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All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy
Bridget Bell
CavanKerry Press (2025)
66 pp. $18 (paperback)

Groom
Austin Segrest
Unbound Edition Press (2025)
126 pp. $25 (paperback)

Austin Segrest: One of the reasons I’m so drawn to All That We Ask of You is the intensity. At least for me, literary intensity, maybe especially in poetry, requires tension. A push and pull, a conflict, an ambivalence. Care and damage. Love and hate. I’ve learned a lot about the power of ambivalence from Frank Bidart’s translations of that famous little Catullus poem “Odi et Amo.”

I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even
wants the fly while writhing.

And later, he styles it:

I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails
itself, hanging crucified.

During my study of the Puritans while I was getting my PhD, I was drawn to a translation of a Latin poem called “Automachia,” or Self-Conflict: “Unto myself, myself myself betray.”

As Mark Wunderlich writes (about Groom), “the kingdom of poetry is a land of mixed feelings.” Can you speak to the riptide of conflicted feelings running through All That We Ask of You?


Bridget Bell: Conflicted feelings, and, perhaps more importantly, the permission to feel conflicted feelings, are really what’s at the heart of the book. For example, in the poem “Raising Mothers,” we encounter a speaker who watches “greeting cards pile up, / pale pink and sparkly: blessing, little angel, princess, precious,” but who feels so disconnected from the sentiment presented in those cards that she crumbles, “like a mudslide caving in a village.” The birth of a baby is overwhelmingly presented in our culture as a happy occasion, and while, of course, happiness is an emotion experienced by many, many new parents, when a new mother is suffering from a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder (PMAD), she is also likely to feel guilt, shame, sadness, anger, fear, shock, boredom, detachment, and grief, to name a few. The book is trying to make space for a realistic conversation about the myriad feelings a person might encounter as they enter parenthood, and to make the argument that those feelings are actually quite common and are okay.

Poets spend a lot of time purposefully drawing a distinction between “the poet” and “the speaker” in poems. We are trained to not assume that “the speaker” is “the poet” and that first-person doesn’t equate to autobiography. And to some extent, I think this is a good tactic—it gives poets the space they need to explore difficult topics without carrying those wounds blatantly as their own. However, in All That We Ask of You it’s made evident from the medical introduction written by Dr. Riah Patterson of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that I did, indeed, experience postpartum depression, and the back cover of Groom speaks of “transforming a difficult personal history into art.” What are your thoughts on that line between “poet” and “speaker,” and how does the distinction (or lack thereof) manifest in Groom?


AS: First, your doctor’s intro is a beautiful little piece. It’s much more than explanation or medical expertise; it’s someone who knows firsthand how much your voice is needed, as well as an astute and sensitive reading of the book. I’m reminded of a recent book of poems I came across with a disclaimer—the kind I might expect in a book of fiction—saying, essentially, this is a work of imagination and does not represent real persons… I found it a little odd. Yes, it was a book which, like ours, seemed to be about real, tough events: a stay at an in-patient psychiatric ward. So was it, like, a FERPA thing? Were those poetic portrayals totally fabricated? I highly doubt it.

My philosophy has always been that in poetry you can make up as little or as much as you want. You are accountable to nothing but the needs of the poem. After all, oral poetry is the original fiction! It’s not like we’re writing (claiming) nonfiction. It’s not like poems get fact-checked. Except that they sometimes do: if it’s published in a fancy enough, or anyway, scrupulous enough, venue. There’s a clause in my Groom contract where the press essentially absolves itself from libel suits. So I suspect it’s a legal gray area.

As the author of a book reckoning with and recounting abuse, this all gives me pause: Groom as truth-claim; using the groomer’s first name. While definitely not trying to out anyone, I also do not take every step I might to protect the proverbial innocent-until-proven-guilty. (Essentially, my press was like, we’d love to see him try to litigate…) I mean, it is pseudo-morally fashionable these days not to use names in poetry. X or L or whatever. Or sometimes it’s a name-that-shall-never-be-mentioned thing. Which I get. All of this is to say, I’ve already fielded some pointed questions about using the name, thought a lot about it, and for a minute even came up with a pseudonym.

