Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poem, “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was chosen by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in The Best American Poetry of 2016. She has been published in over fifty anthologies and chapbooks, both in the U.S. and abroad, and her photographs have been published worldwide. She is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and Other Heart Stab Poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014). Her chapbook about the death of her son, Joshua, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, was published by KYSO Flash Press in October of 2015. Her second, erotic collection, Enter Here, was also published by KYSO Flash Press, in the spring of 2017. Junkie Wife, about her first, disastrous marriage, was published in 2018 by Moon Tide Press. Since 2013 Alexis has been nominated for 25 Pushcart Prizes, one Best Short Fiction, one Best Micro-Fiction, and four Best of the Net awards. In 2018 she won The Pangolin Review Prize for Poetry. She and her husband live and collaborate on the bluffs of San Pedro, CA. They have a spectacular view.

Cynthia Atkins: In your stunning book, The Dead Kid Poems, you write about the death of a child. I can’t imagine a more raw, open wound to work from: “I still cannot bear to hear his name said. (It echoes in the chambers of my head).” These poems bravely forage the terrain. How was the process of writing this book for you personally, spiritually, and as a working artist engaged in craft?

Alexis Rhone Fancher: A year after Joshua died from a rare cancer at age 26, I wrote the first poem. “Over It” spoke to people’s stumbling callousness after his untimely death. I mean, how could anyone ask if a grieving mother was over it, two weeks after her child died? After “Over It” was published in RATTLE in 2013, I received countless emails and Facebook IMs from stunned and furious readers, unable to comprehend such heartlessness. My first chapbook about my son’s death, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, sprang from this poem. It was published in 2015 and contains fifteen elegiac poems. The response was overwhelming. It felt like closure. But soon, I was writing new poems about my lost boy, poems that sprang from his absence, how each year the pain grew, rather than lessened. I realized I had more to say about this grief, and the devastation of losing children, in general. I began writing the sequel, The Dead Kid Poems, in 2015 when I wrote “Cruel Choices.” I chronicled, with her permission, my sister’s grief over her daughter’s drug addiction and mental illness. I wrote about school shootings, drive-by's, death by misadventure, and the lethal overdose of my writer friend Karen’s son, just before Christmas.

CA: One of the complex aspects of the book is that the speaker is not only exploring the grief of a mother, but also the ways in which societal norms and idioms are often completely inadequate and reductive in dealing with grief, death, and mourning. (“He did not pass away / He died,” you wrote.) Can you speak to your feelings about this both on and off the page?

AF: When Karen reached out to me with news of Randy’s death, I knew she needed me, and the comfort that comes only from someone who has suffered a similar loss. I wanted to be there for her and also to warn her of what was to come. The platitudes. The ineptitude. The faux pas. The inevitable “I know how you feel.” (Unless you’ve lost a child, trust me, you don’t.) I wrote “Overdose” as a roadmap to help Karen navigate her grief. It pretty much says it all. I knew that she would watch old friends and family members flee her sinking ship, much as had happened to me and my boy. I also knew she would witness the unlikeliest of people step up and become lifelines. The big lesson: People’s reaction to illness and death was about each of their personal relationship with Death. It had nothing to do with me.

CA: In the oeuvre of your body of work, you write about death, sex, and love so unabashedly and bravely. I wonder if you could render what you see as the similarities and differences in these entities in writing and/or in life?

AF: My “way in” as a writer, and a woman is through the visceral: sex, love, and inevitably, death. That holy trinity comprises the lens through which I view the world. With writing, naked is naked, whatever the subject matter or the vehicle. The most important thing is to write your truth, consequences be damned. I believe poets, like journalists, must have something on the line. Writing needs to take risks, or, to paraphrase Dorothy Alison, it’s not worth a damn.

CA: How do you deal on the page with the privacy zones of those you love? Do you ever feel there is a line crossed? Is there a moral or aesthetic imperative to telling the truth or a truth?

AF: Yes. Telling the truth (as I see it) is imperative to my work. And it is tempered by my respect for my subject. When I first began writing the “sister poems” I asked my sister for her permission to write our shared history. Then with the “Anna” poems for The Dead Kids, I again received her blessing. Not only did my sister tell me to “write our truth,” she often suggests subject matter. I’m lucky. My brave sister is a kindred spirit. Nothing is off -limits. The Dead Kid Poems is dedicated to her. When writing about living friends, I’ll often change their names or crucial details, for privacy. Or I’ll ask permission, as I did with Karen. I’ve written several poems about dead friends where, in retrospect, I could have been more considerate of those left behind. As for my own history, my life is an open book. I am thrilled that readers identify with me. I want to touch others with my work. Mostly people get that and keep things real. Mostly. I’ve written several poems about “fans” who step over the line, where their fantasy (allowed) starts to involve me in real time (not allowed). I’m firm about boundaries, but not unkind.

CA: As both a poet and a photographer you are crossing many aesthetic boundaries. Do they feed one another? Also, what's your regimen and process?

AF: The photography often feeds the poems and vice versa. I work harder as a poet than I do as a photographer; because the writing comes harder. Photography is almost a release. Fun, especially when I’m shooting on the street. When I get into the studio with the lights and the seamless and the Nikon, it’s time to get serious and photography becomes just as labor intensive as writing a poem.

As for my practice, I write daily from 5:30 a.m. until eleven. Then I go about my day, exercise, hang out with my spouse. I edit for pay in the late afternoon—my clients include poets, memoirists, novelists and magazine editors. And I practice what I preach. My own work undergoes intense editing. I write several drafts on my own before I send a poem out to be edited, often by four or more different peer editors, before I’m happy. It’s very competitive out there. A good editor sees what the poet/writer can’t and seriously ups your game.

CA: In closing, the poem "When I Buried My Son I Became Someone Else" is one I found particularly haunting and indelible. I wonder if you could discuss your aesthetic choices with regard to composition, metaphor, cadence and language, and of course the difficulty of the subject matter itself.

AF: This is one of those “naked” poems I spoke of. It was birthed almost without effort. “When I Buried My Son I Became Someone Else” was finished in only three drafts. It came out of my grief fully-formed. (The third draft looks remarkably like the first.) The poem dictated its placement on the page (again, unusual for me). The two columns played off each other. As did the dual loss of both my mother and my child. And that lavender dress? A metaphor for unresolved loss.