There’s no way to know where I have ever been, I think. But: I believe my introduction to Izzy Casey’s work was in Submittable, way back in the dark ages of ~2018, reading a selection of poems she’d submitted to the journal that I read for at the time.
They were—and are, re-reading them—so good. What struck me then, and continues to punch my nose in now, is their ability to dance between the work of the imagination—“Everything I touch turns into a golden retriever”—and, in the same poem, the doggone bared-open work of the heart: “It is sabotage alone that I confuse for love.” It’s less that they are unlike anything else being written—though one could say that—and more that they are so themselves that one can’t help but trust their bold, moon-pink insistences.
Izzy Casey and I sat down for an interview, separated by a little more than 300 miles, at 1:01pm EST on July 29th, 2025. The conversation lasted 43 minutes, and the mildly-edited transcript is pasted below. We hope you enjoy.
*
I want to start by asking about how you approach and work with childhood in your poetry. It’s a pretty major subject of yours, and you seem to approach it with a different tone than many of your contemporaries. Do you have any guiding principles for writing about childhood or writing in a child-like voice?
At Bennington College, I took an acting class called the Art of Auditioning with the fabulous Jennifer Rohn. In her course, we examined Michael Shurtleff’s Audition, which is composed of twelve guideposts designed for actors to understand their characters. The fifth guidepost, “opposites,” states that truth cannot exist without contradiction. “Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene,” Shurtleff writes, “the opposite of that is also true.” Like a character in a play, a speaker of a poem is never one thing. I’m not so concerned with writing like a child as much as I am with depicting the speaker’s contradictions. The most important things are the hardest to say. Being born into the absence of a thing is to never feel its loss. To conquer a beast, first you must surrender to it. The trick to crying on stage is to hold back tears. Things are what they are and also what they are not.
I am currently writing a play about five brothers and sisters. All the characters are children, and all the actors are to be played by adults. The direction I find myself giving actors over and over again is “stop acting like a child. Stop trying to say the line like a child would — just say the words.” Children do not try to act or speak or think or write like children. They are children. I can’t stand watching a movie or reading a book where a character sounds like an adult’s portrayal of a child, rather than a child. It’s just not how anybody thinks or talks. Authors who write about childhood with contradiction in mind are Babak Lakghomi, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Kiley Reid, Kiese Laymon, Daisuke Shen, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Keenan Walsh.
It bothers me when people talk about “the innocence of childhood.” As if childhood is this special, precious bouquet of roses and donuts, and adulthood is where hardship and grief and turbulence make their big debut. The past is not a destination that everyone feels desperate to get to. I’m interested in writing characters that see the past as what they feel desperate to get out of.
I think we have William Wordsworth to blame for that, partially. *Both laugh* While we’re on the subject of style/approach, I do want to talk more about what I think of as “your style” when I call up your work in my head.
I think it’s pretty unique: often declarative sentences, interested in kind of idiosyncratic personas—outlaws, people that turn things into golden retrievers when they touch them, really rambunctious children—and you do often do this thing where you mix rather cutting personal statements with moments of flat-out humor or absurdity.
To get to the point: I just want to ask about the development of what I think of as your style. Did you always sound like yourself? I’ve been reading your work since probably 2018-ish, and you’ve been quite good for a while. I guess I just I want to ask how you got where you are.
I used to be a terrible writer. A terrible, horrible, awful, no-good writer. The first poem I wrote in the first poetry class I took was a concrete poem in the shape of a cockroach that included found text from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis titled “The Metamorphosis.” It came from one of Bernadette Meyer’s writing experiments. My poem was abysmal, but also boring. My classmates thought so too. “This is not a poem,” one announced, “I am so sorry. But this just is not a poem.” He was trying to be nice. I think he meant that it was a bad poem. I didn’t ask him to clarify. The professor did. He and the class agreed that it was, in fact, a poem. A poem in the shape of a cockroach that uses found text from The Metamorphosis… actually that does sound like something I’d write now…
But how did I get to where I am? So many people and so many books. But it started with my former professor, Michael Dumanis — I owe everything to him. He is the one who helped me realize that a poem could be whatever I wanted it to be. Bad Bad by Chelsey Minnis and the poem “Secret Ninja” by Kiki Petrosino, in particular, also ignited that for me.
That’s great. I was going to bring up Chelsey Minnis if you didn’t, so I’m glad we covered that ground. She’s great, and, in a good and productive way, I feel like I can see her in your work. I do want to talk more about Bennington, because kind of a weird amount of good writers have come out of there the past few years, but we’ll talk more about that later.
Let’s talk about another part of your approach while we’re on the topic. This is one thing you do that there’s a historical precedent for but is something I feel like I don’t see around too much these days: you’re pretty into deep repetitions of sound and “lettering,” for lack of a better word. Piss Witch, Go Jump in a Snake Pit, and Estranged Mother all make pretty rich use of repetition. I wanted to ask when that became a part of your poetics and what it is about those linguistic constraints that you find so generative.
