On “Mass for Shut-ins”

Interview / Mary-Alice Daniel

Mary-Alice Daniel

Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: This year, The Account Magazine was honored and excited to sit down with Mary-Alice Daniel, winner of the 2022 Yale Younger Poet’s prize for her searing collection, Mass for Shut-ins. Daniels offered insight and inspiration as she spoke about her various approaches to writing her haunting poetic debut.

Within the first few lines of your collection, Mass for Shut-ins the speaker declares, “Your house isn’t haunted – you’re just lonely,” which introduces us to a voice that isn’t afraid to speak startling truths, wrenching from us any delusions of comfort we might cling to within these poems. How did you approach authorial voice within Mass for Shut-ins? Did you begin to write with a particular tenor in mind? Or did the tone find you?

Spirits in multiple valences haunt the landscapes or dreamscapes I create: an umbra of earthly vice and unearthly totems. My poetic choices center 2 things: emphasis & momentum. I want to call the right amount of attention to something (subtlety or not=tone). Speed: compression, lineation, relaxing register, stumbling up a reader or letting them get there faster. Different usage of word, different singular, grammar that’s slightly wrong/“off”. Do I want to surprise them? Or let them down? Or set them up?

Much of the collection works to understand a great contradiction: humanity’s lack of control over the universe despite our monumental efforts to do so. How did these ideas influence the collection? Did one, in particular, nag at you as you wrote?

My poems harness and unleash a holy mess of conflicting cultures & spirit worlds: Islam, Christianity, magic. They perform cultural excavations and experiments—reseeing region, religion, race. I delve into a millennium of oral history from my Islamic Fulani tribe, along with our indigenous animism—both in conflict with the Evangelical gospel I was raised to revere. I venture through invisible fields of spiritual warfare in my poems. They aren’t autobiographical; they are phantasmal. My world-building weaves familial lore and folkways; new media and mass culture; science, pseudoscience, and syncretism.

My poems naturally encounter supernatural systems. Growing up, I was cautioned that expressing negativity invites curses. You incite your own unluck. There is “power” in the tongue, where poison can entice malignant entities into this dimension. While writing Mass for Shut-Ins, always in the back of my mind was my transgression of this superstition. Tempted by taboo, I write about uncontrollable human impulses—to hurt ourselves and each other—indulging my lifelong flirtation with all that is off-limits. My books mull over my apocalyptic paranoia, my looming death(s), and the Hells I predict I’m heading to, soon. Briefly, I’m anchored—to this body that daily fights decay; to this sunny/sinful city of angels. Then I remember that my body is Black; my Los Angeles is an anti-paradise; my medications may cause madness.

In a similar vein, ideas of morality frequently appear in this collection but are often juxtaposed against a world indifferent to them—or at the very least, intent on ignoring them. The speaker seems both bound to and disenchanted by religion and spirituality. Can you tell us a little about these ideas in your work?

Dreamscapes host—and hold hostage—mutant/machine plus flesh/disease, human/demon, science/miracle, mercy/hellfire. The atmosphere is charged by folk mythology and syncretism. My ethnic Fulani tribe is essentially synonymous with Islam, but I was raised by Evangelical parents in a sphere of fundamentalism and apocalyptic paranoia. Alongside such extremes, the indigenous beliefs of Nigeria survive—within my family, seen in the centering of superstition, the credence in curses. Per an occult Nigerian ritual, a willing human vessel may be possessed by a pantheon of spirits. Spirits populate my writing, their presence presenting the prospect of being haunted or hunted. Inhuman inhabitants prowl about: godlings, ghosts, bots, birds, major or minor saints. Poetry is invocation—opposite of exorcism. I invite the otherwordly inside.

Throughout my manuscript, we encounter the spirits of iconic female figures—the fallen woman; the Bell Witch; the “ultra-black” goddess Kali; Santa Muerte, the death saint; Mary, Virgin Queen of Heaven; an aging, light-phobic Hollywood actress; Christina the Astonishing (the patron saint against insanity); an anthropomorphic she-goat; a spacegirl; a pillar of salt. On each of my many, many moons lives a lady.

You often reference Los Angeles, where you lived while part of this collection was written; and West Africa — Nigeria, specifically, where you were born. Place plays a fundamental role within these poems— though mostly as spaces the speaker orients themselves on the periphery of. In these poems, there is no “home” and nowhere is safe. What do terms like home, place, and setting mean to you as a poet?

