A Conversation with Katherine Larson
BY CELESTE LIPKES
Katherine Larson is the author of Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; The Speechless Ones (Interlinea Press, 2016), winner of the Vercelli International Civic Poetry Prize; and Wedding of the Foxes (Milkweed Editions, 2025). Her honors include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Larry Levis Reading Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Foreword Indies Gold Medal in Poetry. She is active with organizations and artists dedicated to conservation and environmental education in the Sonoran Desert and Upper Gulf of California.
Celeste Lipkes: It’s been just over fourteen years since your first book of poems, Radial Symmetry, was published, which has only increased my anticipation for your next project! When did you realize that you would shift to prose to explore the obsessions of Wedding of the Foxes?
Katherine Larson: Yes, it’s been a while since Radial Symmetry! I actually completed another poetry collection in the interim, The Speechless Ones—certain poems were inspired by my time living at a field station in Sonora, Mexico. It was published as a bilingual limited edition in Italy, which was a lovely experience. I was invited to the International Festival of Civil Poetry in Vercelli, met some incredible Italian poets, and traveled a bit throughout the country for some readings.
After that, life got more transient, and with two young kids, I struggled to find the solitude I needed to write poems. I was drawn to hybrid and prose forms, particularly the lyric essay and Japanese traditions of zuihitsu and haibun. They became my entry point into more spontaneous modes of expression. I found myself returning to thinkers who embrace ambiguity and fragmentation: Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and his notion of the fragment as a unit of meaning was important. So was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and embodiment—his idea of the world as something we are entangled with, not separate from. Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which asks how we can live meaningfully in damaged worlds, also really resonated with me.
There’s a passage from Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, introducing the term “lyric essay” in Seneca Review, that became helpful for me: “The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess . . .” That idea of circling a subject—of creating meaning through accumulation and association—felt like a natural fit for the themes I wanted to explore in Wedding of the Foxes: the sixth extinction, ecological grief, the porous boundaries between the personal and the planetary. Not everything had to resolve. The essay form could hold uncertainty, urgency, even contradiction—and that was liberating.
CL: One of the great joys of these essays is watching you hold those contradictions. You manage to weave the seemingly disparate together: from Godzilla to endangered cranes to the grueling days of early motherhood and pandemic lockdown. I couldn’t help but think of you as a bowerbird, gathering both beautiful and discarded moments into something new. If you indulge my metaphor: what was your process of selecting and arranging the vast amount of raw material in these essays and who did you hope to draw to your bower?
KL: I love the bowerbird metaphor—I’ve always been fascinated by them. They make us redefine what’s of value by their refusal to discriminate between what we might call beautiful and what we’d typically discard: a feather and a plastic pen cap, an iridescent cicada wing and a crumpled napkin. Attention itself can transform an object’s value and the so-called detritus of the world can become part of something intimate, even ceremonial. (By the way, the fantastic poet Marianne Boruch has the most wonderful bowerbird list in her collection Bestiary Dark.)
In any case, that’s pretty much how the essays in this book came together. I remember a conversation with a poet friend about how my students—and I, too—were feeling crushed beneath the emotional weight of climate narratives. That kind of ecological grief overwhelms us and almost by necessity can lead to paralysis and apathy. I mention it in the book, but the term “solastalgia,” coined by Glenn Albrecht, describes that disorientation and distress caused by environmental loss and degradation in places we still inhabit.
I wanted to explore the possibility of repair—not in a naive or redemptive sense, but repair as an ongoing, imperfect practice. That meant embracing what was cracked or discarded, what didn’t seem to “belong” in a typical environmental narrative. The gleaning metaphor became central: to gather what’s left behind, to attend to the fragments, and let form emerge from their unexpected constellations. I explore this most directly in the essay “The Gleaners,” but it really permeates the whole book.
I was thinking a lot about Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World—especially her idea of “living in the ruins,” where salvage and collaboration become survival strategies. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter also shaped my thinking, particularly her argument for a “political ecology of things” where even debris and marginalia have agency (I excerpt some of her writing in “Haunted Household Objects”). And in terms of aesthetics and structure, I was inspired by the way Walter Benjamin imagined the collector—not to impose order, but to create new meaning through juxtaposition and interruption. Repair, in this sense, is less about restoring wholeness and more about composing something meaningful from what remains.
So, the book assembled itself slowly. The braided essays came first—they’re more expansive, associative, often circling themes from multiple angles. Later came the epistolary essays, which are more direct. Those letters became a space where I could speak frankly about damage and also about care—how we might begin again, or begin differently.
As for whom I hope to draw to the bower: it’s readers who, like my students and myself, feel overwhelmed and uncertain, but not numb. People looking for ways to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna J. Haraway puts it. Those who want to imagine other modes of resilience and kinship with a world in flux.
CL: Throughout Wedding of the Foxes, you toggle between first and third person—your first essay, all the epistolary pieces, and half of the final essay are in first person, while the remainder are in third. Tell me a little about the relationship between the she and the I.
