Alexus Erin : part one

Alexus Erin is an American poet and performer, living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity (audacityzine.com), American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, Silk + Smoke and a host of others. She was the 2018 Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference and a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). Her screenplay, American Lotus Project, won an award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival. Her chapbooks Two Birds, All Moon (2019) and St. John’s Wort (forthcoming- 2019) were published by Gap Riot Press and Animal Heart Press, respectively. Erin’s full-length collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is forthcoming (2020) from Cervena Barva Press.

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I think structural aspects of lyrical poems have access to the expression of the embodied experience in really resonant ways. So many contemporary poets are also using enjambment, page-space and alinearity in order to interrogate memory and use self-reflection to confront the reader. I saw a wacky meme on the internet the other day that said, “I’m handing out flyers that say ‘confront yourself.’” I think poets that choose to forgo traditional formatting can get readers to do just that: put change to work, use discomfort as an invitation. I think fracturing says a lot. Negative space is your friend. Time is relative and then constructed, etc.