In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sadie Dupuis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sadie Dupuis
What is the story behind your poem, “Most of Last Year and the Years Before It,” that appears in Volume 27?
I wrote this poem in March 2024, in response to Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker’s ongoing bungling of harm reduction in our city. Parker had announced budgetary cuts to needed services such as syringe exchange, and was refusing to allocate any portion of a very large opioid settlement the city received toward these lifesaving programs; she was interfering with our city’s long standing harm reduction collectives and their lifesaving work. It felt infuriating to watch this newly elected official—whose opponent I’d believed in and rallied behind—fumble these crucial services, despite decades of evidence backing these programs. Her choices were sure to kill people, and they have. In the past month alone, two Philadelphians have died in police custody as a direct result of the mayor’s carceral policies.
I wanted to write about how protest can be rooted in memory and sentimentality, how negative emotional expressions can come from love and tenderness, how all of these feelings can comprise politics.
There’s this repeating image of cobwebs, which I imagine as sticky memories. Where did this image come from?
Cobwebs, in this poem, serve as a few kinds of props: gross objects to be thrown, suspicious substances to try, intricate histories to share. Cobwebs are a way of making one’s presence known, of recognizing that you are tied to others’ lives and experiences. What differentiates cobwebs from spider webs is that cobwebs are abandoned. A cobweb implies the absence of a spider—a small, relatively harmless animal that inspires disproportionate fear in people. All a spider’s trying to do is build its home, hunt its food. Arachnophobia (like most phobias) is not rational, and sort of parallels the baffling way that city governments treat marginalized residents as frightening or disposable. I use cobwebs in this poem as a way of aligning the speaker with those who are wrongly feared, who are harmed by draconian policies that eradicate needed resources like SSPs.
There’s a musicality in this piece with the sensory details of noise. How does music influence your poetry?
I work in several creative mediums and do find they influence one another. I pick up on and pursue melodic or rhythmic threads in poems, and in line editing I like to consider how my lyrics can work as poems or as prose. I also make visual art which brings other perspectives to my poetry or songwriting. What kinds of colors do different timbres sound like? What emotions do the spatiality or architecture of a poem enhance? It’s all a balance of sensations. But in terms of communicating narrative in a poem, since I spend so much time working in and with audio, that is probably a sense I opt toward quicker. My mind’s ear is more active than my mind’s eye.
The line, “When time makes anger loud” stood out to me. You have many of these phrases that mix the senses. How did you develop this sort of phrasing?
Time and volume are entwined in emotion. Years can numb a wound, or make its outrage more acute. In this poem, those concepts are tied to “Sunday,” the end of a week, which should or could be a day of rest. Sunday here is a place in which everyone is “smoking the bad kind of gossip”; the stanza is about community conversations, where perhaps every participant feels inflamed. It’s about rightful collective outrage over issues that matter. “Time” and “volume” are intervals used to measure music, but they also can speak to commitment to a cause.
What themes does your work circle back to, if any?
Grief and harm reduction were major themes of my last book, Cry Perfume, which came out in 2022 but was written between 2016 – 2020. Several years later, I’m obviously still writing about that second theme, because it is so important, and because policy surrounding overdose prevention seems to be regressing, locally and nationally! Other themes I revisit include intersections of art, labor, technology, the body, and illness.
What authors or texts inspire you? What are some of your favorite books?
I’m really terrible at just picking a couple things. These are some faves: Sylvia Plath, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Michael DeForge, Audre Lorde, Eve Babitz, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Shaughnessy, Michelle Tea, Jaime Hernandez, Don Mee Choi, Simone White, Ariana Reines, Thomas Pynchon, Jenny Zhang, Chris Kraus, Fernando A. Flores, Danez Smith, Sawako Nakayasu, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Ruefle, Federico García Lorca, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Kate Zambreno, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, CAConrad, Hoa Nguyen, Jorie Graham, June Jordan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Broder, Tara Booth, Hanif Abdurraqib, David Berman, Ling Ma, Roberto Bolaño, Hiroko Oyamada, Samantha Hunt, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux, Sarah Gerard, Maggie Nelson… sorry!
If I were to pick some more recent loves, Johanna Hedva, Fady Joudah, and M.S. Coe are some of the best new-to-me writers I’ve read this year.
What are you currently writing or working on?
