this was lovely, both the poetry and the photography! i loved the rumination on yous or rather YOUs, the YOU of any particular work is always interesting to explore. well done!!!
thank you so much! when i wrote that section, i was thinking of madeleine cravens' essay on queer epistolary poems + how easily poems become containers for correspondence via direct & intimate engagement with the YOU.... she brought up siobhan phillips' work re: james schuyler 🔄 delineative criteria that sets epistolary poetry apart (if it does) from poetry that engages the YOU: "a specificity of address, an acknowledgement of the poem’s materiality as an object, and an “ineradicable distance” between the speaker and the addressee." i don't have it all worked out but i'd like to think our narrator's poems are also, functionally, letter poems in that regard, thus her hesitation to let susu read them :)
oh thanks for the leads on this topic! it's funny, our submission was genuinely one-half an epistolary work, and inspired by epistolary poetry (in our case, largely Bernadette Mayer's Desires of Mothers), but the letters themselves were not written primarily as poems (barring a few exceptions). that said they do meet that criteria to a lesser or greater extent... i think we're going to continue to explore this since it's an area we don't quite understand yet lol.
that said i can certainly sympathize with the narrator's hesitation to let susu read her poems... i've found even when i am not necessarily writing about someone or to someone, if they're on my mind when i'm drafting or revising, it's not always something i want them to see. or at least i'm aware of it being very vulnerable to let them see.
i'm glad to hear it and hope you like it! (although given the content i do not begrudge anyone if they don't click with it). she was probably like the first poet we really glommed onto, and we have a lot of fun doing exercises to see what our spin on her voice is, and we do wanna try and do more of that along the lines of Desires of Mothers and the journals that resulted in Studying Hunger. her stuff to us is like getting to see inside a person's brain in real time lmao