Letting Go of Narrative Sense

KARAN

Isabelle, “Split Lips” opens this collection and it’s devastating. Your sister makes soup from gravel, thistle, brittle leaves, spoons it into the kitten’s mouth. “We prayed it to life / but we weren’t saints / of anything.” You end with “This is how I learned to love. / Come, / open your mouth.” That ending is so moving. What does it mean to learn love through killing? How did this poem come to you?

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ISABELLE

This poem closes the first section of my forthcoming collection, Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It, a section that explores how we learn love in childhood, especially within our families. My mother was abusive, particularly toward my adopted sisters, and the sister in this poem is one of them. My mom was mentally ill, and in that neurosis, she believed she was saving my sisters through punishment. Religion played a major role in that—along with deeply ingrained beliefs about corporal punishment—so violence became entangled with care.

When that’s the model you’re given, love becomes a kind of distorted formula: if you care about someone, you make them change, no matter the cost. Even if it means hurting them. To learn love through violence is to internalize that distorted formula rooted in a deep fear of abandonment. 

As for how the poem came to me: I wrote it during a Gather session. I’m lucky to work with Maria Giesbrecht’s Gather community as a mentor, editor, and guest host. The prompt was about scale—either zooming in from something small to something vast, or the reverse. I chose to begin small. The smallest things that came to mind were pebbles and the kitten, which brought me back to that real memory.

This poem is loosely based on a true story. When we were five or six, my sister almost drowned a kitten. I think she was trying to make it swim. I had already written about that incident in a flash fiction piece, so this time I approached it differently. Instead of making it swim, I imagined my sister trying to mother the kitten—feeding it, trying to save it—so that when the poem zooms out, it can hold a larger meditation on love and how we learn how to love by emulating our caregivers. 

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KARAN

“Coming of Age” gives us Death as a man with high cheekbones who stands over you in dreams. “I could not move and this aroused him.” Then the mirror tells you to turn into a woman and you obey. The poem refuses to look away from how girlhood and violation get tangled together. How do you write about trauma without making it consumable? What does the body remember that the mind refuses?

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ISABELLE

I love this question, because so much of popular poetry—especially what succeeds on Instagram—makes trauma consumable. I’m not interested in that. Because, like Josh Groban sings in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, “Life doesn’t make narrative sense.” Growing up, I desperately wanted my trauma to make narrative sense. In college, I started writing creative nonfiction about my life. And that was important and useful. But it was also limiting. It felt like I was trying to force something inherently chaotic into a coherent arc.

When I shifted into poetry to write about my life, it was incredibly freeing. Poetry allows for that lack of narrative sense. It doesn’t require things to be neatly explained or resolved. It doesn’t have to be consumable. Contradictions can coexist. There can be paradox—that’s what poetry is built for.

This poem is based on a recurring sleep paralysis dream I had as a child: a man standing in the corner of my room, watching me. It was terrifying. And it made it more terrifying that he was beautiful. 

I don’t want trauma to feel palatable on the page. I want it to feel as jolting as it was to experience. So how do I do that? I tell the truth. If there’s a happy ending, I include it. If there isn’t, I don’t manufacture one.

As for what the body remembers that the mind refuses—everything. Writing poetry has been a kind of excavation, uncovering emotions I didn’t even know I carried consciously.

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KARAN

“Desire” is a torrent. “Desire is fruit flies clinging to horse reins. / Rattle and whip and frenzy.” The images pile up—porcelain chickens, pink frog hair clips, crocodiles gutting carnations. You end with “Forgive me, desire, for living / in your belly like an unsaid prayer.” The whole poem feels like an exorcism. Tell us about your process. How do you begin, write and finish a poem? Are you an obsessive reviser?

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ISABELLE

I’m not an obsessive reviser; I’m an obsessive writer. When a poem arrives, I know I have a limited window to stay inside it before I’m in danger of losing sight of it. So I stay with it as long as it takes to reach near completion, maybe 90%, in a single sitting. I need to understand what the poem wants and where it’s going. I’ve spent eight straight hours drafting a poem because I couldn’t step away before finding that place.

After that, revision can take anywhere from two minutes to two years. But it’s usually small adjustments—line breaks, punctuation, maybe, if it needed a lot of work still, an added stanza or a different ending. 

I think one of the marks of a strong writer is knowing when a piece has arrived somewhere new, when it has done its work, even if poems never truly “end.” I just need to catch a glimpse of that before I can let it go.