So, is it all true? Is any of it fabricated? Push and pull, warp and weft—poetry is fabrication, is a fabric of sound and image and rhetoric. Mostly, I echo Elizabeth Bishop: it all really happened. But then she’ll be like, except… You know, and some eco-scholar will mine her letters and make a claim about her manipulative portrayal of wildlife because apparently she changed the sex of “The Moose.”

We’re talking about old memories, and trauma, here. Memory is already unreliable, as everyone likes to say. And trauma can leave holes. But I’m not going to disavow memory just because that’s what the accepted conference titles say I should do. Memory—Bachelard’s “childhood reverie”—is a major source of poetic power.

Another source of magic for me involves daring to go beyond what I can say for certain actually happened. Giving the memory a nudge, catalyzing the drama. When, at the end of my poem “The Long Game,” the character Jamie asks, “This guy is how old?”—it really happened, yes--in my imagination. I saw it happen and I said he said it and that little bit of dialogue opened up something for me in the poem. This is the kind of license creative nonfiction writers take all the time, of course. But also, Jamie really might have said it (or something very much like it).

Or take the entirety of the long poem “JV.” Picking up a fourteen-year-old me from the high school parking lot after a JV “away” football game was a scenario, which fell swiftly into a narrative, that I could see happening, that I could see Steve doing.

Everyone’s somewhere else.
I’m halfway to Steve’s,
who took the liberty

of offering to pick me up tonight,
his little pigeon-gray pickup
at the edge

of our high school parking lot,
windows down, a glowing
Marlboro.

Which is to say, it might really have happened. The intervening years, the drugs, the trauma—how could I be expected to remember much at all with specificity? There comes a point in the writing where I can’t tell anymore what happened and what I’m fabricating. This is a process that I see, perhaps ironically, as a sign of authenticity.

There’s the question of what happened and attending to that detail, and then there’s the interpretation of it. The wisdom, the takeaway. All That We Ask of You is so wise. I love a humdinger aphorism like “Torture comes in many forms.” This line begins the last stanza—at a point where most sestinas have lost their mojo if not coherence—of the amazing “Sestina in Which the World Fails to Tell You about the Tedium.” Or another beautiful line, just flipping through the book at random: “residual ache in the relentless rain” (“Origin Stories”). I see my two examples are—no surprise—about pain. I love those Randall Jarrell lines, “Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” This “call it like it is” sentiment runs strong through All That We Ask of You, such as in “Co-opting Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ to Process My Miscarriage”:

[…]My sister

says what happened to avoid the unpleasant
word: miscarriage. I prefer accurate
word choice. What’s the point

of euphemisms?

Beautiful, painfully lovely music abounds. But there’s also a directness, a pragmatism, almost. A “mind of winter,” I might say. (I remain convinced Wallace Stevens was right to demand this of the best poetry.) Can you speak to negotiating beauty, wisdom, and pain in your poems?


BB: First, thank you for that note about the directness and pragmatism of the collection. It was important to me to have a certain bluntness to the poems as a way to push back against and challenge some of the “hush-hush” attitude around topics like mental illness, or in the case of your book, sexual abuse—sort of an antithesis to Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” For me, there’s no need to slant—naming pain in a straightforward way is one of the first steps to processing pain, and so that “call it like it is” sentiment felt vital for the poems.

Any wisdom that comes through in the collection is wisdom gained post acute pain—like the poem “Directive for Women Who Aren’t Yet Mothers But Will Become Mothers.” (I love a long title, don’t I?) It’s the first poem in the book but is one of the last poems I wrote for the collection, and I only could have written it after experiencing the pain of PMADs. It’s definitely in the voice of a “wiser” speaker and functions as almost a plea to motherless women to enjoy the untethered independence of being youthful and kid-free.

