Back to Issue Fifty-Nine

SIGNS OF LIFE

by SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

I wish I could learn how to make a mythic garden.
In it, I’d want a song to play—something on the subject
of the promise of pleasure, of a body’s insistence on bliss
despite the many traces left on that same body
by the many incursions that have been made upon it.
I think bliss is what the word loam should mean.
Perhaps my garden is the shape my husband makes
in our bed, which means that my garden is in our bed
whenever he is, and that in our bed must also be dirt
and worms, and the roots of some seedling,
a dead body or two. Me, I know where the bodies
are buried. When his sleep shuffles off of him,
I tell him the dead are always sleeping with us.
He holds my hand and asks, Are you alright?

He used to hold my hand and ask Are you alright?
instinctively, as if it were the most natural thing
to do. I used to let him. It took me so long to learn
I deserved that question, and I was proud
when I got there. But over a period of increasingly
inhospitable time, I slipped into an old suit
of feigned indestructability, and he slipped into a suit
I don’t have the sightline to accurately name.
I stopped sharing the things that haunted me,
and he stopped asking how I slept. When I noticed,
it hurt, although I knew I would have said fine
especially when it wasn’t true. The thing is, we are both

inclined toward behaving like our own planets,

wandering odd ellipses accompanied by distant moons.

Wandering odd ellipses accompanied by distant moons,
it is easy to think oneself alone, even when solar flares
and dying stars alight your periphery. It’s occurred to me
that my more recent anxiety about whether a topic
is worthy of a poem might just be my old anxiety
about whether I am noteworthy—as in, worthy of writing
down—in more ordinary times. As a child, I fell in love
with watching football, and I’d think, I’ll never be able
to do anything as worthwhile as those athletes do.
Well, maybe I’m nothing to write home about,
but then, who writes home about anything that matters
to them anyway? When I used to picture the home
I would make, I had in mind a fortress, and thought
I might be its irrepressible master of arms.

I might be its irrepressible master of arms—
but, as I never tire of reminding my students, poiesis
comes from the Greek for to make, and a word
that can be made with it is autopoesis, or self-making.
In other words: things change. When the athletes
hurtle down the gridiron, dodging all kinds of trouble,
I hoot, despite the danger I know lies behind
every flick of the wrist or juke of the knee or crack
of a helmet. I love them, and I know I only can love them
because of the danger they risk. My father often said
it wouldn’t matter if he killed me in the night,
since, come morning, no one would care. Now, stacking
the dishes we soiled, I ask myself, What have you made
of the chances you worked so hard to shape?

Of the chances I worked so hard to shape
I have made butter chicken. I have made puff pastry
from scratch. I’ve made pies of meat and others of fruit.
I’ve basted swordfish, coddled towering cheesecakes,
squeezed juices out of San Marzanos with my hands.
I’ve made saag paneer. I’ve made brownies. Lavender
chocolate-chunk cookies. Roasted beets with goat cheese.
This stanza is for you, my dear friend who pointed out
that there’s no food in my first book. It’s true, I admit:
when I wrote it, I’d been hungry for a long time.
I didn’t know how to whet an appetite because
I didn’t know appetites could need whetting. I’d spent
most of my life avoiding fullness, resenting the soft
parts of me, running my tongue along my sharpest tooth.

Parts of me, running my tongue along my sharpest tooth,
still crackle and shake. When I try to write about regaining
paradise, I come up flat, my imagination gelded.
At a job interview once, a white interviewer asked me,
What about courses that aren’t about trauma? I made
something up about a course about Asian American
poetics and food. There was some truth to what I said:
I have asked myself often whether I think often enough
about joy, whether I have a vocabulary for it the way I have
one—or twelve—for suffering. But here’s what I wish
I’d said: Parts of me still crackle and shake. Joy has
its lutes, its dances, flower garlands, sarangis, milk baths.
I’m coming to you live from the bowels of hell.
It’s rancid here. Take a seat. Welcome to class.

It’s rancid here. Take a seat. Welcome to class.
When I began trying to imagine how I might create
my version of the Golden Record, I invented a speaker,
a version of myself who shared with me a long-held
mantra: Tell them what it’s like. How I’ve often looked
in an otherwise direction, hoping to find someone
who would believe the kinds of things that replay
inside my eyelids during the time of night that is technically
called morning. At the outset, I didn’t think much
about my responsibility to my alien friends. Selfishly,
I wanted them to hear the stuff of which my nightmares
are made and to sit up with me when I feared no one
else would. When I thought of how they would feel, it was
to wonder what they’d think of me if we met sometime.

