“Bravery is Not A Luxury: A Conversation with Editors Pichchenda Bao, Nicole Callihan, and Jennifer Franklin about Braving the Body”— curated by Tiffany Troy


The anthology Braving the Body, edited by Pichchenda Bao, Nicole Callihan, and Jennifer Franklin focuses on the body as it morphs through puberty, pushes against its boundaries and limitations, and remains resilient. As the editors note, bravery is not a luxury but a mode of survival and of breathing life in a world that confines, maims, and betrays. Braving the Body is also a community of poets who care as much for the well-being of its members as it is about celebrating the power of the lyric form. What follows is an interview with its editors, who have selected a few poems that have personally moved them.

Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American poet and writer, infant survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, daughter of refugees, and stay-at-home feminist mother. Her work has been widely published, featured in international art exhibitions, made into limited-edition broadsides by the Center for Book Arts, part of numerous audio poetry projects, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is one of the co-editors of the anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions). She has received support and fellowships from Queens Council on the Arts, Aspen Words, Bethany Arts Community, and Kundiman. She lives, writes, and raises her three children in New York City. More at pichchendabao.com.

Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her most recent book, chigger ridge, was selected by Sandra Lim to receive The Tenth Gate Prize(The Word Works 2024). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023) and the 2019 novella, The Couples. She is the founder and curator of Braving the Body, an ongoing collaboration with Thomas Dooley’s Poetry Well which invites poets to reflect on embodied experience and includes workshops, ekphrastic experiences, and the Braving the Body anthology which was released by Harbor Editions in March 2024. A frequent collaborator with artists around the world, she has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her next book, SLIP, winner of Saturnalia Book’s Alma Award will be published in 2025. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com

Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Poems from her manuscript in progress, A FIRE IN HER BRAIN, have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Common, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her work has also been published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), Gettysburg Review, The Nation, Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion and Prairie Schooner. She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She is Poetry Reviews coeditor of The Rumpus and coeditor, with Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, of the anthology Braving The Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). Jennifer has spent the last ten years teaching manuscript revision. She teaches craft classes in the Manhattanville MFA Program and 24Pearl Street/Provincetown Fine Arts Center as well as private classes and manuscript consultations on Zoom.

Tiffany Troy: In the introduction to Braving the Body, Nicole wrote of how the three of you coeditors met and put out the call and how the call was answered very enthusiastically by the poetry community. Can you tell us about what initially inspired the three of you to do a call for submissions for Braving the Body? What void does this anthology fill?

Nicole Callihan: In early 2023, my book This Strange Garment was published by Terrapin Books. This Strange Garment reckons with my experiences of a 2020 breast cancer diagnosis and the subsequent treatments, and the poems, even as I wrote them, felt a part of something larger. They truly felt of the body, not necessarily particular to my body, though of course I could only filter them in that way, but particular to a world of inhabiting a body through a particular crisis. In those postpartum days after the book was released into the world, I knew I wanted to hear from other bodies going through their own crises and ecstasies.

I was in awe of Jennifer Franklin’s work. Her book, If Some God Shakes Your House, had been published by Four Way Books that same spring and dealt head-on with some of the most harrowing aspects of being in a body–of mothering, disability, control, disappearance, and reclamation. I also knew Chenda’s brilliant work after having met her at Bethany Arts Community during a poetry retreat and would often find myself deeply resonating with–of all things!–her Facebook posts and how frankly and astutely they commented on her own bodily experiences. I invited them to join me to think more about these issues of embodiment, and we developed an ongoing collaboration which includes, among other experiences, the Braving the Body anthology.

The 116 poems in the final collection are a triumphant cross-section of the many, many poems we received in the call. We wanted as many different poets in as many different bodies as the binding would hold. While many anthologies collect around specific themes–gardening or Taylor Swift or winged creatures–Braving the Body works from the inside out, pondering how our deepest subjectivity makes us more consciously objective and empathetic. To write and read and share our most intimate bodily experiences allows for an expansiveness in which our bodies are not so singular (& alone) but part of a larger, complicated, beautiful organism.   

TT: Turning to the structure of the anthology, how was the decision to present the 116 poets alphabetically made?

PB: Well, we briefly considered grouping the poems into sections, but we realized it would be impossible to impose our own categorization on the subject matter. So we went alphabetically by author last name, which was the ordering system most familiar to us, the editors. Interestingly, subsequently, our readers have found that ordering intriguing. The poems in that order do seem to speak to each other and lead into the next in line. Which is really thrilling to us. Throughout the project, we’ve tried to hold both the poet and the poem in mind, and that kind of organic connectivity between poems makes me feel good that we did our jobs.

TT: In selecting who to include in the anthology, how do you balance gathering emerging and established voices, with an eye to maximize accessibility of different forms of articulating what a body is/ can be through variegated poetic forms and concerns?

