In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Amanda Chiado

“The Carrying Kind” is a beautifully descriptive poem. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?

My brother lost his infant daughter, and it is an all-encompassing grief, an unbearable grief, that no one knew how to process or “carry.” I desperately wanted to help him. I still cannot comprehend the unbearable pain he continues to feel.

The sentence in the middle of the poem, “I keep asking the angels to transform him but they don’t keep ordinary time,” breaks the poem into what the “he” of the poem is doing to overcome death, and what death is doing. Can you talk about how this sentence is a transition and what it does for the poem?

I was thinking about how time can lose its linearity during certain life experiences, like during grief, where time seems to fold in on itself. This is also what happens when you have a baby, so there is a duality here in those experiences. I feel like I was working with inside and outside forces here and using that to break the poem, so that maybe the reader can feel that sense of brokenness emotionally through the transition. There is this struggle in the poem, a wrestling match of will, of peace-making, and there is also this ache of the witness who cannot “carry” that grief for someone they love. Their constant shapeshifting of death, the weight, of death, and of the physical and emotional processing of such crushing grief. Time almost disappears. I hope that it makes the poem feel simultaneously bound and timeless.

There’s so much tension in this poem, sustained by quiet sounds and specific details. How did you work to develop this tension?

I developed this tension through sustaining the duality of the mundane with the weight and complexity of grief. There is a sense of the day-to-day movement of time pushing forward, with its concrete nouns and physicality, but the undercurrent of grief provides this constant dark pull of invisible weight. I felt like there was this sort of pounding down of the person holding the death in their body, and I kept imagining how grief grinds one down into bits. I was also working with the feeling and images of how we can disassociate during times like these.

Did this poem go through different formats before you decided on this one?

I have been working nearly exclusively in the prose poem form for about a two years now because it has been serving the content in my forthcoming collection “Today I Wear the Bear Head,” which won the 2026 Press 53 Award for Poetry. The prose poem form serves this piece because it feels dense, and it also begs to be held and carried. It is slide a stone, a headstone perhaps, or a swaddled thing, a heart wound tight and hiding itself in the body. I am always open to what a poem needs formally, but this piece kept its form, and I worked more on imagistic and sound details that aimed to convey this unbelievable ache, and really, despair.

What themes do you find that you write about?

The themes I often write about are the female body, body horror, motherhood, family, pop-culture, grief, and lineage. Many of the topics I write about arrive through a surreal lens.

What authors or books do you find you return to?

The authors I return to are Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Dean Young, Charles Simic, James Tate. More contemporary authors include Shivani Mehta, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Heather Christle, Danez Smith, Diane Seuss, and Chen Chen.

What are you working on currently?

I am putting together my second collection of poetry currently entitled “Imitate/Intimate.” I am in the final stages of completing my first novel, “Half Monsters.” My biggest dream is to write a screen play, so that is the next big thing.

Amanda Chiado holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, California College of the Arts, and Grand Canyon University. Her chapbook Prime Cuts was just released from Bottlecap Press, and she is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has most recently appeared in Southeast Review, RHINO, The Pinch Journal, The Offing, and numerous other publications. She is an alumna of the Community of Writers and the Highlights Foundation. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press.