1. Both of your poems that appear in Copper Nickel, “Humpback Whale” and “Boto,” are from your fifth full-length collection titled Seabeast. Can you explain how these two poems connect to the themes of Seabeast?

Thank you so much for giving these poems a home at Copper Nickel, which is such a dream! These two poems, while diverging in approach, have something in common that I have been attempting to achieve in Seabeast. I was interested in how the whale-fact could be the sighting, whether dorsal or exhalation plume, of a great being whose entire body is unseeable from the surface of the water. Using this as a jumping off point, I wanted to see what myth making and my subconscious mind could churn up. Essentially, I was able to whale watch my mind through the invocation of the whale, or its fact to lay bare for myself what the whale actually means for me. 

Writing about whales, many ask, why whales? And my answers are always pretty magical sounding, about being led through dreams. So why then, not let my poems lead me affectively. It sounds so simple, but like trying to understand any kind of shimmering chimeric, unseeable mythologized beast, there is more to the Leviathan than a triangular fin.

These two are connected by this way of looking, as well as being two water-dwelling mammals, that last shared a common ancestor roughly fifty million years ago.

2. Seabeast focuses on different aquatic animals and how they relate to human experience, which is very intriguing. What about this topic gave you so much poetic interest?

This collection, which is the second of three whale books I have written and am writing (the third is a Whaler Captain’s Journal of flash nonfiction, photo essay, journal, and poems), were poems that did not make it into Whale Aria (2023). Whale Aria focused on the bioacoustics world of the humpback species specifically, whereas Seabeast is my answer to a bestiary of sea mammals that were also compelling as I was doing my research for these other projects.

Researching and observing whales, their behavior, and human cultures along the American Pacific Rim took me about thirteen years to complete. Seabeast was not a book I set out to write. My process was to generate as much as I could, for as long as I was moved, and as long as the voice came to me. After carving Whale Aria into a book, I took the genus, species poems and put them together. 

Everyone also wants to know how I engage Melville, and there are many ways I do. This book is just one of those ways that expands his chapters on what he calls “Cetology.”

3. “Humpback Whale” seems to be examining humans’ relationship to language but ends with a blunt critique: “O great god, may you be saved from human language.” This really shook me the first time I read it. Can you expand on what you find problematic about human language? Since this poem is, of course, in language, do you think that changes its meaning at all?

The Judeo-Christian myth is emblematic of not only the exploitation of the natural world, but also the colonization we see ongoing today. Israelis, Americans, upper-casted Hindus, and all manner of people justify their settler, imperialist projects through superimposing their fictions onto others. This is a language project. How in science, in order to understand the animal, we need to kill it and explore its organs and veinous pathways. Similarly, to categorize beings, we as humans default into a pattern of organization to serve the original Judeo-Christian creation myth: that we as humans (read dominant paradigm subject positions) have dominion over the nonhuman animal world as well as other humans that can be categorized as lesser, without as much animacy or intelligence as the dominant group. 

Mahmood Mamdani, in his book Define and Rule: Native as Political Entity, was foundational in my thinking that language creates the universe’s order and that is perspectival and relational. The Judeo-Christian understanding of hierarchies of animacy actively erases other epistemologies of relationality, especially those of Native and Indigenous communities (who were and are still given names by the colonizers). 

We can never know the phenomenological realities of whale life, even if we learn to speak their languages and dialects (think: language as a series of differences). The names that we give whales are for our human selves and for our active human categorization, which is directly related to oppression. Language is the tool (into and out of) of this entire schema of problematics. 

4. “Boto” has quite a different stylistic approach. In the last third of the poem, we watch our human speaker becomes a dolphin. In my read, this is an analogy for coming into one’s own body and the challenges of queer identity. How do you decide when a poem should be directly assertive like “Humpback Whale,” or when a poem’s meaning should be more enacted, like in “Boto”?

As far as process goes, I wanted the collection to have a varied approach to subject matter. I attempt to have the speakers reach and stretch differently in the same universe. If all of the poems attempt the same reach and feet forward, I wonder if the book would feel a bit too boring, at least to writing and I’m banking on the same for the reading experience.

“Boto” shows an engagement with watching the mind without trying to engage postcolonial theory, but by engaging it nonetheless via-a-vis the queer realization of bodily awakening. I feel like (feeling being the operative word here) the poems reveal to me what they want to be and how they want to be structured. I like the structural reveal, how a transformation happens in a poem as a directly assertive turn as in “Boto.” The obvious judgement and assertion of an eco-politics is sometimes necessary. Having these both, I hope to provide a kind of relief in the reading experience: juxtaposition AND rest for the reader. 

5. You just moved to Colorado! Since Copper Nickel is based in Colorado (and admittedly I’m a little biased for the state), I have to ask: Have you found any new inspiration from your move here?

I am learning how to be a Colorado person and have started a meditative practice where I try to let the mountains and plains “in”; try to let the landscape teach my heart new ways of being in the world. I have never been so landlocked as I have in the past short while. I did not know what it would do to me, but I have been so happy in the fields and trails here! The changes have been great, ranging from an increased thirst for understanding the geological and natural history of the Front Range, to experiencing the microbrewing game all around us. I am not yet a full mountain person, but I love the feeling of being in a place of becoming. 

I take joy in seeing the Rockies’ peaks and valleys in the horizon’s mountain-line as looking like the dorsal fins of whales.