Eileen Cleary is the author of 2 a.m. with Keats (NixesMate Press, 2020) and Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poems have appearedin Sugar House Review, West Texas Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, JAMA, Right Hand Pointing and other journals. Eileen is a 2016 and 2018 nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Eileen founded and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, and hosts/curates the Lily Poetry Salon.
She is a graduate of Lesley University’s and Solstice of Pine Manor’s MFA programs. As a nurse and poet living in Massachusetts, she is passionate about poetry and its witness of humanity.
KMD: Your latest poetry collection, Wild Pack of the Living, just launched from Nixes Mate Press. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
EC: Steven Stayner was abducted from Merced, California in 1972. When I was a teenager, Steven escaped and returned home after seven years missing, rescuing another boy in the process. To me, he was a hero because I had been seized from my family by the state, in what felt like a legally sanctioned abduction. I never thought to escape. My brother also went missing (stolen by his foster family) and he was lost to us for 40 years.
This book holds Steven Stayner — that boy from Merced who has lived in my chest for forty years. Once a person has been forcefully taken, there is no going back to being fully among the living.
KMD: What a striking title for a poetry collection. How did you choose it?
EC: I chose the title using the traditional method of culling phrases and lines from the mansucript’s poems and trying them on for fit. I asked which phrases hint at the narrative and its lyricism. Wild Pack of the Living seemed apt in depicting the vulnerable, unpredictable, loving, grieving and resilent nature of the characters in this book. An apt way, perhaps, to describe all of us at one time or another.
KMD: There are so many powerful moments in Wild Pack of the Living, but among the most striking are those where you create unexpected juxtapositions between forms, voices, and personae. I’m thinking in particular of the poem entitled “Missing,” which takes the form of a flyer for a missing person, and follows a gorgeously rendered domestic elegy (“Kay and Del the Morning After”). Can you speak to the importance of cultivating moments of surprise on the level of sequencing and architecture when crafting a poetry manuscript?
EC: Thank you for this wonderful question. As you know, individual poems can be arranged in dozens of ways to create a narrative arc. But creating that arc is just the beginning. Just as stanzas, lines and words can be arranged to amplify meaning, feeling, subtext, and to create opposition, depth and surprise, the poems in a munsucript are marshalled to do so. The arrangement becomes the book’s seminal poem, strongly influencing the experience of the reader and relaying the poet’s artist statement to the world. The importance of cultivating moments of surprise on the level of sequencing and architecture when crafting a poetry cannot be understated. It leads to deeper reading and epiphany.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are the publisher of an extraordinary small press, Lily Poetry Review Books. What has curation opened up within your creative practice?
EC: Curation has allowed me to widen my aestethic, and it has been wonderful to encounter poets inventing new forms. There is no dearth of excellent poets and it’s a privilege to read unpublished work. I’ve had the opportunity to more fully recognize poets in conversation, both in form and substance, and to continue that conversation through publishing and in my own reading. Reading is pivotal to my writing practice, so this is a gift. It’s been lovely, too, to read manuscripts that are in their embryonic states and to see them mature over time.
KMD: What are some forthcoming Lily Poetry Review Books titles that you’re excited about?
EC: A few forthcoming titles I am excited about are Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, Heather Treseler’s Hard Bargain, and Rikki Santer’s Paul Nemser Prize-winning Shepherd’s Hour.