In this intimate conversation for Tupelo Quarterly, I sat down with poet and educator DeeSoul Carson to discuss his debut collection The Laughing Barrel (2027, Alice James Books) —a work that pulses with grief, musicality, Black spirituality, and the tension between rage and resilience. Through powerful meditations on lineage, the body, spoken word, and spiritual contradiction, Carson crafts a book that does not shy away from the absurdities of daily survival in a world that demands Black people shoulder grief without pause. Together, we reflected on writing through loss, the sacredness of revision, and why joy isn’t an escape—it’s theology.
Darius Phelps: The Laughing Barrel opens a necessary wound—deeply personal yet profoundly communal. How has grief become its own language for you, and what does it teach you about lineage, faith, and voice?
DeeSoul Carson: I think grief is inherently communal—especially as a Black person. There’s the personal grief of losing loved ones, but there’s also the grief we carry when someone who looks like us is taken. There’s kinship there, whether we know them or not. When I think about Black lineage, I think about survival. And grief becomes something we learn to grow around. It’s not something we erase—it shapes us. We balance it with our daily responsibilities, but we also turn to each other to survive it. That’s what I try to reflect in my work.
DP: Your poems hold a tension I deeply resonate with—the sacred and the sorrowful dancing in the same breath. Can you talk about how you navigate that spiritual duality in your writing, especially as it relates to Black Spirituality and the theology of the everyday?
DC: I grew up in church. My dad was a deacon, my grandfather’s a pastor. So faith has always been part of me. But what I’m always interested in is: how do we hold faith in the face of absurdity? Racism, capitalism, genocide—these things don’t make sense. And yet, we’re asked to carry them. As a person of faith, I believe in God, but I also question God. That tension lives in my writing. I don’t think belief and anger contradict each other. Wrestling with the divine is part of the journey. And I think more people need to feel permission to do that—to ask hard questions about the forces that shape our lives, both above and below.
DP: As someone who writes toward liberation and healing, I often ask: how can poetry serve as both testimony and transformation? For you, how has writing been a space not only for survival, but for becoming?
DC: My understanding of poetry has shifted over time. I started out doing spoken word—all my early poems were meant to be performed. That shaped my relationship to language: I was writing for a reaction, writing to move people. Performance poets like Porsha Olayiwola were my North Stars. As I transitioned to more page-based work, I brought that sensibility with me. I think of the page as its own stage now. In the classroom, I tell my students: poetry is rhetorical experimentation. If you call something a poem, I’m less concerned with whether it fits tradition and more focused on what rhetorical work it’s trying to do. Is it succeeding in that mission? That’s what matters to me.
DP: You mentioned spoken word—and I can hear that legacy in your work. There’s an undeniable musicality to your poems, even in the line breaks. How do sound, silence, and breath shape your revision process?
DC: Sound is everything for me. I revise by reading out loud. If a word trips me up, I cut it or replace it. For instance, I changed “the gorgeous British nature documentary” to “the beautiful British nature documentary” just because the plosives—the “b” sounds—flow better in my mouth. Spoken word taught me to prioritize how a poem lives in the body. I use punctuation, spacing, and line breaks intentionally. I want someone reading my work to hear the rhythm I’m trying to convey—even if I’m not there to read it to them. The sound should still speak.
DP: I often say I write with the lights off—meaning, I write what I’m afraid to say out loud. Was there a poem in The Laughing Barrel that scared you? And what did it demand of you?
DC: I don’t often approach writing with fear—but there are poems where the emotional weight catches me. “ Burning Bush Psalm” is one. It was written after my stepmother’s cancer diagnosis. She passed last year. That poem holds my anger at God next to her unshakable faith. She comforted others more than they comforted her. Another is “Mitrice Richardson,” about a real Black woman who went missing and was found a year later. That poem required immense care. It’s short, but it carries a lot. When I write pieces like that, I’m trying to witness without speaking over the story. I’m not a spokesperson—I’m a witness. And I’m honoring a life.
DP: The body in your work doesn’t just appear—it bleeds, collapses, prays, and rises. How do you think about the role of the body in poetic inquiry? What does it reveal that language alone cannot?
DC: Poetry is an embodied experience. The best rhetoric moves through the body. When I read work by people like Danez Smith or Kaveh Akbar, I feel it in my body. That’s because their delivery is so deeply connected to their physical presence. Performance and the page don’t have to be in conflict. In fact, I think they should be in conversation. I write with that in mind. Every line break, every period, every capitalization—that’s me trying to replicate how I’d perform the piece. Because I can’t be in every room, but the poem can still carry my breath.
DP: If you could sit in a circle with Black poets who’ve passed—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, or even a relative whose poetry never made it to the page—what would you want them to see in The Laughing Barrel?
DC: Lucille Clifton, hands down. The epigraph for The Laughing Barrel comes from her memoir Generations. It’s a short, beautiful book that changed how I think about lineage. She writes, “Oh, slavery, slavery, my daddy would say. It ain’t something in a book, Lou. Even the good parts was awful.”
That line is the heartbeat of my book. I’m trying to honor what we’ve survived and what we carry forward. Clifton wrote about grief, faith, and humor—black humor specifically. That laughter that sits beside unimaginable pain. I’d want her to know that this book is because of her. I hope it’s in conversation with her work.
DP: Last question. What does joy mean for you right now—not as an escape, but as a theology, a muscle, a choice?
DC: I think of my mother when I think of joy. She used to say, “Happiness comes and goes, but nobody can take my joy.” For her, joy was faith-based, an internal compass. Even when the world was falling apart, she held on to that joy. I’ve had immense grief in the last year. But I’ve also had immense joy. And I don’t think they cancel each other out—I think they balance each other. Grief is memory. Joy is movement. Both keep me present.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of My God’s Been Silent.
DeeSoul Carson is a poet and educator from San Diego, CA, currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work is featured in Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, The Offing, & elsewhere. A Stanford University alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from the NYU MFA program, The Watering Hole, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com