The art of discourse is nearest to poetry in its effort to free linguistic spaces from hierarchical structures and resist cliché. Good poetry, like good conversation, is rare. And like all things, they can be practiced. I knew of Laura because we are both New Yorkers and both poets. It didn’t go much farther than that for some time. Then I realized what a great writer Laura is. She is able to work in taut conceptual structures with an easy “non-fini” air, and I’m certain she will prove to be a master in any form she undertakes. When I realized that Laura is also a genuine person on top of this, I could not resist asking her to have a conversation with me about writing. She and I have unusual common ground. We both reference Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” in our first books, are both cinephiles, have daughters close in age, are both teachers. This conversation happened over several weeks, and we saw each other towards the end of it at the Fanny Howe memorial. Laura is the author of Laura’s Desires (Nightboat, 2024) and most recently Duvall, Shelley (Newest York, 2025). My first collection of poetry, Mercurial, or Is That Liberty?, was published by Fonograf in October 2025.
—Rachelle Rahmé
There is something of the epistolary in the immediacy of both our poems and prose, so I think it suits us to be getting to know each other in this way, with our writing between us. The immediacy I feel as a reader of your work is the feeling of being addressed, and I have to turn and look. The pleasure is that it is something I want to hear and see, it is a letter from a close friend. It is very near. And that is a powerful position for you to put the reader in, L. It is an alluring relationship to enter into as a reader, as well, that the writer is willing to play in that way. As you close Duvall, Shelley, the writer is waiting, “I await your reply”—
rr
~~~
Hi Rachelle <3
I was so happy to get to see you at the event for Fanny, busy as you were for most of the evening at the book table, selling copies of the beautiful zine you made to a long line of believers and skeptics, called together by Fanny’s work. I really loved that part of our being assembled that evening included the fundraiser you helped organize to support Glenstal Abbey, what a true and meaningful way to celebrate her legacy. And I’m so glad we get to share this space to continue thinking and talking together, especially in this time where we don’t get to share a city! It’s so interesting to think about immediacy of address in the poems in Duvall, Shelley, since for me they’ve had to travel across many years and rooms to arrive at this book. It is my first book, it just didn’t come out first, but some of the oldest poems in it I wrote more than a decade ago. It’s thinking about where I grew up, it’s thinking a lot about girls, and it felt like a kind of miracle of cyclical time, getting to dedicate the book to my daughter, because really it is for her, and yet when I was writing these poems, who knows where she was, living another lifetime and not very much on my mind. I know that for Mercurial, or Is That Liberty?, the poems are all much more recent, written if I remember correctly in the year or so before the book came out. But still I feel that, in order for them to be so close to me as a reader, to arrive at their pleasurable nearness, they had to travel many kinds of distances, to move around a lot, to span many places. Can you talk about the distances this book has traveled, geographic, temporal, psychic?
yrs,
Laura
~~~
Dear L,
I’m writing to you after midnight now. The apartment is dark. I think about what seeing you and my old city more might mean. The physical distance between us reminds me of tonight’s walk. My daughter has begun leading me in these after dinner strolls, and I oblige her. Tonight we looked for the moon, but the sky was blanketed with clouds. Still, she looked up at the sky and said, ‘Hello!’—to the moon, I imagine, though we could not see it. Physical distance has begun to feel more like that to me—a passing cloud over things (systems and orbits) that remain in order, though they’ve become more difficult to observe. By this logic, the passing of a loved one or strongly held ideal even starts to feel manageable. They aren’t gone, just far away. Distance can generate an array of emotions. Zeno thought that motion didn’t really exist, that we are unchanging coordinates from birth. Spinoza saw the sun and observed how its distance from the earth conceals the truth of its magnitude. With very large things, you’ve got to have distance in order to observe the whole of them. Writers know this feeling, when we put our work down for a while to get fresh eyes on it. But rarely do we think of what we are doing in terms of a formulation like Spinoza’s. For Spinoza, the mistake would be to start thinking the sun is closer than it is, just because we can see it. The mistake in writing would be to start thinking the work is small just because we find a container for it—or worse, make it smaller in order to reverse engineer something graspable. Most of these poems I did write while travelling at a high speed on a train between Providence and Boston. I would sit reverse the train’s motion, so I could imagine funneling back into the past while also barrelling into the future. This speaks to the farthest distance I am certain the poems had to travel, which is from the subconscious to page, and for a writer’s first book that can feel like the distance from birth to pub date, which sounds superficial enough to make me believe Zeno afterall. I love the certainty with which you write of your dedication, “Really it is for her.” That is real. I think about the loving tradition of parts of a book. In my book I write, “A place for everything, parts of a book,” and that is supposed to suggest that in ordering the text that is one’s unconscious, one can feel catharsis in closing the perceived distances in the psyche. There is a separation between active and passive principles in your book, I think. In the framework that the structural decisions you’ve made, such as to title some poems and to title them indexically, after first lines, one sees the traces of a poem's movement from the interior space of the writer to the exterior space of the published author. How did the more recent interventions into this older manuscript alter or support the original intentions and conditions around these poems?
