Roof Beam Reader
Adam Burgess
Interview: Poet Carolyn Oliver
About the Poet
Today, I’m thrilled to welcome to the blog, poet Carolyn Oliver! Carolyn has three new books out this year, including one full-length poetry collection and two chapbooks.
Carolyn Oliver’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST, The National Poetry Review, and in many other journals. Carolyn is the winner of the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.
The Interview
A.B. As I mentioned in my introduction above, you have three publications out this year, including two chapbooks and one full-length manuscript. What would you like readers to know about these three books before buying or reading them?
C.O. First, thank you so much for taking the time to ask these questions, Adam! So glad to have the chance to talk with you.
To your question: I hope readers know that I’m grateful to them for engaging with the poems! And I should note that the three books are quite different from each other—I don’t think I have settled into one particular style or subject (maybe I never will). Mirror Factory is composed entirely of persona poems; Dearling is a book about motherhood and the threat of loss; Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble is tricky to summarize (like many first collections, it follows a rough autobiographical arc); I suppose at its core it is about the ways love and grief are interconnected.
A.B. As a poet who is experiencing a successful publication year, is there anything that has surprised you about the writing or publication process(es)?
C.O. I think I was surprised, once it sunk in that the full-length manuscript really would be out in the world, at how vulnerable I felt (and still feel). While almost all the poems have appeared in journals or anthologies, it’s a different experience to have such them contained in one volume.
A.B. Can you tell us a little about your writing process? Your thoughts on things like solitude versus community? Social media and its influence on writing poetry?
C.O. I am a scattered and slow writer; if I can finish a poem in a week, that’s a good week. A phrase or a subject or a title (I rarely get a whole line at once) usually needs to percolate for a long time (a month, a year, two, three) before it bubbles up into a draft. Flash fiction feels looser, more playful; that tends to come faster. Longer fiction takes eons. I’m largely a solitary writer, by inclination and circumstance, though I cherish my writer friends and enjoy listening to or reading craft talks. Zoom readings have been such a gift (especially now that they can be captioned). And I’m glad for the experience and insight that editing a literary magazine (The Worcester Review) has provided.
Social media seems necessary, if one (a) is not already famous and (b) wishes to reach a wider audience than one’s acquaintances; and for me it’s intensely energy-sapping. I’m grateful to and admire writers who have the ability to build community on social media.
A.B. You and I “met” through book blogging many, many years ago. What are your thoughts on book blogging as a medium, now? Do you still write a blog? Read blogs? Was blogging an effective pathway to creative writing, for you, or is that something you were always doing anyway?
C.O. I started a book blog (many, many years ago, as you say) as a way to keep myself tethered to books and reading and fellow readers when early motherhood was slowly unspooling my ideas about myself and my life. I’m immensely grateful for the kind people I met and the books I read. I don’t write a blog anymore, because I need to guard my writing hours and energy. But I’ve been trying to write a book review or two every year (I agonize over them; it takes forever). And I do still keep an eye on the blogs of those who’ve stuck with it, like you and Rebecca at Bookish Beck and Eleanor at Elle Reads.
A.B. In addition to poetry, you also write prose, and have successfully published fiction and creative non-fiction. What are your thoughts about writing in multiple genres? Is this something that came naturally to you, or is it a struggle to move back and forth? Do you prefer one genre over another?
C.O. I’ve really only dipped a toe into the CNF pool, so I’ll limit my answer to fiction and poetry. When I started writing with the intention of sending work out into the world, I split my writing hours about 50-50 between fiction and poetry. That balance has shifted over time, and I’m still fine-tuning it.
I know some multi-genre writers find they work better in one genre during a certain season or a certain time of day; I wish I had that kind of system. Right now the balance has shifted toward poetry, with a bit of flash fiction or hybrid work. I have some longer fiction projects I’d like to return to, but finding a writing rhythm that will allow me to reliably drop into those projects has eluded me.
A.B. The perennial question, but one I’m always interested in as a writing teacher, is, what advice would you give for early/novice writers? If you could go back and say something to yourself when you were just getting started, what would it be?
