Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert's Wife, coeditor of The Poem's Country: Place & Poetic Practice. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and was the inaugural Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. The Explosive Expert's Wife was the winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton award for best collection; a finalist for the Julie Suk award, Montaigne Medal, and Foreword Indies book of the year; and a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection.

Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she was recently awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Assistant Poetry Editor for Acre Books and recently relocated from Oxford to Dubai.

TS: You've got an undergraduate degree in dance and years of experience in dance performance. Do you see, or feel, connections between poetry and dance as vehicles for artistic expression?

SL: I write about the connection between poetry and dance in “One Cluster, Bright, Astringent,” which appears in The Poem's Country. That essay recounts my experience staying in Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home in Nova Scotia, as well as my time at the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington D.C. For many years, probably out of grief, I tried to separate the art forms. Now I can see how my ballet training continues to influence me as a writer. As I suggest in “One Cluster...,” the dancer’s room is the studio; the poet’s, the stanza. Each has the task of perfecting the line. Both value the integrity of nuanced repetition. My life as a dancer shows itself mostly in how I understand syntax and musical phrasing. I think of sentences as muscular—for me, they elongate and contract. Syllables likewise point and flex. Dancers and poets both train themselves to master classical and modern structures. To reinvigorate set cadences and terms. To perfect the illusions of spontaneity and ease. To turn. Then counterturn. To stand.

Although I have a series called “The Old Life” in my first book, Two-Headed Nightingale, I was extremely reluctant to write about my years as a dancer. When asked about that time I often say, “I no longer live in that body”—a quick way to shut down the conversation. Part of the awkwardness is that even though I stopped performing in my 20s, I haven’t been able to reconcile my feelings about being good, but not good enough. I also have some insecurities about my physical appearance—changes that have come naturally with age and motherhood. For a long time, it was too painful to attend a performance. Thankfully, I’m past it now and love being in the audience. I also waste a lot of time (is “waste” the right word?) watching ballet videos on Instagram (@kurtfroman’s account is the best!) and YouTube. Often, I’ll choose dancers spanning several decades performing the same part. Although the choreography is identical, the signature of each dancer is unique. The way one attacks a phrase while another balances en pointe a half extra count to emphasize a particular line—these choices offer proof that it’s possible to recharge inherited forms. The ballerina’s solo is called a variation, named for its range of steps. I also like to think the word gestures toward the kind of breathtaking revision that occurs when the right dancer’s technical precision and artistic skill revitalize the movement, helping her audience to see a century-old plot as if for the first time. Ballet reminds us that it’s possible, after many years of apprenticeship, to retell familiar stories while simultaneously transcending and making them new.

TS: You and Ilya Kaminsky did a reading together in Oxford this summer, just before your most recent move. We all wish we could have been there! How did the two of you connect, and what kinds of literary collaborations have shaped your own work most powerfully?

SL: The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre event with Ilya was my last in England after living there for three years. I have such wonderful memories of that night—we had a lot of friends in the audience, many of whom were local, as well as others who traveled some distance. There was a very sweet gathering afterwards in an upstairs room at Turl Street Kitchen to say goodbye. Ilya is such an incredible person and thinker, one I admire greatly both on and off the page (Garth Greenwell introduced us). Unfortunately, we haven’t really collaborated in a larger way, although I had the chance to see him briefly this summer at Bread Loaf. On the whole, I’m grateful for his early support of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and would jump at the chance to work with him.

My greatest creative partnership is with the poet Bruce Snider. I don’t know how to characterize the depth of our relationship, except to say that whatever I’ve done well in terms of my writing life is the direct result of an ongoing conversation that started when we met at Stanford in 2003. Bruce and I read all of each other’s drafts—both poetry and prose. We give each other assignments. Although we admire similar work, we have very different poetic strengths and temperaments. I tend to see things rather myopically, and instinctively know where to juxtapose or compress in order to amplify lyric tension. Bruce, on the other hand, tends to think big picture. His questions often help me extend the poem’s (or essay’s) reach. Bruce has taught me a lot about narrative framing and point of view. We push each other. We’re also brutally honest. Needless to say, I trust him completely. Despite our distance (he’s in Northern California and I’m in Dubai), we visit each other several times each year. At one point, we co-directed a reading series. When we both lived in San Francisco, we split a vegetable delivery subscription and cooked together several nights a week. It probably sounds a little precious, but I’d be a lesser poet and person without Bruce. As an admirer of his poems, it’s also tremendously exciting to watch the work grow. His third collection, Fruit, which won the University of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes Prize, comes out this spring. It’s a wonderful book, which grapples with what it means to be childless in the world of procreation, and includes a stunning sonnet sequence on gay adoption called “Devotions,” which came out a few years ago in Poetry. It’s a book that I hope gets some attention.

TS: Tell us about the genesis of The Poem's Country, the extraordinary collection of essays you and Bruce co-edited.