yours,
rr
~~~
Hi Rachelle <3
I love picturing Celine giving you a tour of the early night. Bình shares that impulse to greet, hello sky, hello trees, hello frog and toad. I was reading recently about toddlers’ attraction to repeating language—chanting the same words, reading the same stories—that for them, the words aren’t repeating, they’re newly arriving every time. I think it was a tip intended to help parents be more patient, but it sort of shocked me into remembering that the words aren’t actually repeating for me, either.
I love what you say about the temptation to "reverse engineer something graspable" as a way to shrink and contain poems that don’t need to be shrunken or containable. I’m teaching this semester, and trying to help the writers in my class navigate encouraging a project to grow unencumbered, while also maintaining some awareness or control over what they’re doing, enough that they can talk about it. It’s hard for it to not feel artificial, and we sort of endlessly wonder and worry about what “cohesion” and “coherence” even mean. I’m thinking about that again now as you help me think about closing perceived distances, as I think about you riding backwards on the train. It was actually quite wonderful to edit old poems, to sometimes have terribly clear memories of where I sat to write them while feeling exactly no obligation to respect whatever I had been trying to do at the time, if I felt a desire to try something different while revising. It was a good way to feel both durationally continuous and also totally transformed, and to realize that that’s also how I felt at 24 or 25, when the oldest poems in the book were written.
Thank you for loving my flash of certainty! I remember talking to Anna Gurton-Wachter before Bình was born, wondering if motherhood would give me access to a level of certainty I had never previously experienced, in the style of “moms just know.” And I think it has, while also introducing me to whole new stratospheres of doubt. I’m bringing this up because of our mutual love of Fanny Howe, I’m thinking about the way she reaches into faith and doubt. She wrote somewhere, maybe in One Crossed Out, “doubt is what allows / a single gesture / to have a heart.” I wonder how faith and doubt participate in your writing life, which brings me back again to your moonless moonlit walk, to what is difficult to observe but not, therefore, absent.
yrs,Laura
~~~
Hi Laura,
—And to your point, isn’t it funny that we (poets) formalize that thinking in anaphora. But when I’ve used anaphora, it reminds me of how you’ve described our children learning—in reading the poem aloud, in the speech-act of it, each repetition provides a new context with new possibilities. I think it’s because the voice does not repeat as mimetically as writing can seem to. There are variables in the voice, because when we speak, the body is also doing other things (breathing, standing, digesting, metabolizing). The variables are one reason that I’m drawn to readings.
…and not to avoid your question altogether, those two things may play a part in my writing life by the large gaping hole that is their absence. Faith and doubt for me are the things that are missing. I mourn it, but it’s a generative space.
