Koss: On How Language Fails, Emotional Honesty, Being the Queer Princess of Blank Town, and Their Poetry Collection ‘Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect’
There is a way trauma can sit on your bones, can seep into your blood, and wait until you least expect it to smother you. There is a way grief and loss can envelope you whole: one day you are there, and the next you are swallowed inside their endless void. When I first experienced Koss’s work, in Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode Editions, 2024), I found myself confronted and mesmerized by the swirling crossroads of trauma, loss, and grief.
The poems dance to the questions: How can we be smothered and swallowed whole at the same time? Where is the bottom to the free-fall of the void? Does it ever end? Koss’s work answers this by saying: the unraveling—the simultaneity of being pulled backwards in time, being pushed forward into the present, of what was once and what may never be again—goes on into perpetuity. However, even in the unraveling, there is humor, joy, how it feels to love and be loved, what it is to be seen and held, even if momentarily. It’s beautiful, this work of being a human, and so tragic. Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect captures it all.
Katie Jean Shinkle: The poems in this collection are so filled with humor in light of the grief, loss, and violence the speaker, the place, and the people endure. Can you speak to this humor? I was laughing out loud at times particularly with “My Therapist Sez,” “Dinner at the Bradys’” and “A Dyke Cowgirl Takes Herself on a COVID Taco Bell Date” (but also with various other poems and lines throughout the book).
Koss: I write for healing. I write to transmute experience, and I write to grasp things, too. And if I can get to a place of turning trauma funny, it’s hugely transformational to me. Some of those funny things actually took me years to write and I needed a lot of distance, and writing itself is distancing.
I wrote a lot of poetry in my twenties, and I wrote a lot about bad relationships and connection failures and dating at one point. I had hoped to put out a book about that until I had a loss, a suicide loss, and I put that on hold because nothing was funny for a really long time. I think you can undermine your message being funny, and I’ve been criticized a lot, but I just think that in poetry and life we need more humor.
KJS: Let’s talk about place. This book feels very Midwest, very Great Lakes Region, to me. I’m from Michigan, and there is just such an air of Michigan to it, not only in exact place names (Howell, Flint, Dort Highway, Ann Arbor) or in the specific details, but also in the permeating mood and atmosphere the poems live inside, the particular kind of despair, the particular kind of gray hang in the air, the particular way men die such as in “The Fall of Lady and Toby” where no says much about it, where minding business is best. I can’t describe it to someone who doesn’t understand, but these poems understand.
K: Your gray remark did hit me. When I lived in Flint when I was little, all my memories are gray. And sometimes there’s a couple of little splashes of color. There’s just something about Michigan, being from Michigan and what it does to you energetically, and the space. Also for me, most of my childhood was spent in Michigan, and it was very rural, and there’s something about the seasons, and the corn, and the fields, and the farmland, the cycles of life and death that impacted me as a person. Along with this cycling, there’s a way that people just don’t change, or the people that I went to school with who I’m mostly not friends with, they stayed, and lived their parents’ lives, and they’re conservative. It’s weird being back here. I came back here to take care of my grandmother, and she’s gone now, sadly, but as a queer coming back to a place like this, it’s really strange for me. Queer ghost, small town.
KJS: Speaking of ghosts, I’m interested in the way the work navigates trauma. There seems to be a reclamation process happening, maybe of survivorship, maybe of a glimmer of hope (hate to use that word, seems apt though), and I find it most in the way the poems either reconfigure or reimagine a kind of speculative outcome of the narratives (such as in “Kim”) or how the poems confront the details of a reality/truth (“Friday, Saturday”). Do you feel this is something that is consciously happening on the page?
K: I’ve always had an interest in disrupted narratives—in visual work and writing. I’m not a clever writer. I feel like I’m more intuitive, and I’m not much of a planner. I tend to just jump right in and do it. I’m interested in memory and narrative. With the “Kim” piece, there really were just no details available, and I was interested in how when something traumatic happens, in the face of missing information we recreate our own stories, over and over. I am probably more obsessive than other people, and probably part of why I’m creative is because in my upbringing, there were so many missing things, so many contradictory narratives, including stories from my schizophrenic mother who talked about things like Cuban drug dealers and explosions on yachts. So, in those pieces, I think I was more interested in the structure than I normally would be—in how we create narrative out of nothing. I don’t know that I was thinking about hope exactly. However, I think the vacation poem, despite its dark notes, suggests I will be okay.
