Mackenzie Kozak‘s no swaddle was selected for the Iowa Poetry Prize by Brenda Shaughnessy. The poetry collection “examines the complex question of whether or not to bear children.” Kozak’s other writing has appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, jubilat, Missouri Review, Muzzle Magazine, Sixth Finch, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Kozak lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She also works as a therapist specializing in grief counseling.
We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know the books that inspired her throughout life.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
In my late elementary school years, I was very attached to A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry, which is a beautiful and devastating book about a young girl who loses her sister to cancer. I suppose I was already exhibiting a love of writing that speaks about suffering and grief. I remember I would stay up late reading it over and over again, to the point that I couldn’t stop crying (I see now why my parents suggested taking a break from it). I loved all of Lowry’s books, including The Giver and Number the Stars, but something about A Summer to Die really got to me, partly because I have a sister who I’m very close with, but also because of the unflinching way the main character names her pain and sits with it. And now I work as a grief therapist who frequently sits in spaces of suffering with others, so I haven’t moved too far away from this origin.
What book helped you through puberty?
Thank goodness for books, especially in times of transition and confusion and insecurity. I think the book that impacted me most during that time was Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. I was incredibly shy during those years, and Stargirl was this strange and unique character who wasn’t hiding herself from the world, even carrying around her pet rat, Cinnamon, and dancing when music wasn’t playing. Looking back on this, Stargirl was probably my first introduction to a manic pixie dream girl, but I don’t think that term existed yet. I remember wanting to be unique, to be seen, and this book encouraged me to be myself even if that meant being misunderstood or judged.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
Hmm… what an enormous question that I feel ill-equipped to answer, especially because I’ve never been a classroom teacher. But here are a few that I think would have transformative power for any student: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, everything ever written by Toni Morrison.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
For me, I’m always drawn to lyrical writing, to language that startles and upends through image, cadence, and sound. There are so many I want to include, but these five come to mind: Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay Illusion (my favorite poetry collection of all time, forever), Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (lines like, “Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (“How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.”), Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (“There is no moon. There is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass, pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence.”), and Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”).
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I would not have had the courage to begin writing no swaddle without encountering Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. Reading her words felt like someone had crept inside my brain and found all of its scrawled ambivalences, its clattering, its heave. Heti’s speaker names the complexity of being a woman who is uncertain about motherhood with such eloquence and honesty that I felt a new freedom to write down the poems I had been shamefully harboring, for fear of being “a bad woman,” whatever that means. Additionally, I am always returning to Lucie Brock-Broido’s poetry, and to Joanna Klink’s collection, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, and I knew when I wanted to write sonnets that I needed to spend more time with Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets, which I did, and still do.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I just learned about Morgan Thomas after being introduced to their work in the fall issue of The Paris Review – they have a devastating story in there called, “Everything I Haven’t Done” that sort of knocked me over. So my nightstand books include Thomas’ short story collection, Manywhere, and also Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night which I’m excited to read next (I loved Breasts and Eggs). I also always seem to keep Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger on my nightstand because it’s small and it never loses its ability to break my heart.