Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
Natalie Scenters-Zapico: I wrote much of My Perfect Cognate while struggling with severe post-partum depression. My PPD was caused by my SSRI medications being in flux, my thyroid conditions (Hashimoto’s and thyroid nodules), my mother being diagnosed with breast cancer, struggling with breast feeding, and of course an overall lack of sleep. All of these became the particular pains of my motherhood that were very heavy to bear daily. And yet, when I tried to write about these pains, they all seemed very banal. I would roll my eyes at every poem I would draft. Oh god, here goes another motherhood poem, just what the world needs.
Here I was with this beautiful, healthy baby, a supportive partner, a successful career, and a home of our own—who was I to write about that pain? Miles away in the land that raised me, El Paso, Texas there were mothers who were being torn from their children, mothers being raped and beaten, and an ever-growing wall in my desert kept static in our collective minds like a bad metaphor. These things, and worse, were happening not just at my border but in border spaces around the world. Look at Palestine, look at Ukraine—all test tubes for the violences of our globalized world.
I set off in search of a language, a form, a device that helped me to talk about the intersections of these things in a way that opened me up a bit and helped me to reconsider all my internalized misogyny regarding motherhood. I wondered if there was a site (whether true or false) that claimed to hold a shared understanding between us all as people. That was when I began thinking about the cognate and how I could wield the cognate in a poem. My search for the perfect cognate to be understood, became a series of linguistic games I grew an obsession with. I wanted to find a perfect word, a perfect cognate, that required no translation.
LO: “Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson, and I believe her. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?
NSZ: This is where the title of the book My Perfect Cognate comes from. Both English and Spanish languages kept failing me at every turn. Their ties to colonialism, to imperialism, to capitalism, to violence kept returning to me. Many poets talk about this failure, Kaveh Akbar, Ocean Vuong, and Solmaz Shariff come to mind. In my last book, Lima :: Limón, I did a lot of naming of this linguistic violence—pointing it out, lingering in it. It seemed to me that it wasn’t enough to just name it anymore. I wondered how I could corrupt it. How could I use the Spanglish that I speak daily (sometimes English dominant, sometimes Spanish dominant) as a site for linguistic innovation that made something new and captured the pains I mentioned earlier.
This is where the cognate poems came. I started to view the cognate as both a real bridge of understanding in the perfect, and a bridge towards misunderstanding in the false. I began weaving poems that used English dominant versions and Spanish dominant versions to create a conversation about power, pain, and translation. The cognate (perfect, true, and false) became the metaphor for my unbalanced state. Spanglish—what many people had called (and still call) a corruption—became my site of linguistic resistance. I wrote this book in search of my perfect cognate—a word to be understood across all languages and time, a word that needed no translation.
The cognate also became the perfect vehicle to explore my motherhood since the word cognate first referred to tracing one’s lineage through the mother’s line (cognate), as opposed to the father’s line (agnate). I began using it as a device that requires fluency in both English and Spanish and the multiple ways you can corrupt, or as I’d like to see it create, new meanings across languages and sentence structures.
LO: What’s the relationship between the speaker’s “I” and you, yourself? How is the book’s “I” informed by your I and/or eye?
This is always a tricky question for me to answer. Sometimes (often) the I in my books is me, or at least a version of me. Sometimes it is a speaker, who I may or may not share much in common with. Always though, the “I” and eye in my poems are rooted in versions of me or stories I’ve lived with. I still believe in the speaker of the poem. The older I get the more I rely on the speaker of the poem without conflating it with the author. No matter how personal, who the “I” and eye are in my first book The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015), is very different than the “I” and the eye in My Perfect Cognate because I am different with each poem that I draft.
LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?
NSZ: The riskiest part of this work is how I forced myself to write about motherhood beyond my own internalized misogyny. In the act of confronting that internalized misogyny I’ve found a whole new audience that I didn’t have before. When my poem “Sentimental Evening” was published in The New Republic and later in Best American Poetry 2024 and then again in The Washington Post, I was shocked how it resonated with so many mothers (all kinds of mothers) who also felt silenced by art’s perception of motherhood as sentimental. In fact, once I became a mother, I became all too aware of how much room we give children to write about their mothers in all their beauty and abject horror. But at the same time, we offer little to no room for mothers to do the same of their own bodily experiences in motherhood without silencing them for either being “bad mothers” or misty-eyed bores. To write despite that, to tell myself that the lines I was writing on my phone in the dark with my baby were mine and worthy felt and still feels very risky.
