Sasha West was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. It was also selected as one of ten debut books by Victoria Chang for Poets & Writers. Her second book, How to Abandon Ship, was published by Four Way Books in March 2024.
She collaborates on multi-media, eco-arts exhibitions with visual artist Hollis Hammonds as the collaborative Hammonds + West. Their collaborations have been featured at Texas A&M University’s Wright Gallery, the Austin Public Library Central Gallery space, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, the College of the Mainland, ArtPrize2023 in Michigan, and the Columbus College of Art and Design. Upcoming shows include Houston’s Art League and The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX.
Her work has been collected in the anthologies The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood,Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse, Penned: Zoo Poems, and others. Individual poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Agni, American Poet, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hudspeth Innovative Teaching Award. She lives in Austin, TX, with her husband and kid.
Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
Sasha West: This work started at the moment in the U.S. when climate change data and predictions were rapidly accelerating while the cultural silence was deepening. Climate had been a layer of what I was feeling about and seeing in the world, and then, suddenly, it became the core. The book came out of these questions: How do I contain this knowledge in my body, my life without turning away? How do I raise a child amid the stories, structures, and cultural assumptions that have created this? As I started expanding the scope of time in the book, I started asking: How accurate a tool can imagination be? What kind of tool is it? The book helped suspend me in these questions for much longer than I could have stayed with them otherwise. The question undergirding that (always) is: What happens when I take the unbearable, the unmooring thing in my life and turn it over to (into) poetry? That question is a belief that a different kind of thinking-feeling happens in making art than happens in other spaces of exploration.
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?
SW: I sought to capture the sound of all-at-once-ness. Aural and formal elements combine in litanies and accumulating details. Years ago, I trained in poetic music as an element of syllables and letters (the base iamb, the repetitions of vowels/consonants), but now I process sound as a syntactical force. Syntax is the sound of the thought unfolding—and by thought, I mean not just brain but the accompanying body of emotion and history that molds the experience of ideas. Perhaps it makes sense as I move toward an aesthetics of ecosystem that measuring more isolated sound elements felt less true to the work?
The idea of silence and pausing also became key to how to process the onslaught. The world problem of climate change is that everything can become noise. In poems, the corollary sound problem is how to write the unfolding music so that the poem stays rooted in the attention the body can pay to it. The composition of silence matters both within poems and across sections.
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?
SW: The concerns and factual knowledge in the book are mine. The main speaker and I share this positioning: newly middle-class, newly mother, American white cishet woman. Beyond that, all the I’s are shaped to try and discover something beyond what I can say as my own self. I’ve long thought there is a psychological correlative—a crafted “I” that can best access (and unfold) the particular human experience in the poem. For instance, this book dwells in the moment of unfolding awareness. That’s not my story. I’ve felt entwined in this for the last 35 years—from ozone hole to global warming to climate change—from hope to despair. The book pivots between two alternate points of entry to this knowledge: What would it be like to be encountering this anew (main narrator) and to have always known it (Cassandra)? There are I’s that accumulate around them—Cassandra’s offspring, voices from inside fossil fuel spaces. Each self has a voice, but I am not trying to differentiate them as characters the way I would if I were writing fiction. Instead, I am using their placement in the world, their concerns, their interests to focus on what they can see—and thus what they can speak.
Of course all these I’s are parts of my self—some lived, some imagined responses to the living—all of them bounded by my actual body and the way my brain processes language, but the work of persona as a psychological force also offers a way to try and push the boundaries of my own care and interests in the world.
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?
SW: Punctuation is such a tiny element of form, but it became a marker of porousness and time in this book. As I wrote into the voices of Cassandra and fossil fuels, I needed a form that could hold a large expanse of time. The colon became the joint or core of this, often as a signal, preparing us for the onslaught of the list. The colon both links and fragments. It refuses the clear silo a period marks—and yet it is more jagged than the comma—this is what it feels like to separate something that can’t be separated. It felt like the punctuation of layers of silt in a rock. It’s literally the hinge between scales of time on digital clocks. It brings the non-time-bound voices in the book together and allows for the marking of fragments inside of larger, seemingly cohesive ongoing syntax. The colon is permeable. The unfolding punctuation story of the book is the main narrator moving from period-bound thinking to thinking that can hold the work of the colon and non-punctuation. It’s a synthesis of ways of being. (I’ve had a fondness for the colon since those SAT analogies, and watched other authors employ it in interesting ways, but I wasn’t expecting it to be the thing that allowed a different relationship to time- and space-scale in the book.) If we think of syntax as the fingerprint of a thought-feeling, then each persona’s voice also became a kind of form, a different navigation of silence and information. Those shifting perspectives also allow the book to create recto-verso turns between poems—a sort of constant turning to look again.
