Forward Prize for Best First Collection: Jasmine Cooray and Kelly Michels

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The last in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series. Hear from other shortlisted poets here.

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Jasmine: There’s a line in ‘Cat and Mouse Act of the New Millennium’: ‘she is the hole at the end of language’, that seems to capture so much about the collection in that, while you write the significant figures – the mother particularly – so richly, there is a sense of cold, absolute absence that pervades. Did you choose consciously how you wanted to represent absence or did it arrive otherwise?

Kelly: I think absence permeates through the writing process for me. It is such a vital part of presence and, as a result, creation. Whether it is our own creation built from so many before us, or putting together a poem or another type of artwork. In music, for instance, it isn’t simply the notes that create the song, but the space in-between those notes. That is where the music is.

On the other hand, absence can also be the result of destruction, especially when it is imposed on us through neglect, loss of life, etc. And it is incredibly damaging when we don’t have the time or space to fully acknowledge such absence and loss. In the United States everything seems to go forward without stopping. But sometimes we need to stop and absorb what has happened. We need to grapple with absence – to reckon with the space in-between, to grieve that space. It is a vital component of the human voice. Otherwise, everything is noise.

This tension between creation and destruction and its relationship with absence contributed to my decision to use the wreath of sonnet form as inspiration within the book. It was a way of creating a song by using and acknowledging the space in-between.

Jasmine: The voice in so many of your poems reckons with limitation – in that there’s a recognition that there’s only so much one can do to help, to reach, to love, etc. It’s not an easy place to be, yet you write it with grace. Did the writing of limitation help you to find any resolution with it?

Kelly: The concept of limitation definitely had a profound effect on the writing. There have been so many points in my life where I have had to recognise that there will be no resolution. Within the book there are a lot of places in which limitation exists, whether it is in the loss of human lives, the act of witnessing, or the act of surviving. ‘She is the hole at the end of language’, for example, speaks to a moment in my life when I was attacked and believed I was speaking to paramedics and the police, but no one could understand what I was saying. That experience was momentary, but later, I realised how difficult it was to formulate in words what my experiences of PTSD were because many of the experiences defy conventional ways of making sense of the world. So I had to write around those limitations, and much of my writing process was spent contemplating and exploring how to do that. Additionally, there is the reality of watching so much trauma and loss multiply, knowing the limitations of what I can do about it. While I don’t believe the book led to a sense of resolution, the writing process enabled me to give a voice and recognition to those limitations.

Even when an experience is so difficult, so painful, the learning provides something else to hold onto.

Jasmine: I love the way that several poems feel to be elegy to lives as they were not lived, or places that have changed, and in that way the collection can sometimes feel like listening to the Blues. Was there any music that you found accompanying you as you wrote this collection?

Kelly: It is so interesting that you say that. I don’t really write with music on, but I happen to love Spirituals, Blues and Soul. I tend to be attracted to the uniqueness and intensity of certain voices and the deep, rich history of the music. It speaks so well to the experience of surviving. Many blues songs resonate with me as a grief, a comfort, a prayer. And when you know things probably won’t end well, sometimes that is all you have. It’s incredible you picked up on this because it wasn’t conscious, but it makes sense that it exists in some way in the poems.

Speaking of grief, comfort, and surviving, Inheritance moves like a hard-fought love story of endurance and belonging. Questions surrounding ‘learning’ struck me as central to the movement of the book. At the beginning, the learning process seems forced and imposed rather than natural but this shifts as the collection moves onward. How did you see the relationship between ‘learning’ and ‘inheritance’ change as you wrote the book?

Jasmine: That’s such an interesting question. ‘Aurora Borealis’ – the first poem in the book – is actually quite an old poem, written at a stage where I probably coped by hurrying my emotions to a neat conclusion in my writing. To learn something – or to have learned something – perhaps felt reassuring, as if even when an experience is so difficult, so painful, the learning provides something else to hold onto. It’s not quite the enforced, bypass-y ‘oh there must be a lesson in all this’ thing, but rather, (for me anyway) to come to points of understanding helps the world feel like it makes sense again. As the book goes on – you’re right – the experience of learning widens its arms and allows maybe more mess and disappointment and the embrace of what is unresolved. The unpredictable is a gift sometimes. You’re forced to reckon with it one way or another.

Kelly: In many poems, food seems to be a language that can transcend boundaries – a conduit that binds us, sometimes capable of communicating across long distances and even spiritual realms. Was this relationship between food and belonging a central force as you wrote the poems or was it a theme that you saw emerge as you began to organise the poems into a collection?

