On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

It would not be true to myself.

When you started writing On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous, which is such a...

Yeah, I don't know how to actually, I cannot really pinpoint it, but it's to say at least a very queer piece of art.

Was that an intuitive decision or did you think it through and formally too? Did you think I'm going to make it, it has to be this poetic juxtaposed to real raw sexual explicitness or how did you go about that?

Can I sneak this? There's a poem in that novel, right? Can I sneak poetry? Can I sneak queer theory into it and not assimilate to the novel form that is the 19th century golden age, quote unquote? Again, we have to ask, golden for whom? Because other parts of the world wasn't writing like that.

And so I knew that I wanted to do this mischievous thing that, again, because I had such incredible queer elders, you know, Bono Kapil, Juna Barnes, Arthur Rambeau, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote this really strange novel, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson.

So relative to them, On Earth was quite formally conservative, I think, right? It was just like a pretty normie book with some weird stuff.

on poetry terms.