Ruth Awad: On Reclaiming Tenderness, the Duality of Endings, and Her Second Poetry Collection ‘Outside the Joy’

Ruth Awad captures a breadth of experiences and emotion in her newest poetry collection Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024). The book, described as “a compendium of abundance in a world rife with want”, contains poems on mothers and mothering, alongside poems of grief, violence, world endings, and more. 

I spoke with Awad via email about the various themes that shape and expand the worldview that’s being remade time and again in the collection—from the finite time we get with people in this life, to love as a constant in uncertain times, and everything that is “outside the joy”. 

Erica Abbott: Congratulations on the release of your new book! How did Outside the Joy come to be over the years? How does it feel now that it’s out in the world?

Ruth Awad: Ah, thank you! It’s such a dissociative experience, putting a book into the world. It is both part of you and apart from you. Or maybe it’s like nurturing a wild animal back to health. Perhaps its care was only ever temporarily mine. As you can see, it’s going very normally. Totally straightforward, relatable feelings.

I wrote some of the earliest poems in Outside the Joy in 2016, even before my first book Set to Music a Wildfire was released. And there is at least one poem I rewrote just this year, so this book was eight years in the making. Eight years! Longer than some of my beloved dogs have lived. 

And that’s what I set out to do with my second book: to be expansive, to let the stories of my experiences ripple out against the backdrop of an uncertain and tumultuous socio-political landscape. I was interested in letting emotional logic take the wheel as an organizing principle in this collection. 

EA: I’m curious if you can speak a bit to the title, and how it captures the spirit of the collection. It takes inspiration from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—in what ways did you feel those words really support the overall narrative of the collection, as well as the line “Outside / the joy is clamoring” in the second poem of the book?

RA: The quote from Autobiography of Red is: “Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless. Or hell as deep as the sun is high. Or Herakles ordeal strong. Or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy.”

In speaking to the possibilities Stesichoros unlocks with language, Carson particularly emphasizes that he was a poet who lived among refugees, whose only access to power is often through language. We see that idea bloom in Stesichoros telling the myth of “the red monster” from Geryon’s point of view rather than the hero’s, a storytelling choice Carson mirrors. In this way, language releases Geryon into being and offers a stark contrast to the conqueror’s narrative.  

I think a lot about how language can change the way the world is perceived and understood. I think about whose stories are told and whose are not. And I think a lot about the Western insistence on the convenient and digestible. Joy is so cheap in the hands of empire, and grief is only tolerated in the context of triumph and overcoming. In conquering. I am interested in the undefined and borderless space “outside the joy” that asks you to feel everything as though it were your own. 

EA: The opening poem “Reasons to Live” appeared in You Are Here: Poetry In the Natural World as the anthology’s closing poem. Could you speak a bit on how you view the roles of the opening and final poems in a collection? Can they be interchangeable and provide different perspectives on a collection's first/last moments with the reader?

RA: I think the opening poem sets the tone for the collection. It’s the lens through which you want the reader to encounter and understand every subsequent poem. And the last poem is what you want the reader to take with them away from the book. Those are two different objectives to me: one is your Virgil and one is your destination.

I also like to think about the opening poem as the question of the book and the closing poem as the reflection. They should speak to each other, but there has to be progression and distance between them.

EA: This book has a big focus on mothers and mothering—from the book being dedicated to your mother, to the “Mother of” series of poems throughout the collection. (The line “...where the world // will not end when she does, and I could go on / loving it all…” really knocked me over!) These are paired and juxtaposed with poems of mourning and grief over world endings, both personal and on a large scale, especially as they relate to your mother’s aortic aneurysm. Can you talk about how this overarching theme shapes the collection? 

RA: It seemed intuitive to me that a collection that orbits around my mother and my finite time with her would be haunted by endings. Next year she will have open-heart surgery to repair her aneurysm and failed valve. Such a terribly human, mortal thing. And yet she is the creator of everything I’ve known. Maker of daughters and paintings and the treads of the staircase in her house and crochet sweaters and bushels of basil and tattoos and songs. There is natural tension there.   

Then there’s the fact that I’m a childless woman. I think a lot about my decision to never be a mother myself. What does it mean to not live the life my mother and her mother and her mother chose? I see this as a continuation of the theme of endings, in this case the end of this particular branch of my own lineage. Childless women are so often pitied or shamed in this culture. But there is power in an ending I can dictate. 

EA: In what ways does love change and evolve throughout the book? From lines like “...no one can hurt you like / love can hurt you” to “An eternity of almost touching”, how does love, in all its forms, remain a constant, especially with poems that also address our uncertain futures and impermanence? 

RA: Love, to me, has to be the constant when things are uncertain. It is why my father tells me about oranges in Tripoli, why my mother teaches me to swim, why my sister and I are each other’s depression accountability partners. It’s why I linger in the shower with my husband when we’re talking about the end of the world. We don’t know if things will get better or what happens next, but love is the tether that keeps us here, even if it’s only in memory.  