Jasmine: Because food is, for me, one of the most concrete and enjoyable ways of retaining cultural connection, it definitely relates strongly to belonging. Of course, it’s something that speaks clearly to one’s original contexts, and is often culturally a language of care, something around which people gather, a grounding force. And because it’s so sensory, it evokes such powerful memory. In a way, I’ve always reached for the sensory image to try and tell a story. Though I’d say its emergence as a theme was accidental, there are certainly many moments in the book in which the detail of food – and which type, and made by whom – help to situate the poem in an atmosphere. I think you can tell a lot about a situation by what’s going on with the food!

Kelly: You use sound and rhythm in stunning ways throughout the book. In ‘Ice-Cream Box of Frozen Curry’, the use of rhyme feels like a tightrope. In ‘Song for Absent Loves’, the rhyme feels like a lullaby. How did sound and rhythm inform your exploration of complex issues such as inheritance and belonging?

Jasmine: The form of ‘Ice Cream Box of Frozen Curry’ was inspired by the Jacob Sam-La Rose poem ‘Talk This Way’ in which the author pays homage to the tongues and sounds and environments that inform his speech. I had this commission for the Alchemy festival at The South Bank Centre in 2015 to write a piece (based on many interviews with the British Asian public) about migration, and I was up against a deadline and struggling to pull it together. So this urgency lent itself to the form – suddenly I found myself carried along by it. And yes, it does feel like a tightrope: there is so much that is held at once and also impossible to hold.

I definitely grappled with a lot of difficult subject matter in the book, from the opioid epidemic to gun violence.

I also enjoyed how the rhythm brought a playful tone to the subject matter, and it forced me to be concise and punchy as well, which helped with such a vast theme. ‘Song For Absent Loves’ is definitely a container of so much longing and indeed it was a necessary lullaby, written during the lockdown of 2020, when many of us were not allowed to love each other in person. Thinking about it, I also realise that though usually I tend toward wanting to tell a story slowly – inviting the reader to feel along with me – rhyme and rhythm have the effect of carrying you through a feeling in another way, like going through a carwash or something. Sometimes you need that – to kind of run away from something at the same time as engaging with it. Maybe that also speaks to how a sense of belonging is not static: it is dynamic, we grasp and lose it all the time.

I felt for a while, writing about grief and loss, that I was accidentally answering the hidden question ‘how do I live with grief?’. Now I find I want to ask different questions about how we deal with, or don’t deal with, being alive. Are there any different or new questions that now have room in your mind, having grappled with so much in American Anthem?

Kelly: Yes, I definitely grappled with a lot of difficult subject matter in the book, from the opioid epidemic to gun violence. Because of that subject matter, many of my questions during the writing process resided in how we treat each other. Now, I am focusing on what we can learn from each other. While that question permeates through American Anthem as well, I’m turning more toward the quieter moments where it saves us (even when we might not realise it). And I’m interested in how gratitude has informed poetry throughout the ages and the cultural benefits of giving space to that emotion.

You also deal with heavy subject matter in Inheritance, and you do so with exquisite care. In many of the poems, there is an excavation, a digging, an uncovering of what remains, from ‘Aurora Borealis’ and ‘Inventory’ to ‘Years that Ask Questions and Years that Answer’. It is a beautiful archaeology that uncovers the past in the present, uncovering it in the flesh rather than simply the bones. Is there anything you found while writing Inheritance that you now want to dig deeper into?

Jasmine: I love what you said about quieter moments, and the role of gratitude and its role (or absence perhaps) in culture. I can’t wait to see where that exploration takes you. It seems apt to me that I am brought to your work at this point, because in your writing around addiction you give me inspiration for some ways it can be written about. It has affected my life in various forms, and I want to write about it:  from a personal standpoint and also from a wider view culturally – how did we get here, to the point where it’s unbearable to be present, where we have to constantly run away?

Someone (trusted) said to me ‘Jasmine your life doesn’t have to be the Taj Mahal’ by which he meant ‘not everything has to be a devotional monument to loss’ and I liked that – I think it freed me up to be angry and to say yes, there was love, and there was grief, and now what is left? Can I reckon with emptiness and mess, and life? A fuller picture? An uncertain path ahead? That’s where I am now.

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Jasmine Cooray is a poet, psychotherapist and arts facilitator. She has been a Women of the World Festival speaker, and has delivered creative writing projects for the Barbican, Southbank Centre, First Story, Arvon Foundation and the National Literacy Trust. Her pamphlet Everything We Don’t Say was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2009. Her debut collection Inheritance was published by Bad Betty Press in 2023 and selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Kelly Michels relocated to Ireland from the US in 2019. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Ireland ReviewBanshee and New Ohio Review. She has published two pamphlets, Mother and Child with Flowers (2012) and Disquiet (2015). American Anthem, her first collection, was published by The Gallery Press in May 2024.


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