CRITICAL HATERS GALVANIZED BY LOVE
An interview with stevie redwood about their new chapbook, INTIFADA, available now for pre-order
Written during the first four months of Al-Aqsa Flood, stevie redwoods’ Intifada responds from afar to Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine. Dedicated to the Palestinian resistance and to militants everywhere, Intifada is written in this spirit while also being acutely sensitive to the political limitations of poetry. With intelligence and ire, the poems fight against their own linguistic confines to forge solidarities, confront hypocrisies in the imperial core, and denounce the forces of colonialism, zionism, and liberalism. Intifada is a living mirror held up against a regime of death and a statement of love for the Palestinian people and their resistance.
The press is accepting pre-orders for Intifada now, and the book will ship on March 18th. Also, 75% of all earnings from this book will be donated to Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. This is only possible because of stevie’s generous decision to waive all income from the book’s sales.
Recently, stevie and I discussed the book via email, and you can read the conversation below.
Dead Mall Press: Thanks for doing this interview, stevie! Your book responds to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and it is passionately committed to Palestinian resistance and liberation. You wrote it during the first 120 days following October 7th, and I wonder if you can discuss what that process was like. How did these poems begin to emerge?
stevie redwood: Oh man, writing it has really been a compulsion. Also a ritual in many senses of the word. The reality is that I’ve just desperately needed a way & a place to talk & rage & scream, separate from “organizing” spaces or doing-shit spaces or in-the-streets spaces, about this shit—about living in the so-called US in a very fucking fascist time at the profit-driven end of the world during the momentous Al-Aqsa Flood & the annihilatory escalation of the escalation of the escalation of the genocidal war on the existence of Palestine & Palestinians. Because I am so completely unmoored by unebbing grief & searing fury about Palestine & about empire & capitalism & necropolitics & the iron handshake between fascism & liberal democracy, & about the wildly discordant realities of human capacities for unfathomable beauty & extraordinary care & incalculable atrocity & insatiable rapacious libidinal violence & cruelty. It’s all everywhere, & yet it does not cease to pummel me & everyone I love in ways that are different & the same. It’s flummoxing. It’s obliterating. & when I try to understand or reconcile or even just glance at it without externalizing it, I fucking break.
DMP: Reading these poems, that obliterating sensation is very palpable: having the sense that “it’s all everywhere” and not knowing how to handle it. And a source of the poems’ power seems to be this fight against being crushed emotionally under the day-by-day (hour-by-hour?) awareness of events.
sr: In some ways it feels patently ridiculous to talk now about what’s been happening in & to Palestine since October 7th as though it hasn’t been happening for 75 years (& really since 1917). & / but / also—the way Al-Aqsa Flood has catapulted the realities of the longstanding genocide of Palestinians by the violent fascist colonizing entity into the global limelight has been total.
So like … I guess this book came about because of all those things plus that I live in the Bay Area & no, I cannot afford to live alone—I have roommates in a flat in an apartment building in a gentrifying area near a cop shop. I have single-pane windows & many neighbors. This makes daily unbridled morning-to-night screaming kind of a threatening activity. If I were not at the very least able to externalize my thought-screams loudly & freely onto a page, I would very fucking quickly lose the remnants of what maybe barely passes for my mind.
Writing these poems has been, on one hand, a means of thinking & feeling into my interiority during these excruciating months. I have needed a way to find & yank on & get angry at & be in conversation with the questions that my incredibly overwhelming feelings have masqueraded as answers to. On the other hand, writing these poems has been a deeply social process in the ways that writing can be: through that weird chaotic alchemizing excretory process that happens when you try to synthesize or process or integrate all the dynamic things you’re learning & experiencing & doing with other people by metabolizing them & then spitting (/ shitting?) something out. & then the sharing of that something with other people is a different form or stage or plane of sociality, or at least it is for me.
DMP: This question may feel a bit odd, given the context, but what is one of your favorite poems in the book and why? Also, how do you see it relating to the other poems here?
sr: Hmm. I’m bad with favorites & bad with liking my own writing! But what I will say is that I’m glad to have the J*dith B*