I do still wonder, sometimes, what they’d think of me, as
I’ve grown into an odd person: scalpel-minded, often sad,
unable to let a single painful thing lie, as quick to bristle
in peevishness as I am to tear from sentiment, a ruminator
who’s allergic to everything except cockroach shit and spit,
someone who used to think fury was her single saving grace,
someone who just mistyped grace as grave and took a truly
strange amount of time to realize what was wrong with how
it looked. I’ve never understood people who say things
aren’t worth getting “worked up” about. If I’ve ever told
you that I “agree to disagree,” I lied to you. I can be exacting,
and I’m idealistic to a degree that tends to wiggle along
the oddly thin edge between credulous and dogmatic.
I wonder, too, if they’d think I’d shared enough.

I wonder if they’d think I’ve shared enough especially
because I worry I’ve become cynical about confession.
Look, you and I both know there’s more I could share
even about myself, let alone everything else to be feared
or reviled or loved on the planet. I could tell you
about when I put pennies in my mouth, or how old
I was when I acquired a taste for dirt. I could tell you
I occasionally crave the feeling of slamming my head
into the nearest wall, or how often I begged, and for what.
I confess to understanding the impulse. When astronomers
tell us, as they do from time to time, what they’ve learned
about the moon, I’m as agape as the next fuck.
So, fellow stargazer, we’re in this together, our breasts
pressed against our draftiest windows on winter nights.

Pressed against our draftiest windows on winter nights,
we wonder if the moon has more silt than we thought.
Say it has a mountain range, say it’s full of waterslides,
say baby lions roam its crests in little feline space boots.
Despite the fact that we never bothered to name it,
we think we have the right to learn every secret
it holds in its core. We turned to the moons
of Mars and named them Deimos and Phobos:
brothers. Io, of Jupiter: a name like a marble in the cheek.
Another of Jupiter’s moons was too dim to photograph—
still, we named it Eukelade, after a mythic muse.
Ours? We named it “moon,” like Holly Golightly
naming her cat “Cat.” What would you say if you were
asked, right now, to give our moon a name?

Asked, right now, to give our moon a name,
I wouldn’t have the first idea. Despite my earlier
frustration with how much we feel we deserve to know,
there is yet such a thing as knowing much too little.
Do the shadows that live on it get hypoxia in its thin air?
Did its parents love it? Has it ever heard a description
of itself in a poem that it liked? My sister called me Did,
which was short for Didi, or older sister. The nickname
was her invention, and she pronounced it deed,
like the word that comes from the Old English dǣd,
which I can’t read without seeing dead. How does it
feel about its perigee, when it gets so close to Earth?
Are any of the other moons its sister? Does it mourn
the stars that die? Even the ones that go down spitting?

The stars that die, even the ones that go down spitting,
all leave ghosts behind. Each looks different depending
on the life the star lived. Truth be told, I’ve always been
obsessed with what’s out there. And I’ve also fought
for a we that might have me and within which I can both
come as I am and learn to be better than how I came.
These two impulses are the brother moons that orbit me.
As I write this, the original Voyager 1 is traveling through
Ophiuchus, a constellation whose Greek name means
serpent-bearer. The bad seed of the Zodiac, eliminated
for being unlucky number thirteen. Voyager 2 is in Pavo,
which is Latin for peacock and Spanish for turkey,
meaning that either way, the star-creature still fits
the flock that trammels through its corner of sky.

The flock that trammels through its corner of sky
also includes a crane, a toucan, and a phoenix.
I love thinking of them stomping around up there
together. The Voyagers are the only spacecraft
who have ever made it outside of the heliosphere.
They are being powered down one instrument
at a time. We say we were the last living creatures
to touch them, but I think we must assume otherwise:
at the very least, they’ve met a man holding a serpent,
a motley flock of birds. And it seems strange to me
to surmise that someone doesn’t exist on the back
of the fact that they didn’t return our call. Still,
if you write to someone long enough, you come to
yearn to hear their most crepuscular thoughts.

