NEW LAURELS:

Kira Alexis Tucker

The New Laurels interview series dives into the poetic minds of our recent Open Competition winners. From thoughts on their writerly influences and habits to the intimate, often complicated process of writing their manuscripts, New Laurels invites readers to get to know the hearts and minds of these poets with an inside look at their upcoming publications.

 

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How did you first get involved in poetry? Was this your first writing genre or something you came to over time? 

I’ve always been an artist. Growing up in Memphis—home of the blues, birthplace of rock and soul—I sought creative expression however I could: with crayon to paper, chalk to pavement, fingertips to keyboard chords, the whole of myself to song. At the intersection of my obsession with art, music, and the boundless worlds of books was poetry—a symphony for the page, a dance across the canvas of language.

What are some of your writerly habits (e.g., a daily practice, a preferred beverage at your side, music, writing analog)? 

I often find myself writing in transit—from planes, trains, even the passenger’s side of my best friend’s ride. It’s fitting, as these poems encompass a global sojourn, from the South African safari, to the Russian capital’s Kremlin, to a plantation-turned-college in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and beyond. This book has taken me all over the world and driven me more deeply into where I am most rooted.

My biggest writerly habit is research—scouring news reports, climate science data, clips from TikTok documentarians, archival records, and more. This looks like snapping photos for ekphrastic poems, Shazaming snippets of song, or close-reading signs I see—from nearby lawns and local roadways to national landmarks and historic sites.

It also looks like recovering family lore from elder relatives, as I did while visiting my maternal grandparents’ Arkansas homestead for my uncle’s homegoing memorial. For the poems to flow, I needed to know the meaning of the hymn we hummed while scattering his ashes, the origin story of the tree we ringed in memory of him, and the ecology of what’s grown since then, from all that we’ve sown in his wake.

Manuscripts often come together slowly, but sometimes all at once. How did this collection begin for you? Did it take you in unexpected directions? Can you describe how you ordered the poems?

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself rehearsing a new choreography at the start of each day—wake up from a wildly vivid dream, grasp at its already dissipating memory, and begin yet another morning’s desperate attempts at sense-making. In my research, I’d learn about theories of “COVID dreams” that aimed to explain the spike in sleep disturbances and dream frequency prevalent at the time. More than my nighttime visions, I sought to make sense of the mess of reality I faced upon waking. 

I spent much of 2020 inundated with news of drastic death tolls and protests following George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders crushed by even more police violence. Months later, the echoes of “I have a dream” felt extra eerie on Martin Luther King Day, less than two weeks after a president-endorsed white supremacist coup attempt on the capitol. We were trapped by a nationwide refusal to truly wake up. 

Hattie Mae Jefferson Tucker, my grandmother and our family’s matriarch, deepened this grief with her passing. Her presence grew in my subconscious terrain following this loss. I returned to dream journaling with a newfound urgency. I rediscovered dream theory. I revisited scripture about divine revelations via dream. Much of this pressing desire to dive deep into my dreamscape also arose from a need to process and heal. And, from there, this book’s pillar poems—the three tributes to my grandmother that anchor the collection—emerged.

I will always thank my very first poetry professor Natasha Trethewey, who later became my MFA advisor and remains my mentor today. She witnessed my craft take root in her first-year seminar of fall 2016. Now, we celebrate the publication of my debut book one decade later. 

What sort of craft elements and themes can readers expect from your work? Why do you find yourself drawn to these things? 

Wildest is a book all about dreaming, investigating the mythos of the American Dream through an ecopoetic lens. Across its pages, I unpack climate anxiety amid a series of present-day ecological nightmares. I uncover the truth of the drowned Black town beneath Lake Lanier. I elegize my late grandmother with memories of jumping rope outside her home, decades before xAI’s attempt to take over South Memphis. I examine the connection of the prison state with housepets, Halloween, and heartbreak. I meditate on how Nature is reclaiming the Rust Belt, from abandoned factories to blighted high-rises. How my ekphrasis of an 18th-century Swiss painting called “The Nightmare” became a reflection on what it means to seek love in the wake of slavery. How traversing the Puerto Rican rainforest of El Yunque taught me about marcescent leaves and letting go. Why do I find myself drawn to these things? The quote I borrow from Lakota elder Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa) in my book’s second prose poem says it best: “Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection? Why is it your favorite? 

“Frontier” is probably my most timely poem, though the reasons for this are far from my favorite. I set out to write this sestina following the American Dream and Promise Act of 2021, a congressional bill that “provides certain aliens with a path to receive permanent resident status and contains other immigration-related provisions” (H.R.6, 117th Cong.). 

As a linguist, former legal researcher, and deep believer that words mean real things, I’m struck by how our “justice” system codifies such dehumanizing language into its official lexicon. “Frontier” asks: why call immigrants aliens—what do we really mean? 

Using the lens of science fiction, this poem affirms the absurdity of labeling a human being “illegal.” It also highlights the irony of NASA’s space-age imperialist mission to find ice on Mars the same year Congress (successfully) voted to form US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the same ICE now ravaging our communities. “Frontier” reminds readers of the 2019 internet campaign to Storm Area 51 following unconfirmed reports of extraterrestrials detained at the Air Force base, while images of “alien” children in cages continue to be broadcast in undeniable 4K. 

