Christian J. Collier
Greater Ghost
Four Way Books
If only you could’ve felt the tremor, the stars unknit
from my gut.
If only you hadn’t disappeared,
I would tell you what I have told no one.
I swallowed all I could of you that day,
every bit I could keep down.
—from “Ghost [Talisman]”
How it began: In 2019 I finally abandoned a manuscript I’d been working on for years because it just wasn’t coming together in the way I wanted it to. I spent a week at the Frost Place working with Tyree Daye, and I wrote every day. The poems that emerged were doing things that felt different and interesting, and they brought me into the work in ways I’d not allowed or desired before. When I got home and looked at what I’d made, it felt like the path those poems revealed to me was the one I needed to spend time exploring. Not long after, I got the idea to interrogate ghosts. It occurred to me that all of us live with any number of ghosts; we are always haunted by something. That gave me a lot of terrain to roam, and in the process of writing into that theme, I found myself creating what became Greater Ghost.
Inspiration: Visual artist Mark Bradford has been a huge inspiration. Watching him work and observing the thinking that informs many of his pieces cracked my head open in the best possible way. The idea hit me that if I applied the same lens he used to text, what would happen? That resulted in a range of permissions that completely changed the way I approach writing and revision.
Music was also inspirational. Minus the Bear, Portishead, Blind Willie Johnson, and more are in the collection, and when I was arranging the manuscript I toggled back and forth between songs by Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, formerly Christian Scott, and Mingus Plays Piano, by Charles Mingus, to help capture and sustain the collection’s tone.
Influences: Tyree Daye, Vievee Francis, Airea D. Matthews, and Eduardo C. Corral are four poets who’ve radically changed the way I see poetry as well as my place in it. I had the good fortune of studying with Tyree, Vievee, and Airea in workshop settings, and each gave me several permissions, for instance: Tyree gave me permission to embrace the more surreal aspects of my writing and to not shy away from the music of my language; Vievee encouraged me to work toward rarifying my voice and the worlds I build in my work; and Airea gave me the encouragement to be okay with being misunderstood. Eduardo was someone I kept returning to in video and print interviews. In 2020 he was on a virtual panel and mentioned the technique of braiding different thematic works and how it can be a great way to amplify the sum of what a collection can say. He also recommended not giving everything away to the reader. It’s important to keep some things just for you, and I’ve carried that with me since.
Writer’s block remedy: I turn to so many things. I have a slew of writing and art podcasts I listen to regularly. On YouTube I’ll look up craft talks, readings, and so on, to help shift my approach a bit. Reading is always instrumental in shaking the tree, so to speak. Also, doing nonwriting activities has proved helpful over the years. I like physical tasks like mowing my grass or working out, and several of the poems in the collection came about after I went for walks. Those activities give me space to think broadly, and more often than not I end up hitting on something that I can bring back to the page.
Advice: I think some of the best, but hardest, advice is to not be too eager to publish a book. Over the years I’ve come to know several people who’ve published with presses that had no way of getting books in people’s hands, no platform to build an audience in the twenty-first century, and so on. Is it always exciting when someone finds value in something we’ve made? Absolutely. Beyond that excitement, though, we as authors are the parents of our work. It’s important to choose a press that feels as passionately about what we’ve made as we do and has the means to bring it into the world in the manner we would like.
Finding time to write: The older I get the more challenging this becomes, which I feel is natural. I try to write when I can throughout the day. I’ll write a few lines down here and there and then spend some time at night seeing what I have and moving things around. My wife goes to bed at least an hour before me, so if I have something with legs to it, I’ll read it aloud to get a sense of the music and start figuring out what the next moves could or should be in terms of narrative.
Putting the book together: I originally intended to put the poems in sections, but after I tried Eduardo C. Corral’s method of braiding the work together, I felt that everything was enhanced [and sections were no longer necessary]. I laid all the poems out, separating them by theme, and then selected one from each pile repeatedly until I reached the last poem. This gives the book a cyclical feel.
