Eugenia Leigh: On Excavating the Past, Writing as a Safeguard, Dialectical Thinking and Her New Book “Bianca”
Eugenia Leigh is holding nothing back in her powerful new poetry book Bianca, out now from Four Way Books. In the collection, Leigh navigates violence, mental illness, and traumas while also delving into marriage and motherhood and all the ways healing can take shape over time.
I spoke with Leigh via Google Docs about the history of Bianca, which has remained at the forefront of my mind since reading it last month, writing as a safeguard, memory and rage, the differences between her two collections, and more.
Erica Abbott: First of all, congratulations on your new book! Can you tell me about how Bianca came to be and how it feels now that it is out in the world? Additionally, the title is derived from the “manic alter ego” that emerges throughout the collection and features prominently in the poem “Bipolar II Disorder: Second Evaluation (Zuihitsu for Bianca)” — how did you come to realize this was the story needing to be told in this collection?
Eugenia Leigh: For many years, I didn’t know Bianca was the book I was writing. I set out wanting to write something less related to my personal narrative. The earliest poems—many of which didn’t make it into the final book—used the first person plural “we.” At one point, I even thought I was writing some kind of spiritual survival guide. But then a series of events led to my mental illness diagnoses. Then I became a mother. Then the pandemic hit. Then my estranged father resurfaced, terminally ill. Event after event revealed that I was holding on to a lot of fear and a lot of anger. I was trying to escape these emotions by writing broadly (and badly) about hope and healing.
Poets who aren’t the type to start “project books” but write like me, one poem at a time, hoping the pieces will amount to something cohesive, often say that at some point on the journey, you see an exhibit or hear a story or find an image that suddenly binds all the poems together. And that’s when you know you’ve got the book. For me, that throughline was the title. I toyed with dozens of terrible titles for years, and it wasn’t until December of 2020—after seven years’ worth of writing (and not writing) toward this book—that it occurred to me that the title was Bianca. That the heart and heat of the poems I loved most from my nonsensical pile pointed to her journey, her struggle, my evolution from her to my present-day self. Once I realized Bianca was the title of the book, I knew which poems to cut, then the final few poems came to me in a storm, and the book was done. I am pretty badly dissociated at the moment to try to survive the whirlwind of its launch, so all I feel at the moment is a jumble of feelings. And maybe relief.
EA: Bianca deals with a lot of heavy topics, including childhood abuse, PTSD, grief, and suicidal ideation. In what ways do you try to safeguard your mental peace when writing poems that delve into such difficult themes?
EL: For me, writing is the safeguard. These “topics” and “themes” are simply my daily, lived experience. Even when I don’t write about them, they plague me, and I’m forced to deal with them. Because of complex PTSD, my brain is constantly time-traveling, constantly re-engaging with this material whether I like it or not. Writing helps me move this re-engagement to the page, sort of like moving the thought from the amygdala (my fight/flight animal brain) to the prefrontal cortex, where my logical brain can better process them.
EA: Emerging from and becoming more aware of past trauma, along with life’s brighter spots and survival in general, are major themes in the third section of this collection. How have you come to find that balance between both the darkness and the light in your work and why is that important?
EL: One of my goals for Bianca was to put the work of dialectical thinking on display. “Dialectical thinking,” a term I learned in therapy, refers to the brain’s ability to hold two opposite truths at the same time. For example, I am grateful for the sacrifices my mother made to raise my sisters and me. But also, I am infuriated by the ways her choices put us in constant danger and kept us in an environment of abuse.
I used to feel a lot of guilt about my anger because both Korean American culture and Christian culture—the environments I was raised in—can push you toward the quick redemption narrative. The idea that as an assimilated American or as a “born-again” Christian, your trauma is no longer relevant. You are a new creation. “The old has gone, the new has come,” as the verse goes. But that’s hardly ever the reality for someone who has endured capital-T trauma. Becoming a mother has made me the most furious I’ve ever been, but also the most hopeful. It was the first time dialectical thinking became impossible to avoid. And I wanted to capture this on the page. It is still important to me that healing or redemption is possible. But I am very wary of how these ideas enter my poems because I never want the “good” to erase the trauma or make light of it. I’d rather the good complicate the pain, humanize it, give it depth.
