Relationships, Choice, & Infinite Potentials
at the end, a beginning
When I teach college students, the first question I ask is, what is your relationship to poetry? To which I model by saying my relationship to poetry is obsessive. This tends to garner laughs, a few smiles—one word is not capable of expressing the depth of my relationship to poetry because poetry is the longest relationship I’ve ever had. It is the only constant in my life that cannot leave me. Poetry is not finite. Poetry cannot die. As long as I choose it over and over again, it chooses me.
When the semester comes to an end, I return to the question. After fourteen weeks of study, of writing, of immersion, has your relationship to poetry changed? In the last class we do a rapid fire round robin answer, but it becomes the guiding question for their reflection essays that preface their final portfolios.
As their finals begin to trickle in, I find that many of my non-creative writing majors have the same sentiment: at the beginning of the semester their relationship to poetry was nearly nonexistent, if not fully nonexistent. Now, however, poetry seems to peek it’s head around the corners of their lives. One student says when their friends say something funny or thoughtful or when a song lyric really speaks to them they think, oh, that would be good in a poem. Students who believed poetry unattainable suddenly feel at ease around it. They realized poetry could be whatever they needed it to be, it was not demanding of them anything they would not be willing to give. At times it even nudged them further than they thought they could go—into play, into curiosity, into vulnerability.
Another student has been making a different breakthrough. The poems have begun to know more than they do and I had to withhold my excitement when telling them this was a good sign. When the work knows you better than you realize, that’s when it happens. The very singular magic of poetry where it stakes itself into your core, and holds tight.
My pedagogy has always been one of permission (thank my thesis director and mentor Melissa Crowe for that) because I believe poetry belongs to everyone. In viewing it as a relationship, it also allows choice. I have come to understand I am not just someone who writes poetry, I am a poet in every iteration of the word. Someone said once that when I speak of my students and their moments of revelation, their potential, their curiosities, that I sound like a romantic. In calling this newsletter, Diaries of a Lover Girl, I know many will take it as a cute joke. But that is genuinely my life philosophy.
I contextualize everything in my life as a relationship. My relationship to poetry, to crafting playlists, to manga collecting, to my maximalist decor, to food, to the Sisyphean task of washing dishes, to myself. Growing up my mother repeated often to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which translated to some iteration of karma, or cycles, of the belief in reciprocity.
I have always loved fiercely but often I did it out of the desire to be chosen. One of the reasons I entered my last relationship was because I had spent so much time not being chosen, that I clung to the glimmer of it. I stayed well past the expiration date because I did not believe anyone would ever choose me again. It took years to realize the only person I ever really needed to choose me, was myself. Arriving at that point though, took being loved fiercely by beloveds I frequently refer to as the greatest loves of my life. They chose me unconditionally, easily—so why couldn’t I?
I had to train the voice in my head to speak to me the way someone who loves me would speak to me. This process led to many moments in my apartment over the last five years where I’d drop something or forget something, call myself some variation of a derogatory name, only to verbally backtrack aloud. No, not stupid, sorry my love. My penchant for endearments to my beloveds had to extend to myself. I find that loving yourself can at times look silly because it feels like effort for so long, until it isn’t. There was a moment this year where I was getting ready with friends for a night out and I looked in the mirror and went, have I always looked like this? To which my friends said, yes Jess, always. Being loved into loving yourself by my friendships is why I hold my platonic relationships to the same level as my romantic relationships. There is no care I would offer a partner that I would not also offer a friend. Intimacies and vulnerability should not be reserved simply for romance. Why not pour my love into those who pour into me?
(Stay tuned for a future deep dive into my thoughts on decentering romantic relationships and why it helped me understand what I ultimately need/want from a romantic partner, which all connects in the current poetry manuscript I’m working on regarding desire and grief and devotion! My life is not unlike a russian nesting doll where every time you think you’ve uncovered one level of understanding of yourself, there’s just another one ad infinitum.)
Poetry has always been a place of discovery for me. It started as survival. Some days, it still is. But it is less of a life line I am clinging to and more a dear friend, a confidant who sees me in ways I cannot see myself. I tell people often if I stopped publishing and sharing my work tomorrow, I would never stop writing poetry. Poetry belongs to me, and I belong to poetry.
Every April since 2024, I have lead programing in the local K-12 school district during National Poetry Month, where we enter the schools and teach one off generative poetry workshops which culminate into a community reading on my university campus where one student from each grade is invited to come read in our space. At every reading these past two Aprils, I say something to these students and their families in the audience about how if they continue to choose poetry, it will choose them back.
In a world where individual thought is being rallied against, in the era of generative AI, what luck it is to unearth children who haven’t succumbed yet to the belief that their feelings are arbitrary or unwanted. I think of the middle schooler who wrote a poem about loving basketball. The fourth grader who wrote a climate change poem with a consistent rhyme scheme. The high school senior and their self portrait poem. And then I see my undergraduates, ones who do not feel they are allowed to write rage or imperfection. Ones who cannot bring themselves to reclaim language. Ones whose queerness simmers, unnamed.