The term “uncanny” is derived from its direct opposite in German, heimlich, meaning “homelike” or “native.” The uncanny unsettles the home—it turns eerie and intrusive. I am a nomad of many homes and no home; naturally, my poetry charts far valleys of the uncanny.

Today, my research targets egregious gaps and errors in West Africa’s historic and written record. I do this out of necessity. The glaring lack of useful documents published about my native land proves both frustrating and generative. So ignored is that terrain that the maps inside my memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (HarperCollins/Ecco 2022), had to be drawn by an illustrator: my publisher and I found nothing marking the locations I mention. Every time I review the body of literature from my overlooked region, I am astonished by the distortion in its reporting and representation. The scarce available materials are typically dated; derogatory; limited in detail; lacking in depth. At first dismayed by our erasure, I realized an expansive, ongoing opportunity to counter erosion. To incarnate my own inheritance.

Whenever we speak the name of a place, we become participants in its storyline. While a PhD student at USC, I sought to understand my adopted environs. I am drawn to desert, assimilating from a similar clime. The setting of La La Land lent a surreality to my scholarship. The etymology of the name of the state alludes to Calafia, the queen of a fictional island inhabited exclusively by black-skinned women: a fantasy territory invented in a 16^th-century Spanish novel. Her character recurs in my work: a focal figure in my doctoral dissertation and memoir—a muse.

My kaleidoscopic book braids a sequence of essays—each sets a scene nested in Nigeria’s diaspora. Afro-Palestine; Ukraine; the textile districts in Guangzhou; sampietrini cobblestone streets in Sicily; Texas; Thailand; Morocco; the Americas, where our indigenous spirituality survived transatlantic slave trade, remade into the misunderstood Santería, Haitian Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo. As the progeny of pastoralists, I have odysseyed the world. My book relates African assimilation and adaptation—via personal encounters. Wherever Nigerians go, we animate a corpus of culture.

Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a scholar at Princeton University.

Interviews: An Introduction

Introduction / Lauren Brazeal Garza

In our 10th year of Publication The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought is opening a new Interviews section. Championing this new venture is the brilliant Lauren Brazeal Garza.

Our inaugural interviews section features Lauren in discussion with former Account contributors Jennifer Givhan (poems in our 2020 issue), and Jenny Molberg (poems in our 2022 issue).

Lauren’s thoughtful introduction below.

Lauren Brazeal Garza: The Account Magazine is a journal that has always considered the author’s own account of their work alongside their writing, so it was the realization of a dream to begin an interviews feature for this issue. I was fortunate to have conversations with two former contributors to The Account: Jenn Givhan and Jenny Molberg, who have both recently released collections of poetry, Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal (Weslyan Poetry Series) and Molberg’s The Court of No Record (LSU Press). Over the course of the summer, both poets shared insights into their craft, exploring how themes of survived trauma and bearing witness manifest within each collection.

Jennifer Givhan in conversation with Lauren Brazeal Garza

Purchasing information on Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan

Jenny Molberg in conversation with Lauren Brazeal Garza

Purchasing information on The Court of No Record, Jenny Molberg

Lauren Brazeal Garza received her M.F.A in poetry from Bennington College, and is completing her Ph.D. in literature from UT Dallas, where she is also a creative writing instructor. She is the author of the full length collection Gutter (Yes Yes Books, 2018), a memoir-in-verse about her homelessness as a teenager. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry, most recently, Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte: I Was Here, Release Me (Tram Editions, 2023), a series of fictional interviews with ghosts. Her poetry, lyric essays, and fiction has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and Verse Daily among many other journals. She can be found haunting her website at www.lbrazealgarza.com

On “Belly to the Brutal”

Interview / Jennifer Givhan

Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenn Givhan was kind enough to offer an account of her her wrenching and often heartbreaking fourth book of poems, Belly to the Brutal. During our interview, Givhan generously touched on ideas of motherhood (and how it changes time itself), generational and carried traumas, what it means to be haunted, and the process of writing as a means of spiritual survival

Your most recent collection, Belly to the Brutal, explores ideas of lineages of trauma and how trauma can be inherited. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?

When I was a new mother time didn’t make sense. It stretched, it stuck. It grew ponderous. Heavy at times. Gauze thin at others. Motherhood is a time machine. Now that my children are teens, I feel the weight of their matter pulling me, stretching the fabric of spacetime toward their centers of gravity.

Rooted in my Mexica culture, my work explores cyclical existence, emphasizing the intricate relationship between women, children, nature, and the spirits that inhabit spaces between time and language.

All of these hidden or underbelly experiences speak of what travels through the cells, the inner workings, what’s in the DNA, what we pass on in the unspoken as well as stories.