I want to ask you about certainty, doubt, and editing. In bringing up that quote of Fanny Howe’s, you’ve highlighted for me that "crossing out" and "a single gesture" could be rather powerful editing techniques. I think of Pound’s monster edit of Eliot’s The Waste Land. I saw how Fanny edited, and it was by glee of intuition, it seemed to me. I wonder if a generous attitude towards doubt allows a freedom in writing and especially editing, maybe even teaching, too. Could you tell us more about editing the individual poems in Duvall, Shelley, and what it was like to work with Eileen Myles to sequence the book?
till soon,rr
~~~
Hey Rachelle <3
I know, always spooky when the digital specter of the collaborator flickers into the shared doc! Almost too intimate or something. But yes, these are very good weeds to be in. And yes! Eileen has been my teacher and friend for a long time, since I took this fateful Project workshop with them in 2014 or 2015 (I can’t remember them all, but I know for sure one of the poems from that workshop that made it to Duvall, Shelley is the Coleridge one). They are an exceptionally generous person, and while I can’t exactly remember how it started, I think they asked one day at the Project if I had a manuscript, and I said yes, and they offered to read it and send it around. I remember we met in the East Village a few weeks after I sent it along, and they had printed out the poems, written “goth ny school” on the front, which was hilarious, and reordered everything. Then we went through it poem by poem, and they explained the method they used, which was a combination of finding, almost like little jokes, links from one poem to the next—shared words and images, but less obvious things than that too, making a chain. Along with that threading, they also were thinking about it in the way you might organize poems for a reading (speaking of reading aloud), where it’s really an energetic question—what energy do you need to get started and to sustain both your and your reader’s attention, what kind of rhythm will propel you from one poem to the next, when do you need to accelerate or slow down, when do you need quiet, when can you go long, those kinds of questions. It was unforgettably helpful. And they did everything they said they’d do and more, sending it to many publisher friends, but nobody was interested, which is cool, it’s gotta take the time it’s gotta take.
I feel like for me, more than anything else perhaps, editing is an exercise in testing my humiliation threshold. One thing I don’t love about myself as a poet and a person is that I’m pretty easily embarrassed, and so when I’m editing poems, most of what I’m asking is: “Would I be too embarrassed to read this aloud?” I wish it were more gleeful and intuitive instead! It isn’t a matter of how much is disclosed, in terms of feeling or personal detail, but I think maybe something else about self-awareness, like never wanting to feel or seem like I’m not in on my own joke. Which kind of maybe brings me to what I’ve been wanting to ask you, which again kind of embarrasses me for both its curiosity and its simplicity—how much do you worry, if you worry about this at all, about the poems in Mercurial, Or Is That Liberty? being misunderstood? You have this line at the start of a two stanza poem: “I dreamt of a hall of dark corners / above the haunted / two stanza poem,” and I’m thinking about the hall whose destination is unclear, the ghosts and secret residents of the dark corners of the poem, and wondering when you want to bring a flashlight and when you want the flashlight to break?
xoxoLaura
~~~
Dear Laura,
I do worry about the images in my book being too fuzzy to recognize. It’s easy to hide things in poetry. I should be careful with hiding, because I know its obscurity factors too well from childhood. The masks and veils were something that drew me to poetry as a child in the first place—that I could use it to dress up and say things that adults couldn’t understand. That is an early problem in learning to write. I became a better writer when I wasn’t using poetry to say anything other than what experience itself inspired. The disambiguation in learning to write is clarified for me in the distinction between using poetry as a form to tell the same stories we’ve always heard, as in state poetry, and approaching poetry as the space in service to preserving and advancing literary and linguistic experimentation. With the line of my poem that you mentioned, I am reminded that there is a lot of reference to the act of writing in my book. I used to have a private laugh at “poems about poems.” It became less important to avoid at times I was more open to learning. I think there must be something pedagogical about exploring the edges of poetry in this way. It’s like the muse contemplating the size of the bottle it’s been trapped in. I want to gesture towards expansion, but I always end up having to illustrate that through the struggles one has in getting there. This is like the metaxu, to bring up Fanny Howe again. It was a concept from Simone Weil that interested her. The metaxu is illustrated by Weil as the wall between two prisoners. The prisoners use the wall to communicate by tapping on it. The wall is both what separates them and what allows them to communicate. For Weil, the separation from God is like this. You asked me about the “hall of dark corners / above the haunted / two stanza poem.” I think I like to reserve that space for the possibility of watershed moments like the metaxu to manifest. It’s what I am knocking towards at those edges we poets speak of. I think you’re onto something similar in Duvall, Shelley with the poem “I Thought It Haunted.” You write: “I’ve seen light reflect from more / than one pier.” Light signals are certainly easier to see in low light, as well as the edges blurring and tending toward unification. In the same poem, you write: “Even as I’m wishing I could separate objects from how I use them, I’m thinking of how nice it is to sit on stairs.” I read sitting on the stairs as fusing with the connective tissue of the building’s architecture. This leads me to another source of connective tissue in your book, which is the “you.” How do you wish us to read the other(s) addressed in Duvall, Shelley? Are there many? Do they become one? Whose reply do you, at present, await?
