Literary journals present select poems that stand out among thousands of submissions. And these poems have the power to stand alone. Yet, in this feature, we want to follow individual pieces printed in journals to their next roles in poets’ books.

Here, in brief essays, past contributors who have recently published poetry collections comment on how they constructed complete manuscripts. These are accompanied by poems that originally appeared in Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere, and now share the pages of the poet’s full-length works.

We’re happy to highlight Seize by Brian Dempster, Sawgrass Sky by Andrew Hemmert, Sweetgum & Lightning by Rodney Terich Leonard, Grand Marronage by Irène Mathieu, and Where You Come From is Gone by Annie Woodford—and we hope to provide insights useful in developing your own process as a writer or understanding as a reader.

—The Editors

ON THE MAKING OF SWEETGUM & LIGHTNING

BY RODNEY TERICH LEONARD

“Sweetgum & Lightning concerns itself with realigned and reimagined notions of family, trauma, sexuality, poverty and aesthetics. I’m interested in the notion of place and its thematic and investigative capacities to foster recollection and transformation.” Read more.
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ON THE MAKING OF SEIZE

BY BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER

“‘Storm Music’ and ‘Bird Cries’, from my second poetry collection, Seize, are instrumental in developing the book’s central narrative and thematic arcs: the complex father-son relationship and intense, vacillating physical and emotional states precipitated by my son Brendan’s seizures—between static and song, lightning and light.” Read more.
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ON THE MAKING OF SAWGRASS SKY

BY ANDREW HEMMERT

“When I read collections of poetry, especially those that lay claim to the form of memoir-in-verse, I look for the poems that begin to forge a way forward. What this means is that the book’s poems should not merely inhabit a broken line with a beginning and an end. The book’s poems should continue into the thematic horizon, suggesting a way to live that transcends the collection’s inherent traumas and obsessions.” Read more.
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ON THE MAKING OF WHERE YOU COME
​FROM IS GONE

​BY ANNIE WOODFORD

“​The book started feeling complete around that time, when the different sections started to reverberate against each other, allowing individual poems to hit different, varied notes that nonetheless held a relationship to each other, a sort of confluence of melody and tune, of lyric and music.​” Read more.

ON THE MAKING OF GRAND MARRONAGE

BY IRÈNE MATHIEU
​​“Grand Marronage was also a project book in that it was a projection—I focused as much on reading between the lines and imagining into my grandmother’s silences as I did on the detailed stories she told. I wanted to know what lived in the speechless places and under the façade of platitudes, and poetry was the best tool for such an excavation. To do so, I had to put my twenty-first-century self into her 95-year-old shoes and approximate as best I could—an act of profound imagination and creative license.” Read more.