Who were you thinking of when you wrote this collection?
I was certainly thinking of the nameless horrors of the previous presidential administration. That was something that made me feel terrifically lonesome because it seemed our nation had lost the recipe to raise good leaders. I was also thinking personally of friends and friendships I’d lost over the years, as much as the people who’d been lost to police violence.
What was your experience of writing such intensely emotional poems?
I felt excited reading or hearing poems [by others] that were honest and genuine. It was as if the writers trusted me with their story. That trust encouraged me to tell my own truth, and it felt good doing it even if the truth wasn’t particularly pretty. It felt good to me to pour my heart completely empty over the page and then release it. I appreciate that poetry supports any weight, every story, every emotion. Poems can hit like hammers as much as kisses, and I didn’t just want to write about flowers and my grandmother.
What are your personal antidotes for loneliness or isolation?
Get out of your comfort zone and speak your truth. Someone always hears you, someone’s always ready to respond with love. It may take a while to get a ping back, but the antidote is out there.•
MARTIAN: THE SAINT OF LONELINESS, By James Cagney
NOMADIC PRESS • SEPTEMBER 2022 • 160 PAGES • $20 PAPERBACK
James Cagney’s most recent poetry collection decries violence against Black people in the United States and delivers searing cultural criticism, hitting themes of guns, birth, death, and intimacy. Cagney employs the metaphor of the martian, among others, to depict the loneliness and otherworldliness of the Black experience in America, but his tone is often satirical, as if daring readers to think more deeply.
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
