Brittany Rogers is poet, visual artist, educator, and life-long Detroiter. She has work published or forthcoming in The Hopkins Review, Scalawag, The Poet Lore, Indiana Review, Four Way Review, Underbelly, Mississippi Review, Lambda Literary, and Oprah Daily. Brittany is a fellow of VONA, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat. Brittany is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and co-host of VS Podcast. She is the author of the poetry collection Good Dress (Tin House, 2024).
You can purchase Brittany Roger’s Good Dress here.
Matt Homrich-Knieling: How does it feel having a book out in the world?
Brittany Rogers: It’s still very surreal, honestly. It felt like the day was never going to get here, and then it got here, and I was just like… “Wow!” So now my favorite part has just been seeing people take pictures with the book and things like that have been really, really sweet, and trying not to think about the fact that it’s out in the world. I try not to dwell on that because I’m like “what are people thinking?” and you know, that’s fruitless.
MHK: Yeah, that makes sense! Ok, this might be an unfair question, but what would you say–at least in this moment-in-time–is your favorite poem in this book and why?
BR: It definitely changes every day! Today, October 30th, I think my favorite poem is “Ice Cam February 2023.” If I’m not mistaken, I think it was the last poem I wrote for the collection. I’m thinking about my grandmother really heavy today, and that’s what I was thinking about when I wrote the poem. In Detroit we do, and I mean in other places too, but in Detroit specifically we do this thing where we honor folks who we’ve lost or who were really significant to us by wearing open-face lockets with their pictures in them, and I just find lockets to be so classic, but the open-face pendants are like, everyone can see who you’re looking at, so it’s not a secret. And I had one made for my grandmother, which of course then prompted me to think about the Ice Cam and how often that was the piece of jewelry I saw people lift up toward the camera. And it was a poem that took a minute to write just because I think grief is really, really hard to wade through, especially in poems. So it’s one of the ones that’s most tender to me.
MHK: That’s really sweet. Thanks for sharing. Not that I’m the one answering this question, but if I had to answer this question… Well, first, I don’t remember the last time I read a book in one sitting, but I read this in one sitting, and it was just phenomenal. So many of the poems ended with such a punch, a soft punch, like “phew! But the first poem in the collection, “Money,” the last couple lines of that one were just really powerful. But ok, so part of what you were sharing goes into my next question, which is how much of this book is about Detroit: Your family’s story in the Great Migration, cultural institutions like the city’s libraries and how they shaped you, development and gentrification in the city, and more. What would you say this book is saying about Detroit?
BR: That’s a great question. I think that this book is saying more than anything that Detroit is such a multifaceted place, that it can’t really be pigeon-holed. People have a very specific idea of what it means to live in Detroit or be in Detroit. You know, I think that when people outside of the city, and sometimes even people who live inside the city, especially those who are aspiring to… you know, suburbia… I think people hear Detroit and think about crime or think about blight. Even when I think about the documentaries related to Detroit, that’s what they’re all about. And maybe throw in one or two about the auto industry. And I think that Detroit is just like a full-ass person, that’s how I think of the city, a place that has a lot of fullness and texture and nuance to it that I wanted to pull out.
MHK: I love that. The fullness and texture of the city came through really strongly!
BR: Thank you!
MHK: I’m also curious about tenderness in this book. I know from hearing you at speaking events and from reading this book that tenderness is a core value of your poetics. And this book is just teeming with tenderness! I wonder if you can talk about what you learned about tenderness through writing this book?
BR: I think the book taught me to be a bit more tender with myself. I’m very tender with other people, but I don’t think I realized how hard I can be on myself until I was forced to think about tenderness through looking at my memories and different experiences that I’ve gone through, and trying to see where I can offer that to past versions of myself. And thinking about the way that I talk about those experiences to me, and that forced me to realize “Oh girl, you are not always kind to you,” and so that’s something that stands out. But I think something else that I try to do that I hope shows up is I believe in being tender with the reader. I want them to feel like they have my care and they have my attention and that we’re in the same space, the same landscape that I’m offering them, the softest parts of a story, even if it’s a heavy one or one that’s hard to hold. That’s something I was thinking about too.
MHK: I love that idea of extending tenderness to your past self, your younger self, through writing about different experiences or confronting them through the lens of who you are today. That’s special! So I’m curious… when did you realize you were writing a poetry book? Did you start writing poems for this book, or did you have poems that you started to realize were coming together?
BR: It actually was a different book. It started as a chapbook in 2017, and then by 2018, 2019, I knew it was a full-length. It had a completely different title, and it was mostly about experiences with motherhood and the medical industry and things like that. Then I started submitting it early 2020, but also in the process of doing that, just realized that I wasn’t very excited about the collection anymore. Between that and at one of Randolph’s residency lectures–Randolph College is where I got my MFA–Don Mee Choi came and was talking to us, and in the middle of the talk I think it really hit me that migration was the thing I was most fascinated in at the time, and specifically in the absence of Great Migration narratives in poetry, and then I went back and looked at the poems I’d written over the past six months, and in some way they were all touching on that, and I was like “Oh! Well that’s now what this book is about, so what are you going to do?” So I did a hard, hard pivot and put the poems that I wasn’t invested in to a different folder and started over with what was left.
