Dwaine Rieves is a physician who creates non-fiction, poetry, and fiction works that explore the metaphysical dimensions of human imaging. His collection, When the Eye Forms, won the 2005 Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry. He avoided writing poetry for a decade, this emigration ending with the birth of the poems in his 2025 collection, Red Camaro.
In Red Camaro, we look back to Smithville, Mississippi, where a wizened speaker reflects upon how “[d]eath is reworking the sweet / stench of used equipment within our living.” This used “equipment” includes the world and lives of people we may assume we have left behind, as in the poem “Factory, on Main,” where the speaker honors those who stayed in Mississippi, “saying money life takes might / otherwise take over the living.”
The book’s emblematic red Camaro is a 1970 remake of a model that the speaker’s father lusted for, “one column red monthly” from the bank draft. There is a heroism in the living, as when the speaker says: “I doubt my father ever really / feared Nixon, or years he knew / we could never outrun in a hot Camaro, a chill in every / red number where my rifle should go.” The poems revisit and often celebrate the struggles within a small town, where “power / personalizes a grit / that settles only once // doubt’s slithering wake / turns and moonlight // falls on // this soiled surface.”
Tiffany Troy: You situate Red Camaro with “Prelude,” where the reader is introduced to the speaker who grew up in Smithville, Mississippi, became a doctor, and who “[i]n time” “only came home to visit.” We are placed in the “day of the storm” of unimaginable destruction. How does the prose situate the readers to the poems that are to follow?
Dwaine Rieves: I hoped the “Prelude” might work as an invitation to reflect on the life that preceded the storm, this life now dissected by the wind to its most enduring parts. Which is a fancy way of saying that I’m inviting the reader to walk through the fields and pastures that contain the storm-tossed relics of lives and stories. I’m welcoming the reader to inspect those relics, to imagine how they got to the spot where they were dropped, and how that transporting power just happened, like the story behind the relics. It’s the theme of not passing judgement from a place of lucky hubris, of dealing with the make-do aspects of human nature. Reminds me of a quote from Miss Kitty...of Gunsmoke fame...who said, “Matt, you can’t account for everything that happens to people who touch you. You know, I learned a long time ago, there are some things in this life that you just accept the way they are.” Matt then called the saloon-keeper a “deep redhead,” and the confident Miss Kitty smiled.
Indeed, all the Red Camaro poems arrived after my hometown was destroyed in an EF-5 monster that, according to some weather-gurus, had the most powerful winds in recorded tornado history. By coincidence, I arrived home an hour or so after the destruction, and I walked with my family and neighbors through the debris-strewn streets once the dead and injured had been evacuated. I was particularly struck by the helter-skelter scattering of large tombstones in our town cemetery, these markers of people and times I had grown up among. I couldn’t help but feel as if these markers now had, as the poet April Bernard has written, “something else to say of these bad times to me.” That something else was the ignition for most of the poems in Red Camaro.
TT: I love this because it feels Red Camaro is very much a book of memories. Could you speak about your process in writing and putting together Red Camaro? In the Acknowledgements, you spoke of how Greg Pardlo “plugged [you] once more behind the wheel of a relentless red Camaro, which the poems followed.” How do you feel your life in medicine informed the writing?
DR: In my mid-life years, I read and wrote a lot of poetry, collecting many of the pieces in my first book. That collection appeared shortly following the death of my mother, which left me feeling as if a great chunk of myself had also died. In this post-loss after time, the creation of poetry felt wrong–almost disrespectful because I knew the work would be mechanical and forced and invariably formulaic. So, I quit poetry. I tinkered with prose; fiction, because I felt as if I were living in a fiction, this world of apartness that seemed capable of painting only an unreal story. I wrote an experimental novel, which no commercial publisher would touch, and which ultimately served its purpose, I think, if only in the validation of its title–Shirtless Men Drink Free.
After the novel appeared, I tested the poetry water once again. This time by taking a class at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where Greg Pardlo challenged me to write about my medical work. I didn’t want to, but he was the teacher, and I complied. And so, I wrote “How to Intubate the Trachea,” which surprised me by turning out to be a poem about my father (and not medicine). Alas, I now felt shirtless and thirsty for another ride that, in time, would contribute to the life of Red Camaro.
