Poetry is a witness statement of my life—memories, longing, grief, fear.

We need to have practical ways of managing wildfires, but it’s also important to express how it feels when the air is suddenly unbreathable, or when the sky is yellow for days on end.

I used to be moved by work that was strange and avant garde (if that word means anything anymore), but the older I get I also want poetry to make me feel something

So much of poetry is connected to community. We do the writing alone, but we’re always working within a larger circle, speaking to the poets whose collections we love, whose writing lives in us as surely as our own words do.

Through poetry, I believe I can use pain and anger as productive, redemptive forces. I can write critically from a place of love, soften into tough but necessary conversations, and I can work to create an aura of inclusivity, granting space, as the universe does, to migraines and orgasms alike, to contradictory truths and multiple versions of the same story.

Poetry allows us to inhabit the experience and thoughts of another human being, to find some small part of ourselves reflected.

My mother hunted moose

as a child my grandfather taught her

how to field dress a bull:

make an incision from the throat

to the pelvis

the abdominal cavity emptied

haul him up between two pines

the body inverted

antlers almost grazing

the soil

each hind limb leashed to a trunk above

to allow the flesh to cool

then she'd climb inside

the open chest

fix her toes along the ledge

of two ribs

and with a kick to the bull's left shoulder

he sent her

swinging

Poetry is not a genre so much as a methodology for my interaction with the world. I am not a “solo” writer:

Reading one 16-line fragment is very different from reading 256 of them. Something very interesting happens when all those words pile up on each other over a few hours.

Poems connect us. They are intermediaries when grief blinds us, when joy takes our breath away, when memories visit in the night and don’t leave a trace.

To fully experience a poem is to eclipse our perceived selves and enter into something more heeding and resolute than the frangible cage of flesh, bone and breath that we exist in.

My poetry persists in a state of suspended completion[…] It remains flexible, changeable, ready to be adapted to the world and the needs of the moment.

Rooted in the indescribability and disembodiment of pain, Nisa Malli’s Allodynia looks outward to space and the future of humankind, as well as inward to the body.

A statement of poetics is always a work in progress and is therefore always subject to revision. Revision is to see anew. Revise always, or try to.

Many of my poems contain images of creatures, beings and experiences that have been somehow maligned or ostracized. I try to create space around them where they might be, at the very least, seen without so much stigma or judgement.

Poetry is at its best when it provides a space for radical work to exist. I’m not so much interested in the poem as I am interested in the expansive possibilities of what poetry can or cannot contain.

As a daughter of a flight crewmember, I grew up staring at maps and clouds from within airplanes. I was incubated in flight, my mother used to joke. I lean on this unique upbringing in the way I shape, write, and perform my poems