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AE Hines by J. D. I S I P
Congratulations on your second collection, Adam in the Garden! In this collection, which follows Any Dumb Animal, your speaker is often wiser or more sure-footed than the central speaker in your debut. Was this an intentional shift? What were some of your goals in this collection and how did they differ from your first, if at all? Thanks! That’s an interesting perspective. I think what you’re noticing in terms of wisdom or “sure-footed-ness” in Adam in the Garden, speaks to where I was when I wrote both books, and the underlying themes each explores. Much of the first, Any Dumb Animal, deals with rejection in various forms, whether it be by a parent, society, a partner, or one’s closest family and friends. And if there is an opposing thread to this theme of rejection, it seems to be survival. That first book was written mostly while I was processing a divorce from my then-husband of 20 years, and as such, the collection wants to explore my relationships with all the men in my life – from my father to my Ex, from my adopted son, to, ultimately, my husband I married at the beginning of COVID in 2020. So, the book seems to move back and forth: from my coming out in the 80s and 90s at the height of the AIDS crisis, to finding new love and re-marriage, during the pandemic, in another time of plague. With Adam in the Garden, by comparison, I was much more interested in exploring the power of lyric and persona, and experimenting with more formal constraints -- although the poems as a whole still tend towards a narrative style. The book examines the thresholds we cross, from childhood to adulthood, youth to old age, through the subjective lens of queer love and queer joy. (Joy, I realized, was something I too often ignored in my first book!) I wanted to braid poems that explored the garden as an extended metaphor -- for the body, for our fragile earth -- and ultimately used the biblical garden of eden to thematically weave these together. If there is a through-line between the two collections, I suppose it is this movement from rejection to self-acceptance. Another sort of threshold, perhaps, the most important of all.
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