     […]soon your world will spin

on the axis of your breasts, too-heavy cuffs, prolactin
     like flash floods, or the reverse, a drought and the body’s

fuck you refusal to make milk, so pause
     in front of a full-length mirror and admire

the peach blossom, sand dune, deep taupe, cabernet
     of your nipples before new pigment paints them

a different color, admire your breasts while they are still your breasts,
     not yet udders, hold them, drape them in tulip silk,

caviar lace, smoke and ash.

As for negotiating beauty and pain in the poems, we poets, as you know, see beauty in almost everything, but especially in pain—how else to cope with the shit show that is life?

In that same vein of beauty and pain (how’s that for some monosyllabic rhyme?!), I’m super intrigued by the way setting, and more specifically, geographical landmarks work to create tone in certain poems in Groom. In “Brookwood Mall,” for example, there’s this really cool tension between all these traumatic events (the speaker’s parents’ divorce, the vice-principal “luring a minor to the mall”) and the meandering creek that weaves its way throughout the poem. Like the creek couldn’t care less that it’s “swinging past Steve’s apartment” or “within blocks of Mom’s beloved / first house after the divorce”—it will continue “all the miles” despite the human drama going on around it. And in “Initiation,” the “holes in the hills,” with “no markers”—the caves “in north central Alabama” become almost complicit in the abuse the speaker experiences: these are caves littered with “shotgun shells,” “a puzzle of tunnels,” “a slippery board above an abyss.” But, of course, they are also just caves with no agency or malice toward the speaker. Can you tell me a bit about your thought process around integrating the natural world into the setting of some of the poems?


AS: Well, you’ve tapped the flood subject, so bear with me.

Growing up, my siblings and I wandered widely in the wooded ridge-and-valley hills south of Birmingham, Alabama. Our exploration of the tributary creeks of the Cahaba River and of the occasional cave was especially facilitated, encouraged, and even mythologized by our dad. I’ve gone back and forth about the Romantic sublimity of it all.

Unlike my dad, my spatial awareness isn’t the best. I never took to geography or, until my twenties, to reading maps. Same with history; I’m not encyclopedic. Unlike my siblings, I’m also not a true outdoorsperson. But I do have a uniquely felt sense of time and place.

As I’ve matured as a writer, I see that my mind inscribes certain vividly placed memories. That these often minor-seeming memories are mysteriously, immaculately preserved makes them that much fresher and more fertile. I suspect the imagery of these placed memories makes for a Bachelardian union of memory and imagination, or for Virgina Woolf’s marriage of “incongruous” sights that leads to their preservation “in the queer pool in which we deposit our memories.” “Sights fade and perish and disappear,” she asserts, “because they failed to find the right mate.”

Your astute observation about the animate, rightly mated creeks and caves in Groom nails an idea about the pastoral that my editor at Unbound, Peter Campion, brought up just last week when I was visiting Minneapolis. Appropriately enough, we were chatting on the banks of the Mississippi like a couple of shepherds, discussing, among other things, how, as Peter put it, in the pastoral mode the landscape becomes its own character. In another recent conversation, poet Karl Kirchwey mentioned the pastoral’s investment of the landscape “with human shadows.” This makes me think of the sub in suburban; of the pastoral’s veil over an urban backdrop.

It seems the pendulum is swinging back toward investing nature with agency again; see also Robin Wall Kimmerer. This risks anthropomorphism and sentimentality, risks not having Stevens’s “mind of winter,” risks imputing in nature misery (and/or other emotions) heard “in the sound of the wind.” But treating nature as mere nature (inanimate, indifferent), ignoring its spiritual and political shadows, risks a kind of patriarchal complicity. Take the shadows of slavery on the landscapes of the Deep South, which Agrarian and Fugitive poets struggled to acknowledge. Or consider how often sexual abuse is purveyed under the cover of nature. Before today’s scuzzy scout leaders, it was everywhere in classical myth and institutionalized in the ancient Greek “andreion.” This was a kind of hunting camp, man-cave situation, where the older man faux-abducted his chosen boy. As I write in “Andreion”:

[…]In the woods,
          different rules.