In her essay, “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein argues “When expressing a thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis, and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.” If repetition is a form of insistence, then I think it also has to be an act of desperation. I’ve never felt more desperate than when I have had to insist on something. It’s like saying “I love you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “pretty please with a cherry on top” too much. I like a poem that is a little desperate. A poem that can’t help but repeat itself… a poem with a cherry on top.
Totally. It’s funny—I’m interviewing Srikanth Reddy next week, and in his most recent non-fiction book he also referenced that same essay. So!
Oh, cool! Yeah, it’s a good one.
Let’s move from style to subject matter a little bit. So, this is kind of funny, but fighting, the act of fighting, comes up a lot in your poems. Like: “With my broken hand, no one will fight / me. They are just scared.” in The Modest Chicken Nugget, “Dumb girls don’t like to / fight. But I am half smart! / So I will half fight.” in I Am a Dumb Girl. And even if fighting doesn’t always come up in those terms, expressions of violence or other kinds of aggression seem to be something that you return to with relative frequency. I’m reminded, sometimes, by some of those moments, of that one Ted Berrigan sonnet that ends: ‘Some people prefer “the interior monologue” / I like to beat people up’
And I think I just want to ask, in the least cliché way possible, if writing is in any way an outlet—*Izzy starts laughing*—for things you might not be able to express otherwise. Forgive me—I think I’m just trying to ask what writing poems does for you.
That’s awesome that you noticed that; nobody’s ever asked me that before. It’s funny you mentioned that Ted Berrigan line. It’s the epigraph of my book manuscript.
Really?
Yeah, “I like to beat people up.”
Man, I’m good…
Yeah, yeah, I really, really love that poem.
My uncle was a professional boxer. Growing up, he taught me and my cousins all these cool tricks. Never ever cross your legs, or you’ll get knocked over. Always keep a hand in front of your face, or you’ll get knocked in. My cousins and I took turns socking the punching bag. Socking the punching bag made me feel all tough and brave and wild. I like a poem that is tough and brave and wild. A poem that scares people. Tough people.
Writing a poem does for me now what socking the punching bag did when I was a kid. To me, being a great boxer is akin to being a great writer; it requires equal parts grace and grit. To be tough is to be both brutal and vulnerable, reckless and poised, stubborn and graceful, rigid yet darkly comic. I see both as a performance in the sense that wanting to do it comes from a place of being obsessed with enforcing as much discipline as possible on myself, but also from wanting to be seen. Which goes back to the idea of desperation. There’s something so desperate about wanting to be tough. Poetry, like boxing, allows me to put on a performance different from the performance I put on in my regular life… In a poem, I like to let my rage do the talking.
I like to write plays that are one big argument long. Whenever I try to find ways to fight the urge to make the characters fight in a play, it fights me right back and takes over. I tried to force myself to write a play where every time a fight happens, a love letter appears. But then the stage just flooded with love letters, and all the characters started fighting in it and drowned. I hope that one day, I’ll get bored with it! That would be great.
Yeah, maybe you’ll find peace in your old age.
Yeah! *Laughs*
I fully support the project of beating people up in poetry. I think it’s for the best. *Both laugh* But I didn’t actually know you wrote plays before this interview; that’s news to me. Do you want to talk a little more about that? When did you start working with that genre?
When I was a teen. I got really into The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh and The Memorandum by Václav Havel. I think that’s part of why I like to think of the speaker of a poem as a character in a play. Saying “the speaker of the poem” feels so oddly formal to me. Maybe I will start calling them characters, instead.
I like that. I’m reminded, too: doesn’t Chelsey Minnis write screenplays?
I just learned this! I need to find them.
I feel like I listened to a podcast with her a few years ago where she said she had one where a house was haunted by an orca whale?
Oh, that’s sick.
Yeah, I agree. I wonder what she’s up to these days… I’ve read Poemland like twenty times, that’s an amazing book, but I guess I don’t know her work, like, all over the map.
You should read Bad Bad—it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. The blurbs on the back are more like warnings: “This book takes some time getting used to” and “many won’t find her acceptable at all.” It’s called Bad Bad, but I think it’s the Best Best. Minnis does all these things that the poetry world tells you not to do. Her poems are so good it hurts.
I’m also reminded of Juliet Escoria’s essay “In Defense of Readings” on Zona Motel. “There are bad things about readings,” she writes, “But this is true about anything. Movies. Sunsets. Pie.” “Dismissing pie as a food because they sell bad ones at gas stations is absurd,” she goes on, “Dismissing readings because there are bad ones is equally absurd.” I feel the same way about content and form. I have heard it said that a poem that uses rhyme and meter should not be taken seriously, that a poem written on an upside-down calculator is not sophisticated, and that a poem in the shape of a cockroach is simply not a poem. I think people who believe that should just live a little and try to write a sophisticated rhyming poem in the shape of a cockroach that only uses letters found on an upside-down calculator. The best writers can make something that seems gimmicky sophisticated. Or better yet, make it break your heart.
