Ruoyu: DeeSoul, what is so lovely to me about “Moving to New York” is how this poem bridges the internal and external: the speaker so clearly outlines their “current mental state” with the repetition of “I’m thinking,” as invisible forces such as faith and luck are defined by these very concrete images of floods, subway cars, and garbage. The confession at the end of this piece continues this as well: “if the power goes out & my choices / are a prayer or a flashlight, Lord forgive me, / I’m looking for batteries every time.” In what ways are you preoccupied with these kinds of actions, of orienting ourselves towards what we can literally do and have control over, and the agency this may or may not hold?

DeeSoul: Ruoyu, first off, thank you for engaging so deeply with my work; it's always refreshing and gratifying to know that when we put work out there into the void that is the internet, someone is having thoughts about it, often much deeper than my own. I grew up in church and have always been interested in our collective relationship with the divine and what it means for our own sense of agency. I think there is often an inclination to believe that if our destinies are in the hands of God, then whatever happens to us is his will, and there's nothing we can do about it. However, my personal relationship with who I know as God, and others by other names, empowers me to believe God's will factors in my agency and encourages me to take action knowing I am backed by someone higher than myself, kind like my father standing close behind while I rode my bike without training wheels for the first time. I am always preoccupied with what I can or can't do about something, which is to say I am driven by a need to exhaust all of my possibilities before I give up.

Ruoyu: Still, “Moving to New York” doesn’t deny the surreal, almost-unbelievable aspects of nature and natural forces. The music we hear touches our lives in ways we don’t expect, a raccoon seems to morph into a shadow more frightening. There is no doubt that more dangerous hurricanes are just one manifestation of the devastating effects of climate change, but I feel like you illuminate these scenes in a way that recognizes the true scale of influence that our landscapes possess. For example: the lines “street unweathering the storm, / storm forgetting our coasts, / coasts without dead to be named.” The speaker isn’t quite pessimistic, or hopeful, exactly, but there is a certain kind of knowing in them about the world, and how they live in it. What does it mean for you to “imagine” worlds and to look towards the future? How does your writing move through these worlds in a way that is truthful?

DeeSoul: In the most basic sense, imagining involves seeing something that has not yet happened.  I think imagining new worlds involves a number of different factors. First, it requires us to be honest about the worlds we currently occupy, a world of ecological unbalance as a result of human influence, a world where the ability to combat such unbalances is divided along lines of class, which often turn into lines of race caste. We have to be honest about these things because we have to imagine ways out of the very real things we are facing, not some ideal, simple versions of our issues. The second factor requires us to believe that change is possible, even if we have not yet seen it. It means believing that what we do does have an impact on what we can be, and it means believing that there are ways beyond what has sought to end us. I think often of Franny Choi's poem and eponymous book  "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On." We have faced so many disasters we imagined would end us, and yet, here we are. And when they didn't end us, we imagined a world after them. In this poem, I am trying to be truthful about the internal and external situation I'm facing, but to the very end, I don't want it to take away my agency. I want to imagine there is still something I can do, and then I want to do what I can to make it happen.

Ruoyu: “bloodline” is such a gorgeous meditation on the lineage of families and belief. The fact of a generation, of continuation and survival, is rendered here into a tender, beautiful refrain. You experiment so much with form, not only in your poems in SUNHOUSE, but also in your pieces “Burning Bush Psalm,” “Black History Month (as Told by my Spam Folder,)” and “LOVE IS THE CHARGE, HOW DO YOU PLEAD,” among others. I wanted to know, in what ways is your layout on the page inspired by communities you’ve been a part of, passions you’ve followed, and pieces you’ve loved, whether literary or not? Essentially, how is your approach to writing an extension of what you have invested yourself and your love in?

DeeSoul: Whenever I think about my relationship to form, I have to note my upbringing in poetry via spoken word and Slam spaces. Poetry in these spaces becomes, amongst many things, a performance, and so it is important to consider how the method of performance influences the poem's reception. It is from the many spoken word poets I saw the transition to the page that I learned how we could bring the same consideration of presentation to the written word. I like to think that the presentation of my poems is how they can perform for the reader when I am not there to guide the performance, and how the form adds its own secondary reading/meaning to the text.

Ruoyu: Could you tell me about one piece of art—this could be anything from other poems to TV show scripts—that has been deeply formative in creating the spaces your work exists in? In what ways does it continue to compel you towards new understandings?

DeeSoul: I wish I could limit myself to one specific piece of art, but anyone who knows me knows how deeply video games influence me. I am working on a collection of video-game-adjacent poems concerned with themes of memory & nostalgia. I love the interactive nature of games and how they employ a kind of storytelling that is entirely dependent on the player's continual interaction and exploration. Thinking about video games helps me consider the "gameplay mechanics" of my poems and their forms, and how those direct the reader's experience. And also, I just love seeing a well-built narrative! Helps me consider movement and pacing in my work. ✺