Space for the Ghost to Speak Through: A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of the books Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books) and Novena (Pleiades Press) as well as the chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.

On January 17, 2025, The Interlochen Review editors Andi Erickson, Quinn De Vecchi, and Blondine Moree, sat down with Jacques to discuss his collections Novena and Brocken Spectre, as well as his forthcoming collection, which has the working title Future Past.

Andi Erickson: In Novena, there were two closely mirrored novenas. How did you feel that the form of the novena—a prayer that is usually a request or petition—changed the poem's intention and form? How did it change the book?

Jacques Rancourt: I grew up very Catholic, hence the drive to write a poem using the novena and petitioning a recast virgin in that role. Novena is a nine-day prayer. One would pray a rosary for nine days to the Virgin Mary, whose idea is to intercede on your behalf, whatever request you have for that purpose. It's supposed to be for something very big, something you really need help with. So, the way I conceived the sequence was I wanted it to be in nine sections for the nine days, and I wanted each section to have nine lines. The numerology is very important to the Catholic tradition. It was very important for me to write that poem.

I very much believe in writing a lot more than you need and then trimming down to the barest and purest parts. I wrote twenty-four sections of it—eighteen of those sections stood out to me enough that I saw it as a double novena. The trick then became how to integrate it into a manuscript. Originally, it was all in one push. It was a center section, and it had the double novena back-to-back. Ultimately, it felt overweighted to have this very long section in the middle, twenty or so pages.

I toyed with the idea of having three novenas on a page and having those dispersed throughout at six points in the book, which would have nine stanzas on the page, but that also felt too disjointed. So, it eventually became evident to me that I should keep the nine together, and that's how I spread them out between the second and third and third and fourth sections of the book.

AE: The opening poem of your book, Novena, “Hello, My Name Is Also Jacques Rancourt,” uses an adapted line from Jacques Rancourt's “Fil d’Horizon,” as well as other borrowed lines throughout. When weaving together your writing and another poet's, how do you find yourself drawn to certain lines or arrangements?

JR: The fun story behind that is, as the poem alludes to, my dad's name is Jacques Rancourt, my grandfather's name is Jacques Rancourt, and they're from the small town in Canada called Lac-Mégantic. It's a town of maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people, not that big. I quickly realized through Google that there was another poet who shared my name, Jacques Rancourt, a Parisian poet, but when I looked up his biography, he was also from Lac-Mégantic originally.

He was about my father's age, born a year or two beforehand. The likelihood that there's some blood relation is fairly high, that two Jacques Rancourts were born in the same hospital and within the five-year span. I was fascinated by that.

I took a translation class in college, I was translating poetry, and we had to have a major project at the end of that. And I took on Jacques Rancourt's poems, thinking, how cute would that be? Translating Jacques Rancourt. There's something about the rhythm of his sentences and the unusual imagery that he used that really spoke to me. I wanted to capture some of that—beyond the fascination of the name—correlation into my work. And that line that I take in particular is my own translation of one of his lines in that poem.

But [weaving] other poets' work into my own is something I have been interested in. There's a poem in Brocken Spectre, a poem that entwines Descartes' essay, “A Discourse on the Method,” about fire into my own words. I think there are maybe six excerpts from his essay that I attempted to seamlessly integrate into my own narrative of being on the Appalachian Trail.

I think you can charge your own writing to have someone else's writing be in a tango with what you write. And it creates a challenge, too—how do you rise to that occasion? How do you write in a register such that you can slip in six quotes from Descartes without, hopefully, a reader even knowing, if they'd read it aloud without seeing the italics.

AE: A lot of your transformative imagery in Novena deals with man and creature and the blurring of these two lines. One creature that kept coming back was Deerman. How did this cryptid become a vessel for your project?

JR: Deers are classically symbols of desire in mythology. And Novena, the book and the sequence, is very much an attempt to try to bridge the big schism of my life: growing up very Catholic and wanting to be a priest until I was about your age, and coming out as a queer person and living the life I live now. I wanted the sequence to be the love letter to myself at fifteen, to try to marry these two things together that seem very much at odds with one another.

