Christine Poreba's book, Rough Knowledge, won the 2014 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Subtropics, The Southern Review, and The Sun Magazine, and anthologies, among them most recently All We Can Hold: a collection of poems on motherhood.  She lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and their young son.


I’m taken with your use of memory and history in these poems. For instance, the lines at the end of “Transposition” which read: “Like the scent of smoke / transporting the mind back to a house in Southern France, / then a summer in Rhode Island at an Abbey school, / monks standing at a cookout in their robes over the flames. Places rise in us, small fires at daylight.” Why do you think you look to these places, or “small fires” for inspiration in your poems?

I’m not sure why, but I know I’ve always tended toward a narrative style and often start with freewrites or imitations of poems I admire, which ends up leading to associations of past and present. That kind of unexpected journey through time is one of the things I most love about writing poems, how one recent experience or thought leads to another memory or image. In this poem’s case, the experience of my son’s newfound mobility was the spark. His unpredictable movements connected me to the image of the egret flying off which got me thinking about how the mind does a similar kind of jagged motion through time.


Since I’ve read your first book, Rough Knowledge, (which I loved, by the way), I’m wondering about the presence of family in your work. Is it because you want to honor your roots, or a way to understand yourself? How important are these relationships to you as a poet, and, more critically perhaps, how do you juggle the many roles and monikers: daughter, wife, and especially, mother?

Thank you. In Rough Knowledge, I was focused on several then/now pairings, like the move from single to married self, from living in New York to living in Florida, from old house to a newly renovated one, from childhood to adulthood. So in that case I think the presence of family functioned more as a way of understanding myself. In my second book manuscript, though, (which is where these poems are from), I think the presence of family is equally about honoring my roots and understanding myself in a new context. Becoming a mother offered me a lot to explore in terms of a changed self in an individual way, but also brought me more to a communal context and history of motherhood. Also my grandmother, who was my last living grandparent, died when my son was one-year-old. So incorporating some of my parents’ and grandparents’ stories became both a way to honor them and a way to understand this family history I had added a new member to.


Your poem “What Will Stay” is an ekphrastic poem that responds to an old photograph. The photograph opens a window onto the past, both an imagined and an actual past. Can you tell us about the process of how this photo sparked this poem?

I just remember looking at the picture in the book (this was when I started reading a lot about New York City history) and realizing exactly what block it was on. The combination of that realization and the woman being mid-step along with the quotation about the present leaving its traces made the experience of looking at the photograph feel like momentary time travel. The poem sat for a while without a real ending until I read Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us, which is where the images in the last stanza came from.


Your first book won the 2014 Philip Levine Prize and was published by Anhinga Press in 2016. What were you doing when you got the good news?

Tearing up a rotisserie chicken, actually! I had just gotten my son to bed and the dog was barking at the chicken when my phone rang. I saw that it was a phone number in Fresno, California and I panicked and stood for a second trying to figure out if I could wash my hands in time to answer it. I got excited thinking maybe they were calling to tell me I was a finalist (I had been notified that I was a semi-finalist which meant my manuscript was going to the judge about a month earlier). The voice message just said to call her back, so I did just about ten minutes later and when she told me I’d won I actually blurted out, “Are you sure?”, thinking she must have made some mistake. After sending out some version of it for five years, I guess it was hard for me to take it in.


What are your plans for your next poetry collection?

So during those five years, I was writing poems for a second book manuscript, which I recently finished. It examines new lands and languages and incorporates poems about my son as an infant and toddler, new motherhood, my grandparents, Polish immigrants to New York in the 1930s, and stories from my students of English as a Second Language. The title is taken from that last line of “Transposition:” Fires At Daylight.


What is your favorite food?

Freshly baked bread in pretty much any form and flavor.