michael miller brett walker tie the knot

#MICHAEL MILLER BRETT WALKER TIE THE KNOT FREE#

While this isn’t an explicitly eco-poem, my underlying thought was to call out America’s history of genocide in connection to our current state of environmental peril. I reference acknowledging the indigenous land as a way to undo erasure. I am interested in the intersection of nature poetry/eco-poetics for women of color, and societal possibilities to de-colonize how we interact with each other and our environment. In the poem, outside of the house, nature becomes a sanctuary and a place of subversive transformation, as women appear and find personal and collective power. I grew up in suburban coastal Southern California, where the hills are treeless, so I was always fascinated by the determined young women in fairy tales who wandered through forests and found magic there. While some lines reference domestic life, my mind was in a forest, no doubt because I was wandering around Gambier’s various nature preserves.

#MICHAEL MILLER BRETT WALKER TIE THE KNOT FREE#

After a week of being out in the field, flirting with fireflies, wading in the river, and writing progressively structured poems, he set us free for the last assignment and told us to write the poem we came to Kenyon to write.Ĭan you tell us more about the setting of this piece, and the Indigenous history of the land that the subject considers? When I wrote the poem, I was in David Baker’s wonderful nature writing class at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. And to give them the space to be messy and free. I sought to call in the invisible labor of women in their daily lives-the weight of their love, anger, and grief, their domestic labor, their caretaking and educating, their elemental concern for our world, and their tenuous ability to be in that world, especially alone. I don’t remember when I came up with the title, but I was drawn to the layered meanings of the phrase “as she appears.” It’s used to suggest that a woman is deceptive, so I wanted to push back on this context by affirming the multiple, complex identities that women hold, while also considering the exhaustion and strength of women. I am interested in the tension between self-expression and perception as a queer woman of color, intertwined with the urgency to endure and thrive. Many of my manuscript poems focus on women looking outward and how they in turn are looked upon or looked past. I came up with the title for the manuscript many months before I wrote the poem, so it was a challenge to write a poem that could be the torchbearer. This is the title poem for my first book manuscript. What was your original impetus for writing “As She Appears”? It appears in the July/Aug 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review. Her poem “As She Appears” can be found here. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, I-Park Foundation, and Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, and Sycamore Review, among others. Shelley Wong is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of the chapbook Rare Birds (Diode Editions, 2017). Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers.The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers.

Michael miller brett walker tie the knot