Buy: The Blue Mimes by Sara Daniele Rivera | Graywolf Press | ISBN: 978-1-64445-279-0 | Pages 96 | Publication Date: April 2024
What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?
Both the opening epigraph to the book and the epigraph of some of the final poems come from Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik, whose work I started reading in graduate school. There’s an intense interiority to her work, a fascination with language and silence, a welcoming of the surreal and absurd and existential as vehicles for truth. When I read her in Spanish for the first time it was like hearing part of my own voice echoed back to me–my private, internal voice, the one that always existed between these two languages. I translated her work as part of class projects (she’s published in translation primarily by Yvette Siegert) and found myself lulled by the act of translation, that feeling of language as conduit, as sieve, as the breaking of a veil. I started to think about translation as a theme within my work—how we translate ourselves to one another, or translate ourselves to ourselves.
I ended up publishing a book of poems in translation by the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela (The Blinding Star: Selected Poems by Blanca Varela, Tolsun Books, translated by myself and Lisa Allen Ortiz). She’s the other non-living poet who influenced the book; I lived in her work so deeply, for so long, while writing The Blue Mimes, that allusions to her images or phrasings crept into my language without my even noticing at times.
How did writing this book transform you?
For most of the process, I didn’t know I was writing a book. Many of these poems were shaped from journal entries I wrote to survive the loss of my dad, the loss of my grandparents, the years of the pandemic. These words got me through those years, gave me somewhere to lay my grief down and approach what felt unsayable. When the grief felt insurmountable, writing was one of the ways I could lighten the load or carve open a portal from one moment to the next. I’ll never be without this grief, but writing this book helped me find space in my life for joy and new beginnings. I don’t know what that process of healing and change would have looked like for me without this book as both receptacle and companion.
You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?
The first lines are: “Now it’s all / erased: a black stone / polished by water.” Those weren’t the first lines for the majority of the manuscript’s existence; I actually moved this poem, “Earthworks”, to the front of the book a few days before submitting it for the Academy’s award. When “Earthworks” appeared later in the book, those first lines kept grabbing me and returning to me. I started to wonder what it would mean to begin a book with erasure, with absence and transformation, particularly an elegaic book. An act of destabilization, maybe.
The last line is: “And a road continues into open space.” It’s the ending of a memorial poem I wrote, “Fields Anointed with Poppies”, and the final stanza of that poem became a kind of mantra for me on evening runs during lockdown. Those runs felt like my salvation most days, my source of sanity, and provided space for me to process the grief that lives in the book. I wrote that line as a reminder that life was continuing, and that all I could do was continue, and I like that it acts as a final gesture for the reader, one that carries them out of the book and onward to whatever comes.
Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? This could be the room, the desk, the city, an MFA program, a fellowship, or any other environmental factor (you only wrote when it rained, you always wrote with fresh flowers in the room, etc.).
I wrote in my mother’s childhood house in San Miguel, Lima, writing diary entries while sitting in the tiled courtyard or lying in bed surrounded by piles of my late Abuelito’s books and journals. I wrote it in my head on runs around the Chestnut Hill reservoir in Brighton, MA, or around the Manzano Open Space just east of Albuquerque. I wrote it in the tiny walled yard of my and my husband’s pandemic rental, under cheap string lights, listening to the rush of I-40. I wrote it in my office space in our first home, the first dedicated workspace I’d ever had, with walls painted my favorite shade of green and my cat coiled in my lap. I wrote it by hand, every poem existing first in slim journals that I carried everywhere–on planes to visit my sister in Oslo, on trains from Boston to NYC, on clouded waterfronts and brewery patios, in public libraries, in my childhood backyard the year after my dad died.
I think the beauty of writing a book over many years (in this case, nine years) is that it lives with you across so many places and selves. All of these pieces of self that feel fragmentary, that you try to catch, compulsively, in the space of a journal, start to come together into something coherent, and that linguistic coherence helps you make sense of your own life.
What’s your favorite line(s) from your book?
