Luke Rolfes Interviews Me for The Laurel Review

"Nature, to me, is less self-involved and more honest than the human world. It doesn’t hide or disguise its ugliness while also surprising us with its generosity and protectiveness."

Lean in as I speak with Luke Rolfes at The Laurel Review about nature as it relates to my beautiful new book tether & lung, as well as making art out of pain, motherhood, tyranny, and titling poems. In this interview, we share a vibrant conversation about how "[p]oetry literally kept me alive for several years" and how I believe that the first goal of writing pain is to care for pain.

"That pain is a part of yourself that is suffering and asking other parts of yourself to lean in and be with its discomfort. It’s not asking to be fixed or frozen in time. It seeks companionship. Start there, with companionship."

Luke and I talk about the "rawness" of my motherhood poems and how my whole book "is sort of this inverted Eden." I share that my poems of motherhood and national politics "speak to the limitations that those with less power have in the realms of those with more power, and how it is those with less power that are ogled and more severely judged for their activities in the face of tyranny than the tyrants themselves."

"In fact, tyrants keep the cameras focused on the oppressed."

I am grateful for Luke's smart, probing questions and feel you will glean much from this interview and the poems in tether & lung. Pre-order your copy from Texas Review Press today. Also available on Amazon.

tether & lung: Now Available for Pre-Order

Like the finest impressionist paintings, these poems’ medium of linguistic light and shadow render the many nuances of a heartfelt and hard-won life, testament to the joys and sorrows of womanhood, motherhood, and marriage. Like the most arresting symphonies, the musical lyricism of these poems captivates the soul line by line. Like the most compelling collections, this book elucidates our understanding of struggles and hopes with utterly unique and surprising tropes. 

Richard Blanco, fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of

Homeland of my Body

"With horse (gelding) as totem creature and knife (for the cutting of flowers and food) as totem object, tether and lung moves deftly and with sustained lyric intelligence through a bucolic world in breakdown. Here, the provisional Eden that marriage is, its daily soft violences, is laid bare for both husband and speaker—the husband tending horses during the day and surfing for gay porn at night while the speaker works the Catullan double-bind of hate and love, raising children, preparing food, marginalized and mistreated, but still with first longing. Lives, many lives, are at stake in these poems presented with an unresolved and mesmerizingly nuanced clarity that is human and true."

Dennis Hinrichsen, author of Dominion + Selected Poems

Pre-order from TRP: The University Press of SHSU: https://buff.ly/4fcCLMV

Or find on Amazon: https://a.co/d/hZ5H6m9

tether and lung treads through the liminal landscape of a relationship doomed. Pulled from dirt and Bible verse, this densely packed collection pieces out a disassemblage of bodies into grit, muck, and hoof. In the entropy we find the animal of desire as we twist through power struggles and the wicked beauty and violence of lives lived so closely with nature, tethered together by the fevered pitch of love, longing, and loss.     

H. M. Cotton, managing editor of Birmingham Poetry Review 

Under the pressure of motherhood and her husband’s sexual longing for men, Kimberly Ann Priest’s speaker in tether & lung grapples with the needs of her own body. We witness her desire for her husband as she lingers on the beam and bridge of his neck, shoulders and biceps rolling—sun-kissed dunes, a whole landscape, all the while sensing he is unavailable to her touch. As a queer man, I find these poems deeply familiar—the steaming desire for what can’t be returned, the journey through separation from other (which feels like separation from self), the acceptance that, even with healing, a part of us always feels half-open, half-broken, half-withered, half-revived. Sweet as jam trapped tight under lids of glass jars, each poem threatens an intimate explosion.

Robert Carr, author of The Heavy of Human Clouds

Priest’s art is not for the timid, the faint. In tether & lung, she masterfully threads poems, one into another, widening the wound while expanding the heart. Each poem offers its own cadence, gathering momentum while moving through story, building song, containing pulse. Nature and human experience are braided together. Tell me there are rivers, stars and trees, says the speaker to her husband before she gives birth to their second child, all while believing, mother-with-child is a lone animal clawing, coddling, carving home out of a wilderness. Reading this book will force your heart to skip beats. Mostly, these poems will linger.

Rebecca Evans, author of Tangled by Blood and Safe Handling