CHRISTINE LARUSSO’S POEMS alternate between revelation and privacy, immediacy and distance, memory and forgetting. In her first book, There Will Be No More Daughters (winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize and published by Northwestern University Press in October 2019), family secrets and the lies told in the name of assimilation and patriarchy coexist within a dreamscape of melodies — from grief to intoxication to rage. These poems paint a complex picture of multiracial Southern California, of the experience of women and girls, and the complexities of family and heritage in inventive, restless forms.
[The interviewer] was glad to talk to Christine about how she developed her “multi” sensibility, as well as about Los Angeles stories of racism and assimilation, alcoholism, memory, erasures and false erasures, and the faulty but alluring narratives of capitalism and the poetry marketplace.
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I was talking to a friend recently, who was saying how Le Corbusier’s idea that a home is “a machine for living in” could only be said by a man — this kind of mechanistic view. In your poems, home is, if anything, a machine for advancing assimilation (“a tradition invented by televisions and microwave dinners”), a tool for passing on intergenerational traumas, a series of rooms where shame and self-hatred and alcoholism become a kind of shared language between a mother and daughter — and a place designed to keep secrets, except when they can’t be held back any longer.
Like home, poetic form is a way to contain or surface or subvert different realities and registers of language, which can, in your book, move from gut-punchingly declarative to lushly metaphoric, from the clinical to the fantastical. How do you think about the relationships the “home” of this book contains, and the forms and languages you needed to contain them?
Maybe the best way to get at how I was thinking about these issues is to look at a couple specific poems. I think that in revising, there’s more pressure to cut than to add. For the book, I found that I actually needed to add more, and in the adding, I found myself creating a sort of collage of narrative within the poem, which is what I believed it really needed to find its voice. “When I was painter once” is about a teenager learning how to grieve, for the first time ever, the death of one of her peers. This isn’t the death of a parent, or a grandparent, an aunt — this is someone her own age. The poem had to register as cinematic, it needed to span time, months, a year, it needed to be able to bounce in and out of scenes and emotions and be wild and uncontained, while also being intensely airy, giving room for the grief, the sadness, and depth, like a scar, that that kind of event leaves on a person. That’s why the poem is long, and why it’ll probably never appear in a journal.
That’s funny — it should appear in a journal, but I know length is an issue. I loved reading it, and that line “You can’t invent landscape” really opens up how all of these landscapes (physical but also interpersonal) reshape how we perceive them.
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