Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee whose writing explores diasporic living. Their debut collection of poems, Dear Memphis, was published in January 2024 and is now available from River River Books. Rachel’s poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals.
Rachel and I met at the virtual Tin House Summer Workshop in 2020 where we studied with Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Since our workshop, we’ve forged an intimate friendship which began with fortnightly poem exchanges to keep each other writing, and evolved into exchanging recipes, going on DIY residencies, jumping with glee at having spotted orca whales far in the glittering Pacific. I read Rachel’s book like a scriptural text I thought I knew the ins and outs of. I had seen her individual poems grow and change shapes over single-word documents, but to hold her entire project of care — a tapestry woven with letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue — became an invitation into understanding a place and its people through all their politics and complexities.
To learn more about her expansive and insightful collection, I spoke with Rachel in February 2024 over her book tour when she stopped by San Francisco.
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Preeti Vangani: Hi Rachel. Congratulations, once again! Now I know this book, it took a long time to come together. So much of the haunting of this book lies in thinking about migration and belonging. And therefore, the idea of home. And I love your poem titled, “But Where Are You From?” I wondered how writing these poems and poetry itself expanded or changed your understanding of belonging.
Rachel Edelman: In a previous version of the book, in its earlier draft, the collection was called “Another Exodus.” And that had more of a motion of escape and the velocity of expulsion. But the more that I worked on this book, the deeper I got into my thinking, the more I realised that the sort of symmetrical, opposite, or not opposite but what I want to call symbiotic force to that departure is belonging — it couldn’t just be about a sense of unbelonging within a place. Because there was no reciprocal belonging within the family. There are pieces of belonging within the family, but it is not a complete belonging.
So in order for that expulsion and migration to have real depth to it there needed to be an exploration of true belonging. What does belonging feel like in an embodied way? The “Dear Memphis” poems, a series of epistolary poems, speak from that embodied acceptance and a sense of having found some grounding, some place to land, in a diasporic sense. And a belief in that. I think that the book’s energy needed to be grounded in a willingness to risk creating home.
PV: I love that, and I really love the two parts of what you’re saying. Embodiment and language. Embodied experience of childhood, and embodiment between the speaker and Minnie who is the housekeeper. Also, the only named character in the book. I keep returning to these lines from one of the “Dear Memphis” poems: “I’d sometimes sit / for her to braid my hair, / her touch so light / I couldn’t tell she’d finished.” Your poems are steeped in tenderness, they register the lack of tenderness. All of this while also investigating systemic injustices. How a city’s water supply, for example, in the poem “A liminary Art,” affects its growth and future. The poems that respond to the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series, “Where Else but Here,” consider an even more historical perspective in thinking of migration. What remains ever present is the speaker’s body and then the speaker’s body in relation to city, to plant, to bird to husband, to brothers, and mother. And most strikingly, the relation of the speaker to her own pain through which the gendered idea of who endures what begins to form. How are we taught to speak or not speak about pain? The body then becomes a lens, not only for migration of people but also how pain moves and where does pain rest? How or how is pain not being allowed to travel through language?
RE: I love that idea. Where does pain rest? How is pain allowed to travel through language? Because there are certain kinds of pain that we are allowed and expected to express in a social way and then there are the kinds of pain that are unacceptable to express so fully and that can fracture social relationships. And those are the kinds of pain that I’m interested in. Exploring and figuring out how it is that we can speak of that pain in a way that invites a conversation. Or at least, a listening. I don’t think that it’s necessarily just about empathy. It’s about a willingness to listen to another’s experience. You don’t have to feel it along with me or the speaker, you don’t have to feel, for instance, Minnie’s experience of pain along with her. You just have to accept that it is her experience. So the speaker’s embodied presence offers maybe a vector, a way for that. To come and go, to pass through space.
PV: Yes! It creates a webwork and it originates from the speaker’s body, and it creates this other home of its own. In a technical sense, in thinking about how to put a collection together, but also because the looking is so deep, it doesn’t enforce a narrative. It doesn’t say: I’m going to tell you what to feel, it’s more an invitation to look at all of the angles through which the subjects move.