I shattered my elbow last June, which has been a very long and ongoing recovery, and which delayed a lot of writing and recording plans. That has eaten up a lot of my last year. But I’m currently focusing on tracking some long-postponed new songs for my solo project, which is called Sad13. I’m doing some light touring and sporadic festivals with Speedy Ortiz, which is always a fun excuse to see a lot of friends. I’m writing and editing some new poems, though a bit more slowly than in the past as computer use is still a bit restricted due to nerve injury from my accident. It’s been a lot more drafting by hand than in the past, which I find makes my poetic voice pretty different. And I’m getting or have gotten to be a conversation partner for some of my favorite writers’ Philly book tour appearances this year—Liz Pelly, Jeremy Gordon, Niko Stratis and a few more coming up! Interviewing other writers and musicians is one of the most inspiring things on my own work, so I always really look forward to these conversations.
Sadie Dupuis is the guitarist, songwriter, and singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer and multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Dupuis heads the record label Wax Nine, edits its poetry journal, and is a regular contributor to Spin, Tape Op, Talkhouse, and more. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she also taught writing. Mouthguard, her first book, was published in 2018 (Gramma); Cry Perfume, a second poetry collection, was released in 2022 (Black Ocean). She is an organizer with United Musicians and Allied Workers and its local UMAW Philly.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
Welcome back to Water~Stone! You had a piece last year, “Learning to Live With a Clockwork Orange,” in Volume 26. This year, your poem, “Half-Life of Krill,” puts oceanic and celestial imagery on the page. What gave you inspiration for this piece? Where did the title come from?
Thank you! I’m so glad to return to your excellent magazine. This piece is quite different from the previous, but now that I’m looking at them together, they are both rather anxious poems! Half-Life of Krill started life during a trip I had taken, back to a beautiful place where I was once young. My connection to the scenery seemed at once seemed far away, but also parallel, to the way my younger self has experienced it. That distance between moments in time looms quite large in my own life, but from the broader perspective, the gaps between the person I was and the person I am is actually rather brief. The title likely plays on this idea too, with the notion of a half-life as a measure of time and decay. That’s where it started anyway—this poem did end up taking a few turns.
There’s a lot of natural imagery in here, and you’ve said that you like to add nature into your work. In this poem, there are many references between sea and sky. What drew you to using these aspects of the natural world?
Indeed, I like to see nature shining through the organized, civilized world, such as when you watch a hawk hunting over a city street—it provides some elemental sense of fundamental creation in structuring our carefully constructed modern life. Some of this poem is rather literal—images lifted from places I’ve seen or moments that stood out for a particular significance. I think poetry sometimes is about picking out elements, what you see as important or meaningful, and fitting them together into a coherent mood.
Can you speak to the sense of fragility throughout the piece—not only mentioned at the very beginning, but later on through lines like, “bones swimming / taxidermic,” which gives an image of something delicately put together?
It is interesting that you point to that element as a bit of motif. It’s there, I think, not just because life itself is fragile—our bodies, the short lives of the animals that inhabit the world—but also because of the random nature of experience and our tenuous ability to communicate it. All of these things can give the appearance of solidity, but solidity is often an illusion. Still, fragile things can also be surprisingly strong, like carefully made lace, as well as adaptive and competent at surviving.
I love how you end on the phrase “the dowser’s bobbin,” as if there’s a question, some continued searching. What led you to that ending—or did you have it in mind when starting?
As some inside baseball, the end of this poem came about for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted something brief and punchy, thinking it would have more impact given the overall somber tone. And, I wanted to include some phrasing around taxidermy, which has a kind of morbidity about it while also being a craft of genuine skill. There’s something about how taxidermy captures an animal in motion but is produced by their death, that seemed appropriate (and just a little gruesome).
“Jawset” is taxidermy terminology, but I couldn’t find another requisite part with the right sound drawn from that jargon. So, the last two words of the poem are indeed a phrase I had set aside, and thought they had the right mood. Dowser’s relates to dowsing, a kind of divination or magic, while bobbin is drawn from, in my mind, sewing. Sewing and leatherwork are adjacent to taxidermy as crafts, and I had always found comfort in the sound of my mother’s sewing machine when I was young. Since I find this poem a little dark, or at least resigned, I was glad to end it with an image that seemed warmer and offered the possibility of carrying on. After all, what we can do is keep going and keep making.
Do you ever find your poems as a continuation of others, interlinking in their ideas or characters?
There was a time when each poem was pretty much its own separate world, but these days I am happy to embrace repeated ideas, images, even characters. Sometimes poems seem to cluster around an idea because there’s too much to say without crowding, and I think I’ve gotten better about letting the language breathe a little. So, one piece may start to bud off into other related pieces, and I’ve learned to let them develop and then separate them out when appropriate. I also sometimes get taken by a particular word, so individual words or even very brief phrases have a way of creeping back in from prior work if they really speak correctly.