JF:It was very important for us that the voices we gathered be diverse in every way possible. Yes, we wanted emerging poets as well as established poets to be in conversation with each other but, most importantly, we wanted a variety of embodied experiences. We were astonished by the sheer variety in subject matter, tone, form, and voice. We love the tapestry that we were able to weave together and the way the poems speak to each other, taking on different resonances when read as a group.

TT: Can you speak about the three poems that each of you have selected for this feature? What excites you about these poems?

PB: Abughattas, Lippman, Martin

I think we all could go on and on about any of the poems in the anthology. There are so many rich and textured voices in the collection. I, particularly, love that Jessica Abughattas’s poem, “Strip,” opens the anthology. The title and its inclusion in an anthology of the body may lead you to expect it might be an erotic poem, but it’s this powerful and unabashedly political list of definitions. So our book launches with this kind of playful yet deeply serious encounter, which is how I think about all poems really. I like how we’re confronted by our own preconceptions, which is particularly important because Abughattas is of Palestinian heritage. She is naming what it is to be subject to state annihilation and using our ordinary, plain language to do so. In the lines, “To tease/ Example: prisoners, down to their underwear” Abughattas subverts the erotic by tying it to state violence. Abughattas’s list of definitions for the word,”strip,” is pretty exhaustive, using meanings from cooking, farming, industry, animation, and the military. The way each line stands on its own and also reinforces the other is so skillful. Take these lines from the beginning of the poem: “To empty completely/ A sequence of images telling a story.”  The accumulation of definitions insists on the integrity of the Palestinian body, and towards the end, the poem becomes more lyrical, more personalized. Each definition, especially the action ones, “To gut,” “To deprive someone of, ” “To dismantle, disassemble, demolish, deny,” makes me think about the personal and the political, that there are people who are enacting this violence and people who are subject to it.

In Matthew Lippman’s “ The Treasure of the Silence after the Hard Scrabble Lurch and Lunge for Love,” I’m struck by the play (again) in the use of the word, “treasure.” “My father was a treasure./ He wasn’t really a box of gold bullion or anything like that,/ big jade jewels, forgetaboutit.” The poem meditates on the known and unknown aspects of a father. “What I knew about lovemaking I knew my father did not./ He was a treasure of absence and had no idea he had a body.” This leads right into an anecdote of taking his father who is now suffering from dementia to eat out at a neighborhood barbeque place. There are numerous comedic moments in the poem, and then it lands in such a devastating way. The final lines are so playful and deeply serious: “Watching him go at the breast, wing, the drumstick,/ like he’d never tasted anything that good before, ever,/ was the biggest haul a son could ask for. To be there at the moment/ when they smash the safe open and you realize there’s nothing inside.”

Gail Martin’s “Coming Back Body” makes me feel pumped up. The repetition of “body” in this prose poem insists on my attention to the body. The mix of the whimsical and the severe is so strange and wonderful: “the body that collapses like butter in the sun,” “fighter pilot body born again as razor blades and pop cans. Fencepost body, brittlebush body.” I love the lines: “Here is the beat-up body, the deconstructed, dislocated body, here is the body coming to terms, cast-off body, body without its own parts. Don’t try to pretty it.” But then it goes on to “Bring me the plumed body, transformed body, flash body playing banjo, the body tap dancing.” The poem affirms the body’s resilience and also summons up the suffering it had to go through.

NC: Olander, Blitshteyn, Skelton

Drew Skelton’s “Odonostalgia” immediately compelled me with its play on words in the title. Taking odonotalgia, the medical term for a toothache, and fusing it with nostalgia launches a beautiful meditation on the casting of teeth and how much is contained in those bony little appendages. A former teacher, an ex, the speaker’s grandfather and mother, regret and resentment and longing–it’s all in this poem. The final moment– “I like how my body/ keeps itself/ company–” delivers a beautiful self-acceptance amidst all the other complications in life.

In “thoth,” Marina Blitshteyn so musically traverses pain– “a scale for the faults in my face/ a scale for the lines on my thighs/ dig deep, a scale for a slice of my thumb/ how far can you go down the well–” as to make it somehow bearable. Marina’s poem reminds me of how in our most agonizing bodily moments, our ear and our tongue may carry us. Thoth–the patron of scribes, the weigher of the hearts of the deceased, protector of sacred texts–a true poet.

Rebecca Hart Olander’s “Anniversary” had me crying the first time I read it and has moved me to tears again and again. The poem, addressed to a friend on the anniversary of her passing begins “Do you wonder how I’m getting along/ without you?” The images that follow–doing braids and mascara, belting out lyrics in the car, “pacing an icicled route–” culminate “at Old Navy trying on jeans and make me miss every friend I have ever lost and will ever lose.   

JF: Beatty, Pollock, Thomas

James Baldwin wrote, “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it...If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write.” The poems I love most in this anthology seem to be trying to change the world and I believe they will.

