In our July issue, six scintillating poems by Ali Shapiro. Read on, for bursts.

1. When I read “If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have To Miss You So Much,” I think of it being read to an audience who cheers at every burn. What’s your process like? How did you put all of these pieces together?

I wrote that poem start to finish during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I’d spent most of the residency writing quiet, cozy nature poems in my quiet, cozy writing studio, which felt good, at first; it was certainly a welcome respite from what I’d been doing before the residency, which was boomeranging around New England in my station wagon, blasting country radio and burning bridges with various exes and accumulating speeding tickets.

But after a few weeks of quiet coziness, I started to get restless, impatient. I wanted to blast country radio, but that would’ve disturbed the other residents. I wanted to leave, but that would’ve been a waste of a residency. So being stuck in that quiet, cozy studio forced me to focus that restless, impatient energy into a poem instead of another angsty road trip. And I allowed myself to just jam those pieces together more recklessly than I usually do, because what I wanted to capture wasn’t a crafted, calculated feeling- it was that restless stuck-ness, the engine revving in neutral, the exhilarated-exhausted assertive-uncertain top-volume feeling of wanting very badly to simultaneously leave and stay.

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