What have been some of your favorite pieces or authors that you’ve read in the last few years?
I read literary mags as I can, especially while writing and submitting myself, and there is terrific stuff published all the time. I always notice the beautiful work of Sarah Ghazal Ali and have recently been enjoying some of Tony Hoagland’s later pieces. I’ve been reading a lot of fairy tales recently, sort of as research for a few poems but also just to appreciate their fascinating texture.
What are you currently working on?
A fair number of what I hope are strange and moving poems! I also write some academic philosophy in the area of political theory, and am doing publishing submissions for both areas. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
JC Talamantez is a Tejano poet whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, Water~Stone Review, Nimrod, Guernica, Colorado Review, and others. She was a longtime student of academic philosophy and teaches writing and humanities courses across a number of disciplines.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sam Stokley
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sam Stokley
What was the spark behind your poem, “Ark/ee/awl/uh/gee,” that appears in Volume 27?
The spark was an ancient, buried loneliness that hit me while I was at home on an average day. Other disabled people might experience a similar feeling at times—knowing that every day will be a fight for life, and there’s often not a pearl at the end of all the physical and emotional pressure. I think I also rewatched Jurassic Park.
You use a lot of geographical references (“flashed forged rivers/sunken atolls”) within this piece. How did you come up with the idea of equating the body to geographical space?
This was easily the hardest question here because I think I lack the words to pinpoint a time when the body and the land were separated in my mind. My skin shifts like tectonic plates, blisters come and go like severe storms; when I bleed, I am the Mississippi River, remembering.
The ending, “to you know/what it’s like to feel/the pearl under your skin/not even bone can convince/doesn’t exist” is haunting. Can you talk a little about why you chose to end on this note, and what drew you to this particular ending?
There are tiny white balls called milia that grow under the skin inside damaged hair follicles, as I’ve come to understand it. You mostly see them in babies around their eyes and mouths, but they are especially prevalent in people with Epidermolysis Bullosa, and when they’ve been growing out of sight for long enough, they become, almost literally, perfectly hard little pearls that, using a small sewing needle, I can pop out of my skin like spring loaded relief. Often I don’t see the milia, but, like the princess’ pea, I feel something inside me, under the skin, stretching my flesh from the inside, and so I dig, and I dig, probing for the fossil that stops my tool in its tracks, knowing I’ve found the motherlode. Occasionally I’m wrong, and I can’t find the pearl, can’t put to rest the feeling of stranger living under my skin, and I know, like a when I’m writing a poem, that I have to stop before I’m left with a sink full of blood and not much else.
What is the significance of the title broken into syllables? Did the shape of the poem come right away or later in the process of creation?
Two questions in a trench coat! Re: the title—it seemed to echo many of the ideas and images that birthed the poem: the aged layers of dirt that represent times & eras, the idea that geography & time are pre & post language, the different sections of the finger where milia most often live. Once I broke it up phonetically, I also appreciated the words and ideas I was given: the “uh”s and “gee”s of people trying to navigate conversation with disabled people, the sharpness of an awl piercing leathery skin, an ark where loneliness was spiritually mandated out of existence by systemic soulmates.
Re: the shape—I tell myself, and my students, to stop writing boring poems. To me that doesn’t mean superfluous decoration, but rather a job assigned to me by the poem that I use every technique at my disposal to squeeze all the juice out of the poem. In this case, the shape serves many purposes, all designed to create more echoes bouncing around for the reader to catch. It is hopeful, pointing a way forward out of the loneliness and pain; it is sharp, like the archeological tools I use for my flesh digs; it lies in sections and layers like the millennia of souls I follow as a human and artist.
Do you find yourself circling back to particular themes in your writing?
Skin, politics, family is my go-to answer for what I “write about.” Skin because it has shaped who I am, politics because the radical idea that everyone be allowed a dignified life, that children deserve food, hospitals, all their limbs, is political, and family because it’s an idea I’m still working to understand.
What authors or titles have influenced you as a writer?
Inger Christensen, Monica Berlin, Olio, Spoon River Anthology, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sin Yong-Mok, Emily Oliver, Deborah Keenan, my Uncle Shawn’s life.
What are you working on now?
I am acutely interested in and investigating ways to take poetry from the page and into the world as an active disruptor and connector. Stay tuned.
Also, a book. And my IG: (@)bovinii
(This is unrelated to any question, but if Hamline follows through with the shuttering of their Writing Programs and of this very Water~Stone Review, they will feel the reverberations for generations and likely never will recover spiritually, artistically, academically. Sunset deez.)