A lengthening
          of eros, eromenos
                    sounds like ouroboros,

snake swallowing
          its tail—swallowing
                    ‘men’: beloved teen

pricked with his first stubble,
          picked in a ritual
                    solicitation

and abduction
          from his father’s house[…]

Speaking of the land, you invoke a couple geological processes in the wonderful last poem in All That We Ask of You, “The Language of Becoming Well.” The beginning metaphor is an “archipelago” of language emerging from the “impenetrable” blue ocean of depression. We’ve seen medication, love, and care cut through the blue; this time it’s language.

The language the speaker clings to, it turns out, is not, in the end, poetic or philosophical. It’s actually pretty “mindless”: “word-islands” of simple syllables, a pablum of sheer inertia, of insistence: “You will be happy. You will be healthy.” It’s a kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it mantra. With a perhaps not-incidental echo of baby babble. But the “glittering simple / promise” of this language’s nearly irrational banality is nevertheless playful. A song. Of hope. Of becoming: “lyric-balms       I want to be true.” I get a sense of intellectual shame here, but also of lyric rescue.

Along with islands of sound, the poem also witnesses the formation of a “jagged, brilliant [mountain] range” of “mother-writers.” I’m imagining these writers’ voices pushing up through the blue of silence and cultural/artistic expectations, emerging in the canon. I personally experienced a crushing sense of regret and deep-welling anger reading this poem the second time through, thinking about all the writers who have been prevented or discouraged from writing honestly about their experiences as mothers. Thinking about all those workshop leaders and critics and publishers holding their noses. All that artistic and cultural impoverishment.

You’ve shown me that when language cuts through the silence and becomes a habitable refuge, it marks a real literary event. Which we’re witnessing now. I’d love to hear your take on this intersection of sound, meaning, and gender.


BB: I teach an American Women’s Studies course at Durham Technical Community College where I’m on the English faculty, and as part of that course, we read a piece by bell hooks called “Understanding Patriarchy.” In it, hooks talks about how feelings are gendered, at one point saying, “I was taught that girls could and should express feelings,” which, of course, is a concept present in the space of poetry, but then hooks continues, “or at least some of them,” explaining that if she responded with rage to a situation, she “was taught [...] that rage was not an appropriate feminine feeling, that it should not only not be expressed but be eradicated.” Even though hooks’s piece is over twenty years old, and the idea of emotions as gendered isn’t groundbreaking, I still think hooks’s statement about rage is relevant. I was definitely pissed off writing parts of this book because I felt like the ENTIRE WORLD had tricked me about what it would be like to become a mom, but I also “knew” rage isn’t a feeling moms are “supposed” to feel.

There’s a term called “mom rage,” which is essentially extreme anger that erupts when someone is simultaneously overwhelmed by demands like “reusable diapers, and their sweet, ripe stink,” exhausted to the point of “audio hallucinations / ghost-cries that haunt the cochlea,” but is also ashamed for being overwhelmed and exhausted (“Root Cause Analysis of Perinatal Mood Disorders”). That’s not a sustainable place to be emotionally or physically, and the end result can be sudden rage. I worked hard to get that idea of rage into the poems—both sonically and content-wise. To make female rage okay. Take “Sestina in Which the World Fails to Tell You about the Tedium.” One of my end words is “fuck”—which, honestly, I didn’t know if I could pull off or if it would be perceived as gratuitous—but that’s the word I needed—both for the hard consonant ending that’s akin to an endless knocking and for the way it conveys anger and fear and extreme frustration all at once.