My work delves into the unspoken, the omitted and forgotten, the buried and record-struck. I’ve long advised writers to say the damn thing—and I try never to shy away from the unsayable. Secrets in our house and my mother’s house and her mother’s before that meant a girlchild harmed and I’ll never abide by keeping things hidden that need to be bloodlet and the poison pulled out. I’ll never be shamed or harassed into silence. And yet—we can make omissions as writers for the haunting spaces they create in their wake—the sense that what once lived there has moved on—narrative, memory, or pain. Louise Glück says that “deliberate silence” is “analogous to the unseen… to the power of ruins… [which] inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied.” Something of their spirit is still intact in the work. The ruins of what might have been linger. Even that which stays buried can be redeemed.

All of this relates, for me and my poems, into what we carry through the DNA. Wounds through the womb.

Our genetic memory carries tales of trauma and triumph, passed down from our antepasados, connecting us in ways both tangible and intangible. Scientific revelations suggest we carry trauma in our genes, echoing our ancestors’ experiences. The language of our lineage can bind us to our past for better or worse, as Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldúa have expounded in their seminal works. For some, societal discrimination against ancestral languages has led to cultural disconnection and rootlessness.

The fact that we actually carry trauma in our DNA haunts me. It expands horrifically like an imaginative bomb in my brain… to think of all the world’s horrors within us, claiming us, and not letting us go, and that this is cellular, in the blood…

But there is a saving takeaway. As sociologist Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters argues: “The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, something against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.”

The key word here is transformation. When the ghosts of our past or our ancestors’ pasts come to us, in means that something needs to be done, something needs to change.

In our poems, as in our lives, we have the marvelous ability to transform reality, as well as to see the transformative reality that already exists (around and within us).

So while our genes carry our Ancestor’s trauma, we must also be echoes of their joys. I have started trying to capture this in Belly to the Brutal, but I sense the next journey of my poetic path is to keep capturing the joy onto the page.

In this collection, ideas of wounding, being wounded, and the wound are woven in almost every poem in this collection. These manifest both as physical, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Can you speak to how this theme developed?

As writers, perhaps more than average folks, we likely have a deep, abiding sense that in some way, we’re already all broken. Or, we’ve all been broken at some point. And that the narratives we’re writing and revising and recreating in our poems draw from that foundational fracture. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

In my poem drafts I tend to write the same beating heart over and over. Cheryl Strayed calls it the second heart and writes about getting down on the floor to pull this second heart from one’s chest onto the page. I think of “The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo, each with a heart, one broken.

Tony Hoagland calls the flood subject or foundational fracture one’s “mythical wound.”

Kim Addonizio writes in Ordinary Genius, “I had discovered the thing I wanted to keep close to me for the rest of my life, and if I did that, my tutelary spirit would watch over me, would teach me what I needed to know… This is your genius: your own profound desire to write.” Desire will only get us so far. It’s when we put our “ass to the chair,” she says, that our demons will show up. The demon, then, for some of us, is whatever holds us back from writing the thing we’re meant to write. That keeps us scrubbing floors both literal and metaphorical rather than sitting down at the keyboard and, as Hemingway famously said, bleeding.

Addonizio’s demons resonate with my own, which spew venom in my ears, even after publishing five full-length collections of poetry and two novels; my demons taunt: I’ve been writing the same damn poem over and over—I should be more political. No, wait, I should really be more personal. But somehow universal, and not narcissistic. I’ve been accused of confessing. I should be more esoteric. I’m lost. I’m floundering. I cannot scratch my way out. To hell with it, I give up.

Except, for me, giving up has too often meant more than never writing again.

So writing has been survival.

I must continue writing.

And what almost invariably comes is my deep mythic wound, in whatever form: Heartbreak that stems from my first love having a baby with another young woman—when I’d lost our baby to miscarriage.

No matter what else I write. The mythic wound often finds a way of needling itself through.

I’ve healed again and again. I write myself into healing again and again.

But the second heart that continually needs excising every time I begin a new project is this: I wanted to become a mother and couldn’t. And then I could.

After struggling for years with infertility, I adopted my son when I was twenty-three years old—this was seven years after the traumatic experiences at the Clinicas de Salud with my high school boyfriend.

In my life, I transformed my reality.

Later, I wrote a novel about a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn—and then comes to believe that a baby doll she names Jubilee is the daughter she lost. The story was inspired by Reborns, dolls that are created to look just like “real” babies, and that can be custom ordered to look just like children who have grown up or passed away; they are “reborn.” Reborns fall into the uncanny valley and are often described as “creepy,” though I see them as a beautiful transformation.