C.O. What my earlier self would grumble at, and believe: Cultivate patience! With yourself, mostly. Also drafts—let them breathe a little before you send them out.* What my earlier self would grumble at, and not believe: Someday you will be grateful for the editors who declined work that wasn’t ready for publication.
*Still working on patience, in both respects.
A.B. What is your writing environment or atmosphere like? Do you have a dedicated space where you do your writing? Your editing and revision? Do you listen to music, or prefer silence? Is it important for you to control your writing space, or can you write anywhere?
C.O. I can read anywhere, take notes anywhere, but to write I do need relative silence and a block of what I know (or at least, believe) will be uninterrupted time. Focus, given my particular kind of neurodivergence, is tricky to come by.
When I started out, in an apartment inhabited by a lovable toddler impervious to sleep and no guestroom, my “office” was a wobbly table in the dining room, or the orange-now-yellow velvet chair that my friend J gave me before she moved out of state.
Now I write in an upstairs bedroom, which by square footage is roughly 40% guestroom, 30% library, 30% office. I’d like to be a minimalist, but I’m not, so the walls and shelves are covered with art and photos and postcards and various items of personal significance. I have a surprising number of rocks.
I write longhand drafts at a wonderful old desk I recently found on a neighborhood site (I don’t know anything about furniture, but I think it might be a student desk? The angled top lifts up and the sides are shelves. Heaven, all the storage). Once I switch to typed drafts, I write in the chair my dad gave me when I moved to Boston, with my laptop perched on the plastic lap desk I got for college 20 years ago (still has my dorm name on the back). I try not to stare out the window too much. Sometimes I succeed.
About the Book
Inside this debut collection, girlhood’s dangers echo, transmuted, in the poet’s fears for her son. A body just discovering the vastness of “want’s new acreage” is humbled by chronic illness. Epithalamion turns elegy. But this world that so often seems capricious in its cruelty also shelters apple orchards, glass museums, schoolchildren, century-old sharks; “there’s no accounting for / all we want to save, no names.” Oliver’s polyphonic gathering of speakers includes lovers and saints, painters and dead poets, a hawk and a mother. In varied forms (ghazals and prose poems, dialogues and erasures, bref double and Golden Shovel, among others) these poems bear witness to and seek reprieve from disasters at once commonplace and terrifying. “I can’t surface for every scalpel slice, / I need a dreamy estuary present,” she writes. Stumbling toward joy across time and space, these poems hum with fear and desire, bewildering loss, and love’s lush possibilities.
Buy the Book
University of Utah Press. IndieBound.
Your local independent bookstore! Some of Carolyn’s favorites:
- Newtonville Books
- Bedlam Book Cafe
- Root & Press
- White Whale Bookstore
- Porter Square Books
- Loganberry Books
- Print: A Bookstore
- Grolier Poetry Book Shop
Praise for Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble
“Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble is a marvelous book. It is at once both personal and political, searing and tender. On one page, these poems might skillfully speak to (and through) art and artists across centuries; next, they might tell a new story of Eve, contemplate the complications of America, or deftly chart the mysteries of the human spirit. Through it all, each poem is an event, and each event feels timeless and timely.” —Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions of Design
“In her marvelous debut collection, Carolyn Oliver brings the reader to the garden—the literal garden stalked by wasps, the metaphorical garden where Szymborska’s Polish consonants are ‘bunched like root vegetables’—a lush space of sweetness and growth but also danger. Oliver gives us the textures of a life, and the precariousness: the tremble, the crush, the dissolve, the fizzle. These are poems of the body and poems of the earth. What did I do when I finished this book? I immediately began it again.” —Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Good Bones
“Wunderkammer and honey-laden hive, Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble is a spectacular feat of craft and wonder. Within the finely articulated fury of each poem, we feel ‘time turn nimbus’ and, dizzied, delight in the strange splendors offered here: the body—tender, desirous, wracked with pain, pulsed with pleasure, undone and born again through time—and its threats of memory and grave knowledge; the promise and peril of beloved others intimate, familiar, strange, and lost, perhaps regained; doubt, failure, and the exercise of faith, the poems their own forms of query and prayer. Oliver’s is a voice we’ve been waiting to hear, her music tuned to worlds we suspect, perhaps sound, but never quite touch. What else to call this music but alchemy? O, how these poems gleam—bright gems!—with skies ‘of beaten gold.'” —Julie Phillips Brown, author of The Adjacent Possible
Other Books by Carolyn Oliver
Guest Post: Author Christina Marrocco
Hello readers!