EA: At the start of the collection, there’s two moments that frame hurt/grief in terms of opening yourself up to softening or the tenderness (“...if only // you’ll let the world / soften you with its touching” and “The hurt returns as it always intended—it is tender / as the inside of my thighs…” and “Tender as a mother”). I’m wondering if you can speak to these themes and how they change over the course of the collection?

RA: When I was a child, my family called me “Tender Feelings.” I cried when I heard a sad song or when I saw others crying, even if I didn’t understand it. I have always been soft, and I used to think it was a weakness. I felt too much, I was wrong for feeling too much, and I was vulnerable because of it. So I think I have been investigating the idea of tenderness for a long time now. Maybe in this collection, I am trying to reclaim it. 

It will hurt you to endure. It will hurt you to grieve. But there are others who feel and think like you, and one day you’ll know this is one way we can care for each other: to remain open. To not let the apathy harden you. 

EA: I’m also thinking about different lines towards the end, like “I’m finding new ways to mourn / the lives I didn’t live.” and “...your days of being / immune to wonder // are over, / just like that”, as well as “All this wonder and nowhere to rest” — is there a certain hardening that occurs in the collection as various cruelties emerge or does that softness have a throughline? Or do you also find this following a duality of sorts?

RA: I hope if anything the collection arrives at softness. I hope the argument of the book is that everything we do during our short time on earth matters because we are here together, and we ripple out from each other. It’s wondrous when you really stop to think about it.

EA: I was really struck by the lines “I want to be a better animal. / I want to love what I can while I can…” in the closing poem “Moral Inventory”. It seems to capture so much of what is being said in previous pieces. When in the process of putting together this collection did you know this would be the closer?

RA: I think I knew it would be the last poem when I wrote it. There’s something definitive about the voice and syntax, which I think lends itself to feeling like a resolution of sorts. 

EA: Several poems center on animals and particularly around caring for your dogs and how “one small dog / made me live when I didn’t want to live”. How have pets influenced you, not just in your writing, especially as co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry, but also as simply a human existing in this world?

RA: Thank you for asking about my dogs; I love to talk about them. My dogs saved me, and I mean that literally, as the poem says. I’ve struggled with depression all my life, and guess what is very good for managing depression? Being forced to take care of someone other than yourself. Dogs won’t let you sleep on that. They’ll be like, “Get up, girl, I need to eat.” 

The project of The Familiar Wild was to explore the unique connection that exists between poets and their dogs. My co-editor Rachel Mennies and I found that, for poets who belong to historically marginalized groups, dogs can make writing poetry about trauma and oppression bearable. Possible, even.

Now that I have a significant physical disability—systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)—my dependency on my dogs for living and writing has only intensified. My lupus is currently so active that I can’t be exposed to even minutes of sunlight without getting very sick, and the medications I’m on are austere and have introduced other disabling side effects. So my dogs keep me company and temper the suffering with their beauty and goodness and sweetness, even when I am too fatigued and sick to move from the couch. We really do take care of each other and keep each other alive.  

EA: Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about and can you share a snippet of it?

RA: My current favorite is “Mother Of [Paintbrushes]” because it is really an ode to how much I love and admire my mother and appreciate all that she’s taught me. I like to think the end captures the exact shape of love and lament I wanted to give language to:

my mother who pulled me from

nothingness into existence as simply as a brush

tows red across a canvas until it’s an acre of

bowing poppies, red as my lips drawing another

breath, red as a choir, I want to fill my pockets

with the color my mother made, to break the red

mountain and eat its red pulp, to pin its red wings

to my back and walk the red desert of my heart

that learned from my mother how to live.

EA: What are some of the biggest differences between Outside the Joy and your first collection Set to Music a Wildfire? Any similarities? Did you find any differences between putting together your debut collection vs. your sophomore one?

RA: I was surprised by how much harder it was to write a second collection. I had to let myself wander away from Set to Music a Wildfire quite a bit to find the voice for Outside the Joy. Many of the poems in my first book were about the Lebanese Civil War and written from my father’s point of view to create a sense of urgency and intimacy. Most of the poems in Outside the Joy are rooted in my point of view, and it required a level of vulnerability that made me deeply uncomfortable. It was necessary to stretch myself that way, but it didn’t come easily.

EA: Who are some of your biggest literary influences? What inspires you?

RA: Too many to count, so I’ll just mention the luminaries I’m spending most of my time reading now, especially as the Gaza genocide continues uninterrupted and my American tax dollars fund it. Every time I watch Western news, I’m reminded how much our words matter, and when wielded to protect colonial interests, they can dehumanize entire populations and manufacture consent for unthinkable cruelty. In my more hopeful moments, I remember words also have the power to counter harmful narratives and imagine liberated futures, as is the case with Hala Alyan, Zeina Hashem Beck, Fady Joudah, Muriel Leung, Danez Smith, Mahmoud Darwish, and Refaat Alareer.  

I love to learn something new in the process of writing, so research often inspires my work. Curiosity inspires me. The truth inspires me. 

EA: Do you have any other projects you’re working on or hope to in the future? 

RA: I’m working on a third poetry collection about disability and disfigurement, inspired by losing all of my hair to lupus. It’s been taking my work in a speculative and lyric direction I’m really excited about.

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Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.