My introduction to Nora Claire Miller’s work was, I believe, their verse play in the first issue of Bianca Rae Messinger’s and Toby Altman’s What Happens Mag. The play, called The Wall-Sized Fish, which comes with a set of partially-ominous “Rules” and whose stage directions often resemble the following—“You look up. Though your body is not on stage, the stage makes the sound of your looking, and everything is awake. This can be accomplished with light or silence.”—quickly set the tone for what to expect when reading Miller’s work: if it is at all possible to do or say anything new in poetry, this is probably where you’ll see it first.
Groceries, their debut collection, is a perfect example. Rarely before, I think, has the quotidian taken on so many different transformations: “life on earth is a transcription of falling,” Miller says, and “life on earth sits in a tree like a horse.” Throughout the book, which is its own “transcription of falling,” Miller writes movingly (and funnily) of the ways one has to swim through all the made conditions—‘making’ being one of this book’s repeated concerns—that the people and objects on our planet live inside. “if only life on earth could be made / into oatmeal, you’d eat it every morning…”
Our conversation lasted through most of the last half of the Spring 2025 semester and is presented to you here in full. If you like what you see, I recommend both buying Nora Claire Miller’s book from Fonograf Editions and checking out their journal, Ghost Proposal, which they edit alongside Kelly Clare and Alyssa Moore.
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While I think the poems in Groceries are up to a lot of different things, I’d like to start with a specific question about one particular aspect of your poetics. Some of the “object work” in Groceries, especially the rapid juxtaposition of objects that happens throughout the poems, reminds me of some of the first experiments of surrealism—both in painting and in poetry. When you say “there will be no more latex-free gloves or endeavors” on page 7, for instance, my mind falls automatically to “The Song of Love” by Giorgio di Chirico, one of the classic examples of surrealist juxtaposition. As well, though not to accuse you of automatic writing, I feel your poems often have a kind of inner kinship with the comparative rhythms from the ending sections of Breton and Souppeault’s The Magnetic Fields: their lines “Trees stuffed with luxury hotels / Prisoners reprieved for good behavior / Solid-state gaseous liquid / Radiant action of the sun” vs. your own “miracle: a row of tulips pointing down, / beneath a structure shaped like an armoire, / hurtling through space, not outer space exactly. / the tulips jagged like teeth.”
My question: Do you place yourself in the “river” of surrealism at all? If not, where do you situate your poetics in time? Or, alternatively, do you not really worry about that sort of thing?
The early surrealists used parataxis to talk about witnessing mass death. To understand a world split apart by violence, they split objects from their contexts. The point being, I think, that the relationship between things was not rational, and so you could swap them out—a lobster for a telephone, a statue for a glove.
Today, as a century ago, we are witnessing mass death. But now, our relationships to objects are more estranged than ever. On Earth we make gloves out of the thick white sap of rubber trees, and we call that material “latex,” and some people are allergic. So on Earth we have latex gloves and latex-free gloves. On Earth we have telephones shaped like actual lobsters, and telephones shaped like hamburgers, and telephones shaped like cars, and telephones shaped like tiny rectangles, and telephones that are virtual and so not shaped like anything. On Earth we beam words into space and back again thousands of times a day, often for no reason.
If the array of images in Groceries may seem far-flung, it is because we live in a world full of far-flung images. The world is paratactic. Still, these images are immutable. Things just are, and so they can be lost. Groceries is a book about that loss.
Beautifully said. One way, of course, that loss manifests itself in this text is in those “missing” words, those small blank spaces, that appear throughout its poems: “the future is firm about □□□□ s. / some are thoroughfares, / while others are simply for decoration. / if you pick the wrong □□□□, / the □□□□ will erupt.”
And yours isn’t the only collection, recently, that’s made loss visible in the text. I think first of Fady Joudah’s titular ellipses—which Abdelrahman ElGendy described as a way “to embody the erased, the unsayable”—as well as the acts of state-based deletion pictured in Toby Altman’s Discipline Park.
It isn’t hard to understand why this is, considering, as you say, the way death continues to gain ground around us. I’d like to ask more specifically, though: how did those “holes” in the poems first appear? Were you, from the beginning, looking for ways to bring white space—and all the things it might call up—into the body of the text? Or were they drafted into existence?
In computing, the □ is used as a “replacement character”—a stand-in for an unreadable or untranslatable glyph. Nothing begins as a □, but lots of things end up that way. If I text you an emoji your phone can’t read, it’s likely to show up as a □. Convert one text file type to another and you’ll likely end up with some □s.
A □ is a ghost of language. It takes up space that looks empty but isn’t. The □ is a shape created by absence. It’s not a hole where something was, it’s the scab that forms over that hole.
In the sense that art exists to make visible the unsayable and the deleted, □ has always been at the core of everything I write and make. But the □ glyph first found its way into my work when I was halfway through writing Groceries. What happened was I ran out of groceries, of nouns. It was a book called Groceries so I needed all the nouns I could find to fill the shelves. One can only remember so much, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t more just out of reach. Spark plugs and felt-tipped pens and bundt cakes. Nouns and ghosts of nouns: □ and □ and □.
