KMB: You open THE SMALLEST OF BONES with "Cranium"--a title that already tells us much about the overall shape of this collection, as if we were a marble placed at the top of a skeleton and about to clink and crack and rattle our way down to the toes. Did the shape of the collection present itself to you early on, or did it take a good bit of surgery and experimentation?
HLW: I started with writing the tiny poems individually. As I was compiling them, I realized they formed a poem in the table of contents, where each first line of each poem becomes a part of the “exquisite corpse” of the book. I decided to title each “stanza” of the larger poem with a bone in the body based on this process of discovery.
KMB: One of my favorite moments in "Cranium" is the line: "At birth, the skull is made of 44 separate bones which fuse together as the body develops." This immediately had me leaning in, thinking yes, how our pieces come together to create a greater whole, just like the pieces of a collection, the words of a stanza, the moments of a life, yes! It felt like a skeleton key twisting in a lock, opening up the book to me in a new, almost secret way. Are there any secret things you can tell me about this collection and your process writing it? Any odd inspirations that brought a particular poem together, any strange facts or influences that changed how you approached a particular line, stanza, or theme?
HLW: One inspiration for the book was music. I used to listen to a lot of emo/punk music growing up. The band Brand New was a huge influence for me as a young poet. During the #MeToo movement, it was announced that the band’s lead singer, Jesse Lacey, was a serial abuser. Brand New opened up my eyes to how music was poetry. Poetry is always about song, even on the page. They took cliches and made them original, like the opening song to Deja Entendu, Tautou, “I’m sinking like a stone in the sea / I’m burning like a bridge for your body.”
In The Smallest of Bones, one of my poems has a verse, “let us not assign / too much power / to the virgins”. I think I loved emo punk music because it made sexuality unimportant. It told women, how you use your body is your own, so you might as well have sex with whoever you want. When I was younger, I told myself my persona assigned power to my sexuality that I had control over. Of course, now I wonder if I was right at all.
Another line in my new book reads, “I sink myself in the river at dawn / your words are the stones / in my pockets.” It’s about Jesse Lacey, but also about the women writers who’ve completed suicide like Virginia Woolf.
KMB: Something I particularly admire about this collection is how, no matter the dreaminess of a given poem, no matter how ghostly it may seem, we always remain very close to the bodily and breakable. Does poetry usually feel grounded in the body to you?
HLW: I think a lot about how we describe emotion as being a part of the body. When we describe a character having an emotion as writers, we describe their facial expressions, their movements, how they feel in their body. The most vivid poetry takes this and makes it tactile. I feel that poetry can’t be emotionless, it can’t be without sensation, or else it dulls for the reader. I’m not sure if all my poems are about the body, but the body always seems to be there in my thinking.
KMB: Your section poems--"Cranium," "Mandible," "Sternum," etc--all draw us in with a deceptively simple discussion of the titular bone itself, its strengths and purposes, before crashing us into talk of how these powerful bones can be broken, can be traumatized or manipulated against us. Even as I noticed this pattern emerge, this turn still took me by surprise each time, felt like a physical blow within my body. The poems that follow them are also dripping with pain and vulnerability. Could you share about how it felt to craft so many poems that deal with such intense subject matter? How do you guard yourself while writing such things?
HLW: I do a lot of research when I write poems that are based in science. When I started researching the anatomical facts for the section poems, I stumbled upon these simple statements of how the bone might be broken, or how the bone might decay after death. A description of a bone necessitated a description of its fragility. It occurred to me that there’s always violence when we talk about the female body, and that even in science, that violence creeps in. It wasn’t an intentional thing as I was writing the poems. It was there, in the science.
KMB: This line from your poem "Temporal" has lingered with me all week: "If you keep listening to what they tell you you are, soon enough you become that thing." So many of these poems are concerned with identity in some way ("am I yours?" "how do I know I am a woman?" where does this name derive from?). It gets you thinking about the fact that every piece of your body has already been named by some long-dead men who you will never know and who will never know you. It gets you thinking about the power of names and naming. This makes me curious about your decision to keep all these poems untitled (save for the section poems). Does titling a poem feel the same to you as naming it? Did these issues of identity and naming come into play for you when deciding about titles? Do these issues follow you into your titling process generally?