Now that I’ve dissected my rage via consonance, wanna geek out on grammar and the roots of words? I do. Let’s start with the poem in your collection titled “Grammar,” which is rich in grammar-based metaphors, starting with a reference to the grammatical cases dative and ablative:

There’s a case for giving
and a case for taking away

He gave x [to me – dative]
He took y [from me – ablative]

The poem continues on to dissect the etymology of “da” and “-lative,” explaining that “da” is “from do, dare, to give,” while “-lative” stems “from the irregular / shape-shifter fero, // [...]to bear, carry.” I’m in awe of two things:

1) How perfectly these grammatical concepts map onto the content of the book—the idea that “giving” and “taking away” “are the hardest to keep straight / and sometimes take the same form.” For me, one of the greatest feats of these poems is the way they refuse to place concrete blame on the speaker’s abuser—how they live in that nuanced space between “what have we given?” and “what have we lost?”

2) How perfectly this poem speaks to a poem in my collection called “Don’t Tell Her Congratulations,” where I really allowed myself to go down a language rabbit hole, playing with the meaning of the prefix “con” and homophonic words/syllables. The poem reveals how “not even a -tion” is “harmless”: a “common / suffix but too close       to shun, to sham.”

What do you think is behind this impetus to map trauma onto the nitty-gritty building blocks of language, and, more pragmatically, do you ever do “Grammar” at readings or is it an on-the-page poem? Also, two cents about on-the-page poems?


AS: I’m so glad you like “Grammar”! Yes, I’ve performed it, but maybe only once or twice. It probably should be substantially prefaced, which I probably didn’t do. I think poems read aloud are usually hard to process, especially short ones. It takes practice to get much out of it.

I also noticed our common etymological thread. My grammatical impulse springs from 1) being the child of an editor (my mom), who instilled a care with language in us kids from an early age; and 2) from my schooling in the classics, which started with Latin in seventh grade and continued until I graduated a classics major in undergrad. 1 and 2 are intimately related because Mom insisted that my brother and I take Latin instead of Spanish.

Troublingly, though typically, my twin sister (the girl) was steered toward the supposedly easier Spanish. Mom harbored the old assumption that the classics made you more well-rounded and would give us boys a future professional leg up; my sister just needed to get married. As problematic as Mom’s gender double-standard (she was a French major in the sixties herself) is the idea that the classics themselves are “classic,” “fundamental”—as if all culture, or the greatest of it, springs from that root.

This thinking, especially in a Deep South white cultural context, is tied to aristocratic prerogatives. Myself, I can’t write “aristocrat” without spelling it “artistocrat.” Which is to say, I’m in it for the art. Did my foray into the classics make me a better artist? A better writer, maybe: in so far as learning drastically different/difficult languages helps you access the workings and materiality of words, which, as the very medium of thought, you might otherwise take for granted. I also think it can lend a certain je ne sais quoi, a character, a flavor to a writer. Study of the classics links Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Carson, some of my favorites, not to mention pretty much all the canonical seventeenth-century British poets. Yet I’m drawn to these poets for their voice, thinking, and sound, not because of what they studied. (In most cases I only found out after falling in love with the writing.)

Not only was I, as an adolescent and teen, consistently taking Latin in the midnineties when Groom is set, but the very idea of the classics—Greco-Roman mythology in seventh grade Advanced English, our team name being the Spartans—pervaded the hoity-toity nearly all-white community I was educated in.

In college I acquired an Oxford Etymological Dictionary. In a self-prescribed writer regimen, I would compulsively look up the roots of words. (“Poor bird, he is obsessed!”) I wore the spine out of that book; I still have it, in all its duct-taped glory. I think poets are natural custodians of language. (T.S. Eliot says our “direct duty” is to language: “first to preserve, and second to extend and improve.”) Maybe we’re especially prone to parsing language when we’re working through trauma. Trying to figure out ourselves and our experience, our betrayal and shame. There’s something especially satisfying and poetic about everyday language yielding up wisdom and surprise. About microscope particles, little portals of language, opening onto macroscopic revelations. That language itself carries, as I write in “Grammar,” “traces of” emotion, history, knowledge. That it knows more than we do. That it echoes, embodies, and foretells us. A kind of secret correspondence.