Today, I’m pleased to welcome to the blog author and poet, Christina Marrocco! Christina’s first novel, Addio, Love Monster, is available now from Ovunque Siamo. Read through to the end for a specially selected excerpt from the book!
About the Book
Addio, Love Monster is a novel told in linked stories spanning generations on the “regular” yet remarkable Singer Street of fictional midcentury Mulberry Park, just outside of Chicago. Marrocco transports you fully into this small world where Signora Giuseppa, the “iron fist” of Singer Street, does everything it takes to keep her grown children very near her, no matter what. Where Enrico the widower creeps in the night looking for a new wife in all the wrong places. Where Nicky the golden-gloves boxer wrestles with what he saw in the basement as a child-and Lena, his wife, also wrestles-with how to deal with Nicky’s violence. Each story follows one person, but together they are the story of the neighborhood, a neighborhood that faces life together, whether they like it or not. In these pages you will find humor and sorrow, resentment and adoration, and the churn and change of a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone both two much and too little as time marches on.
Guest Post
It’s sometimes a challenge to appreciate how much place creates people while also understanding how much people create a place. We may laugh at our own connections to our past places and may well fear we indulge in nostalgia, or worse yet, sentimentalism, when we conjure them in our minds or in our writing. Often, we also live in apprehension, in dread that the places we hold close to us will be lost from the physical world. That they will be changed to unrecognizable, that they will deteriorate, that they will vanish altogether under the wrecking ball or backhoe. Or worse, by the new owner of grandma’s house who pulls out her bushes and shiplaps everything in sight. Landscape, buildings, residents, trees, smells, street signs, whatever makes a place can and most certainly will, be changed, in time.
The more inherent things take longer. Some things go fast. So, it is natural that we will hold in in memory and in writing. In literature, a place gets laid down, gets made, and will endure as long as someone reads about it. But more than that, place gets a chance to stand up and be a character itself. A character who interacts with, holds, and likely creates the human characters it holds, and often holds very tightly.
Novels told in linked stories may be the perfect literary space in which to set place as character. There’s room for lush description and for intertwining, even conflating, people and place. That’s a good thing. While writing Addio, Love Monster, I found I could harness Singer Street in Mulberry Park even as it pirouetted through two decades. Note that Mulberry Park is a fictional suburb of Chicago inspired by a few very real ones.
When in graduate school, I “found” and was knocked out by the work of JT Farrell. Farrel wrote from 1910-1940, often about Irish Americans and their lives in a very gritty Chicago. He wrote place so expertly, and his collection, Chicago Stories, leaves the reader feeling they’ve peeked in the window of every house in the Farrell’s neighborhood and gotten an gut-ful as well as an eyeful.
Farrell’s linked short stories set me on the path, but I veered happily into novel, and what novel in story does for the writer is to allow a more distinct overall arc. To have stories as chapters with a sort of character development of the entire place, which may be neighborhood, street, countryside, the parameters are myriad.
Excerpt from Addio, Love Monster
The blonde man lifted his trousers from where he’d draped them the night before—over the heavy walnut footboard––in the tiny spare room off the kitchen, in his sister’s flat. The smells of lard and sugar from the donut shop stole in under the sash and made his stomach growl. Five-thirty in the morning, and traffic on the main roads was already vibrating, most of it headed east to Chicago.To the Water Market, to the building sites, to the demolition sites.
At this hour, there were very few fancy cars on the road. Five a.m. and the lawyers and accountants were still in bed snoring. This was the commute time for candy pourers, metal bangers, ditch diggers, gritty men of all sorts. They rode in trucks and panel vans, and
Reinhold Ruhe knew his ilk well. Their collective breath smelled of black coffee, unfiltered cigarettes, and Listerine. They often nicked themselves shaving and wore bits of tissue on their chins until they fell off naturally. They told off-color stories on the way in to work and bounced in the seats of trucks with poor suspension. Normally,
Reinhold would not be among them, bouncing in the seat of Butch Bobko’s old red moving truck, wedged between Butch and another helper, aggravating his sensitive condition. But today Butch would be picking him up late; something had come up. Reinhold hadn’t asked what—Butch was the boss, so you just didn’t. You just made sure you were ready when he showed up.