Jean Beatty’s poem, “Abortion with Gun Barrel” is one of several poems about abortion in Braving the Body. It is a timely and crucial topic and one that I think and read about multiple times each day. One of the fascinating things about the poems we chose for the anthology as well as those by the seven hundred other poets who submitted work, is that even though we had many poems that addressed the same topics—the voice, form, tone, details, metaphors, language were so nuanced and varied that we never had to say, maybe we can’t take another cancer poem, or we already accepted a poem about abortion. The embodied experiences that these 116 poets depicted through their individual voices, transcends the topics. My favorite lines of this poem have stayed with me since I first read them, “Her mother: My daughter. I give my permission./And the girl cannot be real, or the sky/would burn—not bleed like it does in/ the waiting room of grown women. This is a poem about courage and the impossible choices women and girls are forced to make every day. It is a poem I wish was taught in every junior high and high school across the country through in many states, it would be banned.

Iain Haley Pollock’s “All the Possible Bodies” is the title poem of his forthcoming collection (Alice James, September  2025) and is one of my favorite poems in the anthology. I cannot read this poem out loud without getting goosebumps. As we have traveled with the anthology—to college classrooms, to The Tell it Slant Festival at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, and the Boston Book Fest, we have read, taught, and  discussed this poem a lot. It skillfully conveys one of life’s most essential truths in the way that only art can—that all human life is unique, and when a person is murdered, you not only kill that person but you irreparably damage all the other human beings in that person’s orbit. This poem teaches us but it is not didactic. With a light touch and a lot of heart, with great feeling but without sentimentality, this poem transcends the particulars of a family story and George Floyd’s murder to remind us about the fragility of life and our complicity in the suffering we witness and read about every day throughout the world. This may be the first anthology this poem has been published in but it certainly won’t be the last.

I was struck by the various kinds of pain—emotional, physical, financial, existential that Kelly Grace Thomas is able to convey in her poem, “A Fertility Clinic is the Coldest Place on Earth. The juxtaposition of what is at stake for the speaker up against the sterile and cold (literally and metaphorically) clinic is powerful in its execution. Thomas does not sky away from the cost—emotional, physical, financial, and existential that the experience demands. The form, a prose poem with slashes connoting line breaks that are not there, is a brilliant choice to allow the reader to feel the overwhelming onslaught that the speaker is experiencing in the clinic. The poem is written in the second person which both protects the speaker’s vulnerability and allows the reader to empathize even more with the speaker than if the poem were in first person. As someone who has spent a lot of time in hospitals and doctor’s offices, I appreciated he precise and authentic descriptions of this world. “No one makes eye contact/ Not even the nurse/”

TT: What surprised you the most in putting together Braving the Body, now that it is out in the world and on tour?

PB: I think every time we have an opportunity to do a deep reading of the poems for each event, we’ve discovered more ways different poems speak to each other. Like when, for our Boston Book Festival generative workshop, we paired Ellen Bass’s “Ode to Fat” with Cynthia Manick’s “Dear Future Body (Keep Your Skin Thickk)” we noticed that they shared a kind of prayer ending. They are two very different poems in both tone and subject, but they found their own way to this sacred space. I feel grateful for discoveries like that. Even just being in the multiple readings with contributors, there’s this wonderful newness to hearing the poems in the order of the readers, in their voices, and in their own choices of someone else’s poem in the anthology. It makes me think of recombinant DNA, the endless variation of possibilities.

NC: I’ve been so moved by the community that has formed around this book. Chenda and Jenny and I have become dear friends, yes, and there are so many contributors who want to come together to share space. I remember Jenny and Chenda and I talking about how we didn’t want it to be just a product but a process and a progression, and it’s become just that. Yes, it’s a beautiful book of poems but it also continues to be a beautiful experience which both contains and transcends each individual poem.

JF: I agree, it has been such a joy to see the enthusiasm that still exists, undiminished, to read from the book, to listen to poems from the book, to discuss the book. When we were at the Dickinson Festival in Amherst, we presented a panel entitled “I am Afraid to Own a Body” about Dickinson’s legacy in relation to the body in contemporary poetry. We were surprised and delighted to find that  many of the themes that Dickinson grappled with, ahead of her time, are now being more openly discussed by poets like Diane Seuss, Ellen Bass, Ren Wilding in our anthology.

TT: What are your hopes for this collection as editors and readers of the world?

PB: I hope that it continues to make more room for all of us. As we face a political climate that is hostile to bodily autonomy in all its iterations, I hope that the collection will stand as a record against our erasure. We can never truly, fully know any one person’s embodied life, but we can all speak our truth from our own bodies, and in doing so and reaching out to each other, we make and remake the world. So you know, just a small aspiration for this little powerhouse book.

JF: Chenda said it perfectly. As we prepare to enter a repressive administration that has promised to strip women, nonbinary, LGBTQ+ people of their rights, I hope that Braving the Body can inspire people to use the power of language, community, and solidarity to work together against these attacks. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

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