A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ADAM O. DAVIS AND HERA NAGUIB
Adam O. Davis is the author of Pyrrhic Symphony (University of Nebraska Press, 2026), winner of the Raz/Shumaker Book Prize, and Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. The recipient of awards from Poetry International and the Poetry Society of America, his work has received support from the Community of Writers, the New Literary Project, The Prague Summer Program, and Vermont Studio Center. The co-creator and host of the Poetry Goes to the Movies podcast, his writing has appeared in AGNI, The Believer, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and ZYZZYVA. He lives in San Diego, where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School.
Hera Naguib was born in Saudi Arabia and has lived transnationally in Canada, Pakistan, and the U.S. She is the author of the poetry collection Rupture Anthem (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026). Winner of the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award and the 2022 Quarterly West Poetry Prize, Naguib’s work has been published in The Believer, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, New England Review, Wasafiri, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She lives in Boston, MA.
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Adam O. Davis: Hera, Rupture Anthem is such an active book, not only because it deals so deftly with the question of immigration, return, and exile, but because the poems are woven with a linguistic electricity, a kind of restlessness not just in the speaker but the words themselves. I was struck, in particular, by your use of verbs (cars “belt” down roads, borders that the speaker “pulps” both “slice” and “hollow” her, the “hiss” of the Red Sea “rams” the listener’s ear), which are as surprising as they are violent, suggesting the danger that lurks in every facet of the places introduced. Was this an intentional choice on your part? And how do you, as a poet, approach language?
Hera Naguib: Adam, thank you for this question. What a gift it is to be read with insight. The use of violent verbs was intentional. I want to capture a fractured, endangered sense of belonging in the places the poems describe. I enjoy a poem that offers a sensory and musical experience. One that speaks from a primordial, innate state. When I struggle to write a poem, I remember our first shared language is the sensory one. I learned this years ago as a young reader of Sylvia Plath, whose linguistic restlessness, incisive imagery, and phonetic harshness taught me how to render the danger and alienation of moving as a woman in the world. Later, I’d use this language to describe part of my unique experience of migrancy, in spite of all its wonders of mobility, transculturality, and change that the migrant life can bring. As a perpetual migrant, one’s relationship to language is constantly fluid and I carry a sense of standing outside the border of every language I’ve entered. I’ve been a lifelong non-native speaker of English, which I also read and write in. Yet, there are moments the language feels stilted, collides, and morphs with my non-proficient native Urdu, which ironically feels organic to my bones, in spite of the fact that my skill to read and write in the language is quite limited. Its sister, Arabic, I can’t read or write, even though it’s a language I’ve been born into, and whose study I’ve followed in school for eleven years. My life was once surrounded by its speakers and signage everywhere. As a poet, I oscillate in this multilingual clime and in what springs forth: ruptures in the way we naturally embody language, a writing back, but also a hyper-awareness of the words, syntax, and rhythms of languages I am trying to master. It is a performance of language, which, I think, is the root of all poetry.
Speaking further of language, Pyrrhic Symphony is such an apt title. I’m drawn to how it resonates in poem after poem, in varied and wondrous ways, through precise and moving imagery, especially as you meditate on the toll (human, natural, environmental) of capitalist excess and extraction. For example, in the title poem, set during the COVID-19 pandemic, a quiet anxiety pervades the atmosphere as there is “nothing to do,” “the electronic doors of electronic stores go untroubled,” “the supermarkets are full of people / hoarding frozen pizza,” and “the sky is a color the sky hasn’t been in a century.” As a poet, what were your concerns when writing and shaping this collection?
AD: I love your description—“our first, shared language is the sensory one.” I feel this deeply as a poet, how our first languages were those of the body: the drum of our mothers’ hearts in utero before being introduced to a larger world of noise. And your comments on multilingualism resonate with me as I speak French and was raised in a house full of Spanish and English—what a gift when your ear can work across borders!
No surprise then that sound was one of the primary guiding forces in writing this collection. I wanted to luxuriate in language—to play with tone and voice and volume by putting them at odds with meaning, much like how our concerns with the social, environmental, and political forces present in our lives are complicated by the language used to explain those concerns away. In this sense, I was writing against our contemporized version of history with its endless deflective talking points and whataboutisms, but there were other histories I was looking to confront: my history as a poet—how to do something new, something different?—and my personal history–the debts and doings that are my own along with those assigned to me as an American. Simply put, I was looking to take ownership. Not that what I’d done before was impersonal (from a psychoanalytic angle my poetry may be the truest representation of myself), but I wanted to explore the “I” that I’d largely resisted in my first book, to place myself, however protected by poetic license, in the fray. This was tricky at first as I’m not one to demand attention, but once I brought in different speakers, everything opened up, and I was able to envision the book as a kind of prism whose differing tones and forms were the result of one crystalline whole.
This makes me wonder about your process with your book, particularly with the question of words as tools that can mask or unmask the truth, an idea that you employed to harrowing effect in your poem “News of Another Femicide.” Do you feel that your poems have helped to make more sense of the history you write of or have they further complicated it in your mind?