With the Deerman, it represents that lurking desire that I knew—I couldn't articulate it yet, but it had been brimming inside me. And the figure in the poem is one that's a menace, he's an antagonist, he's something that the speaker is very much afraid of. [Deerman] seems to be in battle with this drag queen Virgin Mary at times. But ultimately, they're basically the same person. The drag queen Mary, the Deerman, they're mirror images of each other. And the speaker comes to terms with that by the final sections of the poem.

Digging into my own background, I grew up on the outskirts of Appalachia in Northern Maine. Hunting is a big culture there. My whole childhood was surrounded by dead animals. It was not uncommon to see someone have a dead deer just hanging from a spoke of the roof, always bloodletting, right? You just walk by this carcass as you try to get into the kitchen. Having this creature that has the head of a deer, but the body of a man, also fit with my own childhood experience of growing up around that kind of imagery.

Quinn De Vecchi: In Brocken Spectre and Novena, family is a fairly large part of your poetry. A lot of your poetry references your parents, your sister, and even goes to your cousins or your further relatives. Could you talk about the recurring themes of family in Novena, Brocken Spectre, and beyond?

JR: Having come from a very conservative place, my coming out signaled a bit of a departure for the family. It definitely led to a period of estrangement, and that's about the time I also started writing poetry. A lot of my early work is trying to grapple with that estrangement, feeling outside of that structure and that comfort. Trying to comfort this earlier, younger version of myself. Earlier poems in Novena, like “Black Horse,” for example, talk directly about that feeling of not being one of the family model, and trying to forge a life outside of that.

Brocken Spectre thinks about the lives lost from the HIV-AIDS crisis. So many of the narratives from that time are stories of men who lived alone, away from their families, moved to a big city like San Francisco, and tried to make their own life, and then ended up dying from this plague. You read all these narratives from that time, and I read a lot of them for research for the book, and it's a lot of these last-minute reconnections with family at the end of their lives, when suddenly you can kind of remove all the pretense of whatever reasons you were estranged for because this is the end. That was very powerful to read.

I had a cousin who died of suicide pretty early in my own life, and so that left a big impact. Thinking about, again, this severance from family, thinking about the loss of his life and how that impacted my larger family, was a big thrust in those poems.

Blondine Moree: How did you go about doing research for Brocken Spectre around the AIDS epidemic? Is anything in your collection based on personal accounts from your time in San Francisco?

JR: When you take on a topic like this, you would do a big injustice not to do your due research. My personal experience with the epidemic is how I grew up, my first account of queerness was when I saw the news of men dying from AIDS. Even when I went on to college, PrEP was still quite a ways away. There was still a lot of fear around sex, but obviously at that point, it was no longer a death sentence. They had developed drugs that would keep someone alive, but compromising one's health, for sure. Still, there was a lot of fear around it.

In terms of hard research, I read a lot of books and watched a lot of documentaries and talked to a lot of people who were first-hand witnesses, whether they were people who lost a loved one to HIV-AIDS, [or] they contracted HIV but lived and had survivor's guilt. And I read a lot of accounts. I read every poet I could that dealt with that subject matter and lived through it in a direct way. Tori Dent, Mark Doty, Reginald Shepherd, Thom Gunn werea few that were very important to me.

But the one book that was the most important to me, ironically, wasn't written by a gay man at all, but Sarah Schulman. She wrote a book called The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. And it's a brilliant, very short book about a lot of things, but all centered around the HIV-AIDS crisis. One aspect is talking about the literal gentrification that it left, neighborhoods being collapsed because a whole gay neighborhood would have 40-50% of its population die and leave behind these abandoned houses. And talking about the generational gap HIV/AIDS created, once we had a generation more or less get devastated and pass away from this. The next generation didn't have queer mentors. They were a brand new generation that had no one to guide them through this queer culture. Then the generation that follows them thus has almost no connection to the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the amnesia that comes from that.

