An Interview with Isabella Bowker

In Transit

What did you have in mind when arranging your manuscript, particularly in terms of an arc or development of the themes of location and dislocation? How did you decide to end the collection, for example, on “Leaving Town”? And did this arc or progression change at all from the initial conception of your chapbook?

Figuring out the ending was actually the easiest part for me. I wrote “Leaving Town” as a creepy love story of sorts, and I liked the idea of closing on a note that was both comical and unsettling. Once I had that conclusive tone established, it was a matter of building backwards.

I tend to write from a very particular point of view, and so it was fun trying to figure out where to put moments that put these perspectives in conversation with one another, or where one poem gives more or different information about a particular character or place than a preceding poem did. The idea that a declaration made in one poem might be challenged by another was, for me, a way of mimicking some of the thematic elements within the poems themselves on a chapbook-wide scale.

In terms of tone, In Transit navigates grounds both wryly comic and deeply introspective. For example, “Let There Be Light” offers a parodic account of the sun taking a break from her lighting duties (“with characteristic impetuousness”); while later in the collection, “Birthright” confronts a polarizing war. How did you find yourself balancing these two tonal modes, both in the writing and ordering of your manuscript? How did your sense of the manuscript’s progression—or even its thematic concerns—figure in the navigation of these modes?

This is a great question, because this issue became quite challenging when it came time to organize my manuscript. On one hand, I tend to find humor in life pretty easily—I like to laugh, and I think humor becomes a good lens of observation. Both comedy and poetry rely on surprise to build narrative power, and thinking of endings as punchlines, whether or not the poem is supposed to make you laugh, has been a helpful way to think about how I reveal the “point” of the poem, if there is one at all.

On the other hand, I did not want to undermine the seriousness of some of the poems like “Birthright” by sandwiching them between poems of a lighter tone. Both “Birthright” and “In the Desert” were responses to issues that are central components of our public consciousness right now, and they deserve to be given the space that the heftiness of their subject matters require. I think at some point, I decided that there was no easy solution to this problem, and that the best course of action, therefore, was to simply put them in close enough proximity to each other that their effects might be cumulative—just as you think you’ve moved on from an uncomfortable topic, another one has come to take its place, and I did not want anyone to feel like they could predict what was coming next.

Most of the poems in your chapbook take place in very concrete places or landscapes: “In the Desert,” “Once, on a Public Bus in Florida,” in a “Row House,” in an Oldsmobile Alero. While we may find a range of places in In Transit, which types of places or landscapes do you think have influenced your work the most, and why?

I don’t really know how to drive, and so I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on various forms of public transportation. In a strange way, I think these spaces rather mimic my orientation towards the world. Public buses, for example, are a collection of individuals all in the process of figuring out how to cohabit a shared space, for however brief a time, and this can bring out some truly fascinating, sometimes hilarious, sometimes beautiful moments of humanity. While I love being around people, I don’t always feel particularly comfortable engaging with them, and moments such as the one described as “Once, On a Public Bus in Florida,” create the opportunity for observation that has always felt natural and, in turn, creatively generative.

I also think that rooting poems in concrete landscapes creates an anchor that makes it easier to go off into abstract contemplation. “In the Desert” is a good example of that. This poem is partly autobiographical—I actually was in the Atacama Desert of Chile right after the 2016 presidential election, and there really were flamingoes involved—but more than that, I thought the desert could capture the desolation and adrift-ness that would otherwise be difficult to put into words in an emotionally precise way.

Many of the poems in your chapbook are written in particular metrical patterns—iambic pentameter and tetrameter, for the most part—and with formal principles and rhyme schemes dictated. At the same time, free verse courses through the manuscript as well. The shift from free verse to strict form between the first and second poems seems an apt example of these tendencies. How did traditional form and meter (and, equally so, the lack thereof) inform your writing of In Transit? How do you, as a writer, navigate between traditional and more contemporary forms?

Meter can be really helpful because it gives me a strict set of rules that forces inventiveness in ways that free verse does not. The same applies to rhyme schemes—when one is forced to conform to a particular structure, the game becomes, how far can I push the bounds of this confined linguistic space without breaking them completely? I don’t think a poem like “The Artist in Her Memorial to the Six Day War” would have been at all successful were it not in such a strict form, because frankly, the word “impolitic” would not have been one that necessarily came to mind except for the fact that I needed a word that rhymed with “quick.”