Sam Stokley is a disabled artist and educator from Peoria, Illinois, and living in Minneapolis. He teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at SPCPA, a high school for artists in downtown St. Paul. His writing lives, among elsewhere, in Narrative Magazine, Brevity, Barrelhouse, Cagibi, Puerto del Sol, Fairy Tale Review, and The Arkansas International. Dystrophies, a chapbook manuscript, has been a finalist with BOAAT Press and Driftwood Press, twice a semifinalist in the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and longlisted by Frontier Poetry. Stokley has recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. Follow him on Instagram @bovinii.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Amy Pence
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Amy Pence
Your poem, “Red Oak, Black Oak” blends nature and family into a real family tree. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Thank you for these questions, Jenn. I wrote the poem looking out a picture window in my previous home. I faced 100 acres of woods: in the spring, the trunks would glow with new growth. On winter mornings, the two trees closest to my window were stark and imposing against the dark. Getting up early for work, I also passed the black and white photo of my father’s college graduation ceremony: two grandmothers, my uncle as a boy, my elder sister–still a toddler–holding my father’s hand and my mother holding me as a baby. I suppose it was a metaphorical conflation: I felt surrounded by ancestors–the ones outside my window and those I lived with in my memories.
What prompted you to split the poem into two columns, or trunks, as it were, with the spacing mimicking bark?
Very much that visual tableau: I took quite a while with the poem, building it over the course of a month or two from the top down and seeing how the lines would read down each column and across from one tree to another and how spacing within each line might affect the appearance of the poem as well as the disjunctive or fluid pacing of each line. I remember savoring how long the process lasted because I felt so awed by those trees.
I had previously played with the contrapuntal form in my book Armor, Amour, (Ninebark Press, 2012) so using the form felt natural. For me, contrapuntals are often about a split consciousness, but also about recognizing a sympathy or coherence between contraries or dualities.
In the case of this poem, new data was just coming out, primarily from Suzanne Simard’s theories on plant intelligence, about how trees communicate through their roots. By writing the poem slowly, I arrived at that conjoining at the end.
You very economically describe a picture in the poem, but even with the specifics, there’s a sense that the reader knows the family. Can you talk about your use of language, how you choose your words for a piece, and how you built the connections between the picture and the reader?
I’m pleased to hear that the photograph is vivid enough that you have a view of, and into, the family. I feel so gratified that this poem found a home. I don’t keep count, but I would guess that the poem was rejected more than 20 times; the spacing of the poem really has to be by hand which can be daunting for a publisher. Your excellent executive editor Meghan Maloney-Vinz got me in touch with Logan Myers who formatted the poem to fit the page so beautifully.
In terms of word choice, I’m probably too in love with adjectives when I’m writing a first draft and while a contrapuntal reins me in, the oaks definitely needed pruning, which I did quite a bit (with each rejection :). In terms of the connection between picture and reader, the poem’s form allows for gaps. There’s so much we don’t know about our family’s interior lives; hopefully those silences are suggested by the gaps in the poem.
What is your favorite book or author? What texts were influential to your writing career?
Dickinson’s life and poems have been very influential to me– and I spent a few years immersed in both. My hybrid [It] Incandescent (also Ninebark Press) arose from that obsession. Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates was crucial to me as a poet, especially her essay on silence in poetry. There are so many good poets! These days I focus more on the book projects that move me. Just a couple I love: Tyehimba Jess’s masterly contrapuntals in Olio as well as Franny Choi’s Soft Science. The books are of the moment, while looking forward and back.
What are your current projects?
Just so happens that “Red Oak, Black Oak” will be the first poem in my forthcoming book We Travel Towards It due out this spring from Serving House Books. Weirdly–or maybe not–a couple years after writing the poem, and in a new home, a 90 foot oak tree destroyed my house after Hurricane Irma as I fled the premises! The poems chart my experience with that natural disaster and the nature of climate-change fueled disasters. I still love trees and that I lived to write about it was an act of grace. I’m at work on a new novel, and in 2026, Red Hen Press will release my debut novel Yellow.
Thanks so much!
Amy Pence has authored two full-length poetry collections and the hybrid [It] Incandescent (Ninebark Press)—as well as two chapbooks. Her most recent is Your Posthumous Dress (dancing girl press, 2019). She’s a freelance tutor in Atlanta and has taught poetry at Emory and in other workshop settings. Her novel, Yellow, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2026.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rob Arnold
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rob Arnold
Chimera by swords4two
Your pair of poems, “Chimera” and “Chimera” speak to growing up, terror, and a cycle of life and death. What was the impetus for these poems? How did they evolve from single poems into a pair?