About the Author
Christina Marrocco works in memoir, short story, long fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Silverbirch Press, The Laurel Review, House Mountain Review, VIA, Ovunque Siamo, and Red Fern Press. She lives outside of Chicago where she teaches Creative Writing and other courses at Elgin Community College. You can connect with Christina on her Facebook page and her website.
Buy the Book
Amazon. Indie Bound. The Book Depository. Barnes & Noble.
Praise for Addio, Love Monster
“In rich, descriptive prose peppered with salty dialogue, Christina Marrocco gives us a penetrating look at several generations of a Sicilian immigrant family. Bookmarked on either end of this novel in stories are two tales focusing upon professional mourner and matriarch Giuseppa Millefiore, who teaches her family that “everything dies”-but not before the entire clan loves, laughs, and dips deep into the gusto that characterizes Italian-American life.”
-Rita Ciresi, author of Pink Slip and Sometimes I Dream in Italian
“Joyce had his Dublin, Ferrante, her Naples, and for Marrocco it’s Mulberry Park, where not much seems to happen, and yet something’s always going on if you look beneath the surface. Marrocco finds the extraordinary in the lives of the folk who inhabit this sleepy suburb of Chicago, creating stories of individuals that she forms into a lively word tapestry, capturing days of lives gone by, reminding us that everyone has a story to tell.”
-Fred L. Gardaphé, author of From Wise Guys to Wise Men
“In Addio, Love Monster, Christina Marrocco has created a world that pulses with life. At the center of that life is the Millefiore family and their iron-fisted matriarch, Giuseppa. Set in fictional Mulberry Park, a suburb of Chicago, on the largely Sicilian-settled Singer Street, Marrocco’s novel-in-stories creates a place that is both familiar and wonderfully strange, a slice of a past time where families and neighbors squabble and gossip and judge, but most of all, they share a love that outstrips those lesser emotions. A wonderful first book by an author with a keen eye and a skillful touch.”
-Patrick Parks, author of Tucumcari
“With a unique and captivating voice and astounding attention to details, Christina Marrocco immerses us in the lives of a multi-generational immigrant family with her debut novel. I know well, these people of Mulberry Park, her fictional, working class, Sicilian-American neighborhood near Chicago. In this sharply focused snapshot of the midcentury Southern Italian immigrant experience, Marrocco populates Addio, Love Monster with people as real as it gets. I love this book.”
-Karen Tintori, author of Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family
July Checkpoint! #TBR2022RBR
Hello, TBR Pile Challengers!
I hope your summer (or winter) is going well. We are now officially in the second half of our annual challenge, and I’ve seen and read a lot of awesome updates and reviews for challenge books. We’ve got more than 140 links posted! Thank you for sharing!
As promised in June, this month’s checkpoint comes with the third of four planned mini challenges. I hope you’ll all take the opportunity to play the game and have a little fun. It doesn’t matter how far you are into your challenge, this time! Anyone who pre-registered for our challenge and linked up their list on time, way back in January, can enjoy this one. See below for details.
Progress: 8 of 12 Completed / 6 of 12 Reviewed
Uh oh! It’s clear to see that I have stalled completely. Since last month (well, since May, to be accurate), I haven’t done any new challenge list reading and still haven’t reviewed the two books that I did read but hadn’t written anything about. I’m going to have to get moving! I find myself suddenly in a position where I’m falling behind instead of being well ahead, where I’d been most of the year. Oops!
Since the Guide to Poetry I’m reading is so long (and such slow reading, intentionally so), I also think I’m going to have to pull another title from my list to read simultaneously, if I hope to continue making well-paced progress. I’m leaning toward James Baldwin, because who wouldn’t?
Books read:
- Chicago Poems (1916) by Carl Sandburg
- When My Brother was an Aztec (2012) by Natalie Diaz
- Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) by Robert M. Pirsig
- A People’s History of the United States (1999) by Howard Zinn
- The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) by Isabel Wilkerson (not pictured)
- Crush by Richard Siken (needs to be reviewed)
- A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion (needs to be reviewed)
How are you doing?
