If I had only one word to describe These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, the debut collection of poems by Soon Jones, it might be lush. This collection is lush in its immersion in the natural landscape of the rural American South. It is lush in the language of emerging sexuality, in what it means to come-of-age ravenous for something too dangerous to name. It is also a collection that interrupts so much of that lushness with the violence of homophobia, of racism, of being a person for whom ‘home’ is complex and ever-elusive—poems that examine, as Jones describes to me in our interview, feelings with no name, poetic truths that hard facts can’t capture. These Aren’t My Woods Anymore is out now from the Boston-based indie Poetose.
Soon Jones is interviewed by E Ce Miller.
Four Way Review: One of the first things I noticed about your poems is that they strike me as being really precisely plotted in a way that I don’t often experience in poetry. Each one is grappling with enough material to fill entire chapters of a novel, yet the poems are distilled to such specificity. Is this plotting I’m experiencing something you’re thinking about as you’re writing a poem?
Soon Jones: For many of my poems, I am trying to set a scene and in that scene, look backwards and how that brings us to the present moment in the poem. “Kentucky Daydreams” is an example of this, where the present moment is my child self in Kentucky playing hide-and-seek and wandering the woods against a dysfunctional home life, but looks all the way back to before I was born and how my parents met.
“…it’s those brisk kentucky nights i think of / when i tell stories from my childhood, / of hide-and-seek with the neighbor kids / the luminescence of fireflies / smeared across our foreheads, / our cheeks, where i watched / meteor showers alone on the roof / and slept in the hammock outside / when the fighting downstairs / was too loud for dreaming…”
I’m always thinking about how to give just enough detail to let the reader fill in the blanks in their own mind, but not be so sparse they’re lost as to what’s really going on. This is something I carry over from writing prose, so my poems tend to feel very plotted! While plot is not something I’m actively thinking about when I’m writing the first draft of a poem, by the time I’m done I’ll realize I’ve written a vignette of a time in my life.
FWR: Expanding upon the previous question, I know that you are a short story writer, as well as a poet. How does one practice (writing poetry, writing prose) inform or inspire the other? Do the stories you want to tell arrive to you knowing what form they’d like to be written in, or is that something you sort out as you write? What draws you to poetry as a medium for storytelling?
SJ: I started with writing prose first as a kid, and that continued into my teen years and adulthood. I dabbled with poetry a bit as a teenager (and it was terrible, haha) but I didn’t really dive into it until I took a poetry class with my mentor, Sara Burge, and absolutely fell in love with poetry. Because of my background in story writing, my poems tend to be narrative and structured. On the other hand, writing poetry greatly improved my prose writing and has led to my prose becoming more lyrical. Sometimes it just comes to me, sometimes I start with a single scene or a character and then expand from there.
What draws me to poetry is that even though it is a text-based medium, it feels very different to me than writing a fully fleshed out short story or novel. To me, poetry is about capturing the magic of a moment, or a feeling that has no name, and finding the poetic truth of that moment that hard facts and statistics can’t capture. It’s like admiring a painting versus watching a movie – they’re both visual mediums, and yet the emotions they evoke in us and how they do so are so very different.
FWR: A number of poems in this collection, particularly some of the earlier ones, seem to be grappling with an abrupt loss of innocence. In “The Last Summer,” the narrator is caring for chickens and picking squash, and then a line or two later, they’re driven from their home by a stepmother, strung out and wielding a shotgun. In “Live Prey,” children crowd through “the pet shop with the funny parrot” when a live mouse is abruptly fed to a cottonmouth. What is interesting to you about these kinds of moments, the way the tone of something can change in an instant?
SJ: It’s the way these moments catch us by surprise. You wake up like any other day, simply living your life, and then something happens that changes you in ways you aren’t able to see until years later. One day you’re shucking corn and the next you’re being chased out of your home. What was meant to only be a fun visit to a pet shop turns into a lesson about mortality and how fleeting life is, and how careless adults can be in traumatizing small children. It’s these kinds of moments I find myself going back to again and again, and realizing just how deeply they impacted me in a way I could not comprehend at the time.