RE: Yes, and that is a crucial part of my ethos of documentary poetics. Of being with. Not witness, I don’t like that term. Of taking down what it is that the speaker is experiencing or encountering. Whether it be an artifact of interpersonal encounter or encountering an artifact and taking that experience into the speaker’s body as it is not necessarily trying to transform it but trying to contextualize it. Trying to place it in relation to other moments in time or political realities. Placing those things one on top of another, one next to another in this arrangement.
PV: There is also a symmetric parallelism that happens between art and word in your work, especially in the poem in conversation with Jacob Lawrence’s paintings. There are crowds in the paintings that the speaker is observing closely— she’s tracing them in her notebook, as she’s surrounded by crowds in the museum. So, thinking especially about the field of documentary poetry, where do your compositional impulses come from? How do your drawings and language converge?
RE: I learnt to draw just a little bit through my undergraduate education in geology when I had to draw geologic formations and map geologic features. So my visual impulse, when it comes to my hand on the page, is very documentary. I am asking, for example, how do I render this outcrop on this piece of paper? And while I am not a natural artist or a visual drawer, encountering that Jacob Lawrence Migration Series, I just wanted to get really intimate with it. I was drawn to it. I couldn’t stop looking at it, thinking about it, and a way to understand the panels. And the first thing, like a lot of the first poems I wrote as part of that project, that are not in the book, were essentially encounters with the paintings. I was gathering data by drawing them and I wasn’t using color, just pencil, and drawing these shapes as I looked at them on my computer screen. When the series came to Seattle and New York, I saw it, but most of that drawing was looking at the Migration Series exhibition website and drawing what I saw. Then thinking, how do these shapes relate to each other in this frame and the framing? Painting versus the framing of the poem as a space became really important. The ways in which art offers us a lens to encounter, and the museum space as yet another frame in which the encounter takes place.
The museum itself ends up taking up a lot of space in the poem. The way that Lawrence portrayed the scenes is very geometric and linear in perspective, but we are much mushier and messier, and we get that a lot in the dialogue and the form. One section in the poem is all dialogue composed entirely from language overheard in the gallery. The arrangement of documentary details into the frame of the poem is very much about creating a social poetics. Even a political poetics. I am taking these pieces and constellating them or collaging them. I used to think of them as very fragmented,but now, spending so much time reading the poems out loud, I find the reading experience is so lyric. And I’m understanding that the fragmentary feeling was only compositional. And so that might differentiate my work from some documentary poetics, in that it doesn’t preserve the fragmentation.
PV: I agree, it is a stunning lyric. The poem pays attention to the deftness of image and sound, but also where the sounds and images are coming from. There’s found language, there’s dialogue, there are introspections and descriptions. So it never feels like a pressing-on towards creating a song, but creating the environment. It feels immersive, alive and coherent.
Let’s talk a bit about the diasporic themes. Having moved to America myself only eight years ago, I think about being at home in Mumbai/San Francisco; America/India. How both homes, like so much more of the world, are simultaneously fascism or some degree of fascism. There are several poems in the book that think about parallel violences in the erstwhile home and current home.
A very deep friction occurs and persists. For example in these lines from “Return”, the book’s first poem, “Who did I choose / when I wished myself elsewhere?” How did you reconcile with that idea of parallel violences? And how perhaps to write when both houses— the left and the built— are in several senses, burning?
RE: I left Memphis almost nineteen years ago. I’ve now spent more than half of my life elsewhere, although I did return. The things that I knew about Memphis certainly, many of them have changed. But I had grown up in a very tight-knit Jewish community in which I felt stifled. I felt unable to access, for instance, ways to queer ideas of family or relationship. I felt unable to access non-normative ways of being just in my personal life. In order for me to be able to grapple with these larger political forces, which, of course, touch our personal life and often control our personal movement, our health— in order for me to turn my attention to those, I needed to be outside of that space. Outside of that family system. Outside of a kind of being seen that was so full of assumption. About what kind of ambitions I should have. About what kind of adult I should be. It’s not even my family that has those assumptions. It was the community, and it was so painful to be perceived like that. I couldn’t breathe in that.