I do yearn to hear their most crepuscular thoughts,
perhaps even more fiercely than I’d once wanted them
to hear mine. For example: the original committee sewed
American flags into the thermal blankets of the Voyagers,
and I’d love to know what they thought of the odd emblem,
whether they’re revulsed by it, as I am, or if they just raised
a curious eyebrow and shrugged. I want to know
what their childhoods were like, what sports they fell
in love with, what their musical instruments are like.
What is their paradise? Or the bowels of their hells?
I once wrote in a poem that when I look at pictures
of the Earth from space, I think that sections of our oceans
look like tanned hide while others look like sea creatures
that shimmer. I wonder if they have seen their planet

and I wonder if their planet shimmered when they saw it.
I’ve spent the last ten years studying questions.
Was it ever hard for them to know what groups
to which they belonged? What did their lives
teach them about safety? Do they fear for their future?
Have they named their moons? Have they ever been
so scared that the fear became rage? I think what
I’m driving at here is that there is a desire to know
that feels like a desire to devour, and there is a desire
to know that feels like the desire to crawl inside
whatever parts of a life to which another yearns
to unlock their door. I learned that from Clifton,
who asked such questions of the dead, and Kapil,
who asked such questions of some of the living.

To ask such questions, whether of the living
or of the dead, isn’t to compel confession.
If you do it right, and I swear to the stars
I am trying to do it right, questions give before
they receive. None of this came naturally to me.
My early years armed me with an axe of a mouth
and machetes for arms. I often felt my chest
held a forge that would never dim and was fueled
by rage. I didn’t dream of love. I dreamed
that forge would make things, and I’d live among
what I made with my ghosts, some of whom
would transform into black holes. I would
spend my days listening to their eerie chorus.
I would pray: Rage, guide what you can.

I would pray for rage to guide what it could,
and I hoped I’d never learn what I had already
begun to suspect: that, in truth, the version of rage
I then knew was a terrible navigator, unreliable,
erratic, prone to obstructions in perception
and in logic. The anger that was bred and beaten
into me, it gave endlessly of ferocity and tirelessness.
I still sometimes miss its boundlessness, that it made
me someone who didn’t need to eat or sleep
for days. I wanted for nothing as long as I could
still feel my want in that sharp tooth, in my brute
hands, in the way my jaw stiffens when my nostril
lifts into a sneer. It felt like paradise, I thought—
as if I could sense, within myself, a minor god.

And if I could sense within myself a minor god,
perhaps something else in me could be as divine
as everything the stories say the gods make or crave.
Perhaps floating in the battery acid it spat
my stomach also held a hidden stash of jaggery.
Maybe there was a spot in me as tender as the pad
of a cat’s paw, as luscious as air drenched in mountain
laurels. Initially, I titled this poem Nandanakānana:
a lush garden where gods frolicked, filled with trees
on which grew anything one could desire. I wanted
to think about paradise: what it means to want it
even while knowing the falsity of that desire, how frightening
the idea of it is, how much more willing I am to rehearse
a hundred ways out of hell than a moment in bliss.

A hundred ways out of hell, then a moment in bliss:
but wasn’t that the precise dream I’d force-fed myself?
Anguish transformed into a diamond-crusted key
in my eager, skin-picked hand. A vine-covered wall
I’d walk over to. Slowly, in order to build anticipation.
I see a keyhole. I know the only key that can open
it is the one that I now hold. I walk inside.
Three forests’ worth of desire-granting trees splay.
Beautiful people stand in the nude, welcoming me
with mangos and sacks of gold, breasts and cocks
growing dimpled in the crisp breeze. Their arms
would smell like lavender. To the cosmic bank I’d take
my suffering and the corpses of those responsible
and cash in the chips of my badly healed bones.

And I did cash in the chips of my badly healed bones,
but when I got the key in return, it had no diamonds.
It smelled a little bit like pus from a neglected wound.
There was, indeed, a vine-covered wall, but when I got
to it, there was no keyhole. Still holding the rancid key,
I noticed the door gave easily to the slightest touch,
as if the latch hadn’t worked in years. No forests, no nudes,
no lavender. A few rats that made me scream whenever
they twitched; air pressure that rose and dropped so often
my body was rocked by pain every second. The clouds
formed gruesome visions that replayed on the insides
of my eyelids, and the stray mango I found on the ground
tasted like iron, the way my mouth often did as a child.
To the flies I said You will not find me alive at sunrise.