When I couldn’t have children, when my body wouldn’t cooperate, when the lines wouldn’t transform into a pink cross, or when the pink cross did appear but then the bright red poppies began their painful stain, I made myth. I became a mother in my poems and my babies were alive and the blood flowing out didn’t mean dead.

When I adopted my son and I had no idea what I was doing and felt like a body snatcher like a thief like an imposter and his colic-stressed body and his sleepless-helpless body kept us both in perpetual dreamstate and I was afraid always he’d wake some day and scream You’re not my real mother, instead, we created myth. We became mythical, to each other. In our mutual need. The myth of motherlove carried us; it carries us still, through thick reality, through thick reality we learn each day to love.

Whether I have a story or poem or spark in mind when I begin writing, every journeying onto the page begins for me as a plunging downward, into the heartgut or through it, and there I must begin digging.

I don’t know if the wound will ever heal. But I’ve created so many beautiful things from it that even if I die with this hole in my heart, it’s a hole that’s sprouted whole ecosystems that’ve fed those I’ve loved.

An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in Belly to the Brutal interrogating these ideas?

Most of my work deals with the monstrous in some way. Belly to the Brutal grapples with monstrous motherhood. Mothering through mental illness.

Sometimes the monsters don’t need our slaying, but our compassion—our empathy and understanding. Sometimes the monsters are not monsters but captive to the dark power wrecked upon them. Sometimes, they need us only to witness. To see them.

This newest collection was about extending that same compassion I give outward monsters to myself. Seeing the seeds of trauma grown into violence within me—and forgiving myself. But first, I had to bear witness.

And it was damn painful at times.

Of writing monsters, Karen Russel writes of having empathy for them: “Poor motherless thing. Look at it looking.”

I wanted to show how even mothered things can be accidentally mothered into violence that needs rooting out. How machismo culture, how the violences enacted upon girls and women… how that can all contribute to unintentionally passing those on as norms. And how one mother needs to be brave and self-aware enough to stand up and say, Basta. Enough. To stop those cycles of violence from repeating.

So the mother at the end of my collection births herself anew, as Frida Kahlo in her visceral painting, birthing her own damn self. And in my collection, the mother does it when she births her daughter and realizes that she has a chance to remother herself alongside her daughter.

In bearing witness to my children’s lives, I was able to witness, again, my own childhood and my mother’s struggle from a new lens that lent me empathy and grace I couldn’t feel when I was hurting within it.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices.

Her newest poetry collection Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press) and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing) both draw from her practice of brujería. Her latest novel was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and as a National Together We Read Library Pick and was featured on CBS Mornings. It also won an International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category.

Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.

On “The Court of No Record”

Interview / Jenny Molberg

Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenny Molberg’s The Court of No Record searingly draws inspiration from court proceedings and criminal investigations, showing how the criminal justice system ultimately fails women. During our interview, she offered wonderful insights into the creation of the collection, touching upon erasure—and how victims of crime are often called upon to erase themselves and their truth in persuit of justice, the banality of evil and silencing, and how poetry bears witness to the unsayable.

Your most recent collection, The Court of No Record, explores ideas of trauma and how trauma can inhabit and even erase one’s entire identity. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?

In an essay I return to again and again, Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” she writes, “After all, the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic. And it seems, many erasure projects today hold these things as unrelated. Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.”

In the wake of intimate partner violence, with experiences of past trauma and sexual assault pressing their hands against my inner mirror, I found myself in court, several times, trying to articulate my Truth against what the court allowed me to speak of the truth. The whole story, the context of a situation, the big picture of the Truth, I’ve learned, is alarmingly irrelevant to the U.S. court system. It’s interesting that you use the word “erase” in this question, as I wrote many of these poems as an outcry, a reaction, and a defense of the self I knew, fighting against what a toxically masculine culture, and a “justice” system wanted me to erase of myself. In the midst of trauma, I often had the sense that I, as I had once known myself, was slipping away, buying into the gaslighting waged against me, until my own perception of reality became muddled, like I was looking at a familiar lake through thick fog.

