NPR Best Books of 2020:

This is a searing elegy for a mother who died after years of illness that held her family in its thrall. With astonishing frankness and detail, Griffiths anticipates, experiences, reexperiences and works to meaningfully incorporate her mother’s memory and death into the everyday fabric of life. This grief goes far beyond the mourner’s typical self-questioning (“Could I have ever saved her?”) into more complex realms of inheritance: “I remember/ her voice like a thorn I never want/ to pull out of my heart.” It’s one of the most empathic and transcendent books of poetry in years.

— Craig Morgan Teicher, poet and critic

Opal Moore:

Seeing the Body, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ new and highly acclaimed collection of poems, brings together her mediums— poetry and the visual art of photography. One confronts poetry, in this volume, as the labor of seeing as much as the work of words. Seeing the Black body has often been presented as social work, work for the maintenance of public spaces—work that we must do to navigate historical divisions of race, class and gender. Griffiths alerts us early on that the “seeing” in this collection issues from the interior. As a “symptom of grief”, the work of confronting herself in all her guises, avoidances and confrontations, ensues. This work of seeing is aided by the eyes of the artist— the poet; however, she is led by grief brought on by the loss of her mother. Griffiths demands a seeing of the self and of the greater world in which she is “both visualized and invisible”. The self, after all, is a landscape. But there is also journey here, from grief to praise song to laughter to joy. Like the salt and the sugar of the Blues, Griffiths’ joy unfolds, enfolds.

Read Full Interview: https://mosaicmagazine.org/rachel-eliza-griffiths-interview/

“Good Deeds” selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for New York Times Magazine (October 2020):

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s profoundly moving “Seeing the Body” is a journey of deepest attention and care. A collection dedicated to her mother, risen from infinite tenderness examining her mother’s life and death, these poems remind us again how impossible certain departures or absences feel. There is always more to know. Comfort comes through closest attention. Gone ones are still here in every relic of memory, every changed thought. “The world insists…” but what do we do with the “everything else” that remains? Some portion of us departs with our beloved ones, but more of us continues to contain them.

“Over recent years, I’ve sifted through The Strand’s new energy—Albert Einstein socks, infinite totes, and author finger puppets—while considering my personal definitions of want and need. Bookstores are certainly part of my need. They are countries of intimacies. They are ruins, resistances, neighborhoods, and mythologies long gone yet unforgotten. They are friends, enemies, affairs, and scandals. They are mysterious havens, ever endangered alephs in our imaginations.”

Full link: https://kenyonreview.org/books-harbors/griffiths-the-strand/

London: When did you begin writing poetry, and do you write with ease? Do you revise often? Ever experience dry spells?

Griffiths: “Since I was a small child, I’ve always been a visual artist and poet. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be—a creator, a maker, a jazz singer, or a kind of inventor. I thought that writing poetry was as close as I might ever be to becoming an astronaut. Yes, I revise frequently and fervently across the mediums I use. It’s an inseparable organ of discovery in my process. I like to practice, to experiment. I don’t mind “failing” because I know even when I miss what I thought I was after there will be something else that will shine, wink, and announce itself. Sometimes it becomes the intention I was after the whole time. I don’t have dry spells.”

Read Full Interview: https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2020/10/06/poet-and-photographer/

Five Women Poets on Writing the Body | by Emily Sernaker

Rachel Eliza speaks about this poem: “Another Age” is an anthem, a praise-song to our imperfect selves. I wanted to put the sad things inside of me on notice. Announcing my wounds instead of denying, hiding, or waiting for someone else to save me, felt possible because I had gone through such a difficult journey of grief after my mother’s death. Embracing things that had hurt me in the past, and would affect the wellbeing of any possible future, was an important sequence of insistence that my life, no matter how flawed, matters.

Rachel Eliza on writing the whole self: “…People can feel uncomfortable when they see that you love yourself. People will show you who they really are when they see you are going to fight for your right to be a whole person.”

Seeing the Body was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in June, after the pandemic drove a retreat into interior spaces. Griffiths herself dealt with Covid-19 in late winter, and, until recently, has remained at home. Her original warm-weather plans included a three-week residency in Italy and an August visit to Provincetown, where she has an enduring connection to the artistic community. The book’s virtual launch was presented by New York City’s Center for Fiction. Other recent virtual readings paired Griffiths with such Fine Arts Work Center colleagues as the poets Marie Howe, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Nick Flynn.

Griffiths discovered Provincetown two decades ago, around the time she was completing a master’s in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. The Fine Arts Work Center awarded her several summer scholarships to study fiction and poetry. “I had never been to the Cape,” she says. “The town and the work center welcomed me. I felt like I was home. The energy, the gardens, the smell of the water, the art galleries, the inclusivity of queer and gay and trans and lesbian individuals, all of that was really beautiful to me. I was in my 20s and had found my place, where I could be all of my different selves.”

Griffiths has since returned to FAWC as an instructor. Her mixed-media workshops combine, like Seeing the Body, writing and image-making. Teaching or not, Griffiths often returns to Provincetown, especially enjoying winter’s calmer pace.

About finding her reading voice, she says, “In the beginning, it was, ‘This is how I use my body to read my work: I don’t want to overthink it.’ I like to read aloud. The feeling of sharing, in that way, is a very old thing in me. It is as though I am meeting the language again.”

Guernica: Is it common for you to revise like this? To cut everything but the end?

Rachel Eliza Griffiths: I’m a big fan of radical revisions. Maybe being a visual artist informs my process in that way. I often write first drafts on newsprint or a piece of vellum, simply because I don’t want to look at them as being precious. I don’t want to get lost in a courtship with the language.

Having said that, this poem’s revision is more radical than most for me. I cut twenty-one whole lines! But it had to happen. It was only towards the end of the poem where I felt like, “This is it. This is my rage. This is the real fire.”

Read full interview here: https://www.guernicamag.com/back-draft-rachel-eliza-griffiths/