Several poems in the collection deal with a slightly medicalized approach to gender, where the gender of the character takes center stage in a narrative. This gender motif (especially the poems about men and their troubles) springs in large part from the innate medical tendency to categorize people in a way that–from the doctoring perspective–has physical meaning. The human body has, for millennia, been classified predominantly as either male or female, with social calamities and advantages framing these categories. Red Camaro delves primarily with the challenges of boys and men, these deeply vulnerable disciples of a maleness that has historically been far more troubling than that of femaleness. I believe this gender motif in our lives is important but also one that largely disappears when it comes time to reflect on the genderless fragility of life as it must be lived in the human body. The idea is explored in the poem, “Six-Step Validation Elegy for Monroe Garment.” The poem builds on growing up in a town where men and women worked side-by-side at the local garment plant, everyone knowing their assigned charge was the same– “to make production.” The poem closes with the presentation of every face in an open casket, the background music interrupted by shouts from a spirit that transcends that body’s last production.
TT: How did you land on the three-part structure, with “Strange Men,” “Could Be,” and “Places”?
DR: I’ve long enjoyed poetry collections that use a three-section format because the arrangement generally suits the way I tend to read the collections—plus, I feel a curious connection to the old mystic tradition engrafted in the number three and its sometimes spiritual meanings.
The section titles derive from three of my favorite Mississippi author quotes. The first section (“Strange Men”) builds on an excerpt from a play by Beth Henley, which frames the concept of “denial” in a seductive coyness. The second section (“Could Be”) follows from one of the most famous B B King quotes in which he acknowledges the love of his mother, but he also suspects she just might be jivin’ him with that love (ah, the magic of living with our suspicions). The third section (“Places”) follows from Welty’s quote that emphasizes how understanding any one place (alas, home) helps us understand all places better.
These section titles are part of my view of the entirety of the book as a composition, a collage of relics, ideas, imaging and word appliances and sometimes puzzles that hopefully help reveal the joy of riding anywhere and anytime in a Red Camaro, regardless of reason.
TT: I agree with your assessment that “How to Intubate the Trachea” utilizes the ABC of your profession but is ultimately about your family and I feel like you achieve something similarly interesting with the forms of the poems. Could you speak a bit about how you decided upon the alternating indented couplet forms (like “Blackberry Winter”) or the tabular forms such as “The Animal, Table 1” and “The Animal, Table 2”?
DR:The presentation of words on a page (or screen, for that matter) needs to feel inviting or intriguing to me as a reader. So, I like to think the display, word breaks, alignment and form of the poems in Red Camaro might prove as provocative and engaging in their visual display to a reader as I felt they seemed to wish to be displayed. It’s almost as if the poems are living creations entangled on the page as much as in my mind, their presentation on the ivory sheets working as a kind of cradle or bed, a holding place where a viewer might bend over and examine this living creature if something moved them to do so.
TT: For writers similarly emerging from familial or communal grief, as you were with your first poetry collection or Red Camaro, what writing practices or exercises would you recommend?
DR: I’m a big fan of self-experimentation in the creative arts, and I have come to value the ability of people to express themselves in various media—cooking, gardening, farming, woodworking, and on and on, and sometimes I find company with folks who enjoy painting with words (“word-working”). In short, if painting with words seems fun to someone, I encourage them to let it flow—no self-censoring and no editing—just flow. Later, the crafting will inevitably come. As will the pocket or purse or billfold that works as a fine container for grief, this powerpack of potential and self-definition.
TT: What are you working on now?
DR: I’m drafting a memoir that is currently growing along a trellis that allows language and science to entwine and sometimes blossom in ways that are doing their best to teach me new things. Ah, the magic of growth and flow!
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
DR: I celebrate you. I believe we live in a world of make do, and I have come to treasure the humble promise of a first step or first touch or first study of a word that looks odd or unusual. And I enjoy exploring the world in which other folks are trying to make do. My closing thought is largely one of saying thank you for sharing as well as creating your world and especially any words that help others find their way through it.