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About Wanting A Love Story So Deeply, You Write Your Own: An Interview With Angelique Palmer
by Pamela Turchin
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Angelique
Palmer is a self-described “Black Woman Queer Mama forced to forge her
own armor and create her own path.” In her new poetry collection Also Dark,
published by Etruscan Press in November, bigotry, ageism, sexism,
colorism, homophobia, and ableism are given voice and a voracious
opponent in these poems—which are raw and candid, while at the same time
personal, yet relatable.
No poets or writers inspired her to become a poet. But “June Jordan,
Rita Dove, Sonia Sanchez, Nikky Finney, Patricia Smith, Ebony Stewart
and any chance to read away a rainy day inspired me to stay in poetry.
And teachers as well! It took two of my high school English teachers,
one at community college, one at university and my Mama to tell me I was
a good writer and to keep going.”
My first experience with Angelique was by watching a YouTube video for a
Write About Now Poetry event from 2018, where she gave a powerful,
jaw-dropping spoken word performance of a variation of her poem,
“Passive Voice on a Tuesday.”
When asked how she became involved in spoken word, she said, “The short
answer is trauma. I used to go to the Water Works and Grand Finale open
mics in Tallahassee a long time ago. I thought I might be good at it.
But it wasn’t until the heavy-duty trauma I wrote about in The Chambermaid’s Style Guide that I went looking for community in performance poetry. I
used to drive home from my therapy meetings and pass an open mic
sandwich board. Because of a chance meeting, I started going to the
Literary Café Poetry Lounge on 125th Street
in North Miami and there I was taught about Poetry Slam. I lost a lot.
And a lot of people didn’t believe in me. But a lot more did. Ten years
later I was standing on the final stage at The Women of the World Poetry
Slam.”
Palmer lives in Fairfax, VA. She knits, dabbles in light hoarding, and
is also an educator. She started out working at the African American
Poetry Museum, then became an afterschool and kindergarten aide and
substitute teacher. Later, she was promoted to assistant kindergarten
teacher and now has her own homeroom in the first grade.
I asked her how she balances her writing life with being a full-time
teacher and she said, “I have been off-balance since I began working on Also Dark
in earnest. Fitting in edits after lesson plans; running late with
notes while making games for little hands. It isn’t a teeter-totter
thing but more of a juggling act. But I will say that I haven’t quit
trying to keep all the important things airborne; to find the balance
(I’m a Libra). I feel stronger because of this.”
My second experience with Palmer’s work, before reading her final manuscript, was when I read her synopsis for Also Dark. An excerpt:
Palmer cuts a path toward finding all the ways she names herself:
with pride and with shame, with growth and with responsibility; with
tantrum and humor; with understanding and a strong desire to understand
the others who are just like her too. This full-length collection of
poems is about hope and despair; about a life well-lived, danced, and
limped through; about light and how that isn’t the opposite of
Blackness, nor is all the many shades of gray; and about wanting a love
story so deeply, you write your own.
I was immediately struck by the line, “about wanting a love story so
deeply, you write your own.” It affected me on a personal level, but I
was also awed by how such a simple statement could be so beautiful and
profound. I told her this and asked if she could explain a bit more
about what she meant.
“I appreciate that this statement touched you. I have been interrogating
it a great deal lately. Your thoughtful question doesn’t have a simple
answer but here’s my attempt at one: I am romantic. Full stop. I like
handholding, long meandering conversation, and the softness of other
attractive/attracted to me humans. I haven’t felt safe to explore that
for a while. First, I had a profoundly broken heart compounded by a
subsequent infidelity. Then life in all the ways it can, showed up. And
then Covid-19! There isn’t a wall around me, but an intricate enough
barrier and a specific tendency toward isolation preventing the
exploration of the softness I crave outside of me. It hasn’t killed my
romantic. I want my love story in the way most people want water to
drink or air to breathe. But I’m a Palmer woman, so I’ll write the story
myself.”
