Sara Mae is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. Their work examines the surreal, the uncanny, body horror, and intimacy. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshops alum, a 2022 Open Mouth Attendee, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. Their work appears in or is forthcoming from POETRY, The Georgia Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere. They are a 2017 Individual World Poetry Slam, 2018 National Poetry Slam, and 2018 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational Competitor. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out now via Game Over Books. Their second chapbook, Phantasmagossip, won the Vinyl45 chapbook competition and was released from YesYes Books in spring 2025. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville. They write bedroom pop as The Noisy and currently live in Philly.

Let’s talk about the title of the book. What made you think, “This is it! This is the titular poem. And this is what I’m going to call my book.”

That’s a good question. A lot of the poems came out of my thesis, which was called Corpse of a Heron with the Face of a Woman, which is an adaptation of a line from a Leonora Carrington short story. I love herons. They mean a lot to me. They’re very important to my personal mythology. They follow me around. Whenever I have a breakup, I see a heron. But when I was submitting different versions of those poems to presses, I wasn’t having any luck. I was throwing my very best poems. And then I was like, you know, I’m going to do a B-side manuscript.

I was a finalist in this one chapbook contest. And I shared that on social media, and wrote in the caption, “so exciting that my little chapbook about haunted houses and rumor mills was a finalist.” And then I kept thinking about that. And I thought that’s a cute way to describe what this project is up to. And it also feels like an organizing principle. So then I looked back to my poems and I realized how much of that was true, so many of the poems are about home, about ghosts, and I was thinking about Pam Grossman whose podcast I used to listen to, The Witch Wave, and her Instagram name is “phantasmaphile,” which I thought was extremely cool.

I was appreciating poets that started to come up with their own language, and so I thought, I can have my own version of that. And eventually, I landed on that. That poem was talking about this idea of a ghost communicating with me from the other side to try and keep me safe and I was thinking about how gossip is a way that women and queer people keep each other safe by sharing these secrets of ours so we know what to look out for. And so the title arose out of all of that.

Okay, tell me more about the haunted house organizing principle that you talked about. How did you go about organizing and structuring the manuscript?

I’m trying to remember what came first because at a certain point I looked around and I was like, “Man, I write about this a lot.” I write about home a lot, about missing people in other places. I’ve just moved so much. And I really wanted to talk about grief. As I was finishing these poems, I had just lost my grandma and I think, something I maybe was not willing to admit to myself was that it was going to be its own collection.

But I was coming to the end of writing these poems really thinking about grief. I was looking backwards and thinking, “What is the thing that unites these?” So many poets have said some version of this line but what is a haunted house if not grief made manifest? It’s someone’s memories that are persisting and it’s generational trauma, it’s trauma of the land that you’re on, it’s history insisting on itself.

There’s definitely grief and there’s also a lot of violence in the poems. There’s a lot of gendered violence, and I was really grappling at the time with how hard I am on myself. The story that had been told to me a lot in the era I was writing about, was that, I am dangerous, my desires are dangerous, being queer or being socialized as a woman makes me dangerous. Every time I tried to come to a conclusion in a poem about “am I dangerous am I not?” it fell flat, and so in the poems I imagine myself being powerful enough to be threatening but also showing moments where I was in danger, and I think both are true. I think queer people are dangerous in the sense that we’re disruptive. We’re dangerous to social norms that are not good. So maybe in some ways it’s about finding a new connotation for what dangerousness means.

I was thinking about that, too. In “You are leaving a trail of bodies behind you,” the speaker is called dangerous by their father, but elsewhere, we see the journey of the speaker and I was wondering who would they be if they were not touched by these acts of violence, carelessness, and shrewdness, and I think yes, they’re being called dangerous but also there is so much danger inflicted on them. How do you tackle that on the page? How do you (poet) maintain distance from the I (speaker)?

A good example of me trying to tackle that on the page would be “Always Cut Flowers at an Angle” which I almost didn’t include and then Gabriel (Reed) said, “you have to keep this poem in the book, it’s really important.”