My leaving was not necessarily entirely about the institutional or civic failures. Those are part of it: I love not having to drive a car, and in Memphis that’s not possible. Or is extremely hard. And as a kid, it was just always one of my dreams to be able to live somewhere where I didn’t have to drive every day. And so that was something that I was able to move toward— like an embodiment that felt safer. Where I can be somewhere where my community is way more queer. I don’t just mean sexuality wise but also the relationships that I have with people around me. I don’t love the term “chosen family.” I like what Sarah Schulman says about valuing the word “friend.” I’m able to have these deep mutually reciprocal relationships that are not family and are not restricted to a certain community. They are a little bit more messy and more open. And when I was in Memphis—I’m sure that these kinds of communities do exist there now—I just didn’t know where they were or how to find them, and it would be so taxing. To go back there and try to break from the community that I was raised in and form new community would be hard. Because the community that raised me is so powerful quite honestly. If I wanted to get a job in Memphis, I’d probably need to go through them. People would know who I am and people again make assumptions that are really heavy and very quickly make you forget the sense of self. Or they stifle desire. They keep desire from being known. And so leaving there, it’s not that I immediately became in touch with my desires, I actually was quite distant from them for a long time, but once I started to find weirder and less normative communities, for example, the co-op house I lived in in college, I was able to forge really deep friendships, mutually reciprocal bonds and just learn to take care of each other. Those kinds of relationships sustain me.
PV: And taking care, I know this as your friend too, care-taking is so central to your relationship to writing as well. I remember you saying in an interview about your first poetry teacher who taught you never to suffer to make art, but to focus on living a good life. That ethics of care also transcends to every single person you write about. Whatever the vantage point, whatever the politics. I am thinking especially about racial politics and labor politics with respect to Minnie’s centrality in the book. Was there a learning curve or a process that sort of got you there? These are very difficult things to write about, delicate and necessary. What helped you craft the idea that this is the raw material of my childhood and I want to honor it? What were you perhaps realizing or cognizant of while writing into the poetics of care and labor given the racial landscape? Who are perhaps some writers who showed you the way?
RE: Oh, wow. Okay. Well I could tell you who didn’t show me! To begin with, Minnie is a real person who I am still in a relationship with, who I love dearly and who has read every poem. The relationship lives beyond the book and the page. It’s current and active and evolving. That is part of the ethics of writing about a person or a group of people or class of people, caste of people who have systematically been oppressed in a different and more significant way. Deep and abiding kinship is really, really important. One of the first poems I ever wrote with Minnie in it, that obviously is not in the book, had a line about how her house flooded in a storm. I was writing about floods then. I had just experienced a major flood in Boulder where I was living at the time. The first line of this poem was Minnie knew how to get her FEMA check and one of my grad school professors who read that poem said, “Yes, she’s got power. She knows how to get things done.” I was like, yeah, of course, she does. And writing with heart has to center her power. Who she is in all of her many complexities and her own life independent of her work that she is a person. Who does this labor? Like, I am a person who does labor. My brothers are people who labor. All of us are people who engage in labor, but because her labor was domestic, and was in my home, it was important to position that kind of spatial politics. The position of the speaker at home versus Minnie at work.
Somebody whose writing always helped me to write through this is Kiese Laymon. Especially his essay “Quick Feet” where he writes about his grandmother’s domestic labor. She is taking laundry in for a family she worked for. And the image of him stomping on the other kids’ laundry like a football exercise taught me how to honor and accept other people’s perspectives. And Minnie’s experiences may be completely different from what I perceive. Her life exists beyond my view as well as inside of it.
PV: The way the poems with Minnie unfold, how they are narratively structured through the book, demonstrate how nuanced and generous the speaker is in capturing her fullness. At the end, I left the book feeling, here’s a speaker who has thoroughly done her emotional homework.
RE: Yeah and I think again, the spatial politics are important to that placing, to showing views from different environments. To show how we act differently when we are in different spaces.