And then, of course, I felt that I pushed myself a lot with the linguistic plays in the book across languages. I am very eager to see how it is interpreted and even misinterpreted. Both responses seem fit for a book that plays with that very concept.
LO: What’s your sense of the aural life of this work? What role did sound or music play in the generative process, in revision?
NSZ: Sound always plays a big role in all my work. This is why I can’t be a coffee shop writer. I’m always reading my work aloud as I’m drafting and revising for sound and music.
Though I do often work in what could be read as a “narrative mode,” I am still obsessed with meter and cadence. In My Perfect Cognate I became interested in how the English dominant version of a poem read differently than the Spanish dominant version and how those two things could be woven to create different sounds and meanings. How could this too be an interrogation of the power of colonizing languages as violent?
In the poem “HR 7059 in Cognates” I force the reader to sit with every perfect and true cognate found in HR 7059, also known as the “Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act of 2018.” What does it mean that there are words we’re all supposed to understand across Spanish and English in this bill, but that are so violent towards the very land that was once México? How are we to ever understand each other if even words that share the same mother betray us?
LO: How did the book’s structure unveil itself to you? What emerged to shape its architecture?
NSZ: This was probably one of the most difficult parts of putting this book together. It saw various orders before landing on this final form. My editor Ash Wynter at Copper Canyon Press truly helped me—thank you, Ash.
This book was written over the course of 8 years, so the concerns of the poems were constantly changing as the concerns in my life changed. The difficult part of this was how to cohere them in a way that didn’t seem too all over the place. In the end, without getting too prescriptive of my own work, the thread that brought the sections together is the very device that helped to free up my language—the cognate (perfect, true, and always a bit false).
LO: What kept you company during the writing of this work? Did any books, songs, art works, philosophical treatises, snacks, walks, or oddball devotions contribute to a book-specific creative realm?
NSZ: My breast pump (not covered by my insurance), my baby who slept on me for a whole year (I drafted a lot of these poems on my phone or on scraps of paper), various medications at different doses to keep my thyroid and depression at bay. I also kept a veladora (or two, or three, or four) perpetually burning in my house both during my pregnancy and then in that first year of motherhood. First, so that the pregnancy would go well and then for my mother who was going through chemotherapy and radiation for breast cancer. I know it is not very intellectually minded of me to confess that I still burn veladoras, that I pray the rosary, that I still wear saints and virgin medals to protect me. But as someone who experienced a lot of death at a very young age, it is the only way I know how to cope when things are so unbearably painful and out of my hands. I don’t know that it works, but it helps me feel less alone.
And then, of course, the texts that kept me company while writing this book: Iliana Rocha’s The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death, Carmen Gimenez’s Bring Down the Little Birds, Jane Huffman’s Public Abstract, Christopher Soto’s Diaries of a Terrorist, Diane Seuss’ Frank, Dana Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are, and the poems of Sharon Olds, Jaime Sabines, Alejandra Pizarnik, Marosa DiGiorgio, and Juana Ibarbourou, to name a few.
I also revisited Plath while working on this book and Ariel hit me in a different way than it had before I became a mother. I’ll confess I was never a Plath-devotee in my 20s, but suddenly on the verge of forty with a baby, the lines “I’m no more your mother/ Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/ Effacement at the wind’s hand” really lingered with me.
LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?
NSZ: I’ve learned to embrace silence after working intensely on a book. I don’t push it anymore. The poems will come again—they always do. And until they do, I throw myself into something I know I’m bad at. Between Lima :: Limón and My Perfect Cognate it was water coloring. This time I’m trying to play the piano. The point is to bring beginner’s mind back into my brain, to be really bad at something for a while. To find joy in just doing and learning something new again with no stakes. From that the poems will return in unexpected ways, which is always more satisfying.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of The Verging Cities (Center For Literary Publishing 2015), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Associations New Writers Award, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, and the Utah Book Award. She holds fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and CantoMundo, and is a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. She is a professor at Bennington College.