EA: There’s an essay in the middle of the collection (“The Part of Stories One Never Quite Believes”). How did that essay come to be? How do “the mechanics of memory” referenced within play a part in our lives?
EL: I’m a PhD dropout, and during my one year at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, I took a nonfiction workshop with Luis Urrea. His first assignment for us was to write an essay response to this prompt: “What my hands remember.” For years, I had tried to write the story of Edward the taxi driver through dozens of awful poems. This class gave me the space and permission I needed to try it out as an essay.
Regarding “the mechanics of memory”—my therapist always reminds me that trauma is a memory disorder. We are constantly processing the memories and pains we were unable to process in real time when the trauma happened. When I am triggered or reacting strongly to something, my therapist always asks, “How old do you feel right now?” which helps me connect the emotion to a memory from that time. Then I can finally do the work of processing that memory now so that I can heal and move on.
EA: There’s also a photo of the note referenced in that essay at the end of the book. Can you talk a bit about this?
EL: This was a last-ditch move I am thrilled I made. I have lost so much physical written evidence of my life because of many abrupt moves or sheer bad luck. Boxes of personal items, whole “chapter books” I wrote as a kid, bags and bags of letters exchanged with friends, entire diaries. But somehow, I have managed to preserve this note and keep it on me every time I have relocated from 2007 (when I received it) until now.
We like to pretend poetry books about the poet’s life are about a removed “speaker.” I wanted the reader to know: no, this is real. This is my real life. Just like the real people you love who also live with mental illness. I also wanted to include this note for the readers who know what it’s like to be “Bianca” or to have an inner “Bianca.” I wanted them to know that these kinds of angels who come in and out of our lives in our darkest moments—the Edwards of our lives—can be real, too. So just before the book went to the printer, I sent a photocopy of it to the good folks at Four Way Books, and thankfully, they all agreed it was a good idea and made it work.
EA: There are also several religious images that emerge throughout the collection, from a plague of frogs to the fiery furnace — how are these central to the narrative of Bianca?
EL: I was raised in a very conservative Christian household. My mother was an extreme evangelical Christian, and my father was a Christian youth pastor. So not a day went by in my childhood that I was not exposed to Bible stories or Bible verses. When my brain time travels and excavates narratives from my past, these icons and artifacts get dug up, too. It’s automatic. If a religious reference appears in my poem, it was more the result of an intrusive thought and less because of an intentional effort to put something biblical into my poems. In fact, I often have to take them out.
EA: The closing line of “One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again” — Everyone I have lost / I have lost before the end really struck me. Can you talk about this idea and how it shapes Bianca?
EL: Death is very rarely the first time we grieve someone we have loved. In fact, if you have had a loving, lasting relationship with someone, and their death is the first time you grieve them, that’s the ideal. A beautiful privilege, in a way. Many of us lose the people we love before they die. Because of a change in the relationship, a change in circumstance. Estrangement from a parent is still a difficult topic for many people. Even those who’ve had toxic relationships with their parents will still say, “But can’t you forgive them now that they’re elderly and dying? Can’t you move past the pain and accept them before they go?” But it’s never that simple or that easy. I have tried.
EA: “Reionization” and “My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself” are two of my favorite poems in the book. Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about and can you share a snippet of it?
EL: I don’t have a favorite poem from Bianca, but I do have favorite lines in every poem. Here are my favorite lines from the two poems you mentioned. From “Reionization”: “God / second-guessing // both Let there be and light.” From “My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself”: “all of us / drunk and stoned, seated in a circle // like schoolchildren waiting for some game / to begin,” and also, “I bent the way they bent me // to do what they invented.”
EA: I love the cover of this collection. Can you share how it came to be and why it really fits with the style of the book overall?