HLW: Thank you for this close reading. I think we used to assign labels often without thinking about what those labels mean. Even when we’re labeling ourselves, we’re relying on a long history. For example, the label “queer” carries a connotation as slur but also as an umbrella term. The word “femme” implies a binary in itself with the word “butch”. I think often of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, where knowing the true name of a thing gives you power over it. There’s a lot of power in renaming yourself or redescribing your identity. In some ways, you remain the same. But by saying, “I’m genderqueer,” or “I’m nonbinary” you can re-describe yourself for the benefit of others and for your own safety and bravery. There’s a deep trust there too. Ultimately, I didn’t title the poems because they form another poem—a spine, if you will allow me—and I wanted that spine to carry the reader.
KMB: You mention how your section poems were inspired by old anatomy books and even some outdated Wikipedia entries. What led you to these sources while writing? Is there a particular "fact" or detail from any of them that still surprises, disturbs, or baffles you?
HLW: The section poems are inspired by the idea of neurosexism—that even in science we assign gender to say, the way the brain functions, looking for sex differences in neuron responses or the shape of a bone. At first, I was looking to see what sex differences exist in anatomy, but then I realized how deeply ingrained sexism is that even when I was researching a bone, I would find that these so-called ways to tell sex are often skewed. An example is that while women often have less dense bones, that also might be caused by say, lack of sunlight and physical activity (as one researcher at Brown University found).
And this isn’t to say that looking at our bodies from the view of sex differences is necessarily bad, because often women or say, trans women, or black women, or women from underserved communities, require different and more sensitive care. It’s just to say that we bring our own assumptions to literally everything we do. And even when we can change our labels, change our bodies, and try to change how others view us, very often sex is bone-deep. So I carry that with me, and it’s a disturbing thought.
KMB: I've long been a fan of your work, poetic and otherwise. In fact, as I was reading this collection, I often found myself thinking of your story "knick knack, knick knack" with Fireside Fiction. All those skeletons following us through the forest. I've always loved the end of that story:
We watch your car wind its way through the trees down the birch path. Your face is hard and you never look back.
I tilt my head, not confused but pleased. I call out to you in my bone voice.
knick knack, knick knack.
KMB: Would you say that this collection is you calling out to us in your bone voice?
HLW: Haha, yes. I’m so glad you loved that story because it’s one of my favorites too. I think we all have skeletons in the forest, as a metaphor. But they don’t have to be harmful.
KMB: This collection feels remarkably whole. As with the bones of a skeleton, every poem here feels essential and in its place. Did you write most of these poems with a larger collection in mind, or did many of them fit together in ways that took you by surprise?
HLW: This is a set of poems that were written intentionally to be a collection. They were written together over a period of several months. This is the second collection I’ve written that way. The first was Numinous Stones, published exclusively in Italian through Kipple Press as Numinose Lapidi, which was a series of pantoum poems. I’ve enjoyed writing poems that aren’t meant to stand alone but are meant to be a part of something bigger. I’m also thrilled that Kipple Press is planning an Italian version of The Smallest of Bones, to be released in 2022.
KMB: Is there a book, movie, song, painting, edible arrangement that you found yourself regularly returning to as you worked on this collection?
HLW: I mentioned my musical influences above, but I’m always inspired by the living art-resistance that is our day-to-day political situation. With Texas’ recent abortion bill passing, I’m reminded that a poem in The Smallest of Bones reads, “they beg for their bodies back / these women who are poor / and we look down on them / we say, you don’t really need that / do you?” This line was in reference to being a woman in Texas and how those who are in control would like women to believe that their bodies aren’t their own. Curiously, when I went back through my older poetry, I found another poem I wrote in protest against George W. Bush’s troop push in the Iraq war in 2007, when I was first started writing poems. It reads, “twelve little graves in twelve straight rows / we do not dream / at night, at quiet rest / we think / we are not happy / not imagining ourselves wrapped in the silence of woods / of meadows.”
I’m always moved by the events of our society and want to respond to them, because this is what it means to be a poet alive today. I’ll never believe that poetry isn’t in some way casting a light on the darkness of our world and asking for it to be better, safer, for not just the poets in the white castles of universities and colleges but every young poet who hasn’t yet found their voice.
KMB: Is there a question that you wish I'd asked?
HLW: if you strip me down to my bones
am I yours?
it will all make sense in the end
the love and the pain
after death, I mean
You can purchase Holly Lyn Walrath’s collection THE SMALLEST OF BONES here.
K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Hobart, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.
Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of words and images, Glimmerglass Girl, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. She is a freelance editor and host of The Weird Circular, an e-newsletter for writers containing submission calls and writing prompts. You can find her canoeing the bayou in Seabrook, Texas, on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath, or at www.hlwalrath.com.