She has this great quote in the book, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but something like, “You see this sixteen-year-old queer person walking down the streets and do they ever wonder why they don't see a sixty-year-old version of themselves?” That really haunted me, this idea that it's a brand new world in the sense that we don't have that same level of generational knowledge or experiences. And even the ones who do remain, who do exist, there's such an age gap that there's not that communication between the generations. It is important to do a lot of research when you're taking on other people's narratives. If you don't do it right, it's offensive, so I wanted to make sure I was doing it right.

QD: Could you talk about how the act of witnessing a “brocken spectre,” in a way, has divine connotations? How did this relate to your themes of religion in Brocken Spectre as a whole?

JR: I was in Hawaii when I saw it. As the poem mentions, I was on Haleakala volcano. And obviously Hawaii is a very moist place, so it’s very prime for that phenomenon, even though the first brocken spectres were seen in Europe. It was pretty awesome. It's like your own shadow is four or five times larger than yourself, cast in the sky. It didn't really present itself to me as a metaphor right away, though. I actually wrote the poem “In the Time of PrEP” during that trip, but without that moment. It wasn't for another year or two before I connected the two together. Obviously the word “spectre” is in the name of the phenomenon, but it literally haunted my imagination.

What metaphorically became clear was the way in which this projection of yourself is enlarged and it's almost as if some version of yourself that's not there has come to visit you. And that's how I started thinking about it in terms of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Had I been born twenty years earlier, I probably would be dead. This is almost like seeing this version of yourself through the mist that could have been you, and that maybe should have been you by some measure. But of course, ensconced by a rainbow—and how gay is that, right? The poem calls it “a queer saint.” It does feel almost like a biblical thing to see this, or at least through your imaginary lens to see this version of yourself that should have died and [you] encountered it just by the luck of being born when you were born.

Once it came in the poem, it later occurred to me, this is basically what the whole book was chasing, right? This idea of hunting down this shadowy version of oneself and the slippages of history, which is why I ultimately ended up calling the whole book Brocken Spectre after that phenomenon.

QD: In Brocken Spectre, you switch between a multitude of poetic structures. A lot of your poetry in this book follows specific forms, but some of your poems break structural form and utilize a great deal of white space, as in “The End Has Not Yet Passed over Us” and “White River: An Argument.” Could you talk about the space of absence in your poems and why you chose them for specific poems?

JR: As you referenced, this book uses a lot of caesuras. There's a lot of indentation, and that was not just because they look pretty, which they do. Part of the reason I was drawn to capture this specific project was that rift between generations and that rift between history and that rift between who you are and who you could have been or who you should have been and generational gaps. So I wanted the poems to almost be at odds with each other and to kind of explore those rifts between generations and potential and loss. We were just talking about “Love In the Time of PrEP” and that poem has staggered lines within each stanza and the poem is also very much about erosion of time, so I wanted to capture this sense of erosion in the visual form as well. Not all of the poems utilize caesuras as a device, but the ones that do, I wanted to have some of that charge in that white space, that space for the ghosts to speak through the poems.

AE: I know you've talked about how writing Novena was kind of like creating a mythology for the queer pastoral. Is there anything comparable for your most recent collection Brocken Spectre?

JR: Brocken Spectre I would say [I was] maybe less so creating a mythology from scratch so much as tapping into one that already existed. In writing this book about a real life plague, I reference a lot of the biblical plagues, such as Noah's flood, or in a poem like “Mt. Diablo,” which talks about the plague by fire. So much of the dialogue around HIV/AIDS was wrapped up in the Christian critique of homosexuality at the time and how this was God's punishment. I wanted to tap into that religious mythology, given that it is something so central to my own upbringing, and try to use it ironically, flip it on its head, reclaim it from the critique of queer culture that was used so frequently during the 80s and 90s rather than create my own mythology. In that case, I wanted to rewrite the script on how that mythology was used and weaponized against us.

This is the same with the Novena sequence. I obviously have a complicated relationship to religion. It's been twenty-five plus years since I've identified as a Catholic, and I still love its traditions in a big way. That imagery, those stories, that iconography, shaped me, and I don't want to use it flippantly. My hope is that the habit of drag queen Mary is not seen as a double middle finger to the church, so much as trying to marry this thing that meant a lot to me as a kid to who I am now.