After the events that were the impetus of this book (which, ironically, are dangerous to directly address in writing), I was left with nearly 400 pages of court transcript. I wanted to create, in Sharif’s words, a kind of palimpsest with that text, where I could write the truth over what happened to me—a complete and violent disregard of my truth, a state-supported silencing. In writing these poems, I had experienced enough self-erasure, so I wanted to insert, to footnote, to make additions to the text of trauma. I wanted to paint over the existing portrait of me, because it wasn’t the truth; in doing so, I felt that I was probably speaking towards the experience of many other survivors who are unsafe in telling their stories. I wanted to write in a kind of secondary language to anyone who had experienced intimate partner violence, abuse, and assault—to create a courtroom where we might be heard, an underground record of the actual truth.

Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil. Many of the poems in The Court of No Record explore this idea though their form and technique—particularly in the second section. Can you speak to how this evolved as you wrote the collection?

I think this question is a perfect segue from the first—in order to create a truthful courtroom setting, I had to play into the banality of its silencing, to use form and language that spotlighted its sometimes-absurd evasions of the truth, and to invent characters that embodied the relentless silencing of survivors. For example, when I wrote persona poems from the perspective of the abuser’s lawyer, I wrote mostly in misogynistic verses from the Old Testament, as this mirrored the experience of being shamed and humiliated for living in a female body and speaking out against abuse. When I wrote the second section’s “evidence” poems to capture the undocumented evidence of abuse or assault—the invisible proof of memory—I used Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquain form, a highly formal syllabic verse, to show that evidence of abuse can be proven in exact measurements, but is all too often dismissed.

The fact that I had to be careful about what I was saying—that I needed to, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “tell it slant” in order to protect myself and others—created a similar situation to writing in fixed form. That is, I needed to write from the margins of my own experience rather than in a Confessional mode—there were intrinsic formal constraints. I looked to the work of female forensic scientists, dream language, and metaphor (like the dogs in the book’s second section, or in “Bitch as Sheepdog”) to get to the heart of the violence and silencing I had experienced.

In terms of how the banality of evil evolves in the book, I was cognizant about the way the sections grew out and away from each other—the first addresses cultural obsession with violence against women, the second confronts the court system, becoming more personal, and then in the third, I adopt the “bitch persona,” a voice that allowed me to more openly rail against those damaging systems, letting a sense of humor and defiance into the voice. Writing poems like “Bitch Interrupts a Wedding” and “Bitch Under a Tree Eating Wendy’s,” I wanted to take back my own voice, inhabiting the sexist language that had been waged against me, to grapple with the fact that my own internalized toxic masculinity had led me to believe that speaking up for myself made me a “bitch”.

An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in The Court of No Record interrogating these ideas?

Lauren, thank you for these thoughtful questions and thank you and the entire staff at The Account Magazine for doing such important work—seeing poetry as testimony is integral to my own creative process, and so many of the poets I cherish and return to. With The Court of No Record, the idea of an “account” is central to the book’s existence. The great Björk comes to mind: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.” “Lying,” or bending facts to get at the emotional truth of a situation, was one of my earliest lessons in poetry, and one that I began to interrogate as I was writing this book. In writing these poems, I sought Truth-with-a-capital‑T, while simultaneously balancing the fact that speaking the Truth about my personal experiences with abuse was not safe for me. This leads, I think, to a question about the author-speaker divide—it’s difficult not to conflate the two—but that conflation can lead to a dangerous situation for the author, which I’ve unfortunately learned through firsthand experience. How can poetry tell the Truth while simultaneously keeping the poet safe? How can writing serve as testimony in a situation where witness is a dangerous act? As a longtime disciple of the poetry of witness, the work of such poets as Carolyn Forché, Paul Celan, Muriel Rukeyser, Czesław Miłosz, Yusef Komunyakaa, and so many others (I could go on and on), I repeat Forché’s words on resistance in the poetry of witness like a prayer: “If we have not, if we do not, what in the end, have we become? And if we do not, what, in the end, shall we be?”

Poetry, unlike other forms of writing, allows an embodiment of the unsayable on the page, through metaphor, negative space, elision, and other techniques. With these poems, I wanted to embody the silencing that often occurs, personally, culturally, and legally, when survivors speak their stories. I wanted to, as Forché writes, look beyond the personal and the political to “the social”: “a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated.” I hope that these poems contribute to an often-silenced dialogue about intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and emotional, psychological, and physical abuse—that they both serve as testimony and bear witness to a larger societal problem. Though the subject matter is dark, in the end, I hope that readers can feel hopeful—that to write into the canyon of silence is possible; that, when able, if we can speak against the pact of silence that so often accompanies abuse, we can create a barrier of safety; and that, in confronting and interrogating commodification of violence against female bodies, the power of toxic masculinity will be diminished.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Having earned her MFA from American University and her PhD from the University of North Texas, she is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.