When I first read Kimberly Grey’s poetry, I was reeling from a cross-country move away from my large family and all the support systems that I had ever known. For the first time, I didn’t have to perform emotional stability for those I love like one of those dive-bar cover bands going all out for a few drunken patrons, but I was also physically—hours and hours from anyone that I knew—alone. Isolated, all the emotions that rematerialized were either too sharp or too dull. I didn’t know where to begin the work of healing. Grey’s work, with her attention to thinking her way into and out of complicated emotional realities, gave me an entry point. I found myself, as she often does, turning to theorists, philosophers, other writers whose presence in my mind makes me feel less alone. Reading Kimberly Grey’s work feels like problem-solving this deeply messed-up and beautiful world with a friend.

In her new collection of essays, A Mother is an Intellectual Thing, Grey navigates her fraught relationship with her mother, what it means to hold embodied trauma, and that trauma’s residual questions and impacts. While the essays center around her own mother, Grey also considers mother as stereotype, as societal construction, as the cosmic giver-of-life. Her punchy, evocative pieces operate like intellectual exercises, accompanied by a host of other thinkers and writers: Gertrude Stein, Elaine Scarry, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Simone Weil, and more. Grey moves freely between prose and lineated verse, while also calling on other modes of communication—diagrams, flow charts, illustrations, erasure—to create a working theory of self. 

Grey’s latest book is uniquely unafraid to put every tender piece of heartbreak and hope onto the page. It’s a book that you’ll dog ear the pages of, that you’ll underline with colored pens, that you’ll return to again and again.

A Mother is an Intellectual Thing is out now from Persea Books.

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Crystal: I’m fascinated by the many angles that this book takes to get to an emotional core: your relationship with your mother, and, consequently, with love and trust. The titles of essays range from “Ideation,” to “Schematization,” to “Halation” (and every fascinating concept in between).

 How did you determine what frames these pieces needed? Did the titles come before or after the essays? What was your process in structuring this collection?

Kimberly: I always began with the title of the concept I wanted to explore. I see the essays as thought experiments where I’m trying to get to the root of understanding. So each new essay concept was a new kind of trying or attempting to process and understand this traumatic experience. But in terms of inner-frame, or whether the piece was more prosaic or more poetic, that just happened. I didn’t feel confined to genre while writing. I felt like each piece dictated its own form—whether lyric essay, more narrative, or lyric poetry. I worked really hard to let the book be as hybrid as it wanted to be, regardless of outcome. I did attempt a narrative arc, but less so in terms of story and more so in terms of comprehension. At what point and in what essays did I fully begin to grasp my trauma? At what point did I start letting go that I’d ever have my mother back? At what point did I feel guilty for writing the book? I think these moments frame the progression toward an end that isn’t exactly conclusive, but maybe a demonstration of some type of new obtained knowledge.

Crystal: In the essay “Nonfiction” you write: “I entered this not knowing what language could do for me. Knowing only that it would not stop doing it…What do I know? That as long as I write, I cannot be erased…”

What can an essay do to assert self-existence that poetry cannot? I’m also interested in the inverse of this question because poems exist throughout the book, like in the essay “Intellectualization,” in which you write: “there’s always a secret scaffolding / to hold language.”

 Ultimately, I’m wondering: What scaffolding/genre feels truest to yourself on the page?

Kimberly: It felt very true to me that this should be a book of creative nonfiction and that the experiences expressed be understood as autobiographical, though I came at them in sometimes abstract or metaphoric ways. I started off wanting to write a more narrative book of essays, but the poet in me often took over. I tried to mirror my own mind on the page, which isn’t linear or cohesive, to give the reader access into the way I process trauma. What can an essay do that a poem can’t? There’s a lot of research in the book and polyvocal conversations with other writers, philosophers, and thinkers. I think the essay form serves as a container for the research, balances it with reflection as the intellectual mind ponders. I’m not sure poems act as a container in the same way. So the hybrid nature of the book allowed me to work in multiple modes at once, moving back and forth between research and lyric assertion. All forms feel like important modes of self-existence. Every piece of writing says I’m here, regardless of genre or form.

Crystal: Your work, including The Opposite of Light and Systems for the Future of Feeling, often disrupts the imagined binary between the intellectual and the emotional. In “Interpretation” you write: “There are no definitions for what has happened to me. I’ve taken to calling it erasure…I am not an origin text. I have not been written down. Am not, no matter how hard I try, explicable.”

What has writing A Mother is an Intellectual Thing further taught you about the relationship between theory and self?

Kimberly: It’s taught me that the self is a theorized thing. We should study our own selfhoods (maybe this is what writers are always doing), and I was interested in a direct study of my own mind. I really wanted to explore my relationship to language, which is fraught. I mostly think language fails to do what we want it to do. So when it comes to something as important as writing about one’s dissolution of family, I needed to understand how language would fail me before it actually did.

Crystal: I also want to talk about infinitive verbs and their significance to this collection. Some essays—like “Multiplication,” “Calculation,” and “Eradication”—end with a string of “to” lines:

“[To gaze in wonder at cruelty.] // To trace pain back to the beginning of time. // To find yourself inarticulate.”

How do you understand the infinitive’s relationship to estrangement?

Kimberly: For me, the infinitive has dual functions: it keeps you in the present, a necessary action when processing trauma. But it also demonstrates the stuckness that comes with trauma, the inability to move forward. And perhaps, in another vein, the stuckness is also a perpetual record of existence. So I’m not sure the infinitive’s relationship to estrangement or memory is always positive, but it can be. I would describe it as necessary to survival.

Crystal: I’m grateful for your vulnerability in writing this book and in answering questions about it. While this book reckons with tough truths, there are also moments that open to hope, like in the essay “Dispossession,” which explore your relationship with your father:

“He did not rescue me from exile. He met me there and held open the door. We prop up our losses into walls, let pain cover us like a roof, and live there, together, alone.”

Were there moments of catharsis—or even joy—as you actualized these experiences on the page?

Kimberly: I’m not sure I ever experience joy when I write. There were moments of genuine surprise—at what I said or thought—that would give me a little rush of excitement, that what I was doing (writing something) was working. But beyond that, I’m not sure the writing of this book felt cathartic at all. It’s nice to know I’ve had a voice and that I get to tell my story and not feel silenced. So maybe writing this book made me feel empowered. It was scary to publish, and by publishing it, I am practicing a great act of defiance against my family. I’m proud of that, that I wasn’t too scared to stay silent. But defiance isn’t joy. I wish I didn’t have to write this book and that things were different in my world. I’ll have to keep searching for that joy elsewhere.