An Interview with Elly Bookman

Elly Bookman grew up in downtown Atlanta and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2013, she has worked as an educator while consistently publishing her poetry in some of the most widely-read markets in the country, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. She was the recipient of the first annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review. She teaches middle and high school at the Paideia School in Atlanta.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I was raised by two journalists. The written word was revered in our house as the highest form of expression. I wrote before I could read, purely because I loved the sensation of a pen in my hand as it poured out shapes on the page. When I found poetry, specifically, it was like learning to speak. Nothing makes sense unless I write it. I write to explain the world to myself.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I’ve worked as an educator for over a decade, largely teaching seventh and eighth grade. I love working with kids that age, when they are just beginning to understand the world’s complexities and to feel things deeply. In the past I’ve worked as a server in a restaurant and a clerk in a used bookstore. There are poems in the book that offer glimpses into each of these occupational phases. Poetry usually doesn’t pay the bills, but it all ends up in the poetry.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The title took about as long to write as the book did: nearly a decade of trial and error and constant revision. In the end, the title came from two poems in the book that were written late in the process. “Love Sick” is the name of a sequence of ten poems that takes up nineteen pages of the book and is in many ways an anchor to the collection. All of the poems converse about the cultural and societal themes that are unique to our twenty-first century, and there’s a poem in the third section called “This Century.” I hope the full title, Love Sick Century, conveys the paradoxical nature of love, longing, and conflict that’s unique to our life and times.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

My editor and I had only a very brief, general conversation about what the cover would look like, and he passed our thoughts on to the design team. When I saw it for the first time, I was floored by how perfectly the visuals matched with what I’d tried to convey with the text. It’s incredibly heartening to think that a stranger could encounter the book and respond to it so accurately within an entirely different medium.

Holding the book never gets old. I carried it around my apartment for the first few days. I gave new meaning to the phrase “I couldn’t put it down.”

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

It would have a lot of sad songs, I’m afraid. Songs about heartbreak and worry, but the kind that help you feel a little hope again by the end. They’d be sung by someone dark and smart witchy, but also soft and sensitive, like Stevie Nicks, Phoebe Bridgers, or Maggie Rogers. And I’ve joked that the long poem is my version of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).”

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I’ve always wanted my poems to be accessible to any intelligent reader, even those who might not normally read poetry. I hope readers come away from the book feeling like they’ve gained a new way of understanding the world, or like they’ve been brought closer to an articulation of the way it feels to have come this far as a human in this country, this world, in this century.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Writing the poems, revising and arranging them was therapeutic. Actually holding the book and especially handing it over to anyone willing to read it was an unburdening, a release of everything I’d poured out onto the pages. I’ve never quite felt anything like it.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I’m writing new poems and beginning to identify common themes that might help shape a new collection. Some of the themes from the first book will continue, I’m sure. My fascination with the darknesses of our world will never go away. But I’m finding new metaphors for understanding it. I’ve been thinking more and more about our planet, our earth and lands which in the end are the only tangible things we humans all touch, even as we divide it up and argue about whether or how to save or destroy it. Also about the ways in which we live online now, and what we’ve gained and lost in the relatively brief time the internet has existed. I’m looking for new meanings in these places.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.