I am a poet, not an essayist, but I found myself writing narrative poems that could not be contained. This particular story, about a friendship that ended, gnawed at me; it was dense with details. My poems are already densely layered and no matter how many iterations I made, the material never worked as a poem. There was too much to tell about this friendship and the ways I’d grieved it, the ways I’d judged myself, and too many odd details—many that I had to leave out of the essay.

Women’s friendship has been as integral to my life as romantic love. Friendship is what first taught me about human relationships, intimacy, and caring for another person. I have grieved the end of friendships like no other relationships. The complicated narrative of this one needed to be told directly. Even when I moved the material into essay form, it retained the odd slant of my own memory and my own hurt, a single perspective that is hard to transcend, and to be clear, one I didn’t want to transcend. I wanted, like I did in my poems, to understand my own experience. In an interview David Naimon did with Zadie Smith back in 2019, she made a distinction between inward-facing writers and outward-facing writers: those of us who explore the interior and those who imagine people outside. Like any binary it’s both limited and fascinating. Shakespeare Professor Edward Taylor used to say “There are those who divide the world in two and those who don’t.”

I respect what I call The Melissa Febos School of essay writing: the need to tell one’s story and defy a tradition of silencing. I’d poured my most vulnerable self into the series of essays that I’d been writing for three years and I thought my resistance to the lyric essay was about publishing such personal material, but at one point this spring, I had an epiphany that the work was wrong in essay form, that the essay was dragging it away from its center. The details were interesting as narrative, but not interesting artistically. I’m not sure what I mean exactly, but I have always recognized when I hit on an aesthetic truth about my own work and I knew it was right. I started dismantling my essays. I took a nine page essay about falling in love and whittled it down to an eighteen-line poem. Oh, I flushed inside. I was back, I was back as a poet.

But this particular essay, one that encompasses a James Joyce seminar, a mentally ill friend, and my role as a teacher, will remain as an essay, and for that I’m really grateful to The Cincinnati Review and judge David Lazar who selected it. I am often full of doubt about my work. I destroy things all the time and start over. This fear is the core of the essay:

For two weeks, The Cincinnati Review will make the essay available for those without subscriptions if you want to check it out: Your Life for Another

CR asked its contributors to share an audio or visual component on their website and I made this collage with a snippet from my college copy of Ulysses.

I pawed through a box of papers from that time in the 1990s and created a little micro-essay with the documents for their website. Check it here: Love's. Old. Sweet. Song.

The essay opens with a note from a student:

Probably because I am of the school of despair, I never give up on my students.

Persistence is something I’ve had since I was little, no matter how hopeless I feel. I can work relentlessly: trying, altering, transforming.

Please forgive the many directions of this piece. Letting myself share imperfect messiness is part of it. xo

I never met Fanny Howe, but once I wrote her a note to tell her what her work meant to me. She answered me immediately with a simple, genuine note of thanks. It felt like her. The language of it and the spirit of it—the way people’s essence often radiates off the page or screen.

No matter how much Fanny Howe you read, it is almost impossible to finish her oeuvre. With the exception of Nod, which was autobiographical, I’d never read her novels, only the poems and essays for which she is primarily known. This week I read Bronte Wilde, imperfect in ways, but I love Fanny Howe for her mind on the page, not for a satisfying arc. Bronte Wilde has the same quiet crispness and startling intelligence as her other work.

Bronte Wilde is the story of Mary, whose name you forget because you rarely hear it mentioned again; namelessness is part of her precarious sense of self. Later she adopts the alias Bronte Wilde. Mary forms a friendship with a troubled and beautiful girl named Honey. The novella is told by addressing Honey in second person, but it’s really a private narrative in Mary’s head that Honey doesn’t hear: “You need my slow dark presence at your side, especially at school…..To be lectured to: it makes you tremble and sweat. You have no defense against the voice of authority.” Mary’s story begins when she meets Honey—that is the moment when she wakes up to her own life; the friendship troubles the waters of her own story. With Honey she feels her own existence—something she repeatedly doubts throughout the book. I guess all relationships enact some form of this, but I think it’s particular for girls who are invisible, girls who negate their own identity to please others and survive.