I think you do that quite successfully. Before we close, I do want to ask about some of your other influences…
So, this is from a while ago, but Sandra Simonds wrote an essay about Chelsey Minnis in which you are quoted.
Yes, yeah. Love Sandra Simonds.
I always think about Chelsey Minnis as kind of her own island; I didn’t really know, as the essay says, that she was grouped into the Gurlesque movement in the 2000s. With… I don’t know who else… Lara Glenum, Dylan Krieger, Dorothea Lasky, Cathy Park Hong, I think? Is that another school that you’re broadly interested in, or is it mostly Chelsey?
I like what you said about her being kind of her own island. Writers on their own kind of island automatically become in conversation with one another to me. My favorite poets are kind of their own island. Dorothea Lasky and Cathy Park Hong, obviously – but also Sawako Nakayasu, Joseph Grantham, Donald Berger, Harryette Mullen, Douglas Kearney, Toby Altman, Kate Durbin, Janelle Effiwatt, Sylvia Jones, Andrew Weatherhead, Zachary Schomburg, Jack Saebyok Jung, Kam Hilliard, Gwen Muren, and Hedgie Choi, too. The same goes for my favorite fiction writers — Scott McClanahan, Babak Lakghomi, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Parker Young, Megan Boyle, Alexa Frank, Bud Smith, Stephen Mortland, Juliet Escoria, Daisuke Shen, Kiley Reid, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Camilla Grudova, and Michael Bible, to name a few. Sorry, I could do this forever, but I can’t. But Chelsey Minnis is my all-time favorite poet. So is Ai. Cruelty and the Killing Floor is a book that I always return to. I’ll stop now.
Let’s go back to something I mentioned a few questions ago… I’ve asked Matt Tuckner this before, and he actually gave me a pretty full answer, but I’m curious about your take: you went to Bennington at roughly the same time as a lot of very good emerging writers: Luci Arbus-Scandiffio, Delilah Silberman, Lydia Golitz, Matt Tuckner.
I want to ask you, too, really out of my own curiosity: what the hell was in the water up there? Because that’s a pretty standout group for a few years at one (what is to me, I’m not from the northeast) random college.
The poetry situation over there is incredible; I feel forever indebted to the writing professors I had, like Michael Dumanis, Phillip B. Williams, Camille Guthrie, Brando Skyhorse, Sherry Kramer, Douglas Bauer, Benjamin Anastas, Marguerite Feitlowitz, and Mark Wunderlich. In addition to the writers you mentioned, I took classes alongside other writers I’m equally as obsessed with. Everyone at Bennington was also kind of their own island – and that was part of the magic of it. We were all kind of our own island, and we all respected each other for it. Michael Dumanis, in particular, stressed the importance of understanding how to talk about one another’s work, rather than just our own. We all understood how to separate our own convictions from those of others. It wasn’t a place where writers led with the idea that their understanding of what a poem or a story could be was better than anybody else’s. It was a place where writers pushed themselves in the direction they wanted to go while also helping others do the same.
Yeah, when I asked Matt he also highlighted Michael Dumanis.
He’s also the Best Best. He’s so moved by poems in this beautiful way. It’s hard not to want to be around him, listening to him try to figure out whether a poem is a bird or a birdcage.
I only have one more question, and I probably should have asked this one earlier, but I’ll ask it now in case you can shade any additional details in:
You said the following in your interview, from back in the day, with Susan Steinberg: “As writers, we tend to hoard a strict set of rules in our head.” What rules do you hoard in your head when you’re writing? In other words, do you have one thing, or a few things, that you know you’re trying to do?
Rules are meant for breaking! That’s the rule I like to hoard in my head most, but also to break the most. Breaking the rule to break the rules by following the rules only to break them totally rules. I’m a sucker for the rules. I’m obsessed, even though I resent them so much. I break up with the rules only to beg them to get back together with me and then break up with them again. It is exhausting.
I’m trying to think of a bad rule of mine that I’ve had that I’ve had to break. Maybe I can think more about it and let you know.
Yeah, take your time. I’ve got nothing else going on.
Oh okay… I know. Writing is more fun for me when I give up on trying to make a poem “good.” Whenever I feel stuck, I try to do something that everybody says not to do. I try to fantasize about the person I would hope to dislike my work, rather than a person I’d like to impress. I don’t feel particularly compelled to write or read a poem that’s like a ginger layer cake with poached pears and vanilla butter cream frosting. I prefer a poem to be like a bad gas station pie. A gas station pie with a cherry on top.
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.