EL: The photo on the cover is an image I’ve held onto since an old roommate posted it online many years ago when I was still undiagnosed, still living as “Bianca.” NAM, a Tokyo-based graphic/art collective created by art director Takayuki Nakazawa and photographer Hiroshi Manaka, captured this image with a model. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it as the cover of a book, and this was years before I’d even published a single poem. But this image made no sense at all for my first book, so I laid this idea to rest.
Then when I was looking at possible cover art for Bianca, I sent several, including this one, to Four Way Books. I had told Four Way that my first choice was another quieter photograph, but they actually pushed back and said, “We like the woman with post-its the best. Much of the other work actually seems to undermine the strength of the speaker in Bianca—woman against a wall, woman in bed. The character of Bianca has risen, is rising.” I absolutely loved that email and wholeheartedly agreed with their decision. It was, after all, my secret favorite—the image Bianca herself had wanted all those years ago.
EA: What is it like preparing to release another collection almost ten years after your debut?
EL: I feel hungrier. I don’t take this book for granted because I know now that it takes me forever to make a book. I am putting in so much work and time into promoting Bianca because I feel fully aware that I could die before I get a chance to do this again. Last summer, I reached out to some poets I admire to ask about their experience publicizing their books. And Tina Chang sent back a generous email encouraging me to celebrate this book I worked hard on and “shout from the rooftops.” Every time I start to feel disgusting about self-promotion, I hear her voice telling me to get even louder.
EA: What are some of the biggest differences between Bianca and your first book Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows? Any similarities?
EL: In some ways, both books tell the same story but through hugely different lenses, voices, and styles. They both touch on my experiences of childhood abuse, domestic violence, parental incarceration, parental deportation. But Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows was written through the voice of an adult child still in the thick of it, still in relationship with her abusive father, still using her childhood coping mechanisms even as she told that narrative. In “Wire Hangers,” I literally write, “I forgive him.”
But in Bianca, the first line of the second poem, “The First Leaf,” is: “I thought I forgave you. Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” I was very conscious that this line was a direct response to the one from “Wire Hangers” when I wrote this. Bianca revisits the entire narrative of that first book but with the added perspective of mental illness diagnoses and the added experience of motherhood. Motherhood gave me access to my rage. Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows is not an angry book. Bianca is pissed off.
EA: When editing for The Adroit Journal or Honey Literary what do you really look for in a submission? What makes a good story to you?
EL: When we’re reading literally thousands of submissions (as is the case at The Adroit Journal), the thing that stands out most for me is when someone has figured out their own distinct voice instead of sounding like they are emulating some of their favorite poets. But I’ll tell you a secret: when the poetry editors at The Adroit Journal get together to choose poems for publication, it is exceedingly rare that we all have the same feelings toward any poem. We’re often having to convince each other of why we love or don’t love a poem. Evaluating art is such a subjective process! What makes a poem “good” to me will be completely different from what makes a poem “good” to another editor. This is why diversity is crucial not only in a journal’s pages but also on their editorial mastheads.
EA: Who are some of your biggest literary influences? What inspires you?
EL: Oh, this is an ever-changing list depending on my work in progress. The books on my desk right now are not the same books that cluttered my desk when I wrote Bianca. Bianca was heavily influenced by The Undertaker’s Daughter by Toi Derricotte, Hybrida by Tina Chang, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss, The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn, Indigo by Ellen Bass, the black maria by Aracelis Girmay, Anne Sexton’s collected poems, everything by Marie Howe, Natalie Diaz, Traci Brimhall, Victoria Chang. I was also reading a lot of Korean women poets in translation. Kim Yideum, Choi Seung-ja, Kim Hyesoon especially.
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and the Best of the Net anthology. The recipient of Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize as well as awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Kundiman, and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary.
About interviewer
Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Serotonin, FERAL, Gnashing Teeth, Selcouth Station, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020), her debut poetry chapbook. She volunteers for Button Poetry and Mad Poets Society. Follow her on Instagram @poetry_erica and on Twitter @erica_abbott and visit her website here.
