working with editor William Waltz over the past year has been an absolute delight—and he has shown superhuman patience with my edits and requests.
6. Do you recall the most recent small press (micro, indie, DIY, university) publication you’ve recommended? What made you want to tell someone about it?
I adore Rescue Press! Their choices have always been spot-on, and they create beautiful objects out of the texts they select. Their catalogue tends toward the experimental and challenging, but nothing I’ve read has been alienating or difficult for the sake of being difficult.
7. Is there a text, song, piece of art, or made thing that your book talks to, borrows from, fights with, or is in tribute to?
I have been fascinated by Brian Catling’s work—he is a British visual artist, author, and poet, and I’ve stolen several of his painting titles for my poems. If I were to make a mood board of what I would like my poems to resemble, I would add Pan’s Labyrith, Tom Waits, Meret Oppenheim’s “Ma gouvernante—My Nurse—Mein Kindermädchen,” and Catling’s The Vorrh. A bit surreal, a bit dreamy, a bit horrible.
8. What adventures are you looking forward to, thinking about, or practicing now?
I had my first kid about a month ago, so that’s an… adventure. I’ve never written autobiographically or narratively, and I doubt I’ll start now, but I wonder if and when and in what form this new addition and new identity will appear in poems. Perhaps it won’t, as I’ve been careful to keep my “real” (ha) life out of my work, but as we well know, the subconscious works in mysterious ways. Birth also may prove to be a generative foil for my obsession with entropy—this tiny person has been put in order, but even in utero, chaos was at work.
9. Who will you gift a copy of The Birthday of the Dead to? Or where will you leave it for someone to find?
I live a few blocks away from Green-Wood Cemetery, a stunning 470+ acre, 180-year-old park-slash-burial ground. It boasts an incredible variety of birds and other wildlife (feral parrots!), as well as a range of mausoleum architecture. I plan to leave a copy of The Birthday of the Dead behind an old headstone, preferably one whose lettering has faded—I’m a sucker for those!