I wrote this poem in a form I’ve been told that most poets hate—the sestina. But after reading “Ethel’s Sestina” by Patricia Smith, among the most moving poems and the single most moving sestina I’ve read, I knew I had to write one. For me, the repetition of the same six end-words in a changing but predetermined order reflects how tragically cyclical our history is. In the midst of a human rights crisis raging from borders to prisons and everywhere in between, the “Pilgrims” are still celebrated for their deadly expeditions, just as astronauts (and anyone rich enough for a ticket) are praised for voyaging into space. Rovers and drones tout names like “Perseverance” and “Ingenuity,” while millions of people are called anything but human. 

While the 2021 American Dream and Promise Act passed in the House, the proposed legislation did not survive the Senate; this iteration of the Dream never became law. Its “promise” remains, in many ways, only a feint of the nation state’s imagination, notably for those of us (immigrant and native-born) descended from captive migrants who were deemed no better than chattel. The final lines sum it up: 

     In childhood, I dreamt of an alien ship, its icy flood beam lifting me
     to a land of no return. Sci-fi informing my eye, I was always already
     a product of abduction. Call me, calling all this what it is, American.

Was there a particular poem that you struggled with in these pages? What was complicated about it, and what did working through the challenge look like for you? 

I took a dream dictionary written by a late-19th century businessman and created erasure poems from its entries, which combined the seemingly benign (bagpipes; balloons; brandy; and the like) with the outright insidious (racial slurs; fatal violence; and other terrors, day and night). My poems “Protect Your Rest” and “In A Storm” were born from this challenge.

In my research, I was struck by this note disclaiming the digitized content: “We have tried to present the enitre [sic] text of Gustavus Miller’s dream dictionary in HTML as authentically as is possible. While we do not particularly agree with anything that Miller wrote, we have created this unabridged edition of his dream dictionary. In part, it is offered for your amusement, but it is also provided to accurately represent popular thinking about dreams from the turn of the last century in America.”

What, I wondered, amused these coders about dreams of ransom or rape, nuns or negroes? Was it the pseudoscientific presumption of dream divination itself, the idea that a singular white, Southern merchant could devise an official cipher for decoding every dream?

I started with an entry that interprets Black people in dreams as woeful omens. My task was to retool the historic erasure of our humanity through a kind of poetic palimpsest. Erasing certain words exhumed a new meaning from the racist text, a message that kept changing every time I experimented with which words to keep black and which to fade grey. 

In my poem, “Protect Your Rest,” a new reading ultimately emerged, a call to both rest and resist. In it, I hear the wistful wisdom at the heart of Langston Hughes’s “Dream Variations,” one hundred years after its 1926 publication:

     To fling my arms wide
     In some place of the sun,
     To whirl and to dance
     Till the white day is done.
     Then rest at cool evening
     Beneath a tall tree
     While night comes on gently,
         Dark like me—
     That is my dream!

     To fling my arms wide
     In the face of the sun,
     Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
     Till the quick day is done.
     Rest at pale evening . . .
     A tall, slim tree . . .
     Night coming tenderly
         Black like me.

Looking to your future writing, are there forms, subjects, or themes you want to engage in that you haven’t yet? 

As a Southern, Black ecopoet, I will always write about my home, my people, and the worlds we share—past, present, and future. As I look ahead, I’m reminded how finding the right poetic forms brings me closer to beloved poets whose writing has taken the same shape. 

After offering my longtime mentor Jericho Brown multiple failed attempts, I’d love to make him proud with an exquisitely-built duplex. I’m eager to revisit the expertise of Gwendolyn Brooks and Terrance Hayes as I try my hand at writing another golden shovel. I miss my friend George Abraham—will pulling off a Markov Sonnet bridge the distance until our next visit? I’ll blend my love of visual arts with more graphic poetry, á là Tarik Dobbs. I accomplished my version of the Sealey Challenge while writing my climate sonnet “Secondary,” a poem after Nicole Sealey’s own “Legendary” persona of Venus Xtravaganza, and I’m ready for more. 

My current book project in process explores two unknowns with which we must make peace: the piecemeal genealogies descendants of slavery contend with, alongside the uncertainty of climate crisis, at which we descendents find ourselves overwhelmingly at the fore. As I compose poems for this manuscript, I’m striving to reach—through personal memory, archives of public life, and seeds of possibility—toward a richer understanding of our collective unconscious. 

Though I’m eager for the future of my art, amid it all I remain grateful to Siwar Massanat, who opened the door for Wildest to enter the world. 

Who were the poets, artists, or other individuals who most influenced you? Do you find yourself most influenced by a particular form of art? 

When you aren’t writing, how do you fill your days? 

I teach what I practice and practice what I teach. After earning my MFA and MA at Northwestern, I returned to my alma mater as an Artist-in-Residence and taught undergraduate creative writing workshops in poetry and prose. Now, I teach Environmental Literature at a nearby Montessori academy, where I verse my students in everything from pastoral poetry to climate fiction—embracing my ecopoetic obsessions at every turn. I’m a plant parent with a mini indoor forest. I bide icy midwest winters in my figure skates. Immersion in nature is my church, whether I hike miles to marvel at waterfalls or walk a few blocks to gaze at Lake Michigan’s endless waves.

What advice do you have for aspiring poets just starting out? What were you told, or wish you were told, in those early stages? 

I would encourage any beginner poet to join me in heeding the wisdom of Lucille Clifton: “I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.” Grab a copy of Clifton’s collected works—you’ll feel relieved (and blessed) you did.

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Kira Alexis Tucker is a Memphis, Tennessee native and winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series, selected by Siwar Masannat. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Northwestern University, where she was the 2024-2025 Artist in Residence. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Obsidian, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. A former managing editor of TriQuarterly, Kira was a finalist for a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Wildest (Akashic, 2026) is her debut collection.