There are conversations that don’t move in straight lines. They circle. They spiral. They wander into memory, science fiction, grief, devotion, and back again—returning not with answers, but with better questions. Speaking with Rosebud Ben-Oni feels like stepping into one of her poems: expansive, associative, fiercely intelligent, and deeply alive to the strangeness of being here at all.
I first encountered Rosebud’s work through its refusal—its refusal of tidy frameworks, of singular genres, of the false divide between the scientific and the sacred. From If This Is the Age We End Discovery to her forthcoming Alice James Books collection, The Last Great Adventure Is You, her writing has continued to ask what it means to live inside uncertainty without surrendering tenderness, imagination, or care. Her poems are populated by particle accelerators and Icelandic horses, extraterrestrial forces and childhood memory, nuclear futures and intimate grief—each held in equal regard.
In this conversation, Rosebud speaks candidly about writing a new book instead of the one she was supposed to be writing; about love that outlives presumed death; about speculative realism as a way of making science fiction unbearably human; and about joy as an inconvenient, unruly force that arrives from the outside. She reflects on trauma, survival, Judaism as poetic practice, and the ethical responsibility of art in a world increasingly shaped by indifference.
What emerges is not a manifesto, but a witness. A testament to the belief that poetry—like science, like love—is an act of imagining otherwise. That to keep writing is to keep insisting on possibility. And that even when the question changes, we are still called to stay with it.
Darius Phelps:From If This Is the Age We End Discovery to your forthcoming collection with Alice James Books, The Last Great Adventure Is You, what changed in you as a thinker, as a maker? What did the new book ask you to shed, and what did it insist you grow? I’m curious where you feel the stakes and tenderness shifted as you moved from particle accelerators and paradox to hooves, weather, and that off-world presence humming at field’s edge.
Rosebud Ben-Oni: My God—that is beautifully worded. That’s a poem in itself.
This book came together in a few months, beginning New Year’s Eve (December 31) of 2024 to the beginning of March. Some of the poems came from my existing Icelandic horse series, but at least half the book is new work I wrote in those few months. I wrote them in one of those spiritually flooding, exigent moments that keep you up at night, won’t let you sleep.
During that year, I was in the middle of completing The Atomic Sonnets right now—I received a very generous grant from the Café Royal Foundation, and I am still working on the manuscript— and in December, I went to see my family in South Texas, along the border. My mother has a very large family, and it’s always challenging to see as many beloveds as I can. We’ve lost quite a few family members in the last few years, recently my Aunt Dolores whom we called “Loli,” Before she died, my aunt made it known she didn’t want any more grief. She wanted a Celebration of Life. My Uncle Romaldo (her husband) saw to that in her memorial service. There was grief, of course. But it was important to remember her as a very adventurous, self-possessed woman who was never afraid to speak her mind. While I carry her and all of dearly departed with me in New York, the urgency of those presences living on intensifies when I’m in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s the opposite of a haunting. In that I feel very blessed. The love never disappears. Not in a sense of a past continuous, but holding an otherworldly stake in a future that never dies. Often I imagine I hold onto tight to the flank of the Arrow of the Time, my favorite unsolved problems in theoretical physics. Sometimes it rolls me. Sometimes it floors me. Sometimes I try to roll it. Often, I have to find a way to regain my balance on my own, and when things get really bad, there’s a push on the small of my back, my electrons ready to repel, and I get back on. The Arrow of Time has never been theoretical for me, but something I’ve dreamt all my life, a fiery stream of force carrying me and my family forever onward, onward. The love never dies. All of us, riding ramshackle on the Arrow of Time. I’ve found that to be one of the strangest and most beautiful things about being alive.
December 2024 was a challenging time for me. I’d had a biopsy earlier that turned up suspicious findings, and was trying to figure out a way to tell my family when all I wanted to do was enjoy the holidays with them. So at that time, I didn’t. I spent as much time with everyone as I could, and there was much to celebrate and grieve, and I put it aside.
It wasn’t until New Year’s Eve, amid all the celebration, that I found out something that knocked me right off my fragile grip, my vulnerable stride, holding onto the Arrow of Time.
Let’s call him Liam. He was one of my older brother’s best friends, and you could say it was my first childhood crush, but it went deeper than that. Liam tried to protect me when I was young, when things were happening that we didn’t yet have language for. Abuse that I mistook for love, and so I didn’t understand what he was trying to protect me from. He was also just a kid. We had a strange relationship—one shaped by trauma, confusion, and protection. He joined the military after high school. I
Years later, in 2014, while I was engaged to be married, my family and I ran into his mother, who told us Liam had died. She offered no other explanation, simply broke down in tears. For ten years, my family believed he was dead. I could never fully accept it.
Then, this past December, we found out he is very much alive.