QD: Most of your poetry in Brocken Spectre follow the speaker's internal thoughts and experiences. I was wondering if you could talk about the narrative interlude that happens in the beginning with “In Fátima.” What was the inspiration for having a third person numbered narrative?

JR: That was a fun one in the sense that after Novena, I was like, I would never write about the Virgin Mary ever again. I am done with that subject matter. And then that poem came to me and I was like, well, I guess I'm not quite done here. The story of Fátima was one that was really important to my mom. She felt very connected to that story of the three children. In Catholicism, there are various versions of Mary, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is this marriage between indigenous culture and European Catholicism, and Our Lady of Fátima. Each visitation of Mary, if one subscribes to that belief, has a very political point. These were all junctures at which the church was trying to colonize and ultimately reignite a lagging interest in the church.

As I did research, it was interesting to see how this was supposedly Mary’s warning to Europe about World War II if certain actions weren't taken. The only survivor of the three witnesses was this one woman–the other two supposed witnesses died very, very young. So I was thinking about it from her perspective and what it must be like if we were to imagine that they made up the story, [if] it was a shared dream between these kids and it got away from them, and she's the one left behind this with a secret. What would her life look like now if she lived to be an old person, what would it have been like to be the only one who knew? Or maybe to question whether what you thought you saw was what you saw. It was a fun experiment to try and imagine it from that perspective. It originally did not come out in the number sequence. That was a later edit, but I felt that having a straight traditional poetic structure, a narrative structure, made certain moments feel too glossed over. I wanted a way to bring those moments more to the forefront and have their own little chiseled-out moment. I wanted to highlight them, isolate them, and that's when the numbered sections came in.

BM: You end your poem “In The Castro,” “Market & out marching our candles/oh, but I came too late.” Do you have any fear that you may be romanticizing dark aspects of queer history in your literature?

JR: Absolutely. One of the purposes of that poem is to address that head on. The poems—and by extension, myself—have such a long-term fascination with this time period. There's part of me that's always wondered, Would you have been outwardly, openly queer if it was a lot harder to be so than it is right now? How much has the comfort of the 21st century cradled your queer experience? What would you have done differently? What would you have done if you were born in 1979 when to be out and gay meant that you could be dead by 25 years old? How would you have behaved? Would your fear keep you closeted? Would you be exactly the same person? These kinds of questions haunt me. Who would you be if you were tested by one of the most ruthless plagues in modern history? And perhaps there is a perverse romanticization that came out of that. Have you ever read Art Spiegelman's Maus?

BM: Yes, I love Maus.

JR: I teach it every year to my students. But the similar question gets asked, he's like, I know it's sick, but I wish I lived through the Holocaust. He almost doesn't feel Jewish enough because he didn't have that experience of whether he would survive or whether he would be proud of being Jewish if it meant his life. That's kind of the same question I'm hoping to be asking in this book. It's like, would I still be as proud to be who I am if it meant I would die for it? Would I die for it?

BM: Is queer history slowly being appropriated, fantasized, and forgotten in this increasingly corporate world?

JR: That's one of the things that I loved about Sarah Schulman's book, [that it] was published around the time of the big gay marriage thrust. If we track the queer experience of the late 20th century and start of the 21st century, we go from AIDS to a pretty sharp pivot to gay marriage, with about a decade between. A big political swing there was to go from re-branding the gay person as not one dying from a plague, brought about by his own hedonistic impulses, but one of, gay people, they're just like you. They too want a house in the suburbs and 2.3 kids and a golden retriever…trying to very much heteronormalize and whitewash the gay experience to make it digestible for a mass American culture, the corporate America you refer to.

That's when the point of erasure began to happen. Let's not associate the gay experience with the AIDS crisis. It’s pretty stunning, when you think about it, in a little over a decade, we go from the AIDS crisis to Modern Family, right? It's a pretty quick turnaround. So, yes, I do think there is that risk, and I do think it has happened to some degree. Even the few media that have come out to look back in certain ways, I feel have missed some of the important elements of it. I think the best literature of those years is Angels in America. I would argue [it’s] one of the great pieces of literature of the 20th century. It came right at the end of [the AIDS crisis]. That, to me, is the story we shouldn't forget.