There can be a violent intensity in the friendship of girls. Female friendship and the emotional life of girls is a theme in many of the books that left deep marks on me: Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, My Brilliant Friend, Sula, Magda Szabó’s Abigail, and Lucie Brock-Broido’s first poetry book, A Hunger.

The intensity of girls is often due to repression, a child version of what Adrienne Rich calls “the pressure of concealment that explodes in poetry.”

Where do the feelings go which life has denied, which are not permitted?

The friendship in Bronte Wilde has that same intensity. It also carries elements of neglect, isolation, violence, and abuse that are present in the above list of books. People often think of abuse as the whole story, but that diminishes the point—maybe a secondary reason that girls often remain private about their lives. Violence may dictate behavior, it may be a hallmark of experience, and in fact is so common it could almost be considered a characteristic of being a girl—but it is not the essence of any person. Bronte Wilde is about what it means to move through the world feeling deep connection and simultaneously alien; it’s about the precise internal experiences of a person that are not visible to the world. The point is the untold part of things. I have to say this so many ways because, while the point does not elude me, I’m still figuring out the words for it.

All of these books are about girls with unexpressed talent.

The talent must out. What if—because of poverty, misogyny, systemic racism, repression, doubt, loneliness—it has no outlet?

And this is a theory I can’t test (but I suspect it in My Brilliant Friend and Sula too): that the two girls in each story form a single girl, the way that a close friendship mirrors back yourself, your hidden desires, your envy, your self that is not fully realized. In the first few pages, Howe nearly tells us so:

In relationships we seek the part of ourselves that is unknown to us. (side note that poets do the same thing with writing)

I had an intense friendship from 8th grade to 12th grade with my friend Rachel. It was pretty healthy, and we remain close friends forty years later, but looking back, I was pretty demanding. I made up complex imaginative games and my friend, Rachel, played all of them. (Hi Rachel! If you’re reading this, you know what I mean!) It was perhaps unusual though it didn’t seem so at the time. Every year we had a journal that we passed back and forth. We had multiple storytelling games with characters that we referenced later. One such game involved creating five characters whose names we wrote on slips of paper and laid out in front of us. The whole game was played by writing letters from your characters to the characters across from you. It occurred silently and one by one the characters disappeared as the story was told, because of death or running off with a lover, etc. We played another game called Project Confusion where we created messages from cut-up magazines and slipped them into people’s mail boxes, lockers, and library books.

Many people thought we were lesbian lovers, but we weren’t, and there was no sexual tension. Some people want intensity to be sexual because, if we strip the potential violence away, it’s less threatening than emotional intensity. If our feelings for our friends are emotional, it implies that there is an entire level of existence beneath the surface in the world of girl friendship. And guess what? THERE IS. When Rukeyser says that the world would split open if a woman told the truth of her life, isn’t it not only horror and rage and fatigue, but the depth and secrets we share with each other? I remember how hard it was to kick my soon-to-be husband out of my bridal shower in 1996 because he knew, he just knew, that the conversations we were about to have would be so much more interesting than where he was going. One night in college, when my friend Kathryn and I were talking over a pot of coffee, a man we hadn’t noticed turned to our table as he got up to leave and said, “That was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever heard” as if mystified.

If you are one of the mystified, there is a whole world there and always has been.

But that sentence sounds like a brag when the truth is that the failure to be seen can feel spooky and terrifying. In Bronte Wilde, it is a dislocation:

We are in a world that will do anything to deny the existence of girls as they are, what they suffer, and what they feel. This is something that girls share with marginalized people.

The waves fell; withdrew and fell again,
like the thud of a great beast stamping.

Virginia Woolf

The Waves

These lines from Woolf’s The Waves are the epigraph to Tania Langlais’s book-length poem, Pendant que Percival tombait. My translation of this experimental book about Virginia Woolf’s last day came out this February from Tiger Bark Press.

