Few people understand a poetry collection better than another poet. We asked Arielle Hebert, author of Bottom Feeders, and Chelsea Krieg, author of Everything Is Water, to chat about their collections and how poetry informs their life.
The two discuss the landscapes that shaped them, the role of water and the natural world in their work, caregiving, motherhood, friendship, and the complicated process of writing toward forgiveness. Their exchange is both an exploration of craft and a testament to the writing communities that sustain poets through every stage of the journey, from first drafts to first books.
Chelsea Krieg: Bottom Feeders is, among other things, a love letter to place. I often think the last thing mentioned in a book of poetry’s acknowledgements is reserved for the relationship that holds the most weight, and you have Florida in that space. How is your book grounded in both your gratitude for and your choice to leave Florida?
Arielle Hebert: I wanted to make sure I was portraying my love for Florida and how much I miss it, but also holding it accountable in the ways that it disappointed me as a young person. I think that is true love for a place, when you see it for all its good, but also acknowledge the ways in which it can do better and grow. Loving and leaving home was a core issue I was working through as I wrote the poems. Writing the book helped me digest my own feelings about leaving, about why it was so hard to let go of that place, of home, and why it still haunts me.
Place also factors largely in Everything Is Water. Your book won Texas Review Press’s Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series representing the state of Virginia and Virginia appears vividly in many of these pages. How does home and place inspire your work?
CK: Like you, I’m a coastal girl, but the coast where I lived was a very rural, non-tourist coast. I call it the “farm beach,” a place with its own interesting and unique landscapes and traditions. There are poems that mention the flora and fauna of the place, but I’m also thinking about climate and erosion and the changing coastline, and how my past is also eroding alongside these natural spaces. This is something I am constantly navigating in the background of my book while I’m more actively considering those challenges that remain foregrounded, such as my partner’s illness and challenges with postpartum anxiety and depression.
AH: Growing up near the water really does shape us, doesn’t it? Did that influence the title of your book, Everything Is Water? How do you see water as an overarching element in the poems?
CK: When I was four or five, I almost drowned. I couldn’t swim yet, and my cousin jumped in and saved my life. I remember so vividly feeling out of control, and it was one of the first indicators for me of how powerful water is as both a sustainer and a destroyer. Growing up on the coast, we were taught from an early age to respect the water, that it’s something that is powerful and almost otherworldly, almost deified. This reverence for water is a strong current through the book. That’s one of the things I want readers to get out of the collection is how it feels to navigate the surface tension that exists simultaneously in a relationship, an experience, a time in life when you don’t know what the outcome will be–and you have to tread water.
I see that same reverence for water in Bottom Feeders. The title references organisms that live deep in the bottom of the ocean, and Florida is surrounded on nearly all sides by water. How is water working as a recurring theme throughout your book?
AH: I was raised by the water in Sarasota. As a kid I learned about rip tides and currents, how to shuffle my feet in the sand so that the stingrays swim away. Like you, I was taught to respect the water, that it is life-giving and full of beauty, but also dangerous. You mentioned erosion, and how the places we love are actually disappearing because of climate change and rising sea levels. The personal responsibility and legislative responsibilities to preserve these lands and waters is something we can’t ignore.
The title Bottom Feeders works on another level in my book too. It’s used as a derogatory term for people who are deemed “less than” in some way, because of their socioeconomic status, the jobs they work, or the kind of lives they lead. I wanted to reclaim that term, to see the humanity, value, and dignity in every person regardless of their station or status.
CK: That brings to mind two of my favorite poems in Bottom Feeders that incorporate animals, “Alligator Fight” and “Black Nightgowns,” which is about vultures. Both these animals are often painted in a derogatory light and both of these poems celebrate or reclaim the animal’s right to existence, to be what they are. Why is it important to you to showcase these kinds of animals in your poems?
AH: I have always been for the underdogs, the misunderstood, the outcasts, the “others.” Our human instinct is to project our own values onto animals, and it’s such an unfair practice. Just like I want to humanize and celebrate people who are misunderstood or undervalued, I also want to celebrate animals who are misrepresented and judged unfairly, or deemed “bad” or “ugly.” I think alligators and vultures are beautiful!