Much of my life has been spent making mixtapes and DJing, so I’ve long enjoyed curating an experience for others. I know there is a belief that one should begin a collection with their strongest poem, but I don’t really subscribe to that. I’m more interested in which poem does a good job of introducing the reader to the world I’ve built, so I knew that if I began with “Boot Hill” and ended with “When My Days Fill With Ghosts,” not only do I aptly hip the reader to the place I’ve created, but the first and last lines of the book are in conversation in a fascinating way.
What’s next: Right now I’m in the midst of wrangling my graduate school thesis. It’s exciting to be making an abundance of new work while still thinking through and promoting a book. So far I’ve had a good time living in both worlds simultaneously.
Age: 41.
Residence: Chattanooga.
Job: I’m a music manager for a company that has a streaming service for libraries.
Time spent writing the book: Most of the poems were written between July 2019 and the beginning of 2020. During the first year of the pandemic there were about nine poems I wrote as more and more people around me passed away and it appeared that the world was literally coming to an end. I’d say that it took a year and five or so months from when I started until the last poem I wrote for the manuscript was done.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out at the end of 2020 and was offered a contract with Four Way Books in September 2022, so it took less than two years.
Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Theophanies (Alice James Books) by Sarah Ghazal Ali, Song of My Softening (Alice James Books) by Omotara James, and What Good Is Heaven (Texas Review Press) by Raye Hendrix are some of my favorites.
Greater Ghost by Christian J. Collier.
Stephanie Choi
The Lengest Neoi
University of Iowa Press
(Iowa Poetry Prize)
Even when she is not here
her hand reaches out
to brush my hair.
—from “Where I Find Her / Where I Leave Her”
How it began: I started seriously writing poetry after undergraduate, and I specifically went to graduate school so I could focus more on reading and writing toward a book. My first draft of The Lengest Neoi was conceived for Jackie Osherow’s manuscript workshop the first year of my MFA program at the University of Utah. It was pretty daunting to have to put together a “collection” for my peers to read and think about, especially so early on in graduate school, but it was also exciting and forced me to start thinking about how the poems I had written thus far spoke to one another. My peers and Jackie gave me a lot of great feedback, and in my last year of the MFA I wrote and revised to shape the first draft into a manuscript I was happier with for my thesis. Paisley Rekdal was incredibly helpful as well, especially in thinking about the vision and questions of the book as a whole.
Inspiration: A really important part of the book is the crown of sonnets that weaves the narrative of the American chestnut blight with anti-Chinese policy and rhetoric in the twentieth century. I was working in the sustainability office of Smith College when I learned about the chestnut disease, and a coworker of mine misspoke and said the blight originated with Chinese chestnut trees, when it actually came from Japanese chestnuts. This was a mistake I could have made too, but there was something there that incited the poem—thinking about the rhetoric of invasive species and immigration, specifically Asian immigration. Something about my coworker’s imprecision regarding the origin of the blight triggered the intellectual questions of the poem, which led to historical and archival research.
Travel is a big inspiration too. Several poems navigate being an Asian American in Asia. I think I became “the lengest neoi” when I was standing in line with my dad and some extended family for Kam’s Roast Goose in Hong Kong. It’s a story that won’t fit in this answer, but it was a moment of mistranslation/cultural humiliation that seared me. Finally, my grandma and mom play a huge role in the book—many poems negotiate my relationships with them.
Influences: So many, but I think I want to emphasize how influential my teachers have been in the sense that they’ve shaped my aesthetic as well as my reading and writing practices. Joshua Marie Wilkinson was my professor as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. I cannot say I was the best student or poet in his classes but I’m grateful for the grace he gave me, and everyone. He helped me love poetry (originally I wanted to write fiction, or even nonfiction), and he also taught us contemporary poets, which was exciting—to see and experience the possibilities of poetry I’d never seen or experienced before. I quite possibly read my first ever living poet in his class. Paisley Rekdal was my graduate thesis advisor, and I learned how to read and write so much better from her workshops and guidance. One book I encountered when I started to engage with poetry more seriously was A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003) by Brenda Coultas; I don’t think I had the vocabulary or experience to fully comprehend that book when I read it, but it really influenced me. Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) came out while I was an undergraduate, and during my senior year Ocean Vuong came to read at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center—it was not the first poetry reading I went to, but it was the first one I cried at. Finally I’ll say: the one and only Marilyn Chin.