LO: Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?
SW: How I wish I could gather every person into a poem. It’s a beautiful lie, no? (One that undoes Whitman’s generous poetics by betraying his own myopias.) Certainly, I’m always revising to make the aperture as large as the poem allows so others can enter. But, the problem of having to create belief in an ongoing catastrophe is a developed-world problem, a wealthy problem, a white-people problem. It is an immense privilege to not believe what is true. So in some ways, I am speaking to other people who find themselves powerful by virtue of their nationality, living place, class, identity—but who are powerless inside of larger systems so that this power feels obscured. I am speaking out of being both victim and perpetrator.
The early work was speaking to silence—or to silencing—the kind of deadening echo chamber that politicians and media dropped climate change into for a long time. The work was a desperate cry outward to someone to listen. All the power, corporations, public officials were on the other side. Even motherhood came with its own silence: the gravitas mothers are given as activists means we are only worth listening to when we have produced another human to bolster the meaning of our body. Mothers now produce not soldiers but consumers for the state. But as I dug and my understanding of climate dynamics sharpened, I better understood how my real powerlessness obscured power. I remembered studying early modernist novels with poet Michael Davidson in college—and how white women were formed into conspicuous consumers to signal their husbands’ wealth. In other words, patriarchy made us into agents of this slowly accumulating destruction, made us the people who policed the zones of sacrifice to make sure they were not in our backyards. I distrust the focus on individual action as a panacea, but I also trust that our mass acceptance of our culture’s story is what fuels the factories and private jets. I had to listen better to the dynamics of my own life and record the ways I have been a sleeper agent for fossil fuels. That sounds like a turning in—away from a listener—but it felt like the truest way to invite someone else into this work.
LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?
SW: Using Cassandra as a speaker for this is so on-the-nose! I tried other ways to solve the artistic problem of rendering deep time. But finally, the sheer obviousness of the choice felt right. We are living with material that is obvious to us: we feel the changes in our weather, storms, species, landscapes. The obvious (overwhelming!) majority of science tells us the truth of what is happening. Still, we are in an era where the obvious does not puncture the idea or our daily lives. (This is true in many spaces: Someone can have neighbors dying of COVID and still mock masking or vaccines.) It’s so easy to undo, to joke, to dismantle, to reject. Because Cassandra invites ridicule as a speaker—both in her character and in my craft choice, taking up that dismissal becomes part of what the poems can do. Owning that risk feels like a part of owning the strangeness of our time.
LO: How do the book’s aesthetics inform its ethics, or, how do its ethics inform its aesthetics?
SW: I felt the push of misinformation in making this book. The debate around climate change outside of poetry has been governed by bad naming, false uses of language (what “debate” means), deliberate misleading. My previous book was more playful in language, more experimental in its own way. Here, I felt the press of clarity as an ethical response to the issue. Some of the concrete poems in the book replicate the emotional tone. A poem about the press of all that oil gives and takes away, “Ode to Fossil Fuel,” is a monolithic, impenetrable, page-filling block. The onset of Cassandra’s vision is a triangle of accumulating-ly long lines. Her vision of disappearing is a mirror-image that winnows out. I fought letting these be overt, instead of trying to work against tone. But something about the poem visually echoing tone felt like a necessary cohesion in a field where someone is always trying to shut down what our body knows. I feel a joy in play, surrealism, maximalism. But in this book, those impulses had to be measured against clarity and truth. These poems are beholden to the world. They are written out of a long catalogue of our human mistakes. As much as I could, I tried not to replicate the problems. I pared down and back so that any remaining complexity is there because it is the only way to accurately render the complexity of the world.
LO: As a medium somewhere between time-based and static, poetry engages temporality in a fascinating range of ways. How does time operate inside this work and across the experience it creates?
SW: Time became the core element of book-making and voice-making and science-making. Whether looking through Burke’s idea of the sublime or Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject, we are dwarfed inside this thing of climate change that started so long before us and will continue after we are gone. First the book needed to find that larger space. But also, those men’s ideas of sublime/hyperobject keep us being an Other to what we stand in. There are alternate ways of thinking in which both time and the body are more porous. What if we hadn’t eradicated indigenous world-views along with indigenous bodies? (Side note: There’s an effort now to modify the definition of nature in dictionaries as something that includes humans. That says everything about our placement in the world.) I know you mean time as an element that the reader experiences as a function of reading, but I was constantly trying to pack in a thicker time to the experience of climate—itself a concept requiring unfolding time (as opposed to the instantaneousness and always-ness of “weather”).