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KARAN

“On My History of Kissing Everyone at Parties” is a perfect defense. I like this poem a lot. “In my defense / they told me I was pretty / or listened to me talk / or shared a secret / or were named James / or Kate / or Miguel.” The catalog keeps accumulating reasons until promiscuity becomes generosity, desire becomes attention. How do you think about desire, intimacy, and connection in your work? 

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ISABELLE

I grew up in a large family—ten sisters and two brothers—and while I was never alone, I still felt a kind of existential loneliness. Art became a way to bridge that. As a child, reading Shel Silverstein, I felt connected to him, like he knew me and I knew him. That sense of recognition and connection, it’s everything to me. And it’s something I want to offer my readers—a feeling of being seen, even in the most private or difficult parts of themselves.

A lot of my work is about allowing the speaker to be fully human on the page—flawed, contradictory, sometimes even unlikable. Intimacy requires that kind of vulnerability: the willingness to be seen without editing yourself into something more acceptable. 

At the same time, intimacy is increasingly endangered—flattened by social media, AI, the merciless pace of capitalism. Art resists that. It creates space for private connection, which is something we can only really experience with someone we love (or kiss earnestly at a party) or with an artist. That kind of intimacy is essential to being human. Without it, we lose something fundamental. And we really are losing that, so we need connection through art more than ever. 

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KARAN

Your lines are so compressed, often just two or three words. “Split Lips” has lines like “a fist” and “soup” standing alone. The white space does so much work. What draws you to the short line? How do you know when to break?

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ISABELLE

I’m drawn to both short and long lines, but short lines carry a particular kind of power. There’s a sharpness to them, a confidence. 

I want my work to be accessible. I want it to make sense, even to readers who don’t usually read poetry. But I also trust my readers to do the intellectual and emotional work. White space becomes an invitation to slow down, to engage more deeply.

As for line breaks, my background teaching EAL (English as an additional language) shaped my understanding of line breaks. I used to cut sentences into individual words and have students rebuild them. It made me see how English moves in units—nouns, verbs, adjective phrases, clauses. I often break lines along those natural seams. 

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KARAN

Religious imagery saturates these poems. We encounter saints, prayers, churches. In “Split Lips,” the kitten’s tongue is “a church.” In “Desire,” you’re “an unsaid prayer.” You mention “a kind true god who doesn’t wish / me dead.” What’s your relationship to faith? Does Catholicism haunt you, or sustain you, or both, or neither?

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ISABELLE

I grew up in an evangelical protestant household. Very conservative, insular. But I loved the church as a child. I loved the singing, the sense of community, the stories.

Around 18, I began to question the church, especially its lack of space for women, and I stepped away. That loss was difficult. It felt like a breakup.

Over time, through reading Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, and C.S. Lewis, I realized that my sense of the divine didn’t depend on belonging to a church. So I began to reclaim spirituality for myself. There’s the stereotype about the girl who says she’s “spiritual but not religious”—that she’s unintelligent or just cherry-picking trendy philosophies. I used to feel so defensive when people put me in that box. I hate to be in any box, but especially that one, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. My spirituality is something I’ve studied deeply and lived rigorously, both in my reading and in my writing. It’s been hard-won and anything but easy or convenient. 

I believe in god. I believe in meaning. I believe in poetry. I believe in love. I’m less certain about doctrine, and I don’t believe in institutions. If anything, religion taught me that human systems are inherently flawed.

In my writing, religion and spirituality show up differently. Religion appears as something inherited, often with tension or resentment. Across collections, I don’t capitalize the word “god” in my poems (with the exception of the poem, “Monologue of a 15-Year-Old at Youth Group in a Church Gym Who Thinks She Just Saw God” because the speaker of that poem is religious) as a way of separating the idea of god-ness from the Christian God I was raised on. Spirituality is something else—vast, incomprehensible, connecting, terrifying. It’s in every poem I write. And it’s especially present in “Desire”—the terror of an unknown singularity, toying with our souls, our fates. 

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KARAN

“Punctuated” is brilliant & clever — just two lines that reverse meaning through punctuation. “I want you no longer. / I want you. No. Longer.” That’s the entire architecture of desire and fear in fourteen words. Short poems, when done well, can be so fun & memorable. What are your thoughts on brevity in writing? Do you think of yourself as a minimalist?

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ISABELLE

Brevity is difficult to pull off. One of my short poems from Good Girl and Other Yearnings, “A Poem is a Place,” has gone viral in a few places, including Reddit, and I’ve noticed that shorter poems often invite more criticism—like people looking at an abstract painting and thinking, oh, I could do that. I promise you, Acceptable_Wall7252, you couldn’t.

