Ina Cariñ o FEAST

Alice James Books (Alice James Award)

How it began: The poems in my original manuscript were initially part of my thesis for the MFA program at North Carolina State University. I came to the program with a strong writing foundation, but my voice and the direction of my writing were unclear. I often wrote what I now call “surreal fluff”: writing that is pretty and well worded but without much resonance or meaning. I started writing with more focus toward the end of my first year, especially when my thesis adviser, Eduardo C. Corral, encouraged me to write about things that were more tangible in my life—namely my upbringing in the Philippines, my lived experience as an immigrant in the United States, and the ways in which my native languages and, in turn, my identity have been whitewashed over time. I leaned into the idea of intergenerational nourishment and abundance beyond trauma, which is where the food motifs come in.

Inspiration: Making food with my grandmothers, mother, and two older sisters in the kitchen. Matrilineal magic. I lived in a house with all of them as well as my extended family— my titos, titas, and cousins—so I found the house to be always bustling, especially at mealtimes and during celebrations, for which we’d lay out platters and platters of food for everyone to share, despite money sometimes being scarce. One memory that inspired this collection is that of my fifth birthday;

in exchange I’ll show you how to nourish yourself. lift your grandmother’s knife. slice through the fattest layer in your gut & eat.

—from “Lean Economy”

my family bought a live suckling pig and slaughtered it in the backyard for the feast. These ritualistic acts of violence are somehow also those of sustenance: sustenance of body and of culture and identity.

Writer’s block remedy: I’m in a post-punk band, and we regularly play shows, so that gives me a different creative outlet. At the end of the day, though, I’ve always felt reading, and reading widely, is what stokes my creative fire and sustains my writing practice.

Advice: I think we’ve all heard “try and try again.” It’s important to persevere, yes, but I think it’s more important to be kind to yourself in the face of rejections. To remember that everyone has a different pace, a different trajectory, some landing sooner than others, and that’s okay. Instead of striving for some abstract capitalist idea of success, remind yourself that your work is not transactional. Let it

bloom on its own time.

Age: 35. Residence: Raleigh, North Carolina. Job: I sling espresso five days a week in downtown Raleigh. I run a reading series centering marginalized poets and other creatives in the Research Triangle area. I also take on manuscript consultations, give readings, and teach workshops. Time spent

writing the book: About a year in graduate school. Time spent finding

a home for it: About a year and a half.

How it began: I started writing this book at twenty-four, soon after returning to Beijing to teach English at a university. Beijing was the city where, at fifteen, I first found refuge from the person who inspired the book’s master figure. Returning there felt like returning home, and everything I was too young to process as an adolescent poured out of me as poetic language, giving way to memory. I wrote the first line of the poem “Self-Defense,” which reads, “To be saved and unsaved,” and I really believe the book originated in that line. I’d written poems before, but they all felt like exercises. “Self-Defense” activated something I didn’t know existed inside me. It was the first poem I wrote that felt like it was mine.

To spite me, he hid the moon in the shadow of a jackrabbit, the

deepest craters in its eyes.

—from “Master (Five Nocturnes)”

Inspiration: Reading other poets’ first books, feeling the energy and momentum unique to great debuts. Derek Walcott’s sun-drenched islands and James Wright’s rainy Midwestern plains; Thomas James’s and Eduardo C. Corral’s imagery; Jericho Brown’s line breaks; Lucie Brock-Broido’s and Carl Phillips’s verbal singularity; the Tang poets’ silences; Louise Glück’s poetic sense of narrative; Terrance Hayes’s wild voices; Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (Columbia University Press, 1984); Jacques Lacan’s seminars and writings; Ocean Vuong’s tenderness; Jean Valentine’s mystery. Finally, this book would not exist if not for the many long conversations I had with my wife and best editor, Charlotte. Writer’s block remedy: I used to think I could outwork burnout and writer’s block (an impulse I attribute to my experience as a martial artist, when I had to fight through exhaustion), but I’ve figured out that an impasse is productive for the poet— that’s where the thinking, the process happens. The poem is a by-product of the impasse. When I don’t know what to write, I do anything but write and trust that the poem is writing itself in my body, waiting to be heard.

Advice: My first book gave me a lot of grief! Every rejection hurt, and there were fortyeight of them. There were times when I felt like scrapping the whole thing. I gradually learned to disassociate my work from the process of publishing it. I learned that every reader and word of feedback is a blessing, not to be taken for granted or even expected. I learned that I am not a writer but a student of poetry.

Age: 32. Residence: Washington, D.C.

Job: I teach Theory of Knowledge to eleventh and twelfth graders. Time spent writing the book: I wrote the first poem in 2016 and the last one in 2019. Time spent finding a home for it: Three years, over which the book changed shape many times.