first book interview: Mari L’Esperance

It's been an enormous relief to have my book published—I'd been living with some of the poems for so long—and it's also been a source of tremendous anxiety. I sunk into a post-book trough for a while, feeling anxious and directionless and unsure of next steps. In recent months, I've been mulling, reading, gathering material, and writing what I've called “transitional” poems, which may at some point become part of a second manuscript. I'm also a very slow writer. My core themes continue to inhabit new poems—how can they not?—but I sense an internal loosening that's reflected in these newer poems, which seem more lyrically associative and intuitively shaped than my previous work.