Like I said before, a great writer knows when a piece has arrived somewhere—when it has said something, when it has moved. That’s especially hard to do in a short poem. You still have to go somewhere. A lot of weak micro-poems don’t—they’re just a few lines that don’t really say anything, or they’re longer poems chopped into fragments. That’s not what a short poem should be.

And I’m glad you used the word fun. I want my work—short or long—to have range. One poem can be sad, moving, or serious, but I also want to write poems that are enjoyable, lyrical, fun. 

As for minimalism, I don’t think of myself as a minimalist. I’m interested in maximalism, too. I’ve been working on a long-armed poem after an Ellen Bass workshop—the idea is that the poem holds everything, that you stretch your arms wide and gather it all in. I’ve been working on it for months now. I don’t know if it will ever be finished, but I’m drawn to both ends of the spectrum. Someday, I’d like to write a long, whirlwind poem like one from Crush by Richard Siken. It’s on my to-do list. 

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KARAN

You live in Mexico City now after growing up in Washington state. How does place shape these poems? Does living in Mexico change what you can write, or how you write it?

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ISABELLE

I’ve been living abroad for about eleven years. Before Mexico City, I lived in Ho Chi Minh City for six years, and before that I traveled through Chile, Peru, Indonesia, India, and Nepal. So place has played a huge role in this collection.

In Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It, the poems are centered on relationships, and place becomes the setting where those relationships begin, end, or transform. It’s the backdrop of each love story—both with others and with myself.

Mexico City, in particular, is incredibly romantic. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived. It’s easy to fall in love here—with a person, with the city itself. There’s this stereotype about all the public affection, couples kissing in parks, and it’s true. And in the spring, when the purple Jacarandas are in bloom—how could I write about anything but love?

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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ISABELLE

I know, through somatic therapy, that I tend to live in my head more than my body. I write about the body, but I wouldn’t place my work there.

I think I’d have to say the soul. That’s the most expansive, all-encompassing category, and I’ve always wanted to have a big, vast life. I want my work to be expansive like that. Like my life. Like the soul. 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell other poets about writing desire, about writing the body?

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ISABELLE

I keep thinking about that Ellen Bass workshop on the long-armed poem. I was so excited to be there with her that I did what I always do: I started juggling. While she was speaking, I was already drafting a new poem, trying to catch every idea in real time, wanting to make the absolute most of being in her (virtual) presence. That’s how I tend to operate—always writing, always multitasking. 

And then, at the end of the workshop, she said that poetry should be slow, that you should be with a poem the way you’re with a lover. And there I was, doing the exact opposite. I was rushing, trying to get everything down as quickly as possible.

That approach has helped me produce a lot of work—I’ve written three books in three years—but it’s also a disservice to my relationship with poetry. Not to the quality, necessarily, but to the experience of it. I want to learn how to stay with a poem, to give it the attention it deserves.

As for writing about desire: you have to sit with the feeling. Even if it’s imagined, you have to inhabit it fully. Notice where it lives in your body, what images it creates and follow that. If you stay with it long enough, the poem will begin to write itself. I fell into this practice when I wrote my chapbook, Sex is from Mars but I Love You From Venus. It’s a love poem for each astrological Venus placement. So, I had to imagine how other people experience beauty and desire and love, not just me (I’m an Aquarius Venus in case you were wondering). 

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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ISABELLE

Write a poem about something you were once made to feel ashamed of—like kissing everyone at parties, needing attention, loving the wrong person.

It can begin with “In my defense…” and then list reasons, justifications, confessions. 

Then, allow the poem to shift into acceptance. Where does that acceptance lead you?

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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ISABELLE

There’s a painting that inspired the cover of my next collection that I’ve been staring at for years: Study of a Female Nude by Henri Lehmann. I love how she looks reserved and inviting at the same time. She seems to want to be seen, and also to hide. There’s something haunting about that balance that I can’t get over. And that sentiment is the exact driving theme of Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It. 

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KARAN

And finally, Isabelle, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language? Who taught you that poems could be this compressed and this wild?

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ISABELLE

Diane Seuss. She showed me that you can be direct without losing originality. Clarity doesn’t have to mean simplicity or predictability.

And Mary Ruefle taught me that a poet can be everything at once—one poem can be clever and funny, the next, devastating and profound. Poetry, more than any other form, allows for that kind of multiplicity. Nothing else holds my multitudes the way poetry does.