These two “Chimera” poems are, in fact, part of a longer sequence of poems that interrogate boyhood, cycles of family violence, self-harm, and monstrous expressions of masculinity. The origin is in my personal experience, but, like much of my work, I began writing the poems before knowing quite what I was trying to say. I was going through a very painful period in my life—marked by depression and self-destructive impulse—and I was writing to understand what had brought me there.
At the same time, I became interested in chimeras—amalgamations of unlike creatures—which felt metaphorically significant to my experience both as a biracial adoptee and a young man living what felt like a split life. The poems themselves are chimerical, both narratively and syntactically, with threads of story and imagery conjoined to evoke the messiness of human experience. Sometimes, in fact, individual poems in the sequence were formed from the remains of two or more separate pieces that became combined in the revision process. So, the sequence itself is chimerical, and individual poems in the sequence are chimeras as well.
The titles evoke a mythological monster turned real. How did you land on the title for each piece? Are there different meanings associated with each title?
Fundamentally, the poems are about monstrosity, the monstrous cycle of boyhood violence and toxic manhood in my family as well as the divisions of self that come from sustained trauma. Each poem either tells different pieces of the story or examines different expressions of human monstrosity. The linkages between poems and even different movements within each poem is often intuitive rather than rational or logical, but they’re all part of the same collective monstrosity and using the same title is a way to signal that collectivity.
In the first Chimera, there’s a stream of unanswerable questions that make up the end that feels similar to a Greek chorus in a play. There’s this combined culpability between the characters in the poem and the reader. What led you to end that way?
I’m glad you picked up on the shared culpability. The question is a powerful rhetorical device to me because it requires the reader to become an active participant in the poem. This poem, like many of the poems in the sequence, is also about memory, which is inherently unstable—both unreliable in a narrative sense and our only interface with the personal past. Asking questions without offering answers is my way of acknowledging this ineffability of experience.
Extending the idea of culpability, some of the poems in the sequence (although not this one) use the second person point of view, which acts as both a distancing tool—allowing me to write into very difficult subject matter—and also as a way to further implicate the reader in the violence of the poems.
Chimera the second has color imagery and a steady rhythm throughout its lines. What was the development process of this poem like? How did the beat evolve?
This poem came more intuitively. It began as a meditation on the colors of the American flag alongside the color black which is simultaneously an absence of color in the visible light spectrum and a combination of multiple pigments in basic color theory. Blackness is also the inverse of whiteness, and because we live in a country where color is racialized, there’s also a sub-thread of the poem that interrogates race and belonging, a refraction of my identity as an Indigenous adoptee raised in whiteness. The propulsive rhythm helps pull the reader through the cognitive disjunctions of the poem, which mirror the cognitive disjunctions caused by institutional and personal trauma. Like the previous poem, this piece uses rhetorical tension—in this case the withheld promise of the if/then construction—to extend and deepen the discomfort.
What authors and literature influence your work? Do you have favorite books you return to?
I’m always interested in the interplay between order and chaos, and few writers dance between those constructs better than Denis Johnson. There’s often a moment in his work when the narrative derails and expectations upend. In those moments, it feels like anything might happen, which is thrilling as a reader, and I feel his spiritual influence on this sequence specifically. Reading his novella Train Dreams, for example, helped me learn how to resist the tautness of the lyric narrative form and let the subconscious take over.
More recently, I’ve felt in creative conversation with Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes, mother by m.s. Redcherries, and Song of My Softening by Omotara James, all of which are exquisite examples of finding one’s power through difficulty.
What are you writing now?
I’ve just finished a new draft of my first book of poetry, which will include the “Chimera” sequence, and which also examines the larger family story.
I’ve also been working on a long epistolary essay about my father, male violence, and masculinities both inherited and rejected. It’s part of a larger collection of personal essays I’m writing, which I hope will come together in the next couple years.
Finally, I’m working through some poem ideas around maps, portals, confession, Indigeneity, and Oceania. As a project, it still feels quite nascent but I’m excited to explore where it takes me.
Rob Arnold is a CHamoru poet, essayist, and arts leader whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, RED INK, Hyphen, Harpur Palate, The Volta, and Solstice, among others, and has been anthologized in New CHamoru Literature and Na’huyong: An Anthology of CHamoru Literature. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have received support from the Somerville Arts Coundil, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Artist Trust. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he serves as executive director of Poets House.