In both of our books, words like “congratulations” and “ablative” are revealed to contain, are made to know and say, that which, perhaps, we can’t/couldn’t, or aren’t supposed to say ourselves: that you felt “shunned” or like a “sham”; that I was “cut away” from my friends and family.

In “Grammar,” I ferret out a so-called “irregular” verb at the root of “ablative”:

the irregular
shape-shifter fero,

     ferre, tuli, latus

This verb is tricky to identify because of its various guises, which, unlike conjugations of “regular” verbs, look nothing alike: a kind of inversion of Latin’s dative and ablative cases being hard to tell apart because they look similar. Thus, Steve, the antagonist, assumes several roles: caretaker, mentor, manipulator, predator. Like mercurial tricksters from myth, he shifts forms/jobs/appearances—to keep everyone guessing, to get away with his schemes. In order to get what they ultimately want, abusers always give—gifts, favor, attention, care.

Though blame is nominally easy and villains have their appeal, the reality is emotionally much more difficult and complex than that. I am showing the complexity—a true range of thoughts and feelings, past and present, with little regard for what the political moment dictates I should say or be careful about.

One thing Steve gave me was a sexual education, at least in the sense of the opportunity to fraternize with adults who were speaking and acting openly about sexual diversity; he gave me an alternative to toxic masculinity. It was not, in the end, a good education, because my best interests were not being looked out for. Not just because of Steve’s indiscretions and predations, but more specifically because of the discrepancy in learning outcomes, the wool pulled over my eyes. In some ways, I learned too much, too fast. Other things I fear I will never get to learn. My poem “All the Young Dudes” asks

whose job is it

to break the horse

(the force

beneath the surface)

of desire? To give it

rein, and rein it in?

I don’t know the answer. I just know that a failure in this department drives sex into the darkness. The left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. A divided nation, we are susceptible to unconscious impulses and entities that exploit this schism.

I fear I will always feel sexually doubtful, guilty, confused. If sex is the chaos agent some people say it is, maybe this feeling is inevitable. The younger generations and their sacrosanct kinks make me envious, while the older generations and their blasé approach to abuse make me feel like a fraud. I’m on a sexual journey in therapy now. So says my therapist. I long for untrammeled desire, something I certainly like to read about and one day would like to be able to write. As the author of a book about painful aspects of relationships and sex, what are your thoughts about writing desire?


BB: Honestly, in my book, I feel like sex is really divorced from desire. Out of curiosity, I did the old “ctrl+F” search for the word “sex” in the collection, and the main time sex comes up is in a medical context in the collection’s long poem “Co-opting Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ to Process My Miscarriage”:

She taps her keyboard
and asks if we just had sex.

It can cause bleeding. I can tell
she is nervous to ask
about sex, which I find funny

and stupid and endearing.
I make a joke to ease her discomfort.
No, my cervix isn’t roughed up, I laugh.

Here, sex is nothing about desire. It’s embarrassing for the nurse asking the questions in the poem, and a point of investigation about the potential cause of spotting indicative of a miscarriage.

Another place where sex comes up in the collection is also super divorced from desire. At the end of the poem, “My doctor recounts to me an anecdote”—a poem I always make a point to say is nonfiction—the OB-GYN stitching me up post-birth is telling me a story about the worst vaginal tear he ever repaired:

I didn’t think I’d be able to fix her. His
face is framed by my open legs. Her husband should send me flowers,
he says as he pushes through me with a needle and thread.

Here, sex between this doctor’s former patient and her husband becomes a wildly inappropriate joke—a verbal manifestation of just how tone-deaf medical providers can be toward women in vulnerable situations. So, in short, again, no desire there—except maybe the desire of that doctor to feel like a sexual hero.

