How to edit the world into a poetry book

(or not).

Have you thought of how we translate the world for each other? The dog leaves thin hairs in my cup of tea and I fish them out with a fingertip. The brilliant Jayne feedbacks my poems, says choruses doesn’t really convey the idea of many to her. And if God is a fish, can you describe it?

Another petal drops off the apple blossom. I haven’t journaled in months. Ready or not, I will hand in the final manuscript of Pin Bones this week. It will be my first poetry collection to meet the world.

Epilogue: I thank the fish. I apologize for not knowing how to dignify a multitude. My language fails fish, stars, fir needles. We’re just a single strand in the thick hair of this beast that is the earth.

I’d never really considered how English words for fir needles apply to them being fallen and to how we’d consider using them – a carpet, a litter, a bed. A squirrel races along the top of the fence. In the early sun, he casts startling shadows. My nephew arrives on a scooter and whispers that he found a slug. He whispers because I told him I am talking to God. He whispers: the slug leaves slime.

A few years ago, in a Sustenance workshop, Joy Sullivan told us that when she was editing her poetry book she realized that she over-used the word “weep”. She had to look for synonyms. I decided to type up my entire poetry book again before handing in the manuscript. Doing that means that my own repeat words become glaringly obvious: tree, swallow, water, spill.

Re: tree, I should say: Douglas fir, red hemlock, black spruce. But I don’t. I come from too many trees in too many places to want to name a tree anything but tree. The way a smile is the same in any language. You hold on to it.

And what about “swallow”? It appears eleven times in my book. Fish keep swallowing food. My past swallows insects. I swallow God. Fry swallow air. You, maybe, swallow grief. The trees swallow light. My dream house swallows the world.

It is a beautiful word. If a non-human body does it – the sun, a tree, a fish – it becomes swallows which is perfect symmetry. Make it your own and your throat feels whatever comes next: I swallow guilt. You cannot stop the word. See how it is supple and yet it sticks? Swallow, swallow, swallow – on repeat it becomes a bird, sharp-edged, traveling in a murmuration above the clover fields. You see? It is a word in your throat and on the wind. It is wolfish and agile. It is daily and a miracle. It sleeps as it flies. It travels in a pack.

I will not edit out a single swallow.

Besides, the advice given to poets doesn’t agree. Write what you know; write what you don’t know; write what you wish you knew. The answer to all of these is still: tree. Swallow. •

One of 16 original watercolours I made for Pin Bones.

Yes, you read that right! This week I send in my final manuscript for Pin Bones. It’ll be out in the world a year from now (Spring 2027) but I’m still allowed to get excited about it, right? I think I need to disappear into the forest to really get the epilogue right, but everything else is in place. I’m so grateful to poetry friends like Sue Ann and Jayne and Laura who have helped me with last-minute edits! Including risky ones, like chopping two-thirds out of a poem at the last minute. There are so many joys to writing poetry, and community is one of the biggest ones for me. Poets gather around a love for language and it always inspires me, how far a conversation goes to find the exact, right word for something unnameable.

P.S. Jayne’s debut poetry book Fluent in Silence is officially published! I’ve watched Jayne polish many of these poems over the last few years and I cannot wait for this book to arrive.