"Trying to capture that reaching is the whole point": A Conversation with Austin Araujo on At the Park on the Edge of the Country
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- 6 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Buy: At the Park on the Edge of the Country by Austin Araujo | Mad Creek Books (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press) | February 2025 | $16.95 | ISBN: 978-0-8142-8382-0
Austin Araujo’s At the Park on the Edge of the Country was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. I sat down for a Zoom call with Austin to talk about some of the ideas that appear throughout the collection—the role of dreams in storytelling, the relationships between ambition and legacy, and the tenderness that arises from loving a flawed figure—as well as his experience working on it as a debut author.
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): I really enjoyed reading this book. I make it a habit to read every book twice for these interviews, and At the Park was so breezy; I was really understanding it as I went, which made me think about your editing of the book. Could you give me a sense of what that was like?
Austin Araujo (AA): I was working towards this idea of a book, but I found the thing that was At the Park late-ish in the process. I wrote my first version as the MFA thesis at Indiana, and I felt super supported there. I was encouraged by Ross Gay and Adrian Matejka to work as hard as possible and to be as weird as possible. I had this hunch that there was a book amongst all the poems, but it was unclear what the poems were trying to say with one another and to me. But as soon as there was a deadline, the organizing and the statement I was trying to make became a lot clearer.
The book won a prize, so the discussion was not about individual poems or even sequencing, but about the bigger picture: “How are we going to market the book? What's the log line for this?” And that was really fun and interesting because it was the first time I'd ever thought of that. The book was more of a feeling or a gesture for me, so when they sent me the author questionnaire I was like, “Oh yeah, there's gonna be copy on the back.” My writer brain and my reader brain don't talk to one another. As a reader, the first thing I do is look at the back. But as a writer? I wonder what it would have been like if I wrote that description six months later. I wonder if I would have a different relationship to that.
So it's these two contradictory things. If I could update the description every six months I would, but also as soon as I got the call, I was like “ I know what it is trying to say.”
BTR: I know you know the nature of poetry is the nature of poets: constantly evolving. So it's interesting to hear you talk about that process like a setting-in-stone of your intentions.
AA: Poems know more than we do. Writing copy felt like guessing at what they were trying to do.
BTR: There is some of that guessing even within the poems, where dreams are opportunities to fill in the gaps of what the narrator can't witness. Do you think the narrator, as a child of immigrants, bears some responsibility to tell his parents’ stories? Is that a driving factor for this invented memory?
AA: The dream feels rich for me as a mode. I didn't see it as an obligation when I first started writing these poems. It was an impulse, a compulsion. But I was wary about exploiting these stories for pathos, so the dreams and speculation allowed me to acknowledge the lack of definitiveness. When I would hear these stories growing up, different family members had different versions and they would contradict each other or pick up where other peoples’ dropped off. A different writer may have wanted to find the capital T truth, but for me it felt liberating. I'll never be able to capture that Truth, so the speculation felt like a way to be true to that.
BTR: This idea of the capital T truth and how we get to that makes me think about the effectiveness of language or art or media at truly capturing something. In the poem “The Father,” the narrator’s father criticizes him for flattening him:
How could you describe me?
You haven’t said what fruit I prefer.
Just from the record your voice has made
who would know what my wide nose looks like?
Do you think that stories can ever fully capture the nuance of a life?
AA: Short answer, no. But that's the thing that keeps me going. Early on, I did have a few longer poems in the book, and the instinct behind them was to get my arms all around, to leave no stone unturned. But of course, no poem can do all that. It's thrilling to bump up against the limits of language. What can we say? Like these dreams, these moments in which we see impossible things. What if I did have access to that? To me it felt really true because it renders the reaching. Trying to capture that reaching is the whole point.
BTR: I like the way you put that. You cannot possibly express the fullness of something, but that's the challenge and the excitement of poetry. If it were easy, then nobody would be writing poems.
AA: Totally. You're trying to say the unutterable.
BTR: There was something I had thought about in my own writing that you bring up in these poems: the narrator struggles with how different, and maybe easier, his life is compared to his father’s. In that poem, the father jabs at the son:
You’re tall as heaven. You’re so big
you made me doubt you were mine.
It makes me think God must be tiny.
That we must tower over our inventors.
How can the children of immigrants recognize their achievements without viewing their parents as inferior?
AA: I was writing a lot of this book when I was doing the Stegner Fellowship where they pay you to go to class once a week and write in your room. I was like, “they don't give people like me this kind of thing all the time. I need to take advantage of it.” I wasn't thinking in terms of the difference in generation so much as the pattern of desire for a better life or ambitions. One of the few poems that doesn't feature the father at all feels really important to me because it was raising these questions about how you can be in the world without going to the figure of the father. I had a certain model for how to be in the world, and I was trying to do something else and trying to reconcile those two things. The kind of labor I long to do is indistinguishable from leisure, and this other person's labor, because of a lack of access to education, etcetera, doesn't look that way.
BTR: It’s true that the father figure is present in a lot of this collection, and you can feel his shadow with an implied undercurrent of violence. And yet, the father exhibits such great tenderness. This conflict made me think about the nature imagery throughout. Did those feel aligned for you as you were writing? The father-son dynamic and the beautiful yet harsh natural world?
AA: The nature aspects of the book didn’t come first. Thinking back to even my undergrad readings, so much of the imagery around Borderlands and Chicanos was so desert heavy. And I have never lived in the desert, but I was writing a lot of desert poems to get close to these stories. But I was like, “Maybe if I look in my backyard, the backyard of my childhood, maybe that would be something.” I grew up around so many rivers, so this key image kept recurring of crossing the border via river. This idea and the Arkansas landscape became really important to me as I recognized that this part of where I'm from is changing and disappearing. But I do think that it's connected to this father-son. I think this implication of violence or sense of unsafety matched by a tenderness is accurate to the book.
BTR: And thinking about violence: we hear, rightfully so, a lot about the violence of a border. Yet, in poems like “At Lake Temescal” and “Clearing,” there is language around borders keeping the narrator safe. Can you talk about that refraction of what a border could be?
AA: I was interested in being able to deploy that word knowing all the charged kind of meanings of it. I'm not into borders, but I am interested in deploying an idea that feels really loaded and charged but just seeing what happens if you try to make different kinds of resonances. Like in that poem, look at the way even this seemingly innocuous summer day scene is loaded with all of these implications:
The border offers one definition of protection,
[...]
It’s not as though at the bottom of the lake
There are many sticks and many bodies of dogs.
That flash of death or violence. I was wondering how to depict the kind of haunting or paranoia, to see the scenes of violence in everyday life. I was really interested in letting things feel provocative or open.
BTR: I feel like we could be here forever, but I'll just ask: Is there anything that we didn't get to talk about that you want to bring into this conversation?
AA: It means the world to know that someone's out there looking at this thing. The fact that it's gonna be published in a column specifically about Latinx writers, it feels really important to me to let my book be in conversation with that. So thank you for the opportunity to chat about it.
Austin Araujo is the author of At the Park on the Edge of the Country, winner of the 2023 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and his poems have recently appeared in Poetry, Cleveland Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. He currently lives in Iowa City where he is a student in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.