yours,
rr
~~~
Hi R <3
The way you’re describing obscurity makes me think about how Fred Moten describes “courting miscommunication” in B Jenkins, when he’s thinking both about the political necessity of secrecy and secrets, and also about new possibilities for communication opened via failed or impossible communication. I think very connected to the child artfully evading the adults’ understanding!
It’s funny, I’m reading Jacqueline Waters’s extremely good new book right now, and the use of “you” in it is so terrific: “This is not aimed at anyone / but you and I know it’s YOU.” So I’ve definitely been thinking about “you” lately. I feel like the power of pronouns kind of scares me as a writer, how echoing the cavern of “she” or “we” or “I” or “you.” Some pronouns feel necessarily narrative to me, in how they imply a character and therefore the possibility of a plot. “You,” though, for me, doesn’t have that, it’s more like a narrative collapse, telling someone a story of themselves, a story of the present—the joke I’m making to myself right now is “a hole story instead of a whole story.” The hole being the outline of the “you” who is no one or is not one, who can only ever coalesce for the duration of the utterance, and will not come back the same when called again. Sometimes. Other times there is a “you,” a secret I keep for myself in the poem’s sweep. This is gonna be more of a quick moment stolen from a work-style note—thinking about “you,” and Eileen, and thinking still about you writing as a child as a way to evade adults’ misunderstanding, I’m wondering who you might name as some of your teachers for writing these poems?
xoxoLaura
~~~
Dear Laura,
You have me thinking about the “cavern,” but where the cavern is more like a well—a wishing well—where I could aspire to someone’s “you.” Being someone’s “you” is a major responsibility. I find I often want to live up to this “you.” It’s a very reflexive, mise-en-abyme space—seeing the you that is seen… On most days, I’m willing/able to do that, though sometimes I fail, as we all do.
On a lighter note, I really liked that story about Eileen. I love to imagine this happening in Tompkins Sq. Park; your pages, newly organized by Eileen’s genius, flapping, almost being carried away down Ave. A on a gentle zephyr. Good editing, I imagine, happens on the wind…
Everyone who has meant a great deal to my poetic development and these poems seems to have come to me on the wind. For the book at hand, Fanny Howe was the most important mentor in its completion. She showed me how nascent I was and how I must own that position. Through our work together in August 2024, she inspired me to reframe my enduring naïveté, and to title and sequence the book as I have.
Can you tell us more about this “Sarah’s Desires,” the speculative alternate title of your first published book, as well as this proliferation of names in your work, the comma, and how it may or may not guide your creative research, as you touch on Audre Lorde, Mary Shelley, and others.
<3rr
~~~
Dear Rachelle,
It was on St Marks! And am I misremembering, or was it the case that you and Fanny passed your time together in the lobby of a hotel, elevator music softly playing? I really delight in that image, I hope I remember it right.
How can I describe it—a bit like the names of places, I feel a kind of thrill at the sound of women’s names in poems, at the suggestion of everything I can’t imagine about the living that is currently organized around that location (be it Jerome, AZ, or the moveable place that Jennifer is). To go back to the masks and veils you brought up earlier, the fascination with naming for me feels connected to the sense that it is a rich but provisional costume on the surface of something too vast to ever articulate so succinctly. So I use a lot of names, real people, fantasy people, friends, fixations, and then do the “is this embarrassing” test and sometimes take them out again. “Sarah” comes from a story a friend wrote a long time ago, where I appeared as my evil alter-ego and was named Sarah, and I always liked that, how close it is to Laura, and have thought of her since, wondering after her parallel life. And the other women—Lorde, Shelley, Weil, and all the commas that link them—are never far away from the poems because they’re never far away from me, guiding the daily research that is cleaning the fridge and talking to people.
