Yes Yes Books, 2020

Kelly Grace Thomas’s poem “There is no metaphor for my mouth” appeared in the Fall/Winter 2016 issue of [PANK] Magazine. Her debut collection, Boat Burned, was released by YesYes Books on January 7, 2020. Julia Klochinsky, author of two forthcoming collections, Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020) and 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2021), interviews her press mate Kelly Grace Thomas, to discuss the silence around women’s bodies, her relationships to Boat, and the use of metaphor in her poetry. 

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Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Boat Burned is a remarkable collection of relation, exploring what it means to be a daughter, sister, wife, and women within one’s own boat-body. I wonder if we can begin by talking about some of the relationships that guide this book. Could you help navigate us through the uncharted waters of these relationships, from familial trauma to romantic love to self-acceptance?  

Kelly Grace Thomas: Relationships are a mirror: they reflect your brightest shine and your deepest shame. This book started through an urgency to understand and eventually heal the relationship I have with myself. 

I have always had a complicated relationship with my body. From eating disorders to body dysmorphia, I felt the pressure to look and perform certain ways as a woman. However, when I really examined these expectations, and where they came from I realized they more than billboards and body types. They came from my parent’s divorce, my great grandmother’s criticism, and the abusive relationship I found myself in, at the young age of 18. The ways I have been taught to woman literally made me sick.

Throughout writing this book I started asking why I needed to uncover the root cause. I started examining all the relationships in my life, but most importantly my relationship with my body.

At first, talking directly to these parts of myself was too painful, I didn’t know how. There was so much sadness and anger, so I reached my metaphor to help me navigate these waters. To look at the body as something separate from me, to try and heal and repair. When you heal yourself, you heal others, especially your relationship with them. I don’t think I could even truly love before writing these poems. Boat Burned helped give me the strength to identify false beliefs, burn them down and build something new. 

JKD: So your own relationship to poetry is therapeutic and cathartic, yes? Is this what most often brings you to the page, the desire to heal, or are there other motivations for this book or your newer work?  

KGT: I come to the page to break the silence. Of course, there is always the hope that healing will occur but more than anything I think I need to talk about what’s hurting.  Poetry offers companionship and comfort that most other things do not, it takes you into a room of your own and holds your hand until what needs to pass passes. Or processes. 

Most of my life, every experience I’ve had has an aftertaste of loneliness, even during the happiest times, surrounded by so many friends and family, there is still this feeling of isolation. The only way to fight it is through connection: to others, to myself, to nature. Poetry gifts me that, it builds a bridge. 

Women’s bodies are a paradox of pleasure and punishment. Women are lusted after for their curves, breasts, even compassion; but when it comes to anything from menstruation to miscarriage there is this echoing silence, often cloaked shame. This past summer, I was granted a fellowship for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, while there I was sitting with a group of women writers this topic came up. I asked them how they learned about their bodies. 

Silence. 

Not one of them could point to someone who had tried to teach them how to know their body or more importantly how to love their body. 

This past year my husband and I have been dealing with infertility issues. I have never experienced something so painful in my life. To try and process I looked into counseling and support groups, but there isn’t much out there. Yet another issue about a woman’s body that is seldom discussed. 

Poetry works against the silence, to grant permission, offers companionship, and talk about all these hard and lonely things: my father leaving, my family’s bankruptcy and foreclosures, another negative pregnancy test. I make a deal with myself:  get the grief out, write the poem, put it into the world. Poetry helps me be brave. It is the easiest way for me to approach my darkness and my joy. 

JKD: Why poetry? What does poetry hold for you that other genres do not? 

KGT: A dear friend of mine and founder of Get Lit-Words Ignite, Diane Luby Lane always quotes Walt Whitman, “how quick the sun-rise would kill me / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.” Everything breaks my heart, from the wildflowers on the freeway to how a glass of Cabernet looks like crushed velvet in the sun. I feel it all so much. Poetry allows me to send the sun-rise or sadness out of me without all the rules and restrictions of other genres. 

Poems grant permission to play with the wildness of language. To chisel a complicated emotion into a  haunting image, to reach for metaphor and sketch the different shades and shapes of the self. I love the idea that you don’t need to understand a poem, you just need to feel it. I have always been drawn to the inventiveness of language, to build a vessel for a universal ache. Poetry allows me an openness to experiment in a way that other forms don’t, to connect fast and deep.

When I began writing Boat Burned, I had spent 35 years not talking about what needed to be talked about. Then suddenly through a single metaphor: woman as boat,  I was able to sit close enough to start the conversation, to not approach the hurt head-on, as one would in nonfiction, or dialogue but find another door to walk through. Poetry has built so many hallways and houses for me. 