That discovery unraveled me.
On New Year’s Day, I wrote a poem called “On the Wisdom of Optimus Prime,” (which will appear in Electric Lit at the time of this publication.) We shared an affection for the old 80s animated film Transformers: The Movie, and I used to think I was in love with Hot Rod; later I realized Hot Rod was just a stand-in for a love I could not understand. That poem began everything. People really can come back from the dead. He really is alive. And from that, a flood of memories returned. Some wonderfully mischievous. Some are extremely painful.
And instead of returning to The Atomic Sonnets right away, I wrote an entirely new book. One that shaped itself as a sequel to my last collection If This Is the Age We End Discovery. It’s now envisioned as a trilogy with The Last Great Adventure Is You as the next in the saga. Adventure is very different from Discovery in many ways. For now, all I’ll say is it delves into the terrestrial to unearth a new poetic speculative realism. It’s a much more “palpable book,” if that makes sense, as much as it is rooted in sci-fi. The speaker and the readers will be guided by the ever rugged and resilient Icelandic horse named Odin, who is both companion and provocateur, who offers succor as much as he challenges. He’s based on this Icelandic horse I met in 2016, a horse that I knew for less than a week, but really formed a strong connection with.
And of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add the whole something is watching this, watching within the book and watching the reader too. A mysterious, extraterrestrial presence slowly emerges, revealing the many possibilities of tomorrow that are already here...
My last book ended with what if? This one lives inside that question.
I do believe life is meant to be difficult. That’s how evolution happens. I grew up a creature who had to figure things out fast. I’m always so close to one answer.
But of course I also believe when I get close to answering any question, the question changes.
This book asks: What happens during that shift?
He is alive. What now? What can I say to him which is what I also want to say to yesterday, today and tomorrow?
Now I’m working simultaneously on the next and last book in what we’re called “The Discovery Trilogy,” along with The Atomic Sonnets, and a series of several interconnected novels. Liam’s character has become part of that novel, only it’s set elsewhere and of course it’s fiction. But it’s him, through and through.
I do believe my grip is only a tad firmer on the Arrow of Time. But I’m touching my cheek now. The love is stronger.
DP: I’m honestly enthralled. This sounds cinematic—the way the poetry, fiction, and speculative thinking are interwoven.
RBO: It’s all interconnected. For instance, my Theory of Efes—Efes being the Hebrew word for Zero, but I reworked as an idea that nullification can lead to transformation— is also in the novel series and will return in the last book of the Discovery trilogy. It will be very important for the novel series. Likewise, with The Atomic Sonnets, I took it upon myself to create new elements because 118 elements wasn’t enough for me. My imagination really is me. I see so much possibility, and not just here for humans on earth.
DP: If we laid pages from both books side by side, where would we see your craft’s growth most clearly—line, length, silence, the braid of scientific lexicon with image?
RBO:Someone once told me I was known for long poems, so I immediately wrote shorter ones for Adventure.
This book opens and closes with prose poems. Like I said, it’s more terrestrial. Still experimental, but the poems are another kind of mischief. A biologist friend told me, “If your last book was a physicist’s dream, this is a biologist’s dream. I felt like I got in the mud with you.”
It’s also quite funny. A few years ago, I entered my full-on Impish Era. Playful. Or rather: prankful. I feel like I’ve been alive for a very long time. Or maybe I should just say it: I’ve been alive for a very, very long time. I’ll let the poems speak on that. Often I don’t ask where I am, but when.
DP: For those beginning to build a life in poems, what permission did you have to give yourself to keep going? And what repeatable craft practice would you offer?
RBO: Art keeps us from indifference. I can’t stress that enough. My brain is in science, my heart is in science fiction. Poetry is my shul. It’s how I practice Judaism. It keeps me open, extended, hopeful. A concrete practice? Don’t imagine a utopia or dystopia. Ask: what’s one thing you wish existed? A cure. An invention. Something small. Something impossible. Create it. Write toward it. You are not isolated. You are part of a larger system, even when you feel alone.
DP: When a girl—especially one told she’s too much, too curious, too strange—finds your work, what do you want to place in her hands?
RBO: I want her to feel excited about life. I want those with power to remember it’s our responsibility to make the world safer for children. Hard doesn’t have to mean cruel. Just because something happened to you doesn’t have to define you forever. Bring people with you. Open doors. Don’t gatekeep.
When we become indifferent, evolution ends.
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his poems navigate silence, ancestry, and resilience, creating sanctuaries for voices too often unheard. His work has been featured by Diode, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more across platforms that champion the power of story to honor every body, every history, and every voice.
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including the forthcoming The Last Great Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027),a sequel to If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her work has been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Cafe Royal Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, APR, The Writer’s Chronicle, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Tin House, among others.