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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rhoni Blankenhorn, whose debut poesy collection, Rooms for Dead and the Not Yet, is retired contiguous from Trio House Press. Winner of the 2024 Trio Award, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet explores nonlinear landscapes of grief, desire, and identity. The postulation revolves astir emotion and nonaccomplishment (parents, family, friends, childhood, pets, the environment) portion confronting the inescapable beingness of longing. Even arsenic our talker butters toast, pets dogs, drives crossed bridges, kisses lovers, admires art, and holds hands with friends, she observes with unflinching perception, uncanny imagination, and a bizarre consciousness of humor. Observing shadiness connected a achromatic ceramic partition turns elegiac. Desert hikes grow into the surreal. Despair coexists with ghosts eating candy, and unspoken information lives alongside linguistic comedy. Replete with explorations of sexuality and multicultural selfhood, these poems clasp analyzable emotions arsenic an enactment of resilience. Jessica Q. Stark writes, “Rhoni Blankenhorn’s Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet exposes what it feels similar to beryllium some live and haunted by one’s aliveness astatine this peculiar infinitesimal successful time.” Rhoni Blankenhorn is simply a Filipina American writer. Her poems person been featured successful Narrative, the Slowdown, the Margins, Adroit, and elsewhere. She is simply a recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Breadloaf, Saltonstall, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
1. How agelong did it instrumentality you to constitute Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet?
My full beingness is the cliché but existent answer. The earliest poem that made it into the collection, “Before the Butcher Knife,” is from 2019. It’s the poem that encouraged maine to dedicate much clip and volition to poetry.
2. What was the astir challenging happening astir penning the book?
Feeling similar immoderate poem was finished was highly challenging. I edit vigorously. There are immoderate poems I cognize I could autumn close backmost into reworking, apt to their detriment. I had to larn however to spot the poems and the sparks they emerged from, arsenic good arsenic the idiosyncratic I was erstwhile I wrote the poems. What I constitute contiguous is antithetic from what I was penning a twelvemonth agone due to the fact that who I americium contiguous and my experiences are antithetic from a twelvemonth ago, and I learned that it’s good for poems from antithetic aesthetic eras and experiments to coexist successful the book.
3. Where, when, and however often bash you write?
I instrumentality notes, which aren’t poems, but which tin beryllium the seeds of poems. Notes/fragments assistance maine relive moments that transportation seeds, sparks, moments of import, humor, and beauty. Most of what I constitute down is visual, oregon thing that really happened—the mode a shadiness flickers crossed jacaranda petals connected the sidewalk, an overheard spot of speech I find hilarious, the mode a canine looked astatine me. When I beryllium down to constitute a poem, reliving these circumstantial moments and trying to recognize wherefore I was funny successful them helps maine entree memories and emotions. I don’t cognize wherever a poem volition extremity erstwhile I commencement it.
4. What are you speechmaking close now?
The Original Daughter (Doubleday, 2025) by Jemima Wei, The Powers of Horror: An Essay connected Abbjection (Columbia University Press, 1982) by Julia Kristeva, We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025) by Patrycja Humienik, and Covert Joy: Selected Stories (New Directions, 2025) by Clarice Lispector and translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson.
5. Which author, successful your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Whenever I conscionable a writer who hasn’t work Paisley Rekdal, I importune they constitute down her sanction for aboriginal reference.
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems successful this collection?
I laid my manuscript retired connected truthful galore floors, beds, and walls arsenic I was moving connected the order. Walls worked best, due to the fact that I could spot each the poems astatine once. I started with ninety-ish poems I think, and I coded them each with overarching themes, recurring characters, symbols, and metaphors, to uncover patterns I mightiness person missed. I learned that dogs were everywhere, truthful I leaned into that. I decided to framework the publication with sampled artwork from my person Ginny Benson, and my poems astir grieving her. The last signifier began taking spot erstwhile I started paying attraction to idiosyncratic poems again versus the overarching order, and what the poems needed to travel earlier oregon aft successful bid for their layers to uncover themselves. The poems ended up showing maine what bid they needed to beryllium in.
7. What is 1 happening that your cause oregon exertion told you during the process of publishing this publication that stuck with you?
Whenever I was feeling doubtful oregon insecure, Natasha Kane and Kris Bigalk would punctual maine that Jessica Q. Stark chose this book, and that they believed successful the collection. Their enactment ever helped maine refocus.
8. If you could spell backmost successful clip and speech to the earlier you, earlier you started Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, what would you say?
Write arsenic overmuch arsenic possible, don’t overthink it, marque mistakes, spot the work.
9. Outside of writing, what different forms of enactment were indispensable to the instauration of Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet?
My person Ginny Benson was a multimedia creator who passed away. Often, Ginny’s enactment manipulates VHS tapes into abstract visuals and music. How does remembering, and re-remembering radical and moments alteration the archetypal memory? I incorporated samples of Ginny’s enactment into the publication successful 2 sections—one towards the beginning, and 1 towards the end—to relation arsenic portals, to invitation Ginny and each my ghosts into the book. Ginny and I had an creation teacher successful undergrad, Gary Burnley, who loved the Bruce Nauman artwork “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” I anticipation this postulation helps radical find their ain ways to commune with their loved ones.
10. What’s the champion portion of penning proposal you’ve ever heard?
Refrains that echo successful my mind: Keep each your notes and drafts. What does the poem want? How is clip functioning successful the poem? Read more. Read enactment that was written earlier you were born.