Well I’ll say first that I think the use of □ is a beautiful solution to that problem—it’s cool, thinking of □□□□ as little baskets that, because they seem to hold nothing, also maintain space for everything.
I’d like to talk next about the origins of the project. There are many moments that display, to me, a rather moving sensitivity toward simply being alive, that least simple of acts, on this place that we call earth. I was sometimes reminded—by moments like “life on earth, oh my god life on earth. I don’t know who you are or where I heard your name before, but I must have heard of you, life on earth.”—of a Ben Lerner moment, from his latest collection Lights, that I, and probably a lot of poets, relate to: “All I have is a kind of supersensitivity to harbor lights and skylines, which come at me hard / It’s like smoking with the patch on for me to be in time.”
How did you first get started on Groceries? It’s just full of so much material’d time, and often so much “supersensitivity” to that material… how did the book end up taking this specific form?
I love that phrase you used, “material’d time.” When I wrote this book I was working as a freelance copy editor, and time had never felt so material’d in all my life. My job was to spend my time as a sieve for other people’s language. Most of my work was in comments on Word documents, where I wrote about writing. Every night I’d close my dozens of documents, each of them representing a chunk of material—time and text and money like little □s.
Over time, as you might imagine, I grew very unhappy, so I did what I knew best: used Microsoft Word. Every night after work, like (and instead of) going to the grocery store, I wrote one new paragraph in the document. At first, the paragraphs were square-shaped. But over time, they started shifting around. Eventually, □s began to appear throughout the book like schools of fish. The groceries themselves felt like a school of fish—a cluster of writings that come out of nowhere and answer to nobody. I wrote every day for three or four months and had no idea when it would end. One day, I had made about a hundred groceries and the book was suddenly over.
This has less to do with the book itself, maybe, but I’d love to hear more about your relationship to, or feelings about, the being named Microsoft Word. (Funny, I guess, how little writing I’ve seen about Word considering how much we as writers have to touch it). It does actually come up in the book a lot: “microsoft word has such / beauty and permanence. / microsoft word has changed / my life. / the point of microsoft word / is that you’re alone.” Or: “oh microsoft word, bring me to my knees.”
Could you say more about your feelings toward the medium/tool/void/□ that is Microsoft Word? Have you tried to avoid it at all since the completion of Groceries?
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of Microsoft Word. I’d announce I was working on my novel, then sit at the family computer and load up Office 2001. I became obsessed with the templates—newsletters, brochures, flyers. A document could change just based on its shape. Text only mattered as much as its container, and Microsoft Word was a place of endless containers.
I came up with excuses to use Microsoft Word as often as I could. I made flyers for services that did not exist and invitations for parties I was not having. I sent George W. Bush hate mail using formal letterhead. I created a multi-issue newsletter about my efforts to learn how to fly.
As I grew older, my relationship to Microsoft Word became strained as I started having to use it for homework. Eventually, I stopped using it in favor of Google Docs. Years later, as a freelance editor, I returned to Microsoft Word for the tracked changes, a truly nightmarish system that soon became the basis of my livelihood. Microsoft Word could be a container for anything, including misery. But it was in that misery that I began to find little windows of □—quiet documents that became the groceries that became my book.
Writing Groceries redoubled my interest in Microsoft Word as an art-making tool. I recently bought a pink iMac from 1999 on eBay, and the first thing I did was install Office 2001. The blank document felt like it always did—like a □, an empty room that is the container for all of life on earth.
There’s one other presence in the collection that we haven’t touched on yet: that of “the university.” The repeated mention of it perhaps stood out to me especially because I first encountered your work—I’m pretty sure it was that play of yours in What Happens Mag that I saw first?—while you were attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop alongside quite a few great, great writers and artists. Too many to really even list them all, I think… correct me if I’m wrong, but you attended at roughly the same time as Alyssa Moore, Izzy Casey, Toby Altman, Benjamin Krusling, Kamden Hilliard, Stephen Ira, Jane Huffman, and Bianca Rae Messinger, correct?
So, forgive me, but when I read about “the university” in Groceries that’s where my mind went first. How was your experience at your MFA? One can probably glean some things from the collection—“when it rains at a university it is an indoor sort of rain”—but I still wanted to ask. Did your time there lay the ground for Groceries at all?
I loved my time in grad school. I got to study poetry alongside some of my favorite writers, including many of the people you mentioned.
When I talk about the figure of “the university” in Groceries, I’m not specifically talking about the Workshop, or really about any school. Instead, I’m talking about the administrative bodies that contain schools. A school aims to teach; an institution aims to protect its own interests. When you try to combine these aims, you get the kind of university I was writing about.
There are no schools or universities left in Gaza. The University of Iowa, like many universities, invests money in weapons manufacturers that supply munitions to the Israeli military. Which means that when I taught UIowa undergrads poems by celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, their tuition money was helping to fund the destruction of his homeland, the genocide of his people.
This is what I meant when I wrote about an “indoor sort of rain.”
Interview by Lloyd Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, FENCE, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. You can read more at his website lloydwallace.com.
