What are you working on?
I hope I’m allowed to interpret “working on” broadly.
With the publisher now, and due out late this year or early next, is my sixth book, called The O in the Air. It’s largely about growing up Catholic in a family with too many secrets, but it also includes other family-centered poems.
Because I’ve always found it difficult to find places in collections for my lighter poems, quite a few of them remain uncollected. But I like them, so I’m now pulling together from the uncollected pile a book of light-hearted poems, tentatively called Airheads.
When I’ve done all this collecting, the poems left in the pile will—I hope—tell me what I should be writing about, so that the next book has a shape. But I say “I hope” because I’ve never yet been able to write “a book.” I write individual poems and then hope I can make them speak to each other. This often works because I have, shall we say, some recurring obsessions.
Longer term, and even more tentatively, I hope to do more translations of the poetry of Christine de Pizan for a possible collection. She lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries and wrote in Middle French. She’s best known for her feminist prose. Her poetry deserves more attention, and it should be translated in rhyme and meter, as she wrote it.
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