KL: Such a great question, thank you. At the beginning, writing in the third person felt natural—it offered just enough distance to observe myself as though I were watching a field subject. It gave me kind of a parallax view, where stepping slightly aside revealed things I couldn’t see head-on. Thinking about it now, I was working in some sense like an ecologist: observing behavior, allowing meaning to emerge through patterns. But really it also gave me some emotional and interpretive space. If you know me well, you know I hate talking about myself! So third person let me explore trauma, displacement, and ecological grief without feeling like I was collapsing into the confessional.
The epistolary essays came later, and with them, a shift into the first person. That change was prompted partly by the physical environment I was writing in—my desk had slowly filled with teapots, feathers, and books by Japanese women writers. Honestly, it felt less like an aesthetic choice than a kind of haunting. I was living in deep conversation with these writers: Kurahashi Yumiko, Tawada Yōko, Ōba Minako, Ōta Yōko, Taeko Kōno, Tsushima Yūko, and Shibaki Yoshiko. Their voices had transformed my inner landscape, and I wanted to reciprocate—not just by referencing their work, but by entering into dialogue and writing to them.
There’s a line in the first essay about cultural exchange requiring reciprocity, and I took that seriously. The letters became a form of relational writing—less about self-expression and more about acknowledgment, indebtedness, offering. I often wrote them late at night, and it really did feel as though the writers were there with me. Only Tawada Yōko is still alive, and I actually sent her the letter I wrote to her.
By the time I reached the final essay, I felt the need to unify the “she” and the “I.” That piece begins in the third person and slowly moves into the first, as a gesture toward integration. I think integration—its difficulty, its necessity—is one of the central themes of the book. The shift in pronouns is not just a stylistic choice but a formal enactment of that inner movement: from distance to recognition, from fragmentation to the beginnings of coherence. Not resolution, exactly, but coexistence.
So, in short: the “she” allowed me to observe. The “I” allowed me to enter. And the final movement of the book tries to let both speak—together, finally, in the same breath.
CL: I love that you sent Tawada Yōko your letter! Did she respond and did you feel differently writing to a still-alive writer versus her ghost?
KL: It did feel different writing to her—I think one of the things I wanted to do in the letter was ask about her current projects since I’d just finished reading two of her books, The Emissary and Scattered All Over the Earth. And I definitely hoped she’d write back (though she hasn’t—yet!). The excerpt I include in the essay is from one of her earlier books, Where Europe Begins, a collection that had a profound impact on me. It shaped my thinking about structure. I was especially struck by its formal innovations—its seamless integration of fairy tale motifs, dream fragments, and lyric narrative. It’s from New Directions and I highly recommend it.
CL: Your collection includes seven letters of admiration addressed to Japanese female writers, but you break this pattern in the collection’s eighth and final love letter, which you address to Godzilla (“My Monster, Your Monster, Our Monster”). I really enjoyed this twist and it made me wonder: is there any version of Godzilla that is female—or an artist?
KL: I love that you picked up on that shift—it’s one of the more quietly subversive moves in the book. To me, Godzilla is deeply generative, not just destructive. She/they/it emerges out of nuclear trauma and ecological violence, and yet continues to return, again and again, both feared and beloved. To me, Godzilla embodies what Timothy Morton calls an “uncanny ecological being”—a hyperobject that’s both intimate and terrifying, familiar and ungraspable. I wanted to tap into that layered symbolism: Godzilla as grief, as protector—and yes, perhaps even as artist.
Writing that final letter allowed me to move beyond human-centered narratives of authorship. If the earlier letters honor literary foremothers, then the Godzilla letter asks: What happens when we extend that kinship to the monstrous, the inhuman, the non-linguistic?
In a way, I imagined Godzilla as a feminist figure, or at least a gender-transgressive one—resistant to the roles assigned, operating outside binary categories. That refusal to be fixed is part of what makes the character so enduring. So yes, in my imagination, there is absolutely a version of Godzilla who is female—or neither—or both—and perhaps also an artist of destruction and survival. The letter to Godzilla felt like a fitting closing gesture: an acknowledgement that our teachers aren’t always who we expect.
CL: Speaking of gender transgressions, in the essay “Haunted Household Objects,” you quote Ecofeminist Lisa Kemmerer’s definition of patriarchy as an insistence on duality: male/female, human/animal, reason/emotion, etc. As a female physician and poet, I was especially drawn to your exploration of that final pairing (reason/emotion). How do you think of the male figures throughout your collection who chastise you for using lyric language (the chloroplasts are “green, sentient pearls”) in a laboratory report or critique the logic of your prose (“the math of this essay is loose”)?
KL: Haha! Great question. I was drawn to Lisa Kemmerer’s framing of patriarchy as a system that insists on binary thinking because I felt the pressure of those binaries not only culturally, but intimately. Especially in academic and scientific spaces, where certain ways of knowing are privileged while others are dismissed.
The male figures in the book—the professor who tells me chloroplasts aren’t “sentient pearls,” the reader who critiques the “loose math” of my essay—aren’t villains, exactly. They’re embodiments of a larger system that polices language, especially when it veers toward the poetic. What’s being questioned isn’t just style, but legitimacy. Can this way of speaking be taken seriously? Can lyric language be valid in an epistemological sense?