HN: Both. In my process, I gained the necessary knowledge about the histories that are tied to the experiences and the places I write about. However, I’m aware that I’ve only grazed the surface of these personal and collective histories. Their emotional weight, their grayness, their layers, ironies, and their contradictions. The more I know of these histories, the less, I realize, I can claim to know. Part of this owes to the lacuna that forms as a result of migration, whether it is voluntary or forced, personal or ancestral. It’s a gap rife with my curiosity. I want to read and write against the multiple erasures I bring up in my poetry. I, too, want to take ownership, as you say. At the same time, I also want to dwell in language, even if it blurs meaning or truth, as you wonderfully put it. In my own writing process, this can translate to an anxiety towards explanation, to remain loyal to a “historical” or “truthful” narrative. But I’m wary of that instinct. “Memory is a poet, not a historian,” as the French poet Paul Géraldy said. I want to arrive in a poem with the same capacity at which I’ve arrived at history (and memory), that is, with ambiguity. I also want the poem to probe doubt, to question, to be able to name what doesn’t make sense rather than to make sense of it.
But all this is not to say that I don’t appreciate clarity and rootedness. My favorite moments in your poems are when we’re delivered precise perceptions of American excess and violence. Indeed, yours is a crystalline work of concrete, concise imagery, sharp edges for lines, uniformly patterned page after page. You’ve mentioned the influence of sound patterns as a driving force, but how do you envision the relationship between form and content in your poems?
AD: For me, form and content are inexorably intertwined, and I wanted these poems to sing both aurally and visually. Part of the beauty of poetry is that you aren’t confined to the paragraph’s cage, so I sought to take full advantage of the page by building in breaks for the eye and the breath. To push the title’s symphonic suggestion further, I was inspired by musical notation when formatting the poems in the book, arranging the words and lines with all the stresses and pauses that a composer might. This offered for a harmonious yet fractured effect, allowing the poems to physically mirror the fractured world they depict.
Also, since there are multiple speakers in the book, I wanted their respective poems to have a visual signature. For example, the main speaker’s poems tend to unravel at the edges or disintegrate like smoke (something that the book’s cover art by Wayne Zebzda captures so well) while the Nurse’s poems, in line with her presence as a figure who diagnoses society’s ills while redeeming the speaker’s humanity, are more contained, at times reticent or tongue-bitten as they skate the edges of unspeakable truths. Speaking of unspeakable truths, I’m reminded of a question that the poet Farid Matuk is fond of asking guests who visit his classes: What did you risk in writing this book?
HN: I love this question. The risk I took was a personal one. I risked writing the poems about expulsion, my father, and migrant labor, all set within the lost country of youth, Saudi Arabia. It was a risk of speaking against silence, one that I shared with family. When I learned about the kafala system, when I had a name for it, and dove into reports and witness accounts from human rights organizations on its abusive practices towards migrants, especially migrant labor from the global south, I came to realize the silence was wider than I imagined. It was political, racial, institutional. I wanted to write from this broader consciousness. It felt risky to write about the experience of migrant labor, but I couldn’t ignore it either. In the poem “In this Country, the Future Will Never Sleep,” I chose a cyclical, layered form that could speak to the systemic and endless nature of the violence. Visually, I wanted it to stand apart from the rest of the book.
I’m still thinking about form, content, and its visual aspects, especially in relation to the often haunting and unpeopled photographs of vast spaces interspersed throughout your book. The first illustration, “The Last Days of Tourism,” echoed for me the line from “Pyrrhic Symphony”: “their white dream of hospitality gone silent as the sun.” I’m curious about the relationship between the photograph and the poem in this book. How does the practice of photography inform your approach as a poet or vice versa?
AD: Being a deeply visual thinker, poetry and photography are inextricably linked for me—the page being another kind of viewfinder, a frame that changes depending on the composition crafted to fit within it. Despite this, I’d always kept the two practices separate until a friend suggested I use my photographs as section breaks in what would become my first book. Now, with this book, you could say that the photographic section breaks have become something of a calling card, and I appreciate you picking up on how they echo the poems that follow and precede them.
In the case of the photograph you mention, it captures the exact moment that inspired the title poem. I took it during the early days of the pandemic, when the beaches in San Diego were shut with cruise ships anchored a mile offshore. Using a telephoto lens, I could see people walking the ship in question and I realized that it was the cruise ship employees who were quarantined there (the customers had all been evacuated) and their apocalyptic loneliness struck me—so close to land and yet so far, locked down like the rest of us but on a floating shopping mall, not unlike the zombies at the end of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, wandering past closed storefronts, remembering a commercial past that no longer existed. The other photographs in the book embrace this theme, often featuring reflections of a defunct past in the mirrored windows of contemporary buildings or the evidence of human presence in otherwise alien environments, always asking whether we’re seeing things as they are or as they’re presented and what our chosen perspective says about us and the world we live in.