In the last drafts of the book, I started working with visual artist Hollis Hammonds on an (ongoing) series of multi-media eco-arts exhibitions. In our work, poems sometimes appear as texts on the wall, but more often, the poems are audio accompanying installations, unfolding in video snippets, or unmoored as slivers of text twined in a sculpture. In other words, they lose their completeness as a temporal experience with a beginning, middle, and end. Viewers can enter and exit anywhere, which makes poems more like a vortex and less like a plot diagram. That definitely changed the way I was making and revising later in the book. I started testing poems as both continuous and fragmented spaces.
LO: How did the book’s structure unveil itself to you? What emerged to shape its architecture?
SW: I wanted the whole of it to be the mind in motion across the idea, a psychological unfolding of the onset of real knowledge for this woman. She starts not in un-knowing, but in the kind of haunted ignorance that comes from being enveloped in our culture. (I think the idea of moral injury that war photojournalists experience might apply to what it feels like to know/watch how our lives intersect with this crisis.) Like all ignored knowledge, her process of learning involves piercing insights—a kind of progress—but also much re-evaluation, unraveling, remaking, questioning, resistance, and grief. So while the overall arrow across the book is toward a kind of bodily and ethical clarity, section by section, the book lives in many contradictions in idea, emotion, tone. That messiness and non-linearity felt true to the actual process of coming to terms with something. The book stops before the next logical step, which is actual change. Even the changes mentioned are still more at the level of imagination. The structure records as full a reckoning as I can make of this one sliver of knowing. On a logistical level, the poem-to-poem structure emerged from making sure the book’s turns allowed us to be with the knowledge for as long as possible. Long, heavy poems have breaths after them to allow for the next immersion, the way an iamb emphasizes the spondee. Those smaller choices are all in service of moving a reader across the entire expanse of the work as a single motion.
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?
SW: I kept coming back to the generous, brilliant incision of thinkers like Naomi Klein, Camille Dungy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Rebecca Solnit. Their ability to link details to larger truth, to give metaphors that unfold world mattered to me as artist—but also, their sheer ability to carry off difficult things gave me hope. When I need to shake off the daily, I start writing sessions with Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” Also, Neko Case kills worldbuilding in Hell-On. Three visual art touchstones: 1) Lars Jan’s “Holoscenes”—tanks filling and emptying with water while dancers inside them replicate daily tasks like sleeping or shopping or reading the paper. 2) I’ve loved Robyn O’Neill’s drawings since we used one of her images for a cover when I was running Gulf Coast. I kept returning to “These final hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past.” 3) Finally, Cai Guo-Qiang’s work “Elegy” from Ninth Wave (on the cover) was a guide for how to gentle a force of war (gunpowder and the jingoism of fireworks), how to remake a cultural inheritance, and how to call attention not just to the act of explosion, but the aftereffects of smoke. Oh, and I have done an embarrassing number of jigsaw puzzles over the decade of this book.
LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?
SW: I still feel the press of this issue—both physically as we watch this hottest summer unfold—and artistically. This last book was about reckoning with harm, but what might the healing look like? I am hungry to start remaking and revising. (As David Buckland projects onto an iceberg: “Another world is possible.”) I’ve been exploring interdependence: mycelium and mirror neurons, symbiotic species, the way whales can locate their kin in the ocean even when they are far away, Darcey Steinke watching research where an infrared camera maps spreading hot flashes across the individual bodies of menopausal nuns, the Care Collective, the microbiome, hope as thinkers like Bayo Akomolofe and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson are envisioning it. For so long the silo of our bodies and our country has allowed a loneliness and concurrent destruction to reign. Brené Brown says that we are wired for the social, and mob mentality and mass hysteria and cults show us the danger of this. What happens when we dissolve our boundaries—not just in religion or hallucinogens or metaphors—but in our daily physical experience of each other? How can I form a poetics from ecosystem? How can I simultaneously re-animal us, and re-make what animal is to us? It’s too early to know where these questions will lead, but it feels amazing to be following them.
Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), Lost Alphabet (2009), Little Stranger (2013), Late Empire (2017), and Dream Apartment (2023). She has also published two books of nonfiction: Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020), a book-length lyric essay on the intersection of pain, perception, and language; and Climate (Essay Press, 2022), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with Julie Carr.
Olstein’s honors include a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation award. She is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite and curates an interview series with poets about their new books for Tupelo Quarterly.