We had the privilege to publish Laura’s debut collection, Borrowing Your Body, and we are beyond delighted to also be publishing her second collection, We the Destroyers. You can read the first interview here and keep reading below to learn about her beautiful new collection, now available for pre-order!
How long did it take you to write We the Destroyers? What was your process for pulling it together?
It’s always hard to answer this question; as a whole I would say it took me about three years to write this book, but some of the poems (including the title poem) are older than that. I had the inkling of what this book might end up being sometime in 2021, but it didn’t come together as a manuscript until 2024. At first, I thought it might be two separate books: one about grief and the pandemic, and one about climate change and the uncertain future of humanity. I realized that these two books were, indeed, the same book thanks to two recent collections that I admire deeply: Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater and Jorie Graham’s To 2040. Both these books grapple with ecosystem collapse and species-wide grief, and both are just harrowing to read. When I read the Graham, especially, I could suddenly see the shape of We the Destroyers in my mind.
How is this collection different from Borrowing Your Body, your first collection, which we had the privilege of publishing?
Though both books share some thematic concerns, Borrowing Your Body is predominantly elegiac; it focuses on my family’s experience with my mother’s illness and death from early-onset dementia, and it looks into the past. We the Destroyers has grief in it, but it’s also an angry book that looks into the future. So much of it emerged from living through the pandemic and writing about how we humans seem determined to ruin our society and our planet for the sake of convenience. I am a high school teacher, and I am constantly in the orbit of brilliant, passionate, ethical young people who deserve a better future than the one they are walking into. It makes me furious for them. Then I think about myself as a teenager in the 1990s, and I remember that I also deserved a future without a burning planet and an uncaring government and a Kafkaesque health care system! So this book depicts our terrifying present moment, but it also has a section (“Poems from Haven”) that depicts an imagined post-apocalyptic populace that has (temporarily?) left Earth to live elsewhere. I guess in that way it’s elegiac, too, but from a different standpoint.
What’s a favorite poem from the collection? Why?
I’m going to point to two very different poems. One is “Poem in Which I Fail to Teach Homer,” because I am very proud of how it depicts my experience teaching The Odyssey to teenage girls and how it incorporates something I had been trying to write a poem about for at least a decade: NASA’s deranged idea of how many tampons Sally Ride needed to take to space. Another favorite is “Advent” from the sonnet sequence “A Year in the Late Anthropocene,” because it’s a love poem written in a very dark historical moment, and every time I read it, I remember the feeling that provoked it. What luck.
What’s your writing routine look like?
I am part of a long-running writing group in Denver that meets every month to workshop and generate poems, which is a huge part of my routine. Otherwise, because I’m a teacher, my routine differs wildly depending on the time of year. I tend to write the most during summer and winter breaks. Every December, I run a group poetry challenge to write a poem a day for the entire month. For much of the year, I have no routine other than writing when the mood catches me or just collecting notes for poems to write later. Then, come December, I write every free moment, using all the notes and scraps of language I have collected the rest of the year. It’s a little chaotic, but it’s fun and allows me to take the pressure off myself to be producing all the time.
Who are your favorite poets?
Every list is necessarily incomplete, but here’s an incomplete attempt: Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mark Doty, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds.
What are you reading right now?
I’m loving Jill Michelle’s Underwater, which just came out from this press! I am slowly marching through two terrific but very large nonfiction books: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark and Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. I am eternally in the middle of multiple novels; right now, I’m reading Louise Penny’s mystery novels, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
What’s your favorite non-writing activity?
I’m such a homebody in my middle age! I love to knit, bake bread, hang out with my pets, and play video games. You can find me covered in yarn, flour, and cats and dogs.
Pre-order We the Destroyers today!!