I say this not only to students but also to friends, to colleagues, to anyone who wants to take their writing further—you have to write for yourself first. It has to be you and the page, everyone else comes after. There’s that Richard Hugo quote that goes, “You owe reality nothing, and the truth about your feelings everything.” A quote I hold in conjunction with Chen Chen’s “I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does.”
In many ways I am a poet because I am full of love, and I am full of love because I am poet. Being a poet makes me believe there is nothing I cannot do, there is nothing I cannot have. And if I don’t get something I wanted, then it wasn’t meant for me anyways. I wrote in my first poetry collection “I turn poems into prayers / prayers into poems” and it makes me think of this image of Octavia Butler’s notebook, where she names all the things she wanted as though she’d already had them and signs it, So be it! See to it! And then everything she names, comes to fruition.
Here’s the thing: I have wanted, for so much of my life, to be an arbiter of community. I believe I have succeeded in that across many spaces in my life, but it isn’t enough yet. These days people say things like, everyone wants a village and no one wants to be a villager. Last week I hosted an open mic downtown in my usual cafe and said, to be in community is to be inconvenienced. I joked that by me choosing to harass the lovely humans behind the counter by asking their names and giving them mine, that was how we were able to establish this event. To continue, to make this kind of programming ongoing in our small town, we need to show up for each other often, constantly, always.
Folks love to talk about taking action, and very few take action. Community comes with a healthy dose of sacrifice. Your time, your energy, your attention. A necessity in many ways. The poetry manuscript I am shopping around at the moment (see: tossing money I don’t have into the book contest abyss and praying) has a through-line about my inherited love languages coming from my father. Watching him is how I learned to care for the people I love, for my communities. Quiet acts like making my mother’s tea before she asked, the very immigrant parent offering of appearing before their children with sliced fruit. I know so well the worth of noticing, of remembering.
A friend of mine is days away from having her first child so before she could no longer travel, she drives up from Virginia to Pennsylvania for a night. I make her Thai Chicken Curry and we eat from bowls I picked out once with my grandmother. I make her our favorite chai on my stovetop, ginger, light sugar. When I hand her the mug I return to the kitchen, and before she can finish her sentence about what would go well with this chai, I turn the corner with a dish of Biscoff cookies and present them to her. Because I know. Her joy is all I need. I care for people without expectation, but every time, without fail, it returns to me over and over again.
All this to say, I want to extend this beyond my immediate relationships. I don’t know if it’ll be successful, but I am going to try. I used to think I needed to wait on other people to ask me to do things but, as I’ve been parroting all year, I have free will. So what does this look like? For one, this newsletter. I’m dreaming up a once a month letter, on craft, on life, tied in to poetry and teaching and process. Life through the lens of a lover girl.
I’ve officially rolled out my freelancing services for literary editing, professional editing, career consultations, and more! Additionally, I want to start offering workshops. What’s in the works: Ordering Your Poetry Manuscript, On Writing Platonic Love, Poetics of the Backslash, Designing Your Author Website. Sliding scale, virtual workshops offering my expertise on topics I’ve been asked about time and time again. Dates, registration windows, and pricing will be announced in my January newsletter!
My Co-Star, on the days when it isn’t coming for my neck, sometimes offers a worthwhile thought to meditate on. Recently, be the person you needed when you were younger. This semester, I’ve been in the position to be, for some of my students, someone I wish I had had when I was in their shoes. I think that’s the hope, to be the force I searched for all those years. To exist loudly, and expansively—the truth is, I once did not believe I would live to this age. Therefore, nothing is anticipated, nothing is written in stone, nothing exists beyond this moment.
(I have something longer brewing on the concept that nothing is really temporary and nothing is really permanent, and to treat anything/anywhere/anyone as a liminal space is a disservice not only to those things, but to yourself—but we’ll come back to that.)
If you stuck around this long, thank you. I was about to say I’ll be less sentimental in future newsletters, but that would be a blatant lie! I wrote in a poem recently “my default is leaking light, my heart the underside of an iceberg,” if that gives you any indication for who I am. (recommendation: Mary Ruefle’s “On Sentimentality” from her book of collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey)
Look, I have never been nonchalant a day in my life. I’m not setting boundaries or expectations for this space, only because I cannot set those things upon myself.
One of my brothers asked me recently what my goals for the next decade of my life were since I turn thirty next year, so I smiled and said I have none. Dreams? Sure. But timelines are arbitrary and my dreams are lifelong and a little nebulous at times. The final line of that Lucille Clifton poem rings in my head, “now i watch myself whenever i enter a room. / i never know what i might do.” Which, all things considered, is in response to enacting a violence sure, but in many ways it is so much more expansive than that. Like Audre Lorde’s “I feel therefore I can be free”—multitudes are not limited to neatness, to digestible versions of the self. Possibility is equally beautiful and bloody. I told a friend recently about my fixation on the goddess Kali, how in one story she emerges from Durga’s forehead as a manifestation of her rage. I am less often a two sided coin, and more often a twenty sided die.
You know that meme from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” of the guy in front of the bulletin board with all the string tied overlapping linking together a conspiracy theory?