Your title has not only a comma, but also a question mark, and before we’re done I want to ask you about that question: Mercurial, Or Is That Liberty? What relationship, what ambiguity, are you looking at there? Is it a question you’re trying to answer? I’m so moved by how the flag on the cover waves below the question, visually gesturing towards the word “LIBERTY?”
I await your reply <3
xoxoLaura
~~~
Dear Laura, Sarah, Jennifer,
I’m so glad I asked, because I find your thrill at the sound of women’s names to be revelatory. I too find women's names to be resonant and echoey spaces. I like it when a poem calls out through another's name. It’s like a mask, as you say.
It wasn’t quite elevator musak with Fanny but lots of R&B and soul in the lobby of the Charles Hotel. This is how I learned she is a fan of the singer Sade. The playlist seemed to give her the idea to remix her last book, as she did, into what became the book-length poem This Poor Book.
I think the ambiguity I’m after is that of authorship. For me, the idea of the author is able to contain the political animal in a way that my being a mother or friend cannot. I come to poetry because I think it is the most free of art forms, in the sense of libre not gratuit. In American English at least, it seems like we don't distinguish between the two.
Before we part, Laura, what are you working on now, once we have finished these letters?
<3 rr~~~
Hi dear Rachelle <3
Yes! After a long time of not writing—my access to poetic language was pretty devastated by the intersection of pregnancy, birth, postpartum life occurring simultaneous to the ongoing genocide in Gaza—I’m finally finding my way back, through working on a long poem called “What Are You Afraid Of.” I think the question mark will be implied, but having this opening question/accusation offers a very functional engine, since I can just look for a new way to answer it every time I have a moment to write, much like the role summarizing Variety played in Laura’s Desires. It’s helping me to think about fear as a political and social tool, and also as one of the less fun defining features of motherhood, and it also allows me to write about horror films, which I’m always trying to do.
Would it be okay if I sent it back to you one more time, so I could hear a bit about what you’re working on lately? Not to force the last word upon you, I’m just so curious!
I’ve really loved getting to send and receive these notes between us, and having another reason to carry your book around with me everywhere I go.
Love,Laura
~~~
Dear Laura,It’s very smart to give yourself an engine that is so generative. The title becomes a mantra. Especially with horror films, one sees that we are more flexible with our fears than with our beliefs. We can take pleasure in our fears, play with them. We also are tempted to, and often do, overcome them. It happens, but it’s rare to find someone trying to overcome a belief. I think we can learn to be more loose in our beliefs in how we fear and overcome fears. Something about fear is both more powerful and less dogmatic than belief. I think you are at the beach right now, and so I’ll add that I really liked reading my older cousin’s Fear Street books on family beach vacations as a kid. Fear is better than boredom. It has the ability to abruptly interrupt boredom and change a situation very quickly. That’s one thing I like about suburban horror, like Lynch and Craven. Needless to say, I’m eager to read your new work.
As for my work, I am staying on the edge of my writing—- working on a lot of hybrid works right now. As a result, I’m having a hard time differentiating between projects. I’m writing a screenplay, for example, and when I start writing about how it’s failing, I start thinking that the journal entry might become a novel. I also teach from time to time and need to do research for my classes. In this way, I am working on new poetry in the margins of other projects. I wrote five new poems as of March this year, and they are coming. I read a few of them at Dog Park in Kingston in February. The new work is similar in tone to Mercurial, but the durations are running longer. We’ll see what happens!
It’s surely been a privilege to share this space with you, L. Not at all haunted or ghosted. I’ve felt like I’ve resurfaced to a warm, sunny day. Thank you for the discourse! With much respect and gratitude for this exchange,
r. rahmé