For me, the answer is yes. More than yes—it’s necessary. The natural world is not just measurable; it’s also relational, felt, mysterious. The lyric gives me access to that space. To name chloroplasts as “sentient pearls” isn’t to reject science—it’s to reach for a language capacious enough to hold wonder and fact at once. That capaciousness is, in a way, an act of resistance.
I think part of what the collection is working toward is reclaiming emotional knowledge—not as lesser, but as another form of precision. A different kind of truth-telling. So when a man says “the math of this essay is loose,” I hear that not just as critique, but as confirmation: that I’ve left the realm of quantification and entered something messier, maybe more alive.
CL: Despite this being a prose collection, you remain very attuned to form: for example, utilizing erasure in your essay “The Crane Wife” to visually suggest the steady obliteration of an endangered species. How did your fascination with disappearance and silence inform the structure of this collection?
KL: I’m so glad you noticed that. “The Crane Wife” was one of the most formally delicate essays to construct, and its structure was very intentional. The erasure format wasn’t just aesthetic; it was a way to embody disappearance on the page. There’s a kind of “Easter egg” embedded in that piece: the ten crane species begin to vanish in the order of their extinction risk, based on the IUCN Red List classifications—ranging from “vulnerable” to “critically endangered” to “extinct in the wild.” So the textual erasure mirrors ecological erasure.
Extinction is often abstract, especially for those of us living in urbanized or industrialized contexts. We might know the numbers (the IUCN estimates over 47,000 species currently at risk), but numbers don’t convey the emotional or relational impact. What’s lost isn’t just a single species—it’s a web of interactions, an entire ecology of co-dependence, sound, movement, seed dispersal, nutrient cycling, cultural significance. These invisible relationships—what Deborah Bird Rose called “multispecies knots of ethical time”—are much harder to see, and therefore easier to ignore.
That’s why the collection as a whole is preoccupied with what slips from sight: echoes, ghosts, remnants. I was thinking a lot about the poetics of absence—not just what vanishes, but what remains to haunt us. Extinction isn’t only a biological event, it’s also an epistemological and emotional rupture. In that sense, the form of each essay—braided, epistolary, fragmented, erasure—tries to register different kinds of silence. Silence as grief, but also as resistance. Silence as refusal to offer neat conclusions.
And then there are monsters. The scale of species disappearance we’re living through is, to me, a kind of slow apocalypse—and the monstrous isn’t just what destroys, but also what exceeds our capacity to comprehend. Godzilla appears in the book for that reason: as an embodiment of ecological grief and human complicity. But also as a reminder that what we fear may also be what we’ve made.
So yes, disappearance shaped not just the content of the book, but its architecture. The essays are built around erasures, hauntings, ruptures in voice and time. It’s a book made as much of absences as presences—and that, I think, is its deepest argument.
CL: I noticed in the slim sections of the essay “Microseasons,” your language becomes even more evocative, attuned to both nearby natural phenomenon and the silences between them. As you worked on this essay, how cognizant were you that the collection would be haunted by traditional Japanese forms like the haibun?
KL: Yes, I was very aware; I’ve long been drawn to haibun for the way it balances observation and distillation, prose and silence. It mirrors ecological consciousness: layered, nonlinear, and deeply attuned to the ephemeral.
Japan’s 72 microseasons, each just five days long, inspired the structure. I wanted to write at that scale, noticing what’s easily missed: a leafcutter ant, a bloom, a temperature shift. I was trying to tune my attention to that level of perception. To track not only what was happening in the world around me—migrating birds, blooming saguaro cactus—but also what was shifting internally. The world doesn’t change separately from us; it changes with us. And attention can become its own kind of ethics.
At the same time, I didn’t want to mimic. The forms I love emerged from specific cultural contexts, and I approached them with reverence. So yes, haibun was there with me—not as a blueprint, but as a kind of quiet companion. Something I bowed to before beginning, and again after finishing.
CL: There is so much reverence in this collection: for form, for repair—and also for failure. In the essay “Soap: Art of Failure” you write about a novel you worked on for many years that was painfully deemed “a failure” by close friends and a famous editor. Is your sense that the “failure” of this novel allowed you to write this collection? How do you know when writing has failed?
KL: That’s a great question—and yes, in many ways, the “failure” of the novel was not just a detour, but the doorway into Wedding of the Foxes. The novel demanded coherence, plot, and resolution, but I found myself preoccupied with fracture, disorientation, and the emotional terrains of grief, extinction, and memory. I realized I had to let that project go—not because it lacked value, but because I knew I had taken it as far as I could at the time. So Wedding of the Foxes didn’t emerge in spite of that failure, but through it—really, because of it.
I don’t think writing ever truly fails—at least not in the ways that matter most. Part of what I explore in “Soap: Art of Failure” is how failure can be reframed: as resistance, as embracing the detour, the unproductive or unmeasurable. It’s an argument for wandering, getting lost, and exploring alternative temporalities—messier ones, slower ones. J. Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure was a touchstone for me in that particular essay. But in general, the essays in Wedding of the Foxes lean into those spaces—the broken, the fugitive, the incomplete—as generative terrain, where new forms of connection, meaning, and possibility might emerge.