Below, you’re going to find the infamous Mr. Linky widget. If you read and review any challenge books this month, please link-up on the widget below. This Mr. Linky will be re-posted every month so that we can compile a large list of all that we’re reading and reviewing together this year. Each review that is linked-up on this widget throughout the year may also earn you entries into future related giveaways, so don’t forget to keep this updated!
MINI-CHALLENGE #3:
Book poetry! Can you create a poem using the titles of the books on your TBR Pile Challenge list (finished or unfinished?) Give it a shot! The “best” poem entry, left in the comments of this checkpoint post, will win a book of choice, $20USD or less, to be shipped from The Book Depository! So, get creative, and good luck! (P.S. Best is entirely subjective. I’m picking whichever one I happen to like most.)
LINK UP YOUR REVIEWS!
The Bone Flower by Charles Lambert
The Bone Flower is a deliciously gothic and atmospheric novel that has unsettling supernatural elements woven into a fiercely human story about love, guilt, and betrayal.
On a grey November evening in Victorian London, Edward Monteith, a well to do but listless young man, stokes the fire at his local gentleman’s club, listening to its members: scientists, explorers, and armchair philosophers discussing their supernatural experiences and their theories of life after death. Edward is taken under the wing of some sceptics and attends a supposed séance where he is captivated by a beautiful young woman selling flowers outside the theater. But their bond is threatened by the inescapable class system of Victorian society. When Settie falls pregnant, Edward panics. Afraid of their fate if he is cut off by his father, he makes a drastic decision with dire consequences.
Less than two years later, Edward is married to another woman. His large country house is adorned with orange trees and his young Sicilian wife is awaiting the birth of their first child. But the past he is desperate to forget won’t be laid to rest.
A little gem of a novel, this quintessential mystery, ghost story, and uncanny love story is perfect for readers wanting to pick up a page-turning, Spooky gothic read that can be enjoyed in far fewer pages than a typical gothic classic.
About the Author: Charles Lambert is the author of several novels, short stories, and the memoir With a Zero at Its Heart, which was voted one of The Guardian readers’ Ten Best Books of 2014. In 2007, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story, “The Scent of Cinnamon.” He was shortlisted for the Polari Prize for LGBTQ+ writing in 2018, and his first novel, Little Monsters, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Born in England, Charles Lambert has lived in central Italy since 1980.
Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a review copy.
June Checkpoint! #TBR2022RBR
Hello, TBR Pile Challengers!
Welcome to the MID-WAY POINT for our 2022 TBR Pile Challenge! I don’t know about you, but the time seems to be flying for me. I celebrated a week or two of “vacation” before summer term began, and now I’m suddenly in the second week of the semester? What’s happening!?
That said, I have somehow, someway managed to keep pace with this challenge (sort of.) I’ve read and reviewed exactly 6 of my 12 required books, with another two books read but not yet reviewed. That’s a total of eight out of the planned fourteen complete. This technically puts me a bit ahead of the necessary pace, if only I could get some thoughts down on the last two books I read!
Progress: 8 of 12 Completed / 6 of 12 Reviewed
I’m not entirely sure what I’ll read next from my list. Book 9 is still in-progress (A Poet’s Guide to Poetry). I’m thinking I might go with James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. I’m going to commit, first, to getting the two unreviewed books reviewed, and then I’ll start Book 10.
Books read:
- Chicago Poems (1916) by Carl Sandburg
- When My Brother was an Aztec (2012) by Natalie Diaz
- Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) by Robert M. Pirsig
- A People’s History of the United States (1999) by Howard Zinn
- The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) by Isabel Wilkerson (not pictured)
- Crush by Richard Siken (needs to be reviewed)
- A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion (needs to be reviewed)
How are you doing?
Below, you’re going to find the infamous Mr. Linky widget. If you read and review any challenge books this month, please link-up on the widget below. This Mr. Linky will be re-posted every month so that we can compile a large list of all that we’re reading and reviewing together this year. Each review that is linked-up on this widget throughout the year may also earn you entries into future related giveaways, so don’t forget to keep this updated!
Roof Beam Reader 