Writer’s block remedy: I’ve been a runner since high school, and sometimes I work through poems while I’m running—not even consciously. I’ll suddenly have a realization about a poem, or a new angle will emerge at some point around the lake. There’s something about the rhythm of running that stimulates these kinds of revelations. When I feel burned out I don’t try to push myself, I just take a break. I read more and read for fun, see friends, travel, bake, engage in political activism, buy unnecessary pairs of shoes, sit alone at bars, then the impulse to write returns. This is not to say I don’t feel intense anxiety when I’m not writing, because I do, but I try to manage it. Really, I try to balance writing and living, because living is the writing. I try to live a full life—learn new things, see new places, meet new people—so I have more experiences to transform [on the page].
Advice: Try to shield yourself as much as possible from the anxiety and laments of other poets trying to publish their first books. Believe in your practice and your book. Be kind to the world and others and yourself. Keep writing.
Finding time to write: I am very disciplined. I think this is because I used to be a competitive swimmer and runner; my body is used to routinely waking up early for practice. And now the practice is writing. I’ve started to do the poem-a-day challenge in April (and October) with my friend, the poet Saba Keramati. It’s delightful reading her poetry every day, even when writing my own feels excruciating. I usually write the most during the winter months and leave the summer months for more travel and fun—recharging. Maybe this will change if I start getting into some residencies!
Putting the book together: My first three drafts had a really different ordering than my final draft. Ultimately Paisley helped me think about how the poems were speaking to one another, the questions they were raising, and the ways they were thinking, individually and collectively. Though she did not give me specific suggestions on where certain poems should go. I did the whole hang the pages up on a wall thing. I find that practice helpful. The first and last poems in the book are the oldest poems—I think that is significant, but I can’t say exactly why. It just felt right. I did intentionally want the crown of sonnets to be in the middle, the spine of the book. I see the first section of the collection as a sampler for what follows—it intimates all the concerns and questions of the book and includes my range of form and technique. I also thought about how to appropriately space poems with similar images and concerns so that they wouldn’t feel redundant but instead create productive motifs.
What’s next: I’m writing toward a documentary project and experimenting with some documentary techniques, which has been both fun and challenging. I’m diving into a couple specific histories and archives: the eight Chinese passengers on the Titanic, Polly Bemis, and Chinese communities in the American South. I’ve been researching quite a bit and practicing persona poems. I’ve really enjoyed writing into Polly’s voice so far.
Age: 29.
Residence: Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Job: I am extremely fortunate to be paid to read and discuss poems as an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the book was written during my two years at the University of Utah.
Time spent finding a home for it: This is kind of a wild story. I was notified that I won the Iowa Poetry Prize the day after I left Salt Lake City to move back in with my parents after graduating from my MFA program with no job prospects. I started submitting the book in January 2023, and it got picked up that June. I know this is very uncommon so I’m grateful the stars aligned for me (thank you, ancestors) and, of course, to the readers at the University of Iowa Press and Brenda Shaughnessy for choosing my collection [as the prize judge]. I had this hope of publishing my first book before I turned thirty and I’m very happy that my wish was fulfilled.
Recommendations for recent debut poetry collections: Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press) by Saba Keramati, Plat (Archway Editions) by Lindsey Webb, Winter Here (University of Georgia Press) by Jessica Tanck, The Flightless Years (Finishing Line Press) by Jamie L. Smith, and Chengru He’s second book, a hybrid memoir, I Would Vanish Into Its Stronger Existence (Wet Cement Press). Full transparency, these are all my friends but their books are incredible, and it feels so special to have my book come out the same year as those of so many close literary friends. Also, I have such a backlog of books I want and need to read that I am rarely reading poetry collections that came out during the current calendar year, unless it is my friends’ books. I do want to change this though and start reading books in advance of their pub dates—for reviewing and teaching.
The Lengest Neoi by Stephanie Choi.