I think there's been a big critique and a good critique that so much of queer literature ends in tragedy and that we need to rewrite the narrative so that we can focus on the gay joy and the gay normalcy. But I think what's important to remember, too, is that joy came out of tragedy. We learned to dance through the tears. You read these interviews of people who lived those times, and they were talking about going to two to three funerals a week. The joy that we experienced was hard-earned, and I think we're amiss to erase that aspect of it.

BM: I'm curious, since you brought up queer media that evokes the past and the AIDS crisis, how do you feel about Rent?

JR: I think it's important to remember when Rent came out, in 1996. The height of the crisis years were ‘87 to ‘94. There was still no hope for a cure, but there was hope for a medical intervention that would help us live through it. The fact that this became a Broadway show requires people who are not queer to see it to be successful because if it was only queer people watching “Rent,” it would be a failed show. There's just not enough of us; it requires a predominantly straight audience to absorb that. I think it was incredibly important, incredibly brave for the time. Is it a bit of a product of its time? Sure. It's aged by now. But I think it deserves a place in the Hall of Fame for what it did and the questions that it braved to ask.

QD: In Brocken Spectre, we see a lot of the earth and nature brought back into your poems. One poem specifically, “The Loons Prove That Even Before There Was a Word for Grief, It Existed as Song,” sort of spirals out of the previous things you've set up in Brocken Spectre and begins putting light on animals like birds, snakes, hornets, and the scenery of the pond water. I was wondering if you could talk about how nature and earth influence some of your poetry in Brocken Spectre?

JR: I spent a very formative part of my childhood on the Appalachian trail. My parents had a place that was a walking distance, four or five miles from the beginning of what's called the 100-Mile Wilderness, which is the last 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail, and considered the most difficult because there's no intervention of highways or roads or stations there.

It's just one wild sprawl. That was my childhood–you go outside in the middle of the night to take a piss and there's a deer running, darting away. You have to constantly be on the lookout for moose as you drive because their eyes won’t reflect the light, so you hear about people dying from moose accidents every year. That was the world in which I spent my formative years growing up in.

And we were on a pond. That poem in particular talks a lot about sound moving across water and seeing someone vaguely off from the other side of the pond moving through the past. These were very much the experiences I had growing up; these were the images and the world I grew up in. This one is an elegy for the cousin, and I think having given that final poem for him in that environment was important to me, a resting place of sorts, politically.

But Brocken Spectre was an interesting book to write in the sense that it's also a very urban book. It's very much about my time in San Francisco and the ghost of San Francisco and the forgotten or not forgotten places [where] all this queer history happened. So my struggle artistically was how do I write a book that has 50% poems set in Appalachia and 50% poems set in the Castro. The one poem that tries to marry those two is a poem called “Western Wall,” where there's a line in it, “There is no queer pastoral/for a reason.” The idea that we can't go back to these places. There's a reason why we pilgrimage to the cities, to find connection and community that doesn't exist where we come from. So, the forest, the world I grew up in, that lives large in my imagination and my poems, isn't one that is a home for me in the real world. Only on the page can these places be merged.

QD: I was wondering if you could compare the themes of nature in Brocken Spectre to those in your past collection, Novena.

JR: The poem that you mentioned here, “The Loons Prove…,” takes place in the same exact location that the last poem in Novena is set in. So, how does one rewrite the same image or the same place without tiring it or repeating oneself? In both poems, I wanted it to be a long poem. For “The Loon's Prove…,” I had just finished reading Milton's Paradise Lost, and there's something called the “Miltonic simile” in which it will be this very long, extended simile. Then we snap back to what the thing is, it's described, and that's something I wanted to do with “The Loons Prove…” For “No Miracle, No Act of God,” which is the last poem in Novena, my project was also to write a very long poem. My goal was to just have it sprawl and feel big, the way that these places feel big in my imagination. Perhaps the connecting point between the two books are those two poems having a similar project/landscape, but hopefully there's a very different feel to them, a different texture.

BM: I was wondering, in a world looking further forward, how did you come about reflecting on queer history?