I read that You will not find me alive at sunrise
was the last thing Nostradamus ever said.
I’ve spent much of my life believing that saying things
can make them true. In early years I practiced endurance
in three-minute intervals, and around me everything
fell into patterns, and around me the patterns became
a blanket, whispering to me that if I followed
every rule my imagination devised, I just might manage
to make it out with body and soul intact. I still have trouble
distinguishing prophecy from prognostication,
and still more trouble understanding the difference
between something that is willed into being by utterance
and something that was always going to be true.
I woke as a young woman with serpents licking my ears.

I woke as a young woman with serpents licking my ears.
It took me half of my life expectancy to learn that in fact,
prophecies can be made out of anything, including
the kinds of sentences you never thought you could say.
I started small, with the spider: Thank you for your work,
and especially for devouring those mosquitos. Then,
to the mosquito: To be fair, I admire your persistence
and your hunger. I worked up over time. Dear dread
of mine, you have served me with the staunchest faith
I have ever known. Dear rage of mine, you and I must
together learn how to turn now to face toward only those
who deserve us. What would they all say back if I could
understand their language? With each sentence
I felt myself change, and I was afraid anew.

I felt myself change, and I was afraid anew
because I know intimately how change can lead
to the reconstitution of one’s entire world.
The question of Kapil’s that first drew me
to her—who is responsible for the suffering
of your mother—has become the one
I am least able to straightforwardly answer.
Here is what I’d pictured: once free, my mother,
sister, and I would learn to love each other better.
Here is what happened: my sister died
knowing both of her parents hated her,
and my mother loathes me too for what she
calls my bad genes, so I will die the same way.
Prognostication, it turns out, is a fool’s errand.

Prognostication is a fool’s errand even
when it concerns oneself. What would I
become? I’ve read stories about transformation.
One turns into a swan. One turns into someone
fearsome, a blood-drinker, a devourer of demons.
One turns into a tree. Another, a spider;
another, a wolf; another, a nightingale;
another, a mare. Don’t get me wrong:
a girl could do much worse, and I wouldn’t
say no to many of these outcomes. But
I’ve never been the biggest fan of uncertainty.
Anticipation chills my blood. Some philosophers
think responsibility is best understood as the
play between its halves, a balancing act within us—

that within us, ability and response play on balance beams
like the ones kids use in school gyms, acting out dreams
of being dancers or vampire slayers. In graduate school,
I was haunted by the implications of this idea in situations
for which mere response is inadequate, which would mean,
or so I feared at the time, we couldn’t help but lack
the ability to respond. Then a memory returned to me.
When I was about ten or so, I’d stand next to trees
although I was already allergic to most of them
and breathe, concentrating especially on my exhale.
I could do this for hours, despite the swelling,
the blossoming hives. I’d learned in school that trees need
carbon dioxide, which is what humans exhale, and I hoped
that I’d at least be useful to them in a small way.

The idea that I’d at least be useful to them in a small way
seemed, then, pathetically inadequate as I worried
I would always fail to save my mother and my sister,
when I realized I hadn’t saved our dogs, when I was helpless
in front of the gallon of bleach poured swiftly
into the tank of goldfishes. The girl with the closing throat
and lungs like maracas in a third-grader’s anxious
and hyperactive hands, imagining she can see mosses
twitch and leaves grow a millimeter with each exhale.
It lived in me then as one of many sad and impotent ways
I endured many small intervals. But when it returned
as a memory, I sensed that it may also have been how
I allowed a sliver of an otherwise to release tentative roots
within me, as inhospitable as they may have found me.

Within me, as inhospitable as they may have found me,
nematodes and mushrooms began to nestle in those roots
and a new ecology inched into being. There was only
one thing of which I was sure for a long time: if I could
not become everything needed by anyone who could
ever need me, I deserved nothing, not even the breath
in my own lungs. I didn’t believe I could be this person
and so it followed that I was living on borrowed time
until I managed to take my life. But the new ecology
grew without my realization. A few earthworms
joined the nematodes and the mushrooms, a few voles
and skunks began to make their shelters. I heard cells
regenerate every seven years, as if we were the odd kin
of a cicada that emerges at preordained intervals.