JKD: Why did you land on boat? (Pun very much intended.) In your book, boat seems to be a metaphor for so many things, the woman’s body, yes, but also unforeseen physical and emotional violence, the family unit rocking on unsteady waters, and so much more. And to that end, if woman metamorphoses into boat, what does that make the water, which seems as central to the world of Boat Burned as the boats traversing its waves? 

KGT: My first word was boat, I had completely forgotten about this until my mother reminded me in a conversation about my book.  Boats have always been a huge part of my family, the one thing that brought us together, and also a way of saying goodbye. 

When I was young my parents separated and my father moved in with his girlfriend. While my mom and dad were no longer together, it was still important that we all spend time as a family. We would spend Tuesday and Thursday night together and all day Sunday with my mother, sister, and I. We spent almost every Sunday on the water. Once we were far enough out, my dad would turn off the engine. It was so peaceful, the wind vibrating in the sail, the water kissing the bow, my feet over the side dipped into the salt water, it felt like nothing could touch us. On the boat, we were together again, away from complications of failed relationships, weekly schedules. 

A few years later my dad’s business went bankrupt. He lost everything. The bank foreclosed his house and he decided to relocate and rebuild his life in his home state of Florida, while we stayed in New Jersey. The boat was all he had left, so to say goodbye we spent a month sailing from New Jersey to Florida. Many of the poems in Boat Burned center around this experience. In this way, our boat felt like the salve and the wound. While for that month of adventure we were together again, there was a countdown looming to when I had to say goodbye to my father. 

For me, boats represent a women’s body, but also the setting where my family came together and broke apart. They represent the heaviness of marriage and the anchor of family, both steady and sinking. There were days we had to outrun storms, a night where we almost sunk in the middle of the dark Atlantic, times where I saw the possibility of us. At the same time, there was always a feeling we were looking at the end,  the sun would set, the wind would die, and I knew. I have a line in a poem that says, “a sailboat is the slowest goodbye.” For me, boats are both distance and longing. 

Boats are also extremely gendered. For centuries women were not allowed on boats, yet boats were considered shes. You can find a number of disgusting quotes comparing women to ships and how both need a man to control them. 

But it is not about control. Water will always be stronger than boat. Stronger than gender. It is the hands that hold us, the mother than covers us, the power and grace, that allows us. In the book water acts as a reminder, to look at energy over object. Women have been taught to deny their power for so long. The role of water is both a comfort and a reminder of the force of feminity when women allow themselves access to their own strength. This also serves as a reminder to myself. The manuscript ends, “they cannot sink us, if we name ourselves sea.” 

JKD: Who are the women, writers and not, who influence you most? Maybe you could tell us a bit the way their work, their influence, seeps into yours. 

My mother, without contest, has been the biggest influence in my life. She has always taught me so much about grace, about how to stay steadfast and grateful even in the roughest seas. My mother has passed down her legacy of kindness and patience. She taught me the importance of laughter and making the best out of anything. While she is the happiest woman I’ve ever met, growing up I could still feel her sadness. Her mother’s sadness. Her mother’s sadness. All this hurt women carry, but seldom talk about. The loneliness of that silence was a huge influence on this book. 

In terms of women writers who influence me, Patricia Smith and her book, Blood Dazzler has got to be my number one influence. That book broke language wide open for me. Showed me how to straightjacket a stanza through the teeth of precise verbs and the corset of form. 

I’m a self-taught poet. Everything I know I learned from reading and reading so many amazing poets. Reading Blood Dazzler felt like getting an MFA. Patricia’s work taught me that it is how you open the door of a poem, that really gives it its own legs. You must find a new way to introduce the same love and wounds we all share, once you mine the language that makes someone say, I’ve never heard that before. Patricia’s work taught me about relentless revision. I was determined to do everything I could to have a poem that fenced electricity the same way she did. 

There are also a number of contemporary female and non-binary poets who I go to for inspiration. Shira Erlichman, Rachel McKibbens, Marty McConnel, Tiana Clark, Paige Lewis, and so many more make me astound me with their lyric and innovation. Their work makes the alphabet new. The ability to create surprise in their work keeps me coming back. There are so many talented women and non-binary writers out that the change the way I look at poetry, and what it can do, daily. They are my  permission granters, their works whispers, “Of course you can.” 

JKD: What I admire so much about your writing is your way with metaphor, the way it begins as a governing principle of your poetry and then grows beyond comparison into a way of knowing, or not knowing perhaps. In your poem, “THERE IS NO METAPHOR FOR MY MOUTH” you take us through comparison by way of negation, showing us what the mouth is by cataloging what it isn’t, ultimately arriving at knowing, “And yes, I know something / of the night, / half-eaten and thick.” Could you tell us a bit about how this poem came to be? How do you use this very particular kind of negative metaphor to arrive at knowledge? 

