Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them), is the author of five collections of poetry including, A Brief History of My Sex Life, from Lily Poetry Review Books; the Lambda Literary finalist, Transitory, 2023, winner of the BOA Editions, Ltd. Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry; Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2023, released in an expanded second edition in the summer of 2024. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Subhaga is an AWP Writer to Writer mentor and teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Their work appears or is forthcoming in a variety of print and online journals including Terrain, West Trestle, The Bellevue Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Prairie Schooner, Nelle and others. A Queer elder, they live in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your hybrid text, A Brief History of My Sex Life, just launched from Lily Poetry Review Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
Subhaga Crystal Bacon: This book is a natural offshoot of the investigation of gender that began while I was writing my previous collection, Transitory. Reading an early draft of the collection, my late, brilliant friend, the poet Jenn Martelli asked me “where are you in this book?” That question set off a deep process of thinking about, reifying, my own sense of gender identity. As Transitory went into production, I continued to write towards these questions: how do I identify as a gendered and sexual being? What shaped the way I’ve thought of myself? What kept me from understanding this? What happened in my early life to shape my particular sense of identity? That led to a psylocibin journey that brought forward a nebulous but believable memory of early childhood sexual abuse. Overall, the book is pretty much what the title suggests: a long look at my sexual history as part of my sense of self.
KMD: The book incorporates a range of forms—haibun, abecedarian, lyric narrative, documentary poetics. As a creative practitioner, how do you choose vehicle for a given story or message?
SCB: Transitory began in an online workshop on writing poems of social protest in forms. I found forms very useful in managing the difficult stories the book told. Form became a trusted tool for just that. In his essay, Poetic Form and Fracture Pantoum, Philip Metres said Falling into a form can trick us into saying something that the form invites us to say—the form opens a space for us to surprise ourselves into revelation. This has become a kind of mantra for my writing. I also spent one April with Jenn writing a poem a day, and many of the prompts were forms and many of those poems found their way into the manuscript.
Form is a constraint, so whatever the poem wants to say has to work within that, and doing so opens new choices, new ways to consider things. torrin a. greathouse’s burning haibun is a wonderful way to pare down story to reveal its essence. I start with a draft, and then begin shaping. Is free verse the best form? What words might warrant repetition and how? Sometimes they go into form and then back out again because the form has done its work of revealing the poem’s heart.
KMD: The poems frequently interrogate language itself—what can be said, what remains unsayable. How do you see language functioning in relation to trauma?
SCB: Having had no language for my early experience—well, that’s not quite right—having only received language from my family’s and generation’s knowing of sexuality and abuse, I was muted about it. The book contains some of that familial language, which called to be unpacked and pushed against.
Maybe because I’m a poet, my psilocybin journey revealed images that led me to language. I think trauma creates a kind of lock box where the events are stored as a way of protecting us from them. If we pick that lock, then we come face to face with things we may not have language for. For me, just writing I was sexually abused was huge. What happened? What was done? How do I write about the ways that formed me sexually? All of that required a heightened attention to language that would be true even as it held a layer of not knowing.
KMD: In this remarkable book, there’s a strong sense of inherited silence and a desire to break that silence. Do you see this book as an act of rupture, repair, or both?
SCB: Wonderful question! I’d say both. I’ve come to the late age of seventy, the age I am now, to see all the ways silence about sexual expression and identity shaped me. My family did not speak of it. It was an open secret. My mother passed in 2016, and by then we’d mended a lot of what had harmed me. But overall, it was a small ratio of time out of the sixty years we’d shared to have her acceptance (more or less) and love for the last ten years of her life. When I debriefed with the therapist who led my journey, they said that the conflicting and repressive attitudes about sex in my family alone constituted a trauma beyond, or perhaps even laid the foundation for, the physical abuse. That really resonated with me. So, it felt important to break that silence even as painful as it was, which was what helped me to heal. I’m still dealing with this in the aftermath of the book’s publication. The first readings put me into a depressive state. “Can I read these aloud?” It still feels a bit taboo to me. But resting with difficult feelings is the path to healing, so on I go. And the response from others who experienced either sexual abuse or lived with the kind of abusive homophobia I did has been heartening. There’s the healing.
KMD: What are you working on? What can readers look forward to?
SCB: I’m working on a new manuscript tentatively titled humaNature. It’s an exploration of the intersection of humans and nature, looking at human nature and the ways cultural and climate collapse go hand in hand. Because we live in this late-stage capitalist, authoritarian country, it feels important to document all the ways our humanity is both intertwined with the natural world and responsible for its destruction. I’m blessed to live in a sparsely populated rural area where I can witness firsthand and intimately the ways climate change is impacting the land and the way we steward it. It’s a kind of continuation of the work in my previous two books, looking at what’s difficult and trying to find the love, the healing.