That all being said, the manuscript I’m working on now deals with desire copiously. It’s all about marriage and marriages ending—whether through death or divorce or disease—and about reclaiming desire in mid-life. I’ve been thinking frequently about what is “okay” to say about desire in a poem that might later be read by my mom or my dad or my kids—how much is too much to share about desire? Like can I talk about a “maelstrom of lacy thongs and new lovers / and STD tests” as a forty-two-year-old mom? Is it the poet’s job to be open about these messy, raw feelings regardless of how people in our lives might be impacted? I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I’m definitely writing the poems anyway.

Speaking of writing new poems, let’s talk about the weird time machine that is publishing a book. Most of the poems in my book were written anywhere between five to ten years ago. You write the poems. You revise the poems. You submit single poems. You submit the manuscript. Then, if you are fortunate enough to get the manuscript accepted, most presses have a long lead time. So, by the time the book comes out, you are likely well beyond the world of those poems—at least creatively. Was that experience true for you? If so, what was it like to then revisit the poems in the super intimate way that readings and interviews and events require you to revisit the poems? How has your relationship changed with the book? AND! What are you working on now?


AS: I honestly don’t feel like I’m “beyond” the Yeatsian self-quarrels of either of my books (the style and reach, or lack thereof, maybe moreso…). This could be because, as my mom herself said (the subject of my first book), I can’t let go of things. Or it could be that, as a mentor said, some things we can and need to write about many times over.

Last month in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at Pearl’s Books, I read a batch of Groom poems to a store full of receptive listeners, many of them writers, not a few MFA students. Three poets read a couple of poems before me—a young local poet, a young MFA student, and a middle-aged recent low-res MFA graduate. I say the audience was receptive because not only were they nice, but it was clear to me that they had been conditioned to respond vocally, emotionally to poems. Manifesting in unisoned mmmmnnns and snaps, the response was not so much, it seemed to me, wonder, as it was emotional accord. More or less political agreement. If you think about it, it takes a certain amount of obviousness to make everyone in a room feel confident that they know when and how to respond together, as one body. Like at church. Or a political rally. Of course I’m thinking about social media right now! As my reading proceeded, it became increasingly clear that this well-meaning audience wasn’t getting its accustomed cues from me. I was then in a position to tell myself this was a good thing, testament to the complexity of the work. While at the same time, of course, I was doubting everything and feeling like a giant imposition. When people don’t know how to react, it can be awkward, to say the least.

As for that weird time machine, with one exception, the poems in Groom were composed between 2019 and 2023—starting in Provincetown, extending into other residencies, and continuing in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I live and teach. I knew off the bat I had a project on my hands, a sustained subject. This was not my experience with the first book, which I cut my teeth on over the course of twelve years. In fact, as a friend recently reminded me, there was significant overlap between the books, as some of the most important poems in Door to Remain were written around the time I was composing Groom. Granted, there’d been many prior versions of that first book, as well as several other totally different books, since I had graduated with my MFA in 2009.

As Groom neared completion, I had an essay phase, experimenting with critical/lyric hybridity. After a year or two, with a good local writer group in place, I’m back to poems. I seem to be doubling down on myth and abuse, homing in on the pastoral, in particular. Shepherds and cyclopes, riddles and rapes. Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis.” Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander.” The Idylls of Theocritus. It remains to be seen if and how these new classics poems might go with a number of “dad poems” (estrangement, boomers, ambivalence, woods, science, sports) written over the past decade.



BRIDGET BELL is the author of the poetry collection All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy (CavanKerry Press), which explores maternal mental health. She is also an educator, proofreader, and digital marketing associate. She teaches composition and literature at Durham Technical Community College, proofreads manuscripts for Four Way Books, and provides marketing services for Anchor Perinatal Wellness. She resides in Durham, NC. You can find her online at bridgetbellpoetry.com.


AUSTIN SEGREST is the author of the poetry collections Groom and Door to Remain. Originally from Alabama, he teaches at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.