Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from : “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Christian Gullette. Christian is the author of (Trio House Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Trio House Press Trio Award.
He is the editor-in-chief of and works as a lecturer and translator. lives in San Francisco. * There is a sense that the speaker in is observing and retelling scenes with a reserved tone, which might seem rather unexpected for a book with in the title.
What influenced your approach to voice for this collection? Emotions like grief bring many conflicting emotions all at once, a space that I find very intimate and intense precisely because discomfort and what’s unsaid are so acutely felt when grieving, yet sometimes impossible to express. For my speakers, grief has multiple layers, often seething and raging and full of despair just beneath the surface. Defying expectations that a poem should convey a single feeling in a very direct way actually amplifies and elevates the tensions.
Grief can make me want to look away or deny or crave pleasure. Sometimes all at once, with no real resolution. That resistance feels very personal and from the heart to me; elegies, like the eponymous poem in the collection, can contain a jarring mixture of joy, beauty, horror, and silent loneliness tempered with ambivalences about how to feel.
I think often about Thom Gunn’s poems in , and how at first, elemen.