In Everything Is Water, there is a similar veneration for the more-than-human world, especially when it comes to motherhood. I’m thinking in particular about your poem, “Portrait as Mother as Nature Documentary.” When you were writing this book, how did animals and the natural world help you write about your own experiences as a mother, about giving birth and raising a child?
CK: I often say that I go to the church of David Attenborough, which is to say I watch a lot of nature documentaries. One of the things I think a lot of women are pushing back on in our generation is the idea of mothers being docile and domesticated, and that motherhood is all beautiful and natural. But there’s so much that women go through that is very animal; giving birth is the most animal experience a person can have. After having my daughter, I became preoccupied with mothers in the animal kingdom. I started wondering what it would be like if we talked about human mothers in the same way. For me, it puts into perspective and challenges all the ways we think about motherhood and caregiving.
In your book, you also often examine partnerships and friendships through the lens of nature, connecting readers to the place you love. Can you expand on how these two worlds come together for you?
AH: I see environmental stewardship and caring for a place and its natural phenomena as very similar to caring for a person. When I see a place suffering environmental disaster, I feel the same desire to protect or mitigate ruin as I do when I see a person suffering. Without caring for our places, I don’t know if we can care for each other properly. What are we without the land we live on and the water we drink?
My book also focuses on a complicated relationship between the speaker and her girlfriend, who is dealing with addiction and recovery. In my poem “Codependence,” the girlfriend is undergoing withdrawals. The speaker takes her to the beach and is finally able to turn her back for a moment and walk into the waves, where she feels the current of the water. Caring for someone with an addiction can make you feel helpless at times, because no matter how much you want to help them, they are the ones who have to do the work of recovery. All you can do is love them and support them the best you can.
In Everything is Water, the speaker is a caregiver for a partner, a child, and for nature. Caregiving is a complex role that is explored in many ways in your book. What aspects of caregiving were important for you to portray?
CK: I wanted this book to give voice to the caregiver, and not the caregiver as martyr. It was important for me to give voice and space to the caregiving role without asking for pity. When writing about my husband’s cancer treatment, I was very careful not to say that my experience was more important than his, when it was his body that was riddled with the disease. I tried to be honest about my own experiences of struggling while also giving him the very deserved space he needed to heal and to be the focus. I think that is why the caregiver becomes erased, because most people who are giving care are people who don’t want to take up space, and so the caregiving narrative doesn’t get told. It’s why caregiving jobs are underpaid and undervalued. Giving care to someone is very complicated and vulnerable work.
In Bottom Feeders, you, too, are navigating care for a loved one, but I’m struck by the ways you navigate care to the self. In your poem “Apology to My Past Self” which starts with “It’s not so much that I outgrew my hometown, / more that I outgrew the person I was when I lived there / had grown to hate her, knew what she was capable of.” I love this vulnerability of sharing different versions of the speaker. What was your inclination toward writing so directly to that girl?
AH: There are so many unspoken apologies in our lives, things we deserve apologies for that never come. “Apology to My Past Self” was an exercise in giving myself that gift. I wanted to admit my mistakes and faults and shame, my complicity in some of the things that happened, and I couldn’t extend that forgiveness to anyone around me or any of the other characters in the book without forgiving myself. I wanted to accept the apology, to accept myself despite my flaws. It was an exercise in proving that I also deserve that dignity.
In your book, you also have a poem that speaks directly to the self, titled “Letter to My Daughter or to Myself.” Could you talk about the title and if the “or to Myself” part came after you wrote the poem? Why was it important for you to address both generations?
CK: I wrote this poem for my daughter and then I realized it was for me as well. So much of this book is about trying to write for others or about others, but really it is me who needs to hear some of these messages. This particular poem started with a moment with my daughter that triggered a memory of my childhood where I used to pick cicada skins off the ground and put them back on the trees because I thought that they were hurt and that they needed their skin. My daughter was playing with the cicada skins on a tree and we were talking about them. It had me thinking about the way life cycles and history repeats itself. I thought a lot about using “or” instead of “and.” I think so much of what poetry does in the world is heal, and sometimes it is an act of healing the self. The “or” felt more directly personal.
AH: Which poems were the most difficult to write and why did they need to be in this book?