Like cicadas that emerge at preordained intervals,
we’d undergo unseen permutations, I thought, until
our flesh became the soil in which we could flourish,
inviting us to break free and skitter up the trunks
of our own rooted limbs. It’s a myth, of course.
The truth of our regeneration is closer to a ceaseless
fugue, as each kind of cell has its own lifespan
and temporality. Intestinal cells regenerate quickest.
Nerve and heart cells last a lifetime, meaning that
injuries to them can be permanent, as is also the case
for cells that help focus light in our eyes. I imagine each
organ as a section of a chorus and an orchestra, each
rendering the melody in its own blood-filled voice.
One begins and swells, and mid-crescendo,

another begins to swell and crescendo
as if in response. There are times
when it all seems to go quiet. Typically,
that is prelude to a stranger, vertiginal
development or alteration. I love the stretto
of a fugue, which is the point right before
it all ends. The sounds overlap in a way
that makes my gums tingle. I think
this might be like those moments in a life
that precede sensations of extraordinary
clarity, or serendipity. As a child I played
piano. I had a black upright I couldn’t
smuggle into the 1994 Chevrolet Jimmy
in which I left with very little to my name.

I left with very little to my name.
I had a few pairs of sweatpants,
some oversized skirts I wore to hide.
A pair of shoes—I don’t remember
what they looked like. When I first
learned the phrase you’ve got baggage
I couldn’t stop laughing. Here I was
thinking I barely even had a bag.
(It goes without saying, but just
in case, yes, it was said to me,
and yes, I deserved it and then some.)
Playing the piano is like psychometry.
Touch produces sound, and sound
tells the story of where it came from,

and the story of where it came from tells
the story of what will happen to it next.
“I tell my piano things which once I used
to tell you,” Chopin once wrote to a friend
who may also have been a lover. I touched my
way further into the very center of sound
each time I sat at the bench, and I spoke back
with the weight of each of my fingers,
wanting to give myself to the sound as it gave
itself to me. I’m writing a few of these stanzas
on my seventh wedding anniversary. It’s four
years after I first began this poem, and our orbits
wandered close again, as the fugues inside us
found improbable harmonies as if by chance.

But improbable harmonies aren’t found by chance.
The flies ignored how assured I was of my own death
and in time the taste of rot changed in my mouth,
becoming a recollection of itself. I don’t mean
that it no longer made me retch—in fact, sometimes
it makes my stomach lurch worse than before
as I have learned its sharp sourness can be secreted
within the most dulcet notes. Recollection is rapacious,
holding collection in its gut and refusing to digest.
I recently began training in how to accompany
people into their deaths, and in one class, the teacher said,
The way you will die is a reflection of the life you have
lived. The phrase gamboled through my mind’s ridges
like a parade of ostriches along the edge of a mountain,

and, like a parade of ostriches on the edge of a mountain
on the moon, it torqued into new shapes, limbs akimbo
as if buoyed by zero gravity. It looked back at me from
the surface of a lake that fills a crater at the mountain’s base,
lapping its edges. I admit I’d chafed initially at her remark
which I mistook for having the scent of accusation or dismissal
but as I watch the feathers flutter in unearthly ways, they spell
the stories of the very things we’ve born during our lives:
the pains and diseases we’ve inherited or had visited upon us,
the betrayals we’ve felt, the scarcities we’ve borne, the institutions
that have built themselves on the very image of our destruction.
The teacher then asked us to imagine how we wish to spend
our final month, week, and day of our lives if given the chance,
from the moment we learn the end is near to our final agonal breath.

From the moment we learn the end is near to our final agonal breath,
the perfect songs, we dream, will be played on our best speakers,
or strummed and sung by our dearest friends. We talk about food
we’d want to smell even if we no longer had appetites: curries
and stews, a thick steak or two, a roasting chicken, green goddess
dressing, good bread dipped in even better oil. We figure that even
if we’re no longer hungry our beloveds might be, and they could eat
as we sit together in the soft light. At the very end, I would want someone
to stroke my hair, and unless I was too cold already, I would want the air
to be crisp, with a sharp breeze, as I have always felt claustrophobic
in still air. Let me tell you the truth. When I left my piano behind,
I thought I’d never have anyone to talk with again, and I was sure
I’d never be of use to anyone when I stopped breathing near the trees.
Please forgive me: it’s taken time to wend my way to this.