FWR: The poem “Kentucky Daydreams” spoke directly to the part of me that has spent an awful lot of time trying to find home in seemingly disparate places—places that don’t necessarily have any immediate or obvious connections to either myself or one another. Especially these last ten lines:
“the deep wood full of caves where I could hide / and be my mother’s child again / imagining that the roots of the cedars / spread all the way to her grave in wawbeek / and that the water from the creeks i waded in / would find their way to the oceans / turn to steam / cradle us both in the clouds / and fall again / on the mountains of korea”
What interests you about place? What are you saying about place in your poetry, or what it means to be from somewhere, or the surprising ways one place might, more or less obviously, connect to another?
SJ: With this poem in particular, I felt more at home in the woods than the house I was living in, far from my mother’s final resting place, which was even farther away from where she came from, and longing for both.
I think place informs a piece, even indirectly, and I believe that feeling of disconnect between where you’re raised and where the motherland is is something many of the diaspora struggle with. I’m out of place where I was born, and I’m out of place in the motherland – there’s a liminal quality to it, always being stuck between worlds and never able to fully fit into one or the other.
I am always trying to find ‘home’ in all of these places I’ve lived, but there is always that feeling of not quite belonging. And yet, all of these places I’ve lived in I still carry with me. It’s been twenty years since I lived in Kentucky, for example, but still it stays with me. It’s like a haunting.
FWR: The poem “Vile Affections” has one of my favorite lines in the entire collection, “…and now everything I own / is covered in Lance Bass.” It’s this wholly relatable, wildly funny moment, yet it is rooted in a devastating and, really, terrifyingly violent reality: the narrator of this poem is not safe—on any level—to be themselves in the community they find themselves in. There’s also this beautiful irony of the queer heartthrob being used to mask the narrator’s queerness. Can you talk about what you’re doing with humor and horror, here?
SJ: I wish I could remember where I first heard it, but humor and horror are two sides of the same coin. It’s subverting expectations and delivering surprises, whether that be a laugh or a scream. With “Vile Affections,” I wanted to capture the absurdity of this fearmongering against queer people and my old pastor’s violent fantasies in what’s supposed to be a Christian church, and having to hide my queerness when all I wanted to do was what any other teenager wants to do: hang out with my friends, flip through magazines, gossip, go on little adventures, etc. When I wrote this poem, I was actually thinking of the Pulse shooting in Orlando and how, before details on the shooter were released, I had this sinking feeling that this could have been someone from my old church, my pastor’s violent fantasy finally realized. Which then led to me thinking about how talking about crushes at a sleepover, something so innocuous for teen girls, carried a danger for me it did not have for others. When Lance Bass came out as gay, I remember thinking “Oh, of course I had a ‘crush’ on him!” I had recognized in him what was in me, I just hadn’t known it yet. There was something safe about him I couldn’t name. In my church, people liked to call me a “prayer warrior” but at the same time, I was so deeply afraid of what would happen if anyone there ever found out I was a lesbian. When I put it all together, the balance of horror and humor felt natural. I consider this poem gallows humor, laughing at the face of death.
FWR: “Robotripping the Light Fantastic” has one of the best titles of a poem I’ve ever read. In the poem, you describe a Sunday School teacher’s explanation that souls are separate from bodies, writing, “finally, a language for why I have never / felt at home in this shape of flesh,”. The Church is a setting of immense violence throughout much of this collection, yet here it is also the place where the language of understanding is first discovered. Can you talk about this?
