Kevin Young

I very much, it helped me figure out a form for these poems that were not poems yet.

You know, they were sort of ideas for poems.

And suddenly, in a burst, they came in the ways that you're talking about.

The Descent, Beyond is another poem.

They're poems that really think about, you know, the grove of suicides and that powerful part in Dante where he's in this grove and plucks a leaf off of one of the suicides who end up in this grove.

And it's painful.

And that kind of

moment of metaphor, but also I think of empathy that Dante has.

Even if in his cosmology, they're among the damned, there's an amazing sympathy and empathy there that I want to write through and about.

And Dante just gave me a sounding board.

He was my Virgil in some way leading me through these poems.

And then I ended up without telling anyone

continuing into purgatory and into paradise, which I call Werewolf Hill and Resurrection City.

They're maybe not the paradise of Dante.

There's not as much light, but in a way, they were trying to figure out what redemption looks like now.

Well, it's a form both influenced by Dante, like all of poetry pretty much in the West is, and also at the same time was influenced by some previous books of mine, including Brown and Stones, which were my last two books.

And in Stones, I really sort of settled on this form of a tercets or three-line stanza.

with the indent and it was a way of kind of keeping that beat going and moving through, in that case, very much Louisiana landscape where both my parents are from Louisiana, but also, you know, it's where all my relatives are buried in these two cemeteries.

And so to sort of confront these two spaces in stones, it seemed like a great way to think about form in this book.

But I feel like it's a slightly different form in this one in terms of its ins and outs.