Interviews
"In this interview series for "A Collection of Quaint Intensities", I talk to poets to discuss life, writing, and everything in between. Our first poet of this new year is Jessica Nirvana Ram, who describes herself as "an Indo-Guyanese poet." Her poetry collection, Earthly Gods, came out in 2024."
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Jessica Nirvana Ram joins us to discuss the work of Aja Monet, falling in love with writing at a young age, and the process of editing a manuscript. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Referential Substack: Book Talk
"I never 100% felt like I had permission to write about everything I wanted to write about, but I knew that I had to write it."
In Jessica Nirvana Ram’s Earthly Gods, the speaker grapples with the intertwined tensions of self, family, and religion. Against larger backdrops of culture and diaspora, the poems in this collection examine what it means to be a self in relation to the world, engaging with tensions of familial and geographical belonging. In lush and abundant images, the speaker’s sense of self expands through the collection, thinking through questions of lineage, matrilineal inheritance, and daughterhood.
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In this interview, we discuss form, inheritance, and the shifting experience of self in relation to the world.
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses “i am unfit to raise daughters,” from Earthly Gods (2024, Game Over Books) by Jessica Nirvana Ram.
Today we published two poems by Jessica Nirvana Ram: “lost language” and “Love Letter to the Chicken Marsala I Made for Dinner Tonight.” Michael Colbert and Emily Lowe spoke with Jessica about punctuation, food writing, and reverence in her poetry.