MHK: I love that story of realizing what you were actually feeling called to and then realizing you had been called to that through poems you’d already written!
BR: Yeah! I was like “Oh it’s all here! I did know it!”
MHK: Yeah, so validating that there was some part of you that already knew!
BR: For sure.
“But I think something else that I try to do that I hope shows up is I believe in being tender with the reader. I want them to feel like they have my care and they have my attention and that we’re in the same space, the same landscape that I’m offering them, the softest parts of a story, even if it’s a heavy one or one that’s hard to hold.”
MHK: So when you realized the actual poetry book that you were writing and started working on that, how did you approach organizing all the poems in this book?
BR: Oh, that was so hard. I hate ordering poems! That is not my strong suit at all. I try to follow the train of thought that makes the most sense to me in terms of telling a story. One of my mentors once described the book as moving in concentric circles that move out from the world to the deeply personal, and I was like “That’s such a cool way to look at it, but that’s not what I was thinking about!” Like I wasn’t thinking about the poems as a spiral, I was really just trying to think about if I tell this story first, then what has to come next? And what has to come after that? And so I fiddle-faddled with the order for a long time, and did a long of crying about the order! And then by the time I turned it into my editor, there were only five or six poems that we moved around. She has a brilliant, brilliant eye, Alyssa Ogi at Tin House, and the poems that she moved made the book speed up a bit more, so it just added some urgency to it that I think wasn’t there before.
MHK: it sounds so stressful to figure out what’s the best order, how are these poems going to be in conversation with each other.
BR: Yes! The only thing that I knew for sure was that the poem that was in the middle, I wanted in the middle. And everything else changed so many times.
MHK: Yeah, I bet! Well one I loved was how inventive you were with form throughout the book. Some poems were in the form of overdue library notices or medical intake forms. I’d love to hear more about your process of landing on some of these forms.
BR: I think I just wanted to play around a bit with… so for the medical forms, I was thinking a lot about the absurdity of the medical industry, especially as it connects to Black women, so there’s a poem in there with one of the in-take forms, because I feel like they ask you the most redundant, ridiculous questions. And so when I was coming up with the poems they didn’t replicate the way they looked on the page, but they still had the same questions. And I was trying to play around with “Ok, if a person has never encountered this situation, how can I most immediately place them in the world that I’m at,” and I think that’s where it was like, “Ok well then you have to make it look the way that it would look if they went to the doctor,” because I think that there’s a sterility that comes with those forms that’s really easy to recognize when you see it. And I think that transformed the poems a lot and helped me edit them a lot more to be like, Ok what are the ways in which I can really highlight the tensions here between things that they’re asking you. “How often are you unable to go to work?” and I’m like, I’m never unable to go to work because I have a job and I have kids. That’s such a dumbass question! There are better questions to ask me to find out how depressed I am, you know what I mean? So that’s what I was trying to produce.
MHK: I love that, like really bringing people into your experiences through these forms is really powerful. And I love the library ones too! The overdue notices… were those materials or documents that you had?
BR: I’m sure I have lots of overdue notices! Paige Lewis, my thesis adviser, gave me the idea for one that was really brilliant. They essentially read the series and was like, “I kinda wanna know more about the books! You keep referencing these books, which books were they?” So I went back and was like, what was I reading at that time? And really trying to compile it all, and frame it in that form. So that was fun!
MHK: I really appreciated the one that had the whole list of books. It was like, “Ok, these are THE books!”
BR: Yes, those are the books!
MHK: Ok so last question I have is what advice would you give poets who are working on or aspire to work on a poetry collection?
BR: I would say to detach from the outcome. Once I realized I was really, really writing a collection, I tried not to think about “Ok, when might this come out? Who might want to publish it? What if no one wants to publish it?” I really couldn’t think about that. My goal was writing a collection that I would be proud of. And I think that that has really helped to keep me grounded in the whole process of after the book and all that stuff because I can’t think about what other people are thinking about the book! I know I wrote it, I know I’m proud of it, I know that I did what I set out to do. And from there, the book belongs to the world, so you just have to be grounded in whether or not you met your own expectations.
MHK: It feels so vulnerable, I imagine, to have a book out in the world!
BR: Yes, it is!
MHK: Yeah and it seems like establishing some of that groundedness could help hold some of that vulnerability.
BR: Yeah because now anybody can just read this if they want to!
MHK: Right, right! Ok well thanks so much! And congrats again on the collection.
BR: Thank you so much!