JR: The first poets I loved were poets of the AIDS crisis–Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, etc. And ultimately, my interest in poetry, my coming out, happened simultaneously. It was reading Mark Doty in particular that convinced me, for someone who grew up with absolutely no queer mentorship at all or even knowing a single gay person, that it was possible to love someone in a queer relationship, more than just the desire to have sex with them. Reading those poems about how Doty cared for his dying partner, in his books Turtle, swan; My Alexandria; Atlantis; and then even a little bit of Sweet Machine, tracing that narrative through those four books was basically what convinced me that love was possible between two men, and convinced me to come out.

From there, most of what I read for the next few years [was by] writers of the crisis years. It had such a profound impact on me as an artist, I think, I very much tie my development and emergence as a poet to that crisis. I think that's probably what led me to want to write about it in my own way, thinking about that in-between generation, and what it means to us now, with this vantage point, post-gay marriage, what reverberations still exist from that time. The inquiry of Brocken Spectre is thinking about what elements of that time still live on with us, the bad and the good.

AE: How do you think the cultural or regional languages you grew up with shape how you write and how writing comes to you?

JR: My dad's first language is French, he's from Quebec. He learned English in his middle school years. My grandmother never spoke English. And my mom's from Boston, where they have a very colorful palette of words they use. That was my household, to have those two linguistic influences on the words I heard. And Maine has a lot of colorful idioms and language that I think are charming to people who are not from that area, but very normalized for those who do. Perhaps, though, the most impactful element of my own use of language is my dyslexia.

A lot of my poems come out of lines I've misread from other people's work. I'll be reading something and the words, the letters, will swap in my brain, and it will create something that’s totally different in my head, that’s way more interesting than what's actually on the page. I'll write that down and that might become a poem opening. There's a poem in Novena called “Black Horse,” which has a line about mouth-colored paint. And that was a misread of another line I had read.

In my journal, if I flip through the pages, almost every page in my writing journal will have quoted lines, a misread line from Robert Hass, or a misread line from Jorie Graham, or whatnot. I keep track of these things so that later when I'm looking for a seed to start a poem or looking for a way to edit a poem, sometimes these lines will come back in. Or even reading my own work, as I edit and revise, I'll misread my own lines or I'll swap the placement of two words, and that will create something a little bit more interesting or more tension that will end up in the final draft.

BM: We heard a few poems from your upcoming collection at your reading the other night and I was wondering how your lens on queerness is shaping the manuscript. What themes in general are you trying to approach with this next collection?

JR: This next book, its current title is Future Past, is about anticipatory grief. Grieving already now for things that have yet to be gone. One lens of that might be climate change; another lens is this book was very mostly written towards the end of a ten-year relationship, at the point when you realize it's not over yet, but it's going to be at some point. The end is in sight and even if it's not fully severed yet, you're starting to see the strings unravel.

Mourning now what hasn't been lost yet, and how it impacts queerness, or how queerness impacts it. One of the things the poems ask is, we fought for gay marriage, but did we not also fight for gay divorce? I think we idealized the gay married couple. So many of my friends who are married, we felt this pressure to be upstanding models for the world because we [fought] so hard for this. If we admit defeat in our relationships, does that prove to some wider culture, cultural significance that this wasn't for us?

Other themes—that are very much queer things that now are becoming not so queer, like now the rest of the culture is starting to embrace, but they're always going to be queer because it's still a deviant from the norm, things like non-monogamy, polyamory, open relationships—are threaded throughout the book, as well. Lastly, this kind of book asks a lot of questions about temporality with love. Can you be falling in love just a little bit with a one night stand? Is there some signature left behind from this connection with someone that you have so much potential, [who] in a different world, in a different life, could have been someone very important to you, but you're just ships at night passing by? I think of all those questions as queer threads.

AE: Is there anything new or surprising that you found while you were writing this new collection, like any poems that you didn't expect were going to happen, but then figured it out and they made it in?

