Interiors

Abstract

Interiors is a collection of poems that navigates the tension between revealing the intimate self and turning away from this revealing to seek safety in solitude. An introspective speaker moves through confessional and lyric narrative modes, questioning her self-perception and the intricacies of her relationships with beloveds in a moment of late empire that is defined by human rights abuses, climate catastrophe, and capitalist hegemony. These poems are marked by a simultaneous inward searching and outward looking as the speaker investigates her evolving belief system, which develops through memories of familial, platonic, and romantic relationships against a largely Midwestern backdrop. In the first section of the collection, poems explore queer desire and the origins of the speaker’s understanding of sex and intimacy, then follow the progression of a relationship as it peaks and ends. The second section consists of a single poem, which unfolds as a searching attempt to make sense of the self’s genesis and future among beloveds and strangers. In the third and final section, the speaker names the world around her in all its beauty and injustice while maintaining a curiosity that attempts to place herself within that world. Interiors ultimately asks: how do we relate to each other, and to ourselves? And how might care, rather than conquest, emerge as a new belief system central to this country’s existence?