PV: Along with pacing that deepens nuance, I am so blown away by the variation in the book. You are working in ekphrasis, erasure, aubade, elegy. How would you describe your relationship to form? How has it evolved or expanded? When does a certain container feel right?
RE: I love this question. I came into poetry through formalism. Studying with Daniel Hall at Amherst, I was writing in iambic pentameter or at the very least always counting my stresses in a line and thinking about sound. He really helped me learn so many techniques of lineation and the attention that the line can hold. The oldest poems in this book are nine years old and I wrote them in my first year of grad school. At that time, I had more of an interest in at least starting from a form and then pressing out from it; I love a container. I love a prompt. But, I don’t know how much of that form is preserved, but I do enjoy working across different kinds of form. And there are certainly books that have helped me. Thinking about the ways that more organic form will work, like Aracelis Girmay’s, the black maria, and Adrianne Rich’s books. Especially, The Dream of a Common Language, and An Atlas of the Difficult World. They helped me think about the drop line and how it can speed up the eye when you don’t have to go back to the left margin. It takes a while for me to find the right form for any poem. A lot of thought and revision. I love when I see a poem in a particular form and I want to imitate it, like for my poem, “Stone Way North.” I borrowed the shape of these stanzas from a Derrick Austin poem from his book, Trouble the Water. A four stress line, a one stress line and then a two or three stressed line. I wanted to see if I could make something interesting with them because I liked the momentum of that stanza.
PV: Your grasp of syntax, sound and image—- how the three work together becomes really impactful, especially in shorter poems. Where every word comes asking for its due. I also love “Stone Way North” because it is such a sneaky love poem. It begins in urban construction imagery “copse of scaffolds / for stories of steel” and makes its way into being a love poem, “Won’t you, / over the simmer, soothe my shiver—”. It feels like you surprised yourself with that turn.
RE: I know. I didn’t know it was going to go there either. I have such a hard time writing love poems. I think we just sometimes have to scaffold. And the subconscious does it for us. And in doing so, so many love poems, like this one and some newer work, become poems essentially about making home. Birds making home, or the speaker making home with her beloveds. Physically building spaces for us to just be and I think that is love to me.
PV: Beautiful, and it ties in so strongly with your idea of care and taking the word “friend” seriously.
RE: I’ve never traditionally had a big group of friends. I really thrive in close one to one friendships. When I was in New York, one of my friends who I know from a wilderness trip in 2011 came up from Baltimore to see me read. And one of my brothers was like, “Wait, you are still in touch with people from then?” And I told him, from each experience, I take one close friend. From each thing in my life I gather one close friend, and they’re with me forever.
PV: And we have Tin House to thank for our friendship! One last question: how to harness anger in poetry. And related to that, because I am familiar with your groundwork, how does your organizing and activism relate to your poems?
RE: My organizing work is what I have to do with my anger, with my outrage. As one of my wonderful comrades, Wendy Elisheva Somerson always says: “We cannot hold it alone.”
We have to hold our rage and our grief in community. And organizing is what we do. Pressuring and shutting things down, that’s what we can do with our anger and rage. Taking that pain and putting it somewhere with the collective body, with the group, is really fulfilling and exhausting and sometimes, terribly frightening because it’s dangerous. And so there has to be a lot of energy put into the care around that. I know some of my comrades at JVP in Seattle are working on building out systems for aftercare more thoroughly for things like post-action care and I really value that. And that is what I have to do with my body. When there is a moment where my body can be useful being on the line, that’s what I need to do with my body.
There’s a lot of processing outside of that and that is often the place for poetry, either reading it or writing it. Reading to feel connected through language. What I can’t necessarily feel when I’m in one of those action moments is connected to language. I am connected through physical language, yes, through physical communication, but not necessarily words. Through song, even, but not through intellect as such. And so then the intellectual, the cerebral processing sometimes can take the shape of poems and weighs in when I’m able to access that quiet space. That’s when a poem can reverberate with the action.
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Preeti Vangani is an Indian writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions, 2019) and her poems have appeared in Poem-a-Day, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and The Margins among other places.