KJS: This is a great segue into my next question about motherhood and mothering. There is an exploration of motherhood as bio family (mother, grandmother, stepmother), chosen family, and also as metaphor (“Mother as Molotov Cocktail”). The book is also dedicated to your grandmother, specifically. What draws you to motherhood/mothering?
K: I had a suicide loss, and was dealing with abandonment, and even though I had this wonderful mother-person (Grams) and we were really close, she’s gone now. I associate motherhood with loss. The way mother imagery appears to me is about estrangement and residual abuse, because my birth mother was very abusive. Part of it, too, is having a loving person, and maybe that’s the hopeful feeling you got from some of it, because I did have that, and I have been loved and I do have a kind of hope. I associate ‘mother’ with ‘wound’ because I have these terrible experiences with my mother.
KJS: There is grief there, too, which brings me to my next question. I’m kind of obsessed with the way the work is piecing together fragmented histories of so many different kinds of grief—queer grief, chosen family grief, bio family grief, suicide/death grief—and in “Fucked-Up History” you write: “The swell thing about fragmented/histories is the liberties one/can take when filling in the blanks.” Do you find it’s easier to piece together histories (personal, imaginary) through fragmentation? That there is a truthiness to the fragmentation that is lost in the rending of it any other way?
Koss: It’s the truthiness, or the emotional honesty of it as it comes out, that appeals to me. I love Zuihitsu for that reason, and some of my work is kind of Zuihitsu-like. I did that kind of work before I knew what Zuihitsu was, but that’s a convenient word to use. Part of why I like fragments is because of the rearrangeability of it. There’s an honesty to it, but there’s also a way of playing with it. I’m also a visual artist, and I’m sometimes writing in visual things, and processes get murky with me. I think of them as collages, and even when they are more logical, I do a lot of rearranging. As with visual art, the white spaces are important for creating resonance; what is out there that isn’t said. That’s what I like about doing list poems, and the fragmented kind of writing, and the interesting rearranging, and the unseen relationships between things that I think also can make a kind of resonance, or be exciting.
KJS: What inspires your form and style, or what inspires you, in general?
K: I think I’m kind of anti-form. Sometimes I get interested in structure and creating new kinds of narratives, and maybe that’s something that’s queer about my writing. I went to a fancy art school, but I’m not an academic. I stayed in school for a very long time because I liked school when I was younger. I am more the kind of person to defy authority and make my own way. I think there’s something kind of queer about that. And there’s something about being queer, when people hate you, it sort of frees you. When you’re not really included, and you’re not playing all of those games, you’re free to go deep, and you’re free to be really creative. I also think that being a visual artist, and visual art, is much more accepting of experimentation than the lit world is. Being a visual artist impacts how I write a lot. And when I was younger, my writing was more conversational, a lot of it. It’s become more visual, but I feel like I’m more interested in what a poem can be than what it has to be. And while I like to get published, it’s okay if people don’t like it, or it’s okay if people don’t get it. Do people ever get each other at all? The interesting thing about language is how it always fails.
KJS: I want to circle back to queerness. There are so many ways these poems explore queerness. What does queerness or being queer mean to you? What was the hardest part and most joyous part of writing queer in the work?
K: I think that this is going to be really disappointing, but I’m so queer and I’m so in my queer self that I don’t really think about writing queer. Sometimes I might want to write about something that pisses me off, and some of my poems are more overtly political. I get sort of excited because I feel defiant or rebellious putting my queer out there. In that way, maybe it is a political act.
I’ve been told at certain workshops to take the gay out of my poetry. But it’s empowering to put my stuff out there, and there’s something absurd about thinking of myself as the queer princess of—I won’t say the name of the town—of Blank Town. The Blank Town of Michigan. It does feel good to parade around about it, even though I’ve lived this gay life for a real long time.
KJS: So as the Queer Princess of Blank Town, Michigan, what are you reading right now?
K: I’m reading a lot of memoirs because I’m doing a memoir workshop with Granta. I’m reading a lot of excerpts. I just finished Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, and I just started Animals Eat Each Other (Elle Nash). It’s good, or maybe just familiar, to read about self-destructiveness. In my path, I didn’t have addiction, but I like to read about people who struggle. They don’t have to come out in a super happy place, but I like to read about people who are struggling and people who are struggling through their writing. I think it’s important to not get too comfortable in your art practice.
Koss is a queer, mixed race writer and artist with numerous publications in both print and online journals. They were published in Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, and other anthologies and won the Wergle Flomp 2021 Humor Poetry Contest with “My Therapist Sez,” first published in diode poetry. Find them on Twitter and Instagram, or stop by their website to keep track of their activities.
