I’m working on a manuscript of poems about opera, Dinner with Kathleen Battle. JD: I’ve just finished Dots & Dashes, which functions as a sequel to my third poetry collection, Stateside. I like to joke that I’m like a shark-my writing has to keep moving or it will die.

I try to have multiple manuscripts going simultaneously, in order to avoid boredom and writer’s block. This can mean drafting or research, revision, editing. Do you have a specific writing routine or regimen you follow? MT: The Arranged Marriage is your fifth book, which suggests to me you’re a very disciplined writer. Received and fixed forms would call too much attention to themselves, and so I learned how to write my version of a prose poem-little, safe boxes that could contain trauma and violence. JD: I came to think of these as my “newspaper column poems” and their narrative strategy a sort of poetic reportage. MT: Did you find that the prose poem form offered advantages for you when creating this book? How did you decide that these would be predominantly prose poems? I wrote fifteen of the collection’s central poems in the first week and then spent the next two years building the rest of the book around those key texts.

These narratives are so much a part of me that The Arranged Marriage happened very organically. Jehanne Dubrow: My mother has told me the stories that form The Arranged Marriage since I was a little girl: her exiled Jewish childhood in Honduras, her experience of being held hostage by a violent man, and her forced marriage in El Salvador which followed that trauma. Matthew Thorburn: How did this book come to be? Did you conceive of it as a larger project from the outset, or did it come into focus as you were writing the poems? She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an associate professor of creative writing at Washington College. The narrative gradually comes into focus for the reader through a sequence of beautiful, haunting prose poems-narrow blocks of words the poet likens to “newspaper columns” that convey her “poetic reportage.” Jehanne is also the author of four previous books, including Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World and The Hardship Post, and co-editor of The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume. Jehanne Dubrow’s latest collection of poems, The Arranged Marriage, tells a difficult and moving story about the poet’s mother and her early life.

Dots & Dashes by Jehanne Dubrow