KGT: Confession: I am metaphor obsessed if you couldn’t already tell. I’m drawn to their electricity and world-building power. You put two things together in a new association and all of sudden you have a new gravity,  a new emotional history or life story. For metaphor is a way to personalize the work without being too heavy with first-person perspective. 

“There is No Metaphor for My Mouth” was published in 2016 in [PANK]. I was reading “Insert Boy” by Danez Smith and read Smith’s poem “I’ll Spare You Another Poem about my Mouth.” I realized I had so few poems about my mouth. 

I use metaphor as a way to uncomplicate my relationship to my body. To other in an effort to understand, to address. Many of the metaphors in my work were created to grapple with guilt and shame. However, when thinking about the parts of my body, I didn’t feel the same about my mouth. The mouth felt like power. It is how I express my sexuality, how I use my voice. It felt strong. I thought about how in the past my voice had been threatened, but I’ve never felt embarrassed about speaking my mind. 

This poem is written with my first boyfriend in mind. I dated him for too many years, without knowing what a healthy relationship looked like, eventually, I learned that I was definitely not in one. I think this piece was born out of a place to take back the strength and power. To show this part of my body will always remain strong. The poem is written as a negation to address all the ways he might argue for my weakness, to show ultimately there is power in saying no repeatedly, in naming yourself instead of what someone else calls you. 

JKD: Now that Boat Burned is out in the world, what is next for you? Are you at work on a next manuscript or projects in other genres? What can we expect next from Kelly Grace Thomas, because I know I am already anxious for more! 

KGT: That is so sweet. Thanks, Julia. For me, the next thing is always beyond terrifying and exciting for me. It’s that moment where anything and everything is possible, but I always wonder if I’ll ever write anything “good” again. Whatever “good” means.  I wonder if all artists are as neurotic as I am. Haha. I blame growing up in Jersey, but I also know that it is neurosis that drives me. 

Outside of poetry, I am working on two projects. The first is a screenplay with my sister, Kat Thomas. We like to write romantic comedies with an emphasis on comedy. There is such reward in making people laugh. And it counterbalances my poems, which are usually soaked in sadness. I will be spending much of my winter vacation working with her to break story and develop characters. My sister and I have written together before, we wrote a romantic comedy about a pyramid scheme titled Magic Little Pills that won Best Feature in the Portland Comedy Film Festival. 

I am also currently working on a dystopian YA thriller called Only 10,001. My husband, Omid, has it has been reading it and giving me amazing feedback on conflict and characterization. I’m about halfway through but have taken a long three hour hiatus because of moving, getting married, working on my poetry collection. I’m hoping to finish my first draft of my novel in the new year. 

As for poetry, I am currently working on my second collection. I have about 50 first, second and third drafts. However, it is a collection that is deeply personal, even more so than Boat Burned, and that makes it a little more difficult to see its future. 

Over the past 12 months, my husband and I have been trying to build a family. However, after a year of no success and more invasive tests than I would wish on anyone, the doctors have identified some fertility issues.

Each month is a disappointment, it cracks me open, reminds me how fragile I feel, and how badly I want to be a mother. It’s tearing me up; writing helps. 

The stigma in society around fertility makes it even worse. From the blame culture, to the silence, to the lack of knowledge about women’s bodies. We know so little and it infuriates me. While I’m nervous to publish poems around fertility struggles in fear of writing a self-fulfilling prophecy, I also think that I owe myself to break the silence and stand with women who are going through the same silent and heavy heartbreak. 

One a lighter note. I am also working on a chapbook of love poems about my husband Omid. Patricia Smith has a wonderful list of overused words in love poems. I’m writing and trying to avoid these words when I can. It’s a great challenge. 

I have also been planning lots of readings in California and across the country to celebrate the launch of Boat Burned. I hope people will visit my website to see where I’m reading next. Excited to meet new friends and chat about poetry. 

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KELLY GRACE THOMAS is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, will release with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Nashville Review, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Director of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. Kelly is a three-time poetry slam championship coach and the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot), currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly has received fellowships from Tin House Winter Workshop, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers. Kelly and her sister, Kat Thomas, won Best Feature Length Screenplay at the Portland Comedy Film Festival for their romantic comedy, Magic Little Pills. Kelly lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Omid, and is currently working on her debut novel, a YA thriller, titled Only 10.001. www.kellygracethomas.com 

JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon is currently back east, working towards a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust, with a special focus on atrocity in former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, now available from Kent State University Press or other book retailers. Purchase her chapbook, The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014), before it goes out of print in 2020. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in March 2020. Look out for her newest collection, 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. You can find her recent poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband. She edits Construction and occasionally writes Other women don’t tell you, a blog about motherhood.