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Tributaries: stephanie roberts + UNMET
In her collectionUNMET (Biblioasis), stephanie roberts explores the intersections of desire, justice, and love with a voice that is both intimate and unflinching.
Today, stephanie reflects on the origins of her work, the poetic influences that shaped her, and why D.M. Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself resonated so deeply with her.
Read “To Call Myself”
from UNMET (Biblioasis)
TO CALL MYSELF
… to feel myself beloved on the earth.
— Raymond Carver
A woman frees her home of white dust.
Now light ambers polished mahogany.
What is the point of calling your tapeworm
adoration if that hunger leaves your rage
alone in its oven.
If my light can’t scythe the clay legs
from under you then what’s the use.
I will will elsewhere; fill another valley;
find spanking new mistakes.
A woman orders rose-shaped pink
pleasure with courage for tomorrow.
During Manhattanhenge I saw myself
mirrored in the Vertical Without You.
Sunrise, oh 42nd! The gold Adhan. I
with the flex of myself loosed
rising to cloud. Shine like gilt winter
birdsong, my alone throat roaring.
An interview with stephanie roberts
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to
write “To Call Myself” and how is it representative of your collection?
stephanie roberts: In essence UNMET is a continuation and complication of my previous collection, rushes from the river disappointment, but where rushes was focused primarily on romantic relationship, UNMET expands to include work that is sociopolitical as well as intimate. I had more that I wanted to explore about desire, something I don’t think of as lustful energy although that can be an aspect. I think of desire more as an engine. It’s the driving energy of dissatisfaction that produced insulin, civil rights, and the work of bell hooks. Those examples are analogous to me of rescue, justice and love the focus of UNMET. I think our actions expose our desires. Where our emotions lack the engine of desire is where we are merely wishful. Even tho we may be painfully wishful.
“To Call Myself” was inspired by Raymond Carver’s A New Path to the Waterfall. The title and epigraph come from the final poem in the collection “Late Fragment.” Carver was dying at the time and knew it when he penned those words. That gravity infuses the voice of “To Call Myself.” In my poem, we see “a woman” as well as experience the “I” voice both embody, a theme throughout the collection of, self-reflection and resilience.
ALU: What drew you to poetry? What do you most value about poetry?
sr: Before I started writing, I met a guy whom I knew in the context of him being a business owner and an attendee of a church I used to frequent. He quietly almost secretly wrote poetry that he shared with few including myself because I was interested in theology. In reading his work, I saw that there was an entire other world inside this person. His poetry reflected my own twisting desire for inner connectivity. People who love language have delivered me here, and what I value most about poetry is that it is the literature that is a shaken soda can.
ALU: What’s a non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection?
sr: Thank you for this challenge! David Usher’s “Love will save the day” came to mind immediately. When I looked up the lyrics to see if that made sense, there it was thwarted justice and rescue with a hope for love. It coheres. I saw David Usher live at a small club in Quebec. I think he must do some sort of martial arts because he can deliver a high kick while jumping backwards.
stephanie recommends…
“The Sandwich” from D.M. Bradford’s
Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books)
ALU: Why did you choose D.M. Bradford’s poem “The Sandwich” from his collection Dream of No One but Myself? What do you love most about this particular poem?
sr: I adored Dream of No One but Myself, and I really struggled with extracting one poem from the whole. If you’ve read this celebrated collection you know that there are graphic images that are part of the experience. What singled out “The Sandwich” was my experience of it as a kind of horror story–a horror story of the commonplace. The powerfully compressed narrative etched itself in my mind. I remember the first time reading it being shocked by the cruelty it recounted. I suffered reading this poem. As a reader we understand what is happening, but why is this happening? What are all the forces and failures that bring us to the moment of the poem? I think this poem effectively provokes empathy. Bradford lays out the chaos with the reader in the centre of it. I want to rescue the boy, the father, and the grandmother. I want to prioritize mental health resources because “The Sandwich” shows how suffering people inflict suffering.
The Sandwich
Two hours into the three-hour argument about the pimento cream cheese and 12-grain sandwich, an interesting fact. The linen closet’s wide-open corner just outside my second-floor boyhood bedroom retains just enough of a sightline down past the upper staircase, over the jumbo soft maple dining room table he badly wanted (the one end then a few months cratered by a wedding plate he had smashed on it), and between the long end of the L-shaped counter and the overhead kitchen cabinets, that the half-eaten sandwich just barely managed to bellyflop the sink’s dirty dishwater when I whipped it. And it splashed him.
The sandwich’s salmon-egg pink smeared into the side of my nine-year-old face while he screamed EAT IT. And I wondered if what was happening counted as physically abusive, and if I had any immediate regrets. The interesting fact being: somehow I didn’t think so. Somewhere my mother was out making sure we got fed, weekly clippings in hand. All over basic cable, cartoons were proceeding without my attention, indifferent. I don’t think I said anything when she got in.11
11 My father’s last-ever room, in my godparents’ basement in Hatboro, PA, is smaller than his old office, my teenage room, in my mother’s basement. A Red Sox All-Star jersey hangs off an exposed pipe headed to the septic tank. The ensuite bathroom is Marines-themed—courtesy of his basement roommate—down to the towels and shower curtain. His tattered Paradise Lost still an eye-roll on the nightstand.
The sound of the roommate, meanwhile, on the other side of the wall. Cleaning a couple of clinking handguns.
Before bedtime, he shows me his mini-fridge stash of Klondike bars. My mother, conked out from the drive, already asleep upstairs. Blazing Saddles on TBS.
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stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.
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Thanks to stephanie for answering our questions, and to Biblioasis for the text of “TO CALL MYSELF” from UNMET which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). Thanks also to Nightwood Editions for the text of “The Sandwich” from D.M. Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself.
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