stephanie roberts
Biography
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, jurors said of the collection, “[r]oberts speaks with clarity and certainty, in a firm and haunting voice. This is an author clearly driven by a need to articulate what is missed.” Her work has been widely featured and anthologized in POETRY, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Crannóg Magazine, Atlanta Review, The League of Canadian Poets, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. A 2021 Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient, her work also won first place in The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press). Born in Panama, she grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and has lived most of her life in Quebec. www.oceansandfire.com IG @ringtales
Poetics Statement
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion
The act of creating is the act wherein I consciously engage the uncertain desires of my mind. The writer/psychologist, Adam Phillips, said in the Paris Review that we learn what we desire through conversation. Taking some liberty with his thesis in that he means a literal conversation with a literal someone, but for me in writing the mysteries of my inner world are illuminated much like the mechanics of dreaming. I strive to balance the many conflicting elements of a poem and what I think to be true. My poetic both implores and declares: Let us understand
In the past, I have felt grossly uncomfortable asked about my writing practice. With resignation I would think, the most honest answer is chaos. But, while I am incapable of writing, 9-5 Monday thru Friday, there is something one might graciously call methodology. Zadie Smith in speaking of novelists offers two breeds which she termed the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager. In my poetics, whether small, a poem, or large, a collection, I am a Macro Planner. I collect triggers: quotes, tweets, philosophies, and the daily epiphany, somewhat haphazardly in journals, notebooks, post-its, and receipts. Using those Lego bricks of inspiration, I begin the constructions of my curiosities.
Out of sheer unbridled curiosity, I write all the time, and when I am working I know no pain. I experience neither time nor hunger. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
ENTANGLEMENT
There is another world, in this one. ~ Octavio Paz
somewhere off the coast of orange county california,
the grandest animal that has ever lived swims tangled
in a fishing line.
in a parallel universe, khalila, a blue whale, swallows krill
without joy. something in her whispers mississippi, feeds
disenchantment with the ocean and hostility to her mate.
her moby wears crown and envy of all the pods in the low seas.
alarmed by the baseless nature of this disquiet,
unsure of her options, she wanes in despondent drift.
somewhere, an emotionally distant father enjoys
a crab-salad sandwich. he does not wear a wife-beater;
he's armoured in a crisp oxford—white with blue lines.
in ottawa, on the fourth floor, near the rear atrium
of the canadian museum of nature, i sit
in the chamber of a blue whale's heart, weeping.
a distress call sounds on repeat tugging bone tearing me apart;
maybe it's khalila or a nameless whale of our own making;
maybe it's the crab man's son.
somewhere in front a vintage smith corona, my love knits
a poem on the tinkerings of spiders and the freedom of flight.
in him, the word clutch nestles painfully, a clogged artery.
we spin the same careless speed in opposite directions;
we tunnelled ambivalent barriers that should've kept us apart;
we are leashed in our longing by a mortgage without end.
first published in Atlanta Review
PEOPLE BELIEVING BADLY
those of us who’ve seen miracles know how to ask.
if you've asked, do you love me, i almost certainly
don't love you. and if,
in a flu-ish bout of poor judgement,
i've asked likewise then,
like death and taxes, by now you've retired,
with fire, to your silent
battle station. be that as it is.
we agree without asking to say nothing about all this strident
confused unbelief – keeping our conversations
to the whether [sic] and that guy who can swallow
a rubik's cube through a mustard-coloured disaster of teeth
solving the puzzle of it (via revolting convolutions in gut)
before regurgitation. i bet that guy believes in i love you.
i bet that guy asks for anything he wants.
first published in Blue Lyra Review, featured as a Verse Daily: Web Weekly,
reprinted and translated into Farsi for, Persian Sugar in English Tea Volume III,
The Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Love Poems
BLACK CONVERSATION
from the noose of the poem
the dead woman points off page
follow her finger to the blue eyes
of the poet
who caps and uncaps
a black fountain pen.
he looks at her finger, wipes his eyes,
scrolls down, not I.
he is sympathetic.
although the purple tongue,
tied shut in its duchess, has a lot it could
say, it wouldn't be saying anything
that hasn't been said before.
her arm maintains indication.
the poet unscrews his pen, marks
the sky—azure, the river—tempestuous,
the bystanders, the good-ole-days,
the rape, the neck, the feet (going
nowhere), the bystanders, the show
not tell.
plus ça change ...
turn of the century postcard,
the body camera, the hoodie, the bystanders,
the wife beside you, the stanza,
the assonance, the brains-
patterned dashboard, the bystanders,
the line
breaks.
his montblanc outlines
her obsidian necklace in mangled AAVE.
he screws his pen back together
the pushcart is coming.
first published in Shenandoah