In April, I was invited to read poems to an assembly of students at Fayetteville-Manlius High School. When I visit high schools I read poems picked especially for teenagers, often narrative—but for this visit, two French teacher colleagues showed up (I’m a high school French teacher in this region) and one of the teachers shared that she had taught excerpts from Pendant que Percival tombait to her French class. Thus, it felt only fair to read a few excerpts from the book, though I was nervous about the response in this audience. The poems are not the kind of accessible poems that people like to share with teenagers. They move in strange, recursive ways, even for poetry. The speaker is unclear and shifting, and I know that students are no longer familiar with Virginia Woolf if they even know who she is. Nevertheless, the room had a mesmerized silence as I read. The students were spellbound. Their attention was deeply affirming because my translation had been primarily led by sound. While Percival Fell is a book governed by sound: the galloping hooves that killed Percival and the recurring sound of the waves.

The translation process was humbling for me. It evoked old doubts and entwined with my life as a public schoolteacher in unexpected ways. I wrote about that vulnerable experience here: The Writer’s Chronicle from February 2026

After I published, I felt like hiding myself. Struggles are never linear. We grow and make leaps, then our old fears latch on as if to say ‘yeah, I’m not done with you.’

What were my fears—in addition to the ones in the article? Fear of not being scholarly, fear of not being a better French speaker. This may shock people, but you can be an outstanding teacher of language and still lack certain fluency. Public school teaching is about relationship, clarity, and seeing your students. Who was I to translate a book? Yet, when it comes to the creative process, who is anyone and who does creation belong to? Or, who was I to assume that these rows of teenage boys would not respond to the music of language? They recognized, I believe, the sound of grief.

All my artistic endeavors have required a kind of defiance, and by defiance I mean defiance of doubt, defiance of fear. I was drawn to the recursive nature of Langlais’s work. I was curious about the way sorrow returns, leaves, and returns again. We wrestle with the same things over and over until they lessen, until we understand. Despite Woolf’s suicide, her voices did lessen at intervals. She had periods of healing and intense creation. If we understand that life cannot be reduced to its end point (such a hard lesson for me), her suicide doesn’t erase the rest. I don’t have an answer for relentless pain or fear. I insist to my students that the more they tangle with it, the less power it has.

Each person recognizes their own story in the cycle of return; it is familiar: sorrow leaves and cycles back, we run from pain and it catches up to us in odd ways.

Here are the excerpts in Langlais’s book that I read to the high school kids:

this story doesn’t end well
he dies
trampled
by a dappled grey horse
this story roars
bloodied hooves
now run

cette histoire n’ira pas bien
on meurt à la fin
piétiné par un cheval
gris pommelé
c’est une histoire qui fait du bruit
les sabots le sang
maintenant courez

Percival’s song
is a defiant beast
a howling story
I am a defiant
beast

le chant de Perceval
est une bête difficile
une histoire qui hurle
je suis une bête
difficile

such beauty
that summer
blue forget-me-nots
you played
a Brahms lullaby
while Percival fell

c’était l’été il y avait
la belle que voilà
bleu myosotis
pendant que Perceval tombait
tu jouais
une berceuse de Brahms

I won’t know how to explain
the waves to you like
the extreme
fixity
in passing objects

je ne saurai pas t’expliquer
les vagues comme
l’extrême
fixité
des choses qui passent

no doubt
the heart is a story
maybe a roar
some say : murmur
something whispered
so the waves
begin again

le coeur est sans doute
une histoire
au plus un bruit
certains diront : murmure
quelque chose a parlé tout bas
de recommencer les vagues

Purchase While Percival Fell here: While Percival Fell

You can hear Langlais read some of the poems in French here: Plume Literary Journal

It opens like this:

I seldom dream. When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat. Then I lie back, waiting for my frantic heart to slow, and reflect on the overwhelming power of night’s spell. As a child and young woman, I had no dreams, either good or bad, but in old age I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through. In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me dreaming from my sleep.