Okay, that’s me. That’s how I define my poetics and/or my day to day thoughts. Just a warning moving forward, but if you’re here for the ride, welcome! I hope you’ll stay.
Until Next Time Beloveds,
Jess
Take Homes:
Writing Prompt: I taught a queer poetics workshop recently so I thought I’d share the prompt that we worked our way towards. This is multi step!
Make a list of words that mean something to you, but may hold different meaning for other people. Take two to three minutes to do this, set it aside.
Read “Poetry is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde. Read “#LoveMachine” by Faylita Hicks.
Return to your list of words, meditate on one of those words keeping in mind the way Lorde and Hicks talk about language, perception, and ownership.
Let me know if you try this! My classroom share rules are: share your draft, share your topic or focus, OR share your process.
Openings & Opportunities:
Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets 2026:
June 7-14, 2026 | Fully funded & free to apply
Visiting Poets: Airea D. Matthews & Chet’la Sebree. Director: me!
Application due January 31st, 2026
Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing:
Open for Fall 2026 & Spring 2027 | Fully funded & free to apply
Applications due February 1st, 2026
Literary Magazines currently open for submissions:
Shō Poetry Journal, Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch,
Lover Girl Life Stats:
Reading: Symposium by Plato, Date & Time by Phil Kaye
Watching: My Hero Academia, Gilmore Girls (annual rewatch, #TeamJess), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Abbott Elementary, & the tarot readers on tiktok that won’t leave me alone (seriously, are they in my walls)
On Repeat: after the sun goes down by Khalid which, for an album that released in October, somehow rose the ranks of my listening in two months—I will find my way to his concert next year; very specifically “Marble Arch” by Erin LeCount because I like to hurt my feelings; & also this playlist I looped on a recent six hour drive that I’ve affectionately titled Millennial Yearning and/or Ass Shaking RnB, enjoy
In Conversation: VS the podcast—very specifically this episode with Hanif Abdurraqib on obsessions, something about listening to Ajanaé & Brittany in conversation feels like sitting in a living room with friends (this is my favorite podcast, uncontested)
Favorite Recipes I’ve Made Recently: Mushroom Risotto (here’s my poem about this recipe, Love Letter to the Mushroom Risotto I Made for Dinner Tonight / you have to scroll down a bit in the issue), Apple Crumble (I learned how to make this during a very bizarre little stint I had in France working at a cooking school)
Favorite words: polyjamerous (i.e. music taste that resembles a randomized grab bag); paramours (as a certified lover girl I’m just in love with everything all the time constantly—additionally this is my favorite way to refer to my dating history that somehow encompasses all of the spectrum of connection irregardless of depth or length or impact)
Hyper-fixation/Project: buying (staring wistfully at) vintage gold mirrors off of eBay & victorian era couches on Facebook Marketplace that would likely not fit into my 2013 Corolla
Bouquets in my apartment right now: pastel pink & orange carnations & baby’s breath on the coffee table & altar, burgundy alstroemeria & baby’s breath by the front door, leftover baby’s breath in an old peach soju bottle on the window sill in the bathroom
Makeup Product: no idea why it took me so long to succumb to the brown lip liner, but we’re here now & we’re never going back
Titles of poems written in the last three months: conceited (ghazal after SZA), The Day I Built a New Altar, Crashout After Seeing My Situationship on Tinder Again, Self Portrait as Brushstrokes, Reversal of a Benevolent God, Liability, instant, pedagogy of permission, my gods & I, index of paramours, oral fixation, on the cusp of another decade, When I say if there is anyone in this world I could drop everything & run away with it’s you, ode to the halal cart
Upcoming Whatnots:
December 27th: new poem coming out in wildness
January: new poem in Shō Poetry Journal No. 8
From Beloveds:
Recent Releases & Pre-Orders:
Bottle Episodes by Michael Colbert
Blue Opening by Chet’la Sebree
with gasoline by nat raum
Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang
The Book of Alice by Diamond Forde
Force: A Memoir by Monica Prince
The Hungering Years by Summer Farah
Support Independent Creators:
Nailed by Ryan—custom press on nails!! All of my nails from the last six months and into eternity has been and will be from Ryan. Fun fact, we wrote an insane raunchy vampire novel together in middle school. @nailed.by.ryan on Insta.
Girltaku—nerd culture with a feminine twist!! Whether you’re obsessed with anime, manga, gaming, or all other things otaku—this is where you want to go, trust me. Blog, podcast, events. Genuinely some of the coolest people I know.
O, Word?—new poetry podcast by DeeSoul Carson!! We need more poets hosting podcasts, these are the people that deserve those microphones.
Dear beloveds: if you have any news (books/pubs/projects) you’d like me to share let me know!
Logistics:
Diaries of a Lover Girl will go out on the 15th of every month! Occasional updates may be released regarding workshop openings as necessary. Any major schedule changes will be communicated. See you soon!
I LOOOOOOVEEE this "Dreams? Sure. But timelines are arbitrary and my dreams are lifelong and a little nebulous at times" can't wait for more 💜