I really enjoyed thinking about this question. It’s rare that we give ourselves space to love on our own words, on the lines that stay with us most. I’ll highlight two moments: first, from the poem “Semillas de lúcuma”—“How to be an archive / of things no one / thought to tell?” Those lines, for me, captured the feeling of source-less loss that I felt permeating the book. The sense that there are parts of self, of language, and of family history, lost to time, death, migration, assimilation, shame and violence. That there are traumas that calcify inside us that we struggle to name or translate. In a way I’m always asking myself this question: how do we hold the silences we’ve been handed?
Then there’s a section of the last poem, “Fields Anointed with Poppies”: “ Maybe a memorial poem is the way we / document the sky to each other, saying, look, / today the light breaks in five places and it is /so specific, so compositional, that it has to be / the person I lost the voice I lost the person / I lost speaking to me / in a new third tongue.” I have trouble getting through those lines without crying when I read the poem out loud, because I feel my parents and grandparents inside them. I think back to every moment in my childhood when my mom or dad would point out the drama of the sun breaking through clouds, insisting that something so beautiful, so like a vision of heaven, had to contain a celestial language. Our loved ones reaching towards us, shattering space time barriers.
How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?
As a little kid I used to fold up pieces of paper and make them into my own “books”, with a drawing on the top half of the page and a narrative on the bottom. My dad always read to my sisters and I and gave us leeway to invent our own endings or change the plot, so the act of writing books and participating in story creation always felt within reach.
By middle school, my sister Alyssa and I wrote a fantasy novel together, and my best friend Kelly and I were writing fanfiction online. I didn’t have writing classes or literary community/education available to me, so these familial and digital spaces became a free place to learn, to receive feedback and try things out. I wouldn’t be a writer if not for these collaborative experiences with my sisters and friends.
I remember, when I was ten, reading the poem “The Garden of Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne because there was an excerpt from it in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I fell in love with the music of that poem, the cadence of it, and for years wrote poems that were metered and structured before I ever studied the literary tools I was using. It was all linguistic play through mimicry. Poetry felt as natural as song.
William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why?
I don’t know exactly, but I will say that the drawings of lúcuma seeds on the cover of my book have become increasingly important to me. I wouldn’t have thought to put them on the cover, but the book’s designer did, and I’m so grateful to her. Lúcuma was my abuelita Adriana’s favorite fruit. I was obsessed with its taste from the first time I tried it in Lima (lúcuma mousse and ice cream is to die for), and drew the smooth, glassine seeds as a kind of meditative archive for myself. It’s such a distinctly Peruvian fruit, depicted on ceramics at Indigenous burial sites, represented in ancient Moche artwork. In Incan culture, lúcuma was a symbol of new life and fertility, and the fact that I clung to those seed drawings during a period of mourning and managed to find new life on the other side feels poignant to me.
As for animals–I’ve always felt an affinity with turtles. I have two beloved pet slider turtles and have ended up with a collection of turtle things, and people have caught wind of this and send me turtle videos/articles/gifts. So I think I’ve become an inadvertent turtle lady, which is just fine with me!
What are you currently reading?
I’m finishing up The Age of Loneliness by my friend Laura Marris, also a recent Graywolf release! It’s a book of lyrical ecological essays that connects environmental loss to human alienation and grief. The book is punctuated by lists of birds Laura kept from her brilliant father’s birdwatching, a visual archive grounded in his memory as well as an intimate, constant connection with the natural world. Others have blurbed it and reviewed it more brilliantly, so I’ll just urge you to read about it and check it out. It’s one of the most entrancing books I’ve read this year.
Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator. Her writing has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Solstice, Waxwing, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology, and elsewhere. She is a co-translator of The Blinding Star: Selected Poems by Blanca Varela (Tolsun Books, 2021) and co-editor of Not Your Papi's Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope (Mouthfeel Press, 2025). Her debut book of poetry, The Blue Mimes (Graywolf Press, 2024), won the 2023 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.