Each of these books has helped me through a difficult month and a difficult part of my teaching career—one where I’ve healed enough as a person to stop pleasing others, to discover an overpowering desire to live for myself, to write and sequester myself away from the constant psychic demands of other people. I’ve been a teacher for thirty years; in many ways, these books have arrived to tell me I am nearing the end of that time.

Hungarian novelist Magda Szabó (1879-1959) was also a teacher, an experience that influenced Abigail, a book that takes place in a girls’ gymnasium. I have only recently begun to understand how my teaching life (thirty years in public schools in The Bronx, South Texas, and rural New York) have shaped my writing life. Annie Ernaux (subject of my first substack) also worked as a secondary schoolteacher for 30+ years.

I discovered Magda Szabó by accident, which is how I’ve discovered many of my literary loves. My reading, my writing, often occurs by accident. I trust the universe and what it brings, especially when it comes to books. I encountered Iza’s Ballad first.

Iza’s Ballad is partly about the peculiar and individual way that each of us loves. If we all loved in the same way it would be easier, but we are infinitely mysterious. One reason I loved this book was that it featured an elderly woman as a fully realized person—and that is rare. Ettie, in her interior, is as childlike, tender, and vulnerable as any young person. This is an insight that most of us come to late, when we ourselves age and then realize that we remain childlike in many ways, that those parts of us continue, despite our aged bodies. Most people are really children in grown-up bodies, especially men, thus one reason the world is so fucked up. Aren’t we currently watching the worst boys from middle school run things? Women often mature more readily because they are asked to relinquish the ego in service of others. How we do this determines the adults we become. How we adapt to it can also keep us childish too—this is what happens to Iza, Ettie’s daughter, a brilliant doctor, who takes care of everyone else, but who cannot let herself feel. She cannot allow others to feel either. No, everything with her is logical, practical, modern, and this becomes the pain she inflicts on herself. Because everyone in the book, no matter who they are, is depicted with empathy. There is no easy answer or formula for how to live. Szabó is anything but reductive. For those of us who need literature, this is one of its gifts: it does not reduce human experience, does not categorize or limit. It continually provides the exception and the infinite possibility of human interiority.

Nearly every character in Iza’s Ballad is an orphan. Ettie’s parents died when she was a child. Her beloved husband was orphaned by a flood that killed a large percentage of his village. He was saved by a schoolteacher, himself an orphan. Ettie’s husband donates money to his old school to help poor kids and this money buys books for Antal, also orphaned, who ends up marrying Iza, his daughter. Iza is the only one raised by loving parents. A fascinating question in each of Szabó’s books is what loss, or scarcity of love, does to a person—how it can make a person lean into transcendent possibility and deepen their interior life. It teaches a person to root around in the hidden, invisible world.

Ettie is widowed early in the novel and taken from her beloved home to her daughter’s middle-class apartment. There she fades in vitality because she is no longer needed. She feels that she is in the way, and though it is unsaid, (this book is smart and subtle as fuck), her early abandonment means that she needs to care for others, needs to be needed.

One of the beautiful things about this book is that every character is loving. There are no mean-spirited or stingy people. Yet even with an abundance of love, people hurt each other and do the wrong thing.

Iza cannot understand the magical thinking of her mother. Her need for her old, beautiful things. Her desire to commune with the dead and revisit the past. It is not nostalgia that leads Ettie to her dead husband’s old town at the end, but an awareness that time is illusory. That love transcends the living body. I don’t know how, Ettie doesn’t either—an outsider would think she is a crazy old woman—but our experience of love in this world cannot be reduced to what is in front of us or what is alive. Joy cannot be reduced to physical comforts or modern conveniences. There is a soul, there is a joy deeper than that, a love calling from outside, though so much conspires to stop us from listening to it.

The other books by Szabó that I found in our library system, Abigail and Katalin Street, had a profound effect on me as an artist. Each book is entirely different from the others in tone, mood, and world. I am currently in the middle of The Door and it is electric, surprising, and entirely feminine in its perception. It is a gift to discover her.

