OM: A few of the words readers have used to describe Seeing the Body include “tender,” “harrowing,” and “radiant.” Your work, for me, brings to mind the phrase “radical empathy” or even “radical joy.” The poem “Ars Poetica” does the work of inhabiting moments that seem mundane, unmemorable, to look around and open all the closet doors of that moment. The radical part is claiming what you discover in the process—knowledge, mystery. And then there is the poem, “Paradise,” which is pure joy in laughter, resistance, self-claiming love. Can you talk about the arc between “harrowing” and “radiant”?
REG: I didn’t want the book to concentrate on wounds, on absence, on death. One of the most fulfilling elements of writing these poems happened when I could write poems that acknowledged how much work and power was necessary to accept radiance, kindness and that there was/is an imagination that can hold these spaces in one gesture.
https://mosaicmagazine.org/rachel-eliza-griffiths-interview/