Thinking on that last sentence, I’m reminded of your poem, “Nostalgia is a Pathogen”—such a good title!—that begins: “I halt to prior ghosts / that well up again as sirens / through the tracheal alleys.” The idea of ghosts being not only spirits—possibly seductive, possibly vengeful—but alarms is powerful and speaks not only to what you mentioned you risked—raising awareness of migrant labor abuses—but also your family’s intergenerational odyssey. Can you offer some insights into how you resisted nostalgia when exploring the ghosts of you and your family’s past? Specifically, how you used first, second, and third-person point of view to give voice to multiple speakers, and also how you decided to structure the book?
HN: “Nostalgia is a Pathogen” is a very nostalgic poem! Originally published under the title “Quarantine,” I wrote the poem during our age’s pandemic, an event—you speak of evocatively—that made us still, mortal, and the world, as we knew it, at once historical and lost. Away and afraid for loved ones, I resisted and I drew from paralyzing fright and grief in the same way I wanted to memorialize past pains and places without perching myself at the altar of victimhood. That’s why I came up with a title that would create tension against the poem and reject any notion of nostalgia’s desirability.
However, I think nostalgia, much like shadow work, can also be fertile insofar as it translates to an active negotiation between the past and the present. In other words, what does it mean to mourn the loss of a beloved place or homes left behind? What does it mean to hold and honor the past from the present in a manner that reflects detachment and growth from its cloying and clichéd grip? As in “Nostalgia,” I chose to ground the writing in mundane details and the sensory experience as a way to avoid a glossy rumination of loss as well as to situate the varied worlds I am uniquely positioned to render. To add to my point of the use of poetic tension to challenge nostalgia, you may notice that the poem moves from a past illustrated with elevated diction to an unsentimental, clinical awareness (and acceptance) of a present that is rife with anxiety and unfulfilment.
Elsewhere, the book’s impulse of movement and flux, its several departures and arrivals—that lend the book its narrative arc—also serve to actively rupture time and voice and thereby resist nostalgia. Through movement, I wanted to usher in a form of dynamism that resists staying swamped in the past, just as I introduced speakers and point of views to alleviate the poems from an excess of self-contemplation of the “I.” Movement also allows the speaker to critically de-frame from unquestioned assumptions of the past—its places, people, and ghosts—and to actively reckon with its beauty and terror alike.
On the note of multiple speakers, beauty, and terror, I’m fascinated with your “Self-Portrait” poems, in particular “Self-Portrait as the Interstate Highway System” and its penultimate image of an unending chase: “I hunted myself any way I could.” What was your process in writing these poems, including the nurse poems? How does the use of persona in poetry aid in the expression of your obsessions and concerns? Further, to which poet and artists would you attribute influence?
AD: Hera, I think you hit the nail on the head as I, too, sought to “alleviate the poems from an excess of self-contemplation of the ‘I.’” As antithetical as it might sound, seeking to do just that brought me to those “Self-Portraits.” I found that this small shift of perspective had a dramatic impact on the poems, as such an approach automatically places the speaker at an analytical distance. It also freed me to consider how the self is implicated in things that are very non-self-like, like the Interstate Highway System you mentioned. The poem’s last line—”I hunted myself any way I could”—strikes to the heart of the book for me: throughout, I was searching for meaning in a world that seemed to have lost it. This shaken faith wasn’t only related to the pandemic, but also to the implosion of democratic values, the degradation of environmental norms, and end of my marriage, which demanded that I reconsider beliefs I’d long held about love, family, nature, health, and self-governing bodies. Needless to say, I was pretty broken up about it all, but these poems showed me a way through.
Draft after draft, I found that the poems were singing, but I became increasingly aware of the need for dissonance as the “I” was coming from only one speaker. It wasn’t until fairly late in the game—actually, February of 2025, shortly before I sent the book out to the Raz/Shumaker Prize—that I finally acquiesced to what I’d long suspected: the book needed multiple speakers. This meant I needed to write new poems in their voices but also—and this was the most difficult part—I had to give existing poems away to those speakers too. Yet what at first felt like a betrayal proved a revelation—and all largely thanks to the Nurse, who, though present from this book’s earliest days, had yet to speak. Once she did, the book felt like a matchbox, full of necessary friction and imminent conflagration. It sounds simple—and, I suppose, it is—but at the time I was so deep into the poems that I didn’t realize I’d fallen into dogma and wasn’t seeing the big picture. After adopting different personas, I could see myself and my work, as Stevens writes, “more truly and more strange.”
Regarding the poets I turned to while writing these poems, as an act of restoring faith in my own life, I wanted this book to be full of the poetry that brought me to poetry, so there are many moments where I incorporate or play on a line from a poet I love. Off the top of my head: Plath, Mullen, Berryman, Brooks, Dickinson, Whitman, Mackey, and Donne to name but a few…and, of course, William Carlos Williams, whose epigraph introduces the asphodels I adopted as a relational talisman. But, more than anything and perhaps not unsurprisingly given my concerns, Eliot, with his freewheeling rhythms, pinpoint language, and outrageous gift for metaphor when it comes to describing the unnatural pallor of modern life, served as an essential guide. In all, through all these poets and in all these poems, I was seeking to reconnect to what first inspired me to write and what has given my life such meaning: a love of language, a love of music, a love of play.
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