In this love story, there’s the self-consciousness we feel when we put
ourselves out there: “Turn your whole body to her smile/give in to your
colors, if you find them there/You’ll find them there. You are every
color when she shines… They say it is simple/But she is beautiful, and
you are clumsy/with simplicity, with words… (From “Flirting”)
The ache to love and be loved: “Make sure you are alone… That you are
quiet with your secrets…That you swallow your sexuality/Make sure you
don’t begin to wish…Make sure you are not actively thinking! That you
don’t look for hidden meaning, where there is none/or think about the one you cannot touch… (From “On Listening to Meshell Ndegeocello in the Workplace”)
Our need to connect: “I say with my most honest self/Give us a good
ground to trod, to trudge/Give us great sky to aspire to touch/Give us
community like a song/we are surprised we already know the lyrics to…
(From “And Maybe, Community”)
Within the pages of Also Dark, you’ll find poems filled with
grief, joy, longing, and desire. But also the kind of hope that just
won’t quit, and everything about what it means to be human on this
Earth.
Angelique Palmer is a performance poet, a finalist in the 2015 Women
of the World Poetry Slam, and a member of the 2017 Busboys and
Poets/Beltway Poetry Slam Team. Author of The Chambermaid’s Style Guide,
she’s a Florida State University Creative Writing graduate who calls
northern Virginia home. Her work centers on Black Femme Narratives,
Awkward Queerness, and Mental Health and Recovery. She makes her own ice
cream.
Pamela Turchin earned a M.A. and M.F.A. in fiction from the Maslow
Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University, where she
serves as the production editor for Etruscan Press.
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New Releases from Etruscan
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We are pleased to welcome Angelique Palmer’s Also Dark to the Etruscan Press family.
What happens when a Black Woman Queer Mama forges her own armor and creates a Spoken Word collection? In Also Dark,
Palmer confronts bigotry, ageism, sexism, colorism, homophobia, and
ableism through perseverance and persistence, hope, resignation and
peace. It’s about a life well-lived, danced, and limped
through.
Also Dark is Dark Skin, Dark Humor, Dark Nights. It’s how she
fell in love with seven distinct voices in her head, including the one
that tells her the beautiful truth that is, sometimes, Also Dark.
Release date: October 15, 2021.
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2021: Etruscan Press Executive Director Phil
Brady; 2021 Etruscan Prize recipient John Cornelius of Nescopeck, Pa.;
and Etruscan Press Production Editor Pamela Turchin at the June 25, 2021
Wilkes Graduate Creative Writing Program ceremony. (Photo credit:
Kirsten Peters)
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John Cornelius of Nescopeck, Pa. was awarded
the Etruscan Prize during the Wilkes University Maslow Family Graduate
Creative Writing Program residency. The Etruscan Prize is awarded each
year to a member of the Wilkes Creative Writing student community who
submits one page of any genre (prose, script, poetry or play) that
sings. This was the twelfth consecutive year Etruscan Press awarded a
Wilkes University Creative Writing graduate student for their writing
excellence.
Cornelius’s submission, “Second Marriage,” was the prize winner. This
was the fifth year the Etruscan Prize was awarded for a work of fiction.
Prize recipients from prior years were awarded for works of fiction,
memoir, and poetry. Cornelius is pursuing his Master of Arts in Fiction
in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Wilkes
University faculty member Nancy McKinley has served as Cornelius’s
mentor.
Etruscan author Karen Donovan judged the award. Donovan commented about
Cornelius’s submission: “‘Second Marriage’ is a work of very short
prose, as compact and evocative as any poem, that pops open a haunted
room where events occur in a way they have never quite occurred before.
The narrator, both the subject of and witness to this haunting, fastens
on primal elements – sun, moon, forest, stars – to report its effects.
The room stays suspended in magic time as the telling accumulates. In
one last gesture, a foot touches down, and what is at stake reveals
itself. The beauty of the craft here is that so much is made to happen
in such a small space. Every sentence has a twist in it. Every idea is
exquisitely tethered to the concrete. The images resonate and expand,
pushing the room out until it is much bigger on the inside than it looks
– big enough to summon ‘impossibly large owls’ that take up residence
in a reader’s mind for a good long while.”
Donovan is the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press, 2018), a collection of illustrated short prose, and two collections of poetry, Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books) and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press). Planet Parable was published as part of Trio, an Etruscan Press Tribus imprint, in August. Donovan works for a social enterprise accelerator in Providence.
Click here to view the 2021 Etruscan Prize Broadside:
https://etruscanpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-Etruscan-Prize-Broadside-05-17-21.pdf
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About Etruscan Press:
Housed at Wilkes University and partnering with Youngstown State
University, Etruscan is a non-profit literary press working to produce
and promote books that nurture the dialogue among genres, cultures, and
voices.
For the latest Etruscan events, please visit our website.
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