*Also…a note of gratitude to New York Review of Books that publishes these novels in translation. Otherwise we would not know they existed.

Today I am showcasing one of the poems we published at Tahoma Literary Review that moves me deeply: “Ineluctable Modality of the Visible” by Jennifer Franklin. It will be in her forthcoming book A Fire in Her Brain (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets 2027).

The poem is about James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce, but it’s also about Franklin’s own daughter with autism.

Ineluctable Modality of the Visible

after Mai Der Vang

Let’s assume you do not know about Lucia Joyce.

Let’s assume you read one of her father’s early books in school.

Perhaps you love the last paragraph of “The Dead” or once identified with Stephen Daedalus.

Let’s assume you have not seen Lucia’s photograph.

That you do not know about her extraordinary talent as a dancer in Paris. Or that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1930s by Jung and transferred to a Northampton hospital after her father died. That she languished there for thirty-one years without one visit from her mother. Where she wrote all her letters and a novel that her nephew destroyed after her death.

Let’s assume you don’t know that she was often restrained.

Let’s assume you don’t know that people with autism are now kept at this hospital. That two documentaries have been made including an exposé about people with learning disabilities who were restrained and sedated. That four patients died between October, 2010 and May, 2011.

Let’s assume you don’t know that, in 2018, the father of a girl with autism sued the hospital because his daughter was kept in a 12 x 10 room with only a mattress and chair, fed through a hole in a metal door.

Let’s assume you do not know anyone like Anna Livia—part of the twenty-five percent of those on the spectrum who cannot speak, read, bathe themselves. You may not know she needs her hand held to keep her from walking into traffic when she is outside. That she spends every unsupervised moment flapping her arms, jumping, babbling, engaging in “non-contextual laughter,” mumbling lyrics from Sesame Street songs, scratching herself, eating paper.

Let’s assume you care.

Let’s assume you understand what’s at stake.

Let’s assume you understand my love for Lucia is my love for Anna Livia.

And for the part of me that was also thwarted.

First published in Tahoma Literary Review March 2026. Continue reading this poem here: Ineluctable Modality of the Visible

I am drawn to poems that connect people from different times. It happens in my own work (Yours, Creature about Mary Shelley) and works I love, like Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters, about Emily Dickinson. These pairings are more than mere identification with others, they are kinship, and kinship counters invisibility by creating community. It doesn’t matter if these other lives are from a hundred years ago or in a book, they mirror our invisible selves that the world refuses to acknowledge, and without them, for me, life would be too hard to bear.

The academic diction of the title and the insistent formal refrain remind me of Layli Long Soldier's Whereas. Repetitive formality—that "Let's assume"—creates a kind of protection through irony: such language is often used to whitewash cruelty and to disguise dehumanization. Yet here the repetitive formality acts as a protection spell for the vulnerable. It repudiates erasure and carries restrained anger: Whether you care, whether you know, this will be told.

The title in this poem accomplishes a lot—I was bristling against cold, institutional forces before I even started reading the poem—which is part of Franklin’s brilliance here. We begin alienated, wondering how we will be included. Modality is a word with all kinds of meanings. It can represent therapeutic and diagnostic systems, ways of interpreting senses and speech, it can classify and label human behavior. Fixed patterns have power (they can disappear people, even people in the room) whether it’s Joyce stating that it’s unseemly for a girl to dance on stage or labeling someone as unfit and locking them away.

The poem is about who is seen and who isn’t. It’s about who we pretend is not even there.

One of the most painful details from the poem is the line about Lucia Joyce’s mother not visiting her once in thirty-one years. Being ignored, in one’s most painful time—as if it is not happening—is unbearable. One of the things psychologist Gabor Maté says about trauma is that pain can be born more easily when it is acknowledged, when we bear it with others.

The entire movement of Franklin’s poem contradicts Joyce’s neglect of his own daughter. Her poem insists on facts, the uncomfortable and the joyful. Her poem insists on love. It is not a fuzzy love, but a love from the thinnest place in human experience—one of despair—and in that thinness, it is resolute, beautiful. It accepts its own ethics despite the forces against it.