JR: Hopefully every book we're charting new territory while also being true to who we are. Aesthetically, one thing I've noticed is I'm writing a lot more short poems. I have a number of poems that are less than half a page long in this collection. Historically, my poems have always pushed the page mark, I think because I've been so interested in narrative and narrative just takes more time to develop and to string along. This book I would describe much more in the lyric mode–more feeling, less story. So that was a surprise to me in a way that I was excited to explore.

I've had two teachers tell me that the longer my poems are the better they tend to be, that writing short poems was not a strength of mine. It's been over a decade since I've gotten that feedback. It's always been an anxiety of mine, my ability to write a short poem. So it's been fun to push that anxiety aside to dive into a short aesthetic. Vulnerability is something that I've always been interested in. In all three of my books, I've tried to put myself out there and be as vulnerable and honest on the page as I can. But this book is definitely the most vulnerable of the three, [exploring] things I might have been shy to write about in my other two books. I am very much in the forefront of this collection.

BM: How has the process of finding a title been for your upcoming collection?

Is it similar to your previous processes with titling your poetry? And how would you describe your titling process in general?

JR: This has been a journey for this one. I've been working on this book for eight years, and the title for most of that time has been Future Past Tense. It's a grammatical tense that's rarely used, but it really spoke to me in this idea that what is about to end is still ahead of us. And we're pre-eulogized, even grammatically, we can eulogize what's yet to have transpired. I was very smug with that title. But when I learned that another collection titled Future Tense was slated to be published, I decided to scrap it and go back to drawing boards.

For a while, my backup title has been Mayfly, which is thinking about the temporality of the life of a mayfly. They basically lived to mate, and that's about it, so the idea that our short-lived connection is still of value. But the title itself didn't quite sit with me the right way, perhaps because it's so straightforward. One rule I had for myself, though, was whatever title it was, it was going to be something people did not have to look up on Wikipedia to know what it was. Novena, no one knows what that is unless you're raised Catholic. Brocken Spectre, unless they read the epigraph, people aren’t often familiar with this phenomenon. It's not that common. So I wanted something that people just know what it is. At least Mayfly accomplishes that. Ultimately, I got feedback from a friend who suggested that I simply drop the word “tense” from Future Past Tense, and just call it Future Past. I think that's currently what I'm going with. It is, sadly for me, the title of a Duran Duran album. So I have that to compete with on Google, I suppose. But that's the working title for now.

Brocken Spectre, once I came across the image of it for the poem, “Love in Time of PrEP,” it had to be the title. My ex actually was the one who pointed it out to me, but once that was pointed out, the idea of it was so important to my project that I couldn't even imagine a different title for it.

Novena actually for the longest time had a different title, which was Hand that Bears No Mercy. It was very divisive with my readers. Half of them thought it was very appropriate for the book and effective and half of them hated it. I adapted it from a line in the Bible, from the Book of Isaiah. I loved it. It was a title for maybe three of the five years I worked on the book, but it just had too many divided opinions. I didn't want to take the risk of alienating a potential reader. Once I made the move to put Novena as these split sections that took up 18 out of the 56 pages, which is a fairly big percentage, I was like, it's already so prominent, it feels like such a thrust of the book, I think it's appropriate for the title as well.

So that's been my project with titles. Some poem titles have been challenging for me in the sense that I don't really think a poem is done until I come to a title, and I usually don't come to a title until the poem is done. So it's kind of a cyclical thing. It's usually one of the last things to get changed about a poem. I usually have a placeholder title for most of my work. Actually, when Brittany [Cavallaro] and I were in grad school together, we met once a week to write at this cafe called Ground Zero, and she was always so good at plucking my titles. She’d be like, “Oh, I don't like this title. I think this line is your title. I think you should cut this line from the poem and make it your title.” She probably did that to maybe twenty of my poems. Taking some of her vision for titles has shaped my own.

In Brocken Spectre, I was very interested in long titles. This book, much less so. Where Novena has one word titles, Brocken Spectre has phrases for titles. This new book, I'm more on three to five word titles. But one of my traits about putting a book together is I don't like the table of contents to look uneven. If I have one title that’s a sentence long or a phrase long and all the other titles are one word, it feels awkward in the table of contents. So I want my table of contents to fit, almost like the shape of a poem should feel somewhat consistent with its line length.