CK: Some of the things that were the hardest to share were the places where I let myself be angry. Southern women are often told to be “proper” and “lady-like.” There are a lot of “should” and “should nots.” As a result, I suppressed a lot of my anger and therefore I suppressed a lot of my truth. I gave myself permission to be angry and not perfect. The poem, “Wanting,” after Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure,” was an exercise in giving myself that permission. Beasley’s poem uses the capybara as an arbitrary unit of measurement to expose how we often create arbitrary standards and universally impose them. I started thinking about how we do that with motherhood. “Wanting” gets to a very plainspoken and vulnerable place for me, and it was hard. I still have to navigate the fear that my daughter will grow up and read this poem and hate me. I have had a lot of women talk to me about that poem and thank me for it because they don’t feel like they can say those things out loud, and that feels important.
AH: You mentioned these taboo topics. Another of those experiences that you write about is postpartum depression. In the poem, “Postpartum Depression in the Mother Colony,” you use bats as a lens through which to unpack this vulnerable experience. How did that lens help and what more do we have to learn from nature?
CK: I think this goes back to our mutual love of the demonized animal. Bats are one of my favorite animals. I remember when my grandfather took me out at dusk as a child and taught me how to identify bat flight patterns as different from birds. I was immediately drawn to them. The colony is the collective noun for a group of bats. Often, when female bats are pregnant, they form a female-only colony in which they help each other give birth and take care of the pups. When I learned that, I cried. I thought “Oh my god. That is exactly what is happening to me,” because it was my female friendships that sustained me during that period. The women in my life just came immediately to help in all different ways. I didn’t need to reach out; they were just there. The bats just felt like an appropriate vehicle to tell that story. I wanted to celebrate the bats and the women in my life.
To me, Bottom Feeders is also so much about celebrating female friendship and love. Could you speak more to how women become central to your collection?
AH: I had so much internalized misogyny to unpack. Until I was in high school and fell into this party girl pack, I didn’t have many true bonds with other young women. These women were vibrant and queer and diverse. They challenged gender expectations and roles. These incredibly intense female friendships helped me fall in love with women but also with being a woman. I hadn’t felt that way before, in love with all the possibilities of what being a woman could look like. It paved the way for the friendships I made later in life–like with you and our close friends. I learned to be a good friend and to celebrate the friendships that women have.
CK: Friendship is why we are here! Our friendship has lasted over a decade. We met in graduate school in the MFA, and it was the beginning of our parallel journey in poetry. Your friendship has been sustaining in my work and life. It has been such a privilege to navigate all of these stages together–from publishing our first poems, receiving our first rejections and almosts, to finally celebrating our first books. I can definitively say that I would not be here without you. I’m so grateful for the way we continue to celebrate and encourage each other in what can often feel like such an isolating career. I often tell my students to find their people. Programs and workshops are important to the development of your craft, but nothing will buoy you like the writers you write alongside, the ones who first hold your poems in their hands and give you the courage to keep nurturing them.
AH: I truly feel like I found my family when we became friends! We are such fierce champions of each other’s work, celebrating the wins and the close-calls, and building each other back up through all the rejections. Trading early versions of our book manuscripts and giving each other feedback was one the most helpful and encouraging experiences I have had as a poet. There is nothing more valuable than to feel like your work is truly seen by someone else whose writing and craft you also admire. We’ve pushed each other to grow as poets and people beyond anything I could have imagined in grad school. It’s because of you and my writing community that this manuscript turned into a published book instead of dying in a drawer. Thank you for being on this journey with me, and I’m so excited to see where we go next.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Arielle Hebert, is a queer poet based in Durham, NC, with roots in Florida and Louisiana. She holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. She won the 2024 Lit/South Award for Poetry selected by Jericho Brown and was included in Best New Poets 2024, guest edited by Anders Carlson-Wee. Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Grist, Great River Review, Nimrod, and Redivider, among others. Bottom Feeders was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and is her debut poetry collection.
Chelsea Krieg was raised in southeastern Virginia. She received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work may be found in Fairy Tale Review, Writing the Land: Virginia Anthology, Terrain.org, Gulf Coast, New South, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. IX: Virginia, and elsewhere. She was runner-up in Hub City’s New Southern Voices 2023 Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New South 2021 Poetry Prize. Chelsea lives in Durham, NC, and teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University, where she also codirects the MFA Program.
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