Let’s assume you understand my love for Lucia is my love for Anna Livia.

And for the part of me that was also thwarted.

That my love for Anna is inextricable from my grief for Anna.

That my love for Lucia is my love for every woman who is thwarted.

Incredibly, the poem connects all these women, and what connects them most, in my humble opinion, is love from this solitary voice.

Childhood attunement occurs when the mother mirrors back the child’s feelings and the child learns that their feelings are real, that they exist. I feel like attunement happens on a larger level too. When the world at large does not mirror back someone’s existence, when a person cannot find themselves out there among others, they exist in perpetual invisibility because of cultural gaslighting. Or they exist partly, if their behaviors meet acceptable norms.

We all understand how horrible it is to be alone with one’s suffering and I feel like we weren’t meant to experience suffering this way; in fact, I think we feel each other’s suffering even when we are not consciously aware of it. My friend, the activist Aly Wane, always says, “I am not well if you are not well.” I remember in high school listening to Joseph Campbell tell a story about a policeman who, without thinking, threw himself into a freezing river to save a person who had jumped. When he was asked why, he said he didn’t know, he didn’t think. Jennifer’s line “the part of me that was also thwarted” stuck out to me, it radiated, and my heart tightened. Yes, a part of her is there too, present in Lucia Joyce and present in her daughter.

People’s capacity for denial is deeper than I ever knew: what people “don’t know” or choose not to know. But people keep writing. That impulse. And this impulse to write back into other voices and bring them into view. That is how we belong to each other, how “we are each other’s / harvest:” as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about Paul Robeson: “we are each other’s / business / we are each other’s / magnitude and bond.”

What’s integral to my love for Annie Ernaux, and another favorite writer, Elena Ferrante, is the honesty with which they write about shame. Ernaux writes that “there is this need I have to write something that puts me in danger, like a cellar door that opens and must be entered, come what may.”

Ernaux and Ferrante were the first writers who made me feel fully seen in a book. In Ferrante, I felt present all over the place: in her depiction of female friendship, in the familial environment, in her protagonist’s competition and drive, insecurity and doubt, and in the maneuverings of her mind. At some point I want to write about how the My Brilliant Friend books are anti-fascist—but aren’t seen this way because they reflect the perspective of women.

After I discovered Ferrante, my previous beloved books paled slightly. Ferrante combines two distinctive kinds of lack: economic and emotional, and it was important for me to see how those two deprivations worked on each other, and especially how they existed internally where much of what women experience and think is lived: I’d lived a large portion of my life in my head, silent, but churning intensely on the inside.

In 2022, during the throes of Covid (when I had a devouring crush), Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. I had not read her since 1992 in Paris when I spent a junior semester abroad and rented a single room on Rue Blomet in the 14th arrondissement. My host was a British writer who lived with his teenage French daughter. She was still in high school and I was a junior in college, but perhaps due to differences in maturation between American teenagers and French teenagers, she and I hit it off immediately and became good friends. Like me she was a reader, and one day she handed me La Place by Annie Ernaux. I took it to bed with me and didn’t get out of bed until it was finished. I was struck by so many things that spring afternoon of 1992: the simple diction, the force of a feminine voice, the depiction of class through the eyes of a daughter. I had never read anything like Ernaux before. In my study abroad program we were reading Barthes, Perec, Céline, and Sartre. In contrast, Ernaux was startling easy to read—but somewhere along the way I’d been taught that easiness and clarity meant you were not a serious writer. She was entirely herself and she was clearly digging into her experience to make her own sense of it.