I wrote the first sonnet, and then it felt like it just wasn’t telling the whole story. It was talking about an ex that was difficult. I was thinking about Diane Seuss, and I was trying to really break open what a sonnet is capable of. I kept writing past where I thought I wanted the ending to be, or where the tidy, neat ending is. And I sort of break open this sonnet. When I went back to that, I talked about the speaker’s culpability in the relationship and having a complicated ending to a story and learning how to tell a story in a complicated way that you can both leave a relationship having been deeply hurt and also having hurt someone. There’s so much about that story that I’m still learning how to situate and integrate in the narrative of my life and of my poems. There’s so much there that it resists a simple story.

Because you write in multiple genres and you write prose, when you’re trying to tell a story that’s so complicated, how do you navigate POV in poetry, and has your practice of prose informed that in any way?

When I was writing these poems, I was thinking a lot about speculative fiction. I was writing from the point of view of a phantastical monster. I was imagining myself as characters that I loved or creatures that were interesting to me.

I love having a regular practice of poetry. I love being someone who gets up and writes every day, even if it’s not good. I am at my best when I’m writing regularly. Because of that, it’s really easy for me to write quotidian poetry, like, here’s what I did today, here’s the meal that I ate, here is the drink that I drank.

There were moments with my songs where that really leaked in. There was less pressure on my songs to achieve some goal of craft. The most important thing is that they sound good, and the lyrics are kind of secondary, which is infuriating to me as a poet, but unfortunately is true. This is all to say that I am trying to push myself now in my poems to have the gravity of something larger than our everyday because ultimately those are the stories that I gravitate towards the most, like the ones that are surreal and speculative and weird. They’re the ones that seem to most articulate my real feelings about gender.

I was just reading this book, Sky Daddy by Kate Folk. The quick TL, DR; it’s about a woman who has romantic and sexual attraction to planes and she believes that if she is in a plane crash, it is the plane choosing her as its soulmate. It’s insane to me that she was able to turn that into a novel, but she did, and it was amazing. It articulated some of the truest loneliness I’ve ever read on the page. Just that feeling of, I’m so weird and unredeemable. And if I show my true self to the people around me, they cannot possibly love me, told through the lens of this lady who gets off on planes, which I thought was really compelling. The poems I’m most proud of achieve a true feeling through an outsized metaphor or piece of figurative language.

I must read that book. That kind of connects to my next question. I think what is at the heart of this chapbook is this innate desire to be seen and loved, not even accepted, just seen, like what you just said. What are some of the places or practices where you feel most seen and how do you translate that into your poetics?

I’m really working on this because I think that it’s really easy to write about your hurt and not about your gratitude and your safety and your love. When I’m looking at Phantasmagossip, I feel like the closest I’m able to achieve that is at the end of “Before I Left the Condoms Out,” there’s a scene with my friend Madison Olmsted where I was basically saying, “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this relationship, he ruined me,” and she said, “you are unruinable.” I wouldn’t always put a piece of dialogue someone said to me in a poem, but it felt like the book couldn’t breathe without it, it felt like such a revelation for me.

Most of the moments in my poems where I’m able to be kind to myself, it’s because someone else said it to me first or showed that compassion to me first. When I think of a Sara Mae poem, it is me starting with a difficult circumstance or being really hard on myself and then there’s a beam of light that breaks through the clouds and that comes from other people recognising something redeemable in me, which I’d like to change. I would like to write from a place of real gratitude and warmth and love for myself more often. Right now I’m trying to work on this book-length poem about spitting.

Tell me more about it.

I’m really excited about it. I’m really excited because I’ve been wanting to write something that reaches outward. A lot of my poems are about sexual and gendered violence and intimate pain, and this is a lot more about intimacy and art that I love. It’s also about labor rights, which I’m really excited about. I’m so glad I found a framework for something that it’s further reaching and also, I’m writing down the dark thought underneath the metaphor more often. I’m being more honest. In being able to write down some of those scariest thoughts, I’m also able to get to a kinder place with myself on the page. I’m working through some of the circumstances of my unemployment through this project, which I’m really excited about.

Art imitates life, et cetera. Do you think this approach feels different?