However, I have never been a particularly successful rule follower—I really hate being told what to do, and I also resent the idea that a reason why I should not do something is arbitrary. So the poems that are in free verse represent points where my desire to say something in the exact way I wanted to, rules be damned, no longer fit within a received form.

While In Transit is concerned with dislocation and movement (“Sunday in January” seems a fitting example, given that we find the speaker motion sick while she learns how to drive), many of its poems also address origin—a place or background that isn’t supposed to move or change (“Origin Story” is the obvious example here). How, for you, do these thematic threads relate and/or stand in tension?

The conception of In Transit as a cohesive project came from the realization that in the past five years, I have lived on two continents, in two different countries, and, within the US alone, in four cities in four different states. I often feel as though I am in a perpetual cycle of packing and unpacking, of introducing myself to strangers and deciphering subway maps and getting lost trying to find the bathroom. At times, this can feel incredibly unsettling. Each new place requires a period of adaptation, both physical and emotional. There are the obvious changes, of course—to sleep cycles, to social mores, and to language, perhaps. But the most profound changes often come in relation to my identity. Being new to a place means existing with a history that no one else knows. The process of how this history is revealed, and to whom, is directly related to the geography in which one finds oneself. This is an experience that I have had over and over again, and will probably continue to have.

At the same time, I’ve been lucky to have a lot of stability in my life. My parents have lived in the same house since I was two, and nearly all of my extended family lives within two hours of each other. It has also become abundantly clear to me in certain very specific ways just how similar I am to my parents, and this is something that I actually feel very grateful for. A poem like “Origin Story” was an attempt to pay homage to my upbringing, which was often unusual, occasionally strange, and certainly full of love and support for me becoming the person that I am. So, for me, this element does not stand in tension with my current state of dislocation, but rather makes it possible. I can afford to take risks and be brave because I know what’s waiting for me if I fail, and that knowledge is incredibly freeing.

“A subtle warning: ‘Ojalá no hayan otros’” is a last line that sticks with me, in part because of its comically eerie implications (How many dead bats go unnoticed by us?), and in part because of its deft use of the Spanish. What went into the writing of this poem, and how have different linguistic registers influenced your writing more generally?

“Encounters” was about as close to a literal retelling of an actual event as any poem in this collection—I was at my parents’ house one day when the women who clean their house found a dead bat in the kitchen, and I was suddenly thrust into this strange moment of crisis. I actually have a deep-running antagonism with bats as a collective species, thanks to a series of them that have found their way into my living spaces over the years, which once resulted in my entire family needing rabies vaccines. This particular scene lent itself to poetry in part because of how bizarre it was—I don’t think I’m nearly imaginative enough to have invented such a circumstance, and so once I got over my revulsion, I immediately recognized the artistic gift that a bat decomposing at the bottom of a vase represented. I was a little worried about using Spanish because I am a non-native speaker, and because I didn’t want the other figures in the poem to be reduced in any way due to my shortcomings in this second language. However, I do think that having both languages present mirrors the sudden, unexpected alliance that formed between the three of us that day.

The final line of the poem wasn’t ever actually spoken, but I wanted to end on a note of unsettlement. I mean, what else can you hope for once something like this has happened, other than that such an occurrence never arises again?

Why did you decide on train tracks (say, over a car or bus) for your chapbook cover, and what other decisions went into your chapbook design? For example, how did you come to choose the steel blue, as well as the vast size of the train tracks as compared to the cover text?

I’m a total city kid, and so I wanted my chapbook to reflect an industrial feel that I hope comes through. It was a novel experience to have such control over the visuals of this book—I don’t think I’m naturally very visually oriented, so I had to think long and hard about something that I normally don’t pay much attention to. Renee Scavone actually recommended railroad tracks as potential cover art, and I loved the stark minimalism of this particular image. They’re not leading anywhere in particular, and yet to me, there’s a clear sense that they’re going to take you somewhere, and the hope—my hope—is that this somewhere is going to be as interesting or more than wherever I am now.

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Isabella Bowker is from Cranston, Rhode Island, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.A. in the Writing Seminars, and is currently pursuing her Masters in Teaching at the Johns Hopkins University. In Transit is her first chapbook.

Lesya Bazylewicz received her B.A. in English and Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. In 2016 she was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review Allison Joseph Poetry Award, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Salamander, New South, and elsewhere. She serves as a Poetry Reader for The Adroit Journal. Originally from Chicago, she currently lives in Dallas.