FROM: Prism Review

Genevieve Kaplan: I met Michelle Brittan Rosado’s poems when she read from her just-released chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef (Anhinga Press, 2016), and I remember being so captivated by her work, which is precise, narrative, and moving as well as inventive and musical. Michelle’s poems tend to feel very located in our shared landscape of California, they make keen observations, and they speak to directly readers. When her full-length book, Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil for the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and published by University of Wisconsin Press, of course I wanted to talk with her more about it! Happily, Michelle, the PR poetry judge this year, agreed to offer insights into her poetic process and attentions. Read on:

GK: Can you tell us a little bit about the process you went through as you wrote, compiled, and published these poems? We know some of these poems here were previously collected in your chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef (Anhinga,
2016), but can you tell us more about their evolution? Encountering a completed book like Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, we sometimes forget to take into account the journey from manuscript to book, from poem to manuscript, from idea to poem….  What was your process like?

MBR: If I learned anything from this process, it was to trust divine timing. Strangely, Why Can’t It Be Tenderness took exactly a decade: I mark the book’s beginning with my move to the Central Valley to begin my MFA at California State University, Fresno on August 1, 2008, and the final edits were due to my publisher on July 31, 2018. Although the prospect of this project taking ten years would have been discouraging to my younger self, the timing now strikes me as just right.

My MFA thesis, which was titled The Numerology of Us then, was the book’s first iteration, and I continued to work on it afterward and during my time as a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California. I published individual poems in journals and anthologies, though I also took a four-year break from publishing to dive into my doctoral coursework, which gave me a new outlook on the project when I started sending out poems again. For the next few years I struggled with the order of the poems and how to divide the manuscript in sections; it wasn’t until I put together the chapbook that I could see the book’s core clearly, and the final arrangement crystallized around that condensed shape.
In hindsight, my education and personal life kept sending ripples through my writing process, which sometimes felt like interruptions—but these were the very events I needed to push the book forward.

Along the way, I became a mother, and a second manuscript about parenthood and lineage began to emerge, so I decided to make some deep incisions to the manuscript for a second project that’s now the one I’m currently working on. In hindsight, my education and personal life kept sending ripples through my writing process, which sometimes felt like interruptions—but these were the very events I needed to push the book forward. Read Rest of Interview Here