untitled sugar poem (Emerging Writer's Contest Winner: POETRY)
In poetry, our winner is Giovannai Rosa, for their poem “untitled sugar poem.”
Of the poem, poetry judge Chen Chen says, “I love it when a poem makes me gasp because of its language and its turns—and this one made me gasp at multiple points. Then, rereading it and realizing: of course a poem thinking about sugar is a poem that thinks about labor as well as family and ancestors, bodies and land, history and photosynthesis. The costs of sweetness are steep; the poem is steeped in beauty and brutality, refusing to compromise on how it confronts them both.”
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? Or, when did you first call yourself a writer?
I have warm, early memories of being young, listening to the women of my family gathered in a room passing stories, gossiping, and remembering. That’s where I enter, that’s the origin—the oral tradition. Since childhood, I’ve always been making something, telling some story, and that has morphed through the years across mediums.
Describe your writing process. What works for you as a writer? What do you find challenging, or even difficult, about writing?
I’m led by feeling and the sound of language. Everything else is time. Yet I’m challenged by time and money—I work in a retail store/optometrist office all day, so I’m squeezing in writing whenever I can: in the mornings, scribbling during shifts, on lunch breaks, and on my days off while trying to unwind from the relentlessness of working for an hourly wage to stay afloat. In addition, I’m challenged by desire, impatience, and the self.
What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before writing?
It depends on what I’m working on, but it’s a collage of looking inward and outward, as well as locating the sources for what I want to know—books, maps, articles, photos, films, memories, phone calls, etc.
Who are you reading now? What writers or works have most influenced your writing?
I’m making my way through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss as well as Safia Elhillo’s Girls That Never Die. Some influences: Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Louise Erdrich, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pedro Pietri, Justin Torres, Safia Elhillo, Tommy Orange, Elaine Castillo, Terese Marie Mailhot, Edwidge Danticat, Solmaz Sharif, Natasha Trethewey, Octavia Butler, Kiese Laymon, James Baldwin, Arundhati Roy, Han Kang, Jacqueline Woodson, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Teo Castellanos, Brittany Howard, Solange, Frank Ocean, Barry Jenkins, and Juan Sánchez.
What inspired “untitled sugar poem”? What works of writers would you say directly informed this poem?
This is part of a sugar suite. I’ve been thinking about sugar, how it’s made from the sun, the magic of that, and the memories, pleasures, and horrors that stem from its existence. I looked at a map of crops America had prioritized for profit in Puerto Rico (like the Spanish empire before them): coffee, tobacco, and—sugarcane. A question: what does sugar mean to Puerto Rico across time and bodies? I rewatched a video on Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby and went through this accompanying portfolio from Creative Time Reports on sugar that has a nasty poem by Tracy K. Smith (“Photo of Sugar Cane Plantation Workers, Jamaica, 1891”) and an illuminating essay by Edwidge Danticat (“The Price of Sugar,” which informed the second line of this poem). In construction, I was pulled to the precision of space and language employed by Lucille Clifton and Yusef Komunyakaa, wanting to meld that with my own ideas of form. The rhythm came to me first. I wanted to create something outside of linear time, something that shifted and switched in order to capture the ecstatic and chaotic realities of sugar—labor, torture, sweetness, pleasure, memory, consumption, health, botany, slavery, history, time, and the ecological relationship developed between the land, the flora, and the people forced, one way or another, to brutally harvest. It’s all connected.
What’s the most valuable piece of writing advice you’ve received?
The most recent thing that was told to me: make sure each line is doing what you want it to be doing; if it’s not, get it to; if you can’t, get rid of it.
What risks do you take with your writing that have paid off?
Stepping back when the work sounds like nothing I expected. That’s how I know it’s coming from a true place, because it doesn’t sound like anything else or what I thought I wanted.
Do you have any advice for new or aspiring writers?
Octavia Butler told us to persevere. Don’t give up. Shoot your shot. While it feels purposeless in the face of hot rejection, you learn valuable things putting together applications for workshops, residencies, fellowships; preparing work for contests, writing statements of purpose; and being forced to put your work and yourself as an artist into words. Don’t get caught up trying to write like your favorite writers; be informed and listen. Read read read. Revise revise revise. Don’t be afraid to give yourself praise. Confidence is essential. Do more things that have nothing to do with writing, reading, or stories. Write from the body, with sound, and lean into the risk.
What projects are you working on now? Where is your writing headed?
I’m working on my first poetry collection that incorporates visual and herbarium work. There’s also this polyphonic novel in the light of Paradise and There, There following characters stuck in loops beneath time and history. With my writing, I’m working to capture this filmic quality of language, almost like the color and grain of a beautiful film. I’m working on making something that will last beyond me. There is also this kind of energy of when western science was trying to understand the core of the planet, how it was understood not by sight but feeling, measuring seismic waves to get something like a map and image of the heart of the Earth. That’s what it feels like I’m doing, getting to the core, to the heat moving everything.
time is ugly
we still eat sugar
in similar ways
with dim holes in my teeth
i still stuff my face
with something gold
good and sweet
to make me
glow for an hour
i found my grandmother
with candy wrappers
at her feet
drowned
in her cushions
her round jaw
rising and falling
ventriloquist behind her
with heavy feet
sinking to the carpet
old island hunger
and too much history
i watched a documentary on sugar
and they didn’t mention slavery once
how convenient
the beginning
always holding
their hunger
too easy to see
what they would kill for
alter time for
the gruesome
stalks cutting
bodies and bloodlines
people too alive
afloat in the sea of fallen
sugarcane
sweet ruin
eating them
like they were teeth
puerto rico sugarland
this is not the past
this is a plan
to plant the cane
you divide the stalk
and feed them to the soil
the same
duplicated body
propagating
summoning the suffering
somebody cut in half
to move the light
across my heads
to move the light
the cells open
pushing a mouthful
of daylight
deep into the old machine
of photosynthesis
eating the light
to make the sugar
i eat the past
to make my body
i can only be
the invisible
people standing
in my blood
maybe a bit more