POETICS OF UNCERTAINTY

KATE A poem I keep returning to in your book [Path of Totality] is “Urine Season.” It ends with the lines: “Some will say this is not a poem for them. But I say it’s a poem for anyone who ever expected anything.” “Urine Season” is about the loss of your child, and takes place in the hospital. It gutted me with its grief, but what brought actual tears to my eyes was its generosity, bringing the reader into the speaker’s suffering. There is this quality throughout the book, the speaker’s grief spilling out so that it encompasses everything, including the reader. I am not sure this is a question, only that I wanted you to know this before we talk about anything else.

NIINA Thank you for telling me that, and also for pointing to this poem in particular, which has felt like a keystone poem since I wrote it. It was difficult to work on this book, and when I started thinking of it as a book (itself a mental hurdle given the topic), I knew only one thing for certain: that I did not want there to be a resolution to the grief, as there is no resolution to the things that devastate us, and as there shouldn’t have to be.

The lack of resolution is a quality in that I admire too. Your raw material is a show with a