I followed up La Place with Une Femme, then put them back on the shelf for three decades. When she won the Nobel and I decided to read her again, her oeuvre had grown enormously. I began with Getting Lost, translated by Alison Strayer. Strayer has a feel for the emotional depth, diction, and energy of her voice. Getting Lost is about an obsessive affair. The setting of the book remains almost exclusively in Ernaux’s apartment where she is either having sex with her obsession or else thinking about when she will see her obsession again. I then read A Simple Passion, which is a meditation on that same love affair. By then, I’d fallen into a kind of trance with her narrative and it chafed against my own obsessive crush. Her voice has an overpowering, hypnotic power. The world of it is all-encompassing and I felt relief when I’d finished it.

Like many of her books, Getting Lost is written as a journal in fragments, a form that leans toward a certain kind of truth-hunting. The fragments stop and start, pursuing what pulses and resonates. She does not waste time, but moves where the electricity is, and you can feel it:

Sunshine, everything is blue and gold and sweet. Birds chirp and, abruptly,
the sadness of adolescence is upon me. Someday, someone should probably
say how close a woman feels to adolescence between the ages of forty-eight
and fifty-two. Same expectations, same desires, but you’re heading into winter
instead of summer.

When I began reading her again I was forty-eight years old. I too had an obsessive crush that had taken over my brain like a drug and plunged me into a girlish insecurity. Now I understand the link between these crushes and my own low self-esteem (this kind of crush is sometimes referred to as a limerence—but that is a more recent realization). “Someday someone should say how close these years feel to adolescence.” I wish I could ask Annie Ernaux why that resemblance exists. I sense that our answers would be different, but I don’t know.

I talked about Getting Lost and Ernaux’s love affair so frequently to my husband that he started making Ernaux jokes.

“If I made you a “hos for Ernaux” t-shirt would you wear it?”

“Only if you spell it haux so it looks French,” I answered. Haux is a geographic place but it’s also a homophone for “haut” (high).

My husband goes through multiple ridiculous hypotheticals in a week, (What if I gave you this? What if this happened? What if you showed up and said X?) but he did actually give me a “Haux for Ernaux” t-shirt on Christmas.

Last night I was staring at my husband who lay naked as he was falling asleep in the lamplight and I remarked that he looked like a painting. I tried to pull up the name of a comparable painting but nothing came to mind and it occurred to me that rarely do we gaze at a gorgeous man in art through the eyes of a woman painter. Rarely is female desire expressed as we feel it. My crush was so intense, I saved a slip of paper my crush had written his name on, folded it up, and carried it in my wallet for three years. Ernaux writes of her lover that “Everything about him was precious to me—his eyes, his mouth, his penis, his childhood memories, his voice, and the decisive way he took hold of things.” She saves a glass because he had drunk from it.

Ten years ago I wrote to poet Alice Notley and asked her why she’d said in an interview that there was no distinction between the conscious and unconscious and she said that she’d written so much that it had all come to the surface, there was no difference between the two.

For years I believed that freedom meant thinking or behaving in certain ways. I am now certain that nothing is more liberating than bringing forth everything from the depths where shame and dust cling to it.

I know that I am more free than Annie Ernaux is/was, simply by virtue of the year I was born. Still, I’ve inherited my own palimpsest of that script of self-abandonment. At the end of her affair, in pain and alone, Ernaux says, “I live outside men—I mean, outside the male realm—and it’s as if I were completely outside the world. Every day I have to create a schedule all over again, and convince myself to write.”

For so long, being seen by a man could bring me into the world of men, which felt, when I was growing up, like the world itself. To be cast out by a man was to be cast out of existence. “Do you know you exist?” poet astrologer Ariana Reines asked me last year after she’d gazed at my chart, and in the same encounter, in response to my poems, she said, “You’ve put yourself in a cage.”

“But,” she said earnestly, “The cage is open.”

I devoured each Ernaux book. Her books allowed me to breathe. Annihilation is too strong a word, I’m ashamed to use it, but I often annihilated my own thoughts and shoved my feelings away. The poetry book that I wrote during this time period, Feral (coming in 2027!), is my first poetry book that owes a greater debt to prose writers (Ernaux and Ferrante) than to any poet. Feral is not about desire or obsession, but it does bring forth buried experiences that made me ashamed to take up space in the world.