Forgive me, as it’s taken me years to wend my way to this:
I don’t think I’ve wanted a mythic garden for a long time.
Secreted in our end-of-life scenarios are mosaics
of our worst days. Earlier, one had spoken about having taken
an elbow to the head by police in riot gear, how they learned
how hard it is to wash tear gas away. Now, they say
they’d want readings of Jordan and di Prima and hooks.
Another can’t focus on what candles or blankets
she’d want until she talks us through the financial plan
she’d leave for her loved ones. I recall the recovery room
after my hysterectomy, particularly the long hours of pain
before anyone believed my medicine dispenser was broken.
Faces of those who know the language my eyes speak
take shape in front of me as I speak their names.

As I speak their names, in front of me a space takes shape.
As a younger woman, I yearned for any room that would
have me, and I was equally afraid that I would be found
out for having such a desperate desire. I hated myself
for it, to be honest, and if I were to be really honest,
I would admit that I feared that were I, like a daylily,
to open, I would, like that same flower, perish
by that same night. What I’m saying is that I am grateful
for change. I will always know fury intimately, but mine
now exerts a different pressure upon the compass that lives
in my throat. With my sister’s ghost on my shoulder
I seek siblings in every subsystem of our planet and beyond.
I live and scrap and battle for us now. What I’m saying
is that I can see a bumblebee outside my window.

I see a bumblebee outside my window
nosing against the netting like a housecat.
When I was about fifteen, dozens of bees
got ensnared in my hair, which was then almost
as long as it is now. I must have been like a Medusa
to them, and they reacted accordingly, trying
to sting their way free. I cried as I washed their torn
bodies out of my hair; since then, the sound of any
buzzing has ordinarily been enough to frenzy me.
Today, though, I swear I can hear within her a purr.
There is a drought in my county, but the air
smells like incoming rain promised by the fish-scale
clouds in the sky, a tip I once learned from a fisherman
in the seaside place from which I initially hailed.

In the seaside place from which I hail,
the weather is fitful and impulsive, as is also
the case in the mountain town I now call home.
In the grocery store, I walk by the fish aisle
to remember what it smelled like there.
I would like you to picture a room
with me. It is the room I imagined
when I told my classmates how I hope
I will spend the days before I die.
The one thing I like about insomnia
is that it is otherwise rare for me to see
the sun rise, and despite my predilection
toward the night, it is that pale haze
I see filtering through the windows.

Through the windows also filters
the smell of chimney smoke, which
means that, if possible, I should like to die
in fall or in winter. I refuse to outlive
my husband, who I’d ask to cook something—
I don’t care what as long as I can smell
frying garlic for that perfect single minute
it can stand the sole attention of flame.
I would want my siblings to come and go
as they please. Please play No. 4 in E minor
from Chopin’s Op. 28, some Thomas Tallis,
Neko Case, Frank Ocean, Mitski. Put a classic
football game on. Please dress the windowsill
with lavender and hydrangea. Let me

give an armful of lavender and hydrangea
blooms to everyone who comes by, no matter
how long they can stay. The only rule
is that no topic is off-limits. Let me hear
your beautiful voices. I’ll give what remains of mine.
There is no subject deemed too grim for this room,
no tone of voice too strident, no sob that requires
concealment. I will hope by then to have learned
a few more words to say about joy, and I would
like to practice them. At dusk on the third day
of our gathering, place beneath the fig tree
in my yard a few extra bouquets, my sister’s picture,
pictures of every pet I’ve ever loved, and several letters
written on cardstock, with different creatures and plants

drawn on that cardstock with precision, creatures and plants
like the takhi, the corpse flower, the brown thrasher.
One letter would be addressed to the moon. Others
addressed to everyone I love who has died before me.
Another telling whoever is then president of my cursed
nation-state to get bent. Another to the ocean that has been
the margin to which my life has hewn, another to every
mountain range that has taught me how to think.
One to the spiders. One to the bees. And surely,
one to someone I think might just live on a distant star.
Until then, I would like to spend what life remains
learning how to write these letters and how to play
the alphabet by giving myself to their sound. Hey, come
here. Listen. A murmuration of stars is starting to speak.

author pic here

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet and a scholar. She is the author of the debut poetry collection Arrow (2020), and her current book projects are a scholarly monograph titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene and a second poetry collection titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. She lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she works as an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

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