SL: Bruce and I are both poets who are deeply invested in and curious about place. While most of his work moves between rural Indiana and San Francisco, my recent poems tend to focus overseas. Over the last decade, we began to notice a shift in the ways our peers were seeing themselves in relation to place. For all of our virtual connection via the Internet, it seemed people were feeling increasingly isolated and divided—a tension we saw entering the poetry published stateside. We were also interested in how, in light of the current environmental crisis, writers were rendering various landscapes or reimaging the pastoral. Rather than embracing the traditional meditative lyric, many people we admired were writing with increased urgency in ways that interrogated their own subjectivity. Sometime in 2012 or 2013, we were both teaching classes on place-based poetry and couldn’t find updated resources. It was around then that we decided to invite a group of emerging to mid-career poets to share their thoughts on the subject. The Poem's Country—an anthology of twenty-nine (mostly original) essays by writers including Shane McCrae, Philip Metres, Elizabeth Bradfield, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Sandra Lim, Craig Santos Perez, Spencer Reece, Molly McCully Brown, Kazim Ali, Rigoberto González, and Monica Youn, among a great many others—was the result of the almost four years of collaboration that followed. All things considered, the project required a tremendous amount of labor—more so than we initially dreamed. Because we admired but hadn’t met most of our contributors in person, we were particularly grateful as editors to earn their trust as we entered into various rounds of revision. In the end, we have a wide range of formally varied essays exploring the connection between lyrical and geographical constraint. The book includes entries on cities like Detroit and Compton, the gay rural lyric, Ground Zero and Guantanamo Bay, the ocean and archipelago as poetic, the U.S.-Mexico border, the queer body, and imagined spaces of our own minds, among other topics. The Poem’s Country also includes an extensive list of place-based poems, many of which are available online. We think of that final section, as well as our contributors’ recommendations, as an “anthology within the anthology.” Overall, I’m really proud of the project and learned a lot putting it together.

TS: Your own recent poetry collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, is very much about place as well, in a way that finds the speaker often unsettled.

SL: Yes. One of the most difficult poems in that collection for me to write—one that still makes me feel enormously self-conscious when sharing in public—is “The Ugly American.” That the poem is autobiographical is unmistakable. In it, I call out my own naiveté and duplicity. Set in Petra during Arab Spring, “The Ugly American” has a very particular dramatic circumstance. What I hope the poem conveys, however, is the ease with which we, as Westerners, can fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve somehow shed the bigotry we’ve quietly absorbed from a very early age, as well as the extent to which colonialism has saturated our thinking, however much we try to deny or press against it.

I’ve heard some readers describe The Explosive Expert’s Wife as a book “about Jordan.” While I think of the collection partly as a love letter to the country and its people, the book’s true subject is America; particularly, American attitudes and assumptions about the Middle East. It’s also a book about hypocrisy. My hope is that the last section, which features poems about the history of domestic terrorism in the United States (crimes mostly perpetuated by white men), helps complicate the way we, as Americans, think about our relationship with violence, and how quickly and conveniently we tend to point the finger elsewhere.

TS: Have any of the responses to the book particularly surprised you?

Overall, the reviews have been incredibly thoughtful and generous. Many have helped me to see my work with fresh eyes. Hannah VanderHart for The Rumpus, Hugh Martin at Kenyon Review, Elijah Burrell at Consequence Magazine—each of these really shed new light on the book. Lit from the Basement’s coverage blew my mind. Danielle Cadena Deulen and Max Stinson (the podcast’s hosts) pointed out things I didn’t even realize I was doing.

I think what’s most surprised me about the response to The Explosive Expert’s Wife, however, is the assumption that my husband works for the military. My guess is that this is partly due to the fact the book includes a poem called “The Marine Ball.” While we attended the event in Amman as guests, neither of us has ever been a member of the armed forces. Part of me wonders to what extent readers inadvertently associate the American presence in Jordan and the Middle East with war. Our geopolitical history certainly emphasizes conflict rather than diplomacy. In fact, we’re a foreign service family who moves every few years for embassy and consular posts. Although I’ve met a handful of Marines and Naval officers overseas, I more often encounter aid workers, economic specialists, experts in education and security, translators, and people employed in the fields of technology management, public affairs, legal counsel, and so on.

TS: What’s next for you?

SL: This summer, my family and I moved to Dubai and so our main focus right now is settling in, finding a new routine. Because The Explosive Expert’s Wife and The Poem’s Country both came out last year, I’m between books and just starting to draft new poems. I’m also finishing several essays for a collection that’s tentatively titled Somewhere Still. So far, the book is about the importance of places and families we haven’t been born into. I’ve moved more than a dozen times since college and was adopted as an adult, which is why I’m especially interested in instability, the risks of intimacy, family history, and friendships formed in countries teetering on the edge of conflict. One of the unfinished essays is about perceived notions of danger in Jordan, and the stupidest thing I did while living in that country that put myself and unborn son at risk (spoiler alert: it could have happened just as easily—if not more so—in the States). Another essay juxtaposes the time I spent visiting various Keats-related sites in England and Italy with remembrances of my dear teacher, Stanley Plumly, who died this spring. Stan’s influence on my life was profound. He recognized our shared history of rural violence and appreciated in me (at least I think he did) a particular work ethic he held in esteem. I have a hard time letting things go. Sometimes it can prove a burden emotionally, but it also benefits me as a writer. I think and think and tinker and edit and think again and revise and revisit and move things around, think some more, and so on. It never ends. Stan used to say that a piece of writing is never really finished, but only rests. I suspect that’s also true of poets, no matter where we are in the process. At our core, we’re unresting.