Yeah, what’s so slay about a book-length poem is that you don’t arrive at the page being, Oh, what will I write today? You don’t just wait until you find the topic. You’re kind of like, I have this general central tension that I’m writing around. There’s more gravity and momentum in the project. I am noticing that it’s really narrative and I’m self-conscious about that because when you write narrative poetry and you think, is this a poem? Or is this an essay? I can’t tell.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Right now what I’m trying to figure out is, is there room for changing some of the texture of the narrative voice and doing weird things with form or just changing the rhythm of it? Maybe messing with language a little bit. I need to go back and read feeld by Jos Charles because I read it when I was a lot younger and it would be a good project for me to read because it does a lot with the same language.

Would that be something that you would tackle in revision or are you somebody who revises as they go while writing?

I find revising in fiction a lot more fun than poetry. It’s a little hard to re-enter a poem. There’s a section I have been trying to work through that was so narrative that I thought, this is simply gonna have to get rewritten. I’m just gonna look at it as I go and see what it’ll be. There are some sections in it where I will have no choice but to revise because I want the lines to still be delicious.

A little bit of pivot here. I know how important colors are to you. You were very specific on how you wanted the graphics of the book to look like. There are a lot of color associations in the book, a lot of colors in the purple family, a lot of greens. And I think you could almost draw a map of the speaker’s life based on how they’re feeling color-wise. I want to hear more about it.

I got to pick the artist and the designer for the cover. When I was thinking about whose art I wanted on the cover, I had just read Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen and Sophy Hollington designed the cover, and it was beautiful and super colorful. It was both whimsical and deeply scary in the way that folk art can be. It felt really right for this book to have their art on it. There is this illustration of theirs that I had kept tucked away in the back of my mind for years and it was the “Devil” illustration. So we asked if we could use it and she said yes! My partner Alex Bruce did a bunch of potential cover options. At first he did a black background because the illustration, on its own, is this almost orangey-red, it’s a bright, bright red. And when he did the purple, he was just like, “This is a deeply Sara Mae color.” And you’re right, there’s so much purple in the book. Lavender was my favorite color forever. I’m trying to remember where there are colors in the context of the book.

I think “Streetlamp Mouth” has the most of them.

That feels right because it’s stained glass vibes. Green to me feels deeply fertile and exciting. Yellow is kind of whimsical. My mom loves the color blue. So I was thinking of her as blue, but also blue is obviously very sad. There’s the gendered implications, too. “Exquisite Corpse as Cootie Catcher” right next to it has pink and blue for the reveal party.

Also, when I look at the purple on the cover, I’m reminded of the Odorama scratch-n-sniff card that I referenced in “Bottled Bride.” The color palette of it was a bubble gum pink and purple-magenta. That’s a John Waters reference. When Alex showed me this one with the purple, it felt like a deeply me cover and I think contextualizes the red to be more me. I’m not necessarily a wear-a-red-dress-to-a-party kind of person. I’ll wear a hot outfit, but it has to be something weird. Purple is that kind of strangeness, and then the letters are as green as the fluorescent stars you put on your ceiling as a kid.

You’re right, Shlagha, I do write a lot about colors.

I love that the cover has little easter eggs. We talked a little bit about generational trauma but I want to ask about lineage. Who would you say are your artistic predecessors or literary lineage?

I would have never written a poem without the wonderful poet, Jess Rizkallah. There’s a joke she made one time that made it in the book where she said I had my season 3 bangs. So that’s in “Haunted Duplex with Blue-Lipped Hydrangea.” John Waters, Anne Carson, Tyehimba Jess, Douglas Kearney, Diane Seuss. Who else? Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I can’t believe I forgot to put in the acknowledgements, some of the famous writers that I was inspired by. I forgot to mention Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, who writes so much about desire and intimacy. I studied the lyrics of “Boyish” so much when I was in grad school. The book wouldn’t be what it is without her honest writing about intimacy.

Lastly, give us some writing prompts.

One would be, tell us a ghost story. Second, tell us a piece of gossip. Third, find a form in your everyday life and write in that form, like a recipe, a cootie catcher, something like that. And then the last one would be, describe home.

– Shlagha Borah