SJ: It was just ironic to me that this place where I wasn’t free to be myself had given me words to describe why I felt so detached from my body. It’s one of those things where you can’t grapple with something until you have language for it. But really, looking back, I think it did more harm than good – I felt detached because I had been traumatized by the death of my mother and the invasion of a racist, xenophobic stepmother in my home, and I couldn’t find a way to connect to my body or my soul. I wanted to connect this with the out-of-body/out-of-control feeling I had when I had abused cough syrup, which at the time felt like the only way I could handle the compounding traumas of my life, to that same feeling I had had in that Sunday School class. I’ve been on a long journey of trying to feel connected and one with my body, and realizing my body is me, and I can look back now and see that the reason why that spoke to me was because I had just lost my mother, my home life was terrible, and I was living in a state of perpetual shock where I could not confront these things. What I wanted to do with this poem was trace back to that early out-of-body feeling and show where it had led me: a deeply depressed early-20s-something left to deal with the aftermath of a hard childhood.
FWR: Nearly this entire collection is comprised of lineated poems, except for “Walnut Hill,” a poem from which the collection also takes its title. What inspired you to shift form here? What do you think is the relationship between “Walnut Hill” and the other poems in this collection?
SJ: I don’t mean to name drop here, but I need to give her her flowers: Dr. Niki Herd came to my graduate college for a teaching demonstration, and I was chosen to be part of the workshop demo. I submitted “Walnut Hill,” which at the time was a lineated poem that didn’t feel quite right and was frustrating me. Dr. Herd suggested I try it as a prose poem, and when I did that, the whole thing unlocked for me. If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t think I would have ever figured out how to fix it. I don’t know why it works, but it just does, and it was picked up by Lunch Ticket shortly after. So shoutout to Dr. Herd, you had a very real hand in getting my first collection published! I feel very fortunate to have been part of that workshop demo; I learned so much about poetry in that one hour and I am very jealous of her students who get to have her for a whole semester.
As far as the relationship between the other poems, I see it as a kind of ending. The woods I grew up in had been so changed by industry that they were no longer home. It’s a capitalistic destruction of something natural and beautiful, and to go back to one of the earlier questions, was another loss of innocence, even though it was far into my adulthood. It’s losing something I didn’t even know I could lose.
FWR: In the poem, “Cosmopolitan Skylines,” you write, “All those adolescent years wishing / you’d make it out of the country, / and now all you want // is to return.” It is a poem of such longing. It’s also a poem that, I think, adds a voice to a critically important conversation poets like Warsan Shire and Javier Zamora and Li-Young Lee and many others have been having, which is: many times home is the required exchange for that which one cannot live without: safety, autonomy, identity, etc. Is there something in particular you hope this poem—and These Aren’t My Woods Anymore as a whole—says to the current moment, to those being forced, often violently, to live somewhere other than the home of their choosing?
SJ: It’s the tragedy of it all. I recognize that I’ve been very fortunate and have tremendous privilege to hold citizenship in this country by both blood and soil, but even then my own white grandfather threatened to deport my mother and I “back” to Korea, and I’ve had white people threaten to call ICE on me for my “slanty” eyes. And that was before the current administration and the explosion of violence that has erupted in this country. I can only speak for myself, but it is soul-crushing to try to make a home somewhere, to find some sense of belonging, to build a community, only to have my very existence considered a threat by my neighbors. The longing in the poem is a longing to be able to carve out a space for myself where I can live freely and openly without the fear that someone will see the shape of my eyes or the contours of my face and decide to erase me from this world, and I wish we all had this freedom. This is a Christian-majority country, and yet so many Christian Nationalists are the ones kicking and screaming and taking up arms to violently expel and detain anyone who doesn’t look like them. I don’t hold to any faith anymore, but I often think how much better this world could be if Christian Nationalists actually listened to their own Bible and the words of Jesus – to love their neighbor as themselves, to take care of the stranger from a strange land. Things have always been bad – this nation was built on the enslavement of one race and the genocide of another – and it breaks my heart to see what we have become. Every day seems worse. I fear for how much worse it might be and hope that we as a nation will turn the tide towards acceptance and community, to recognize the strength and the hardships and the dedication of those who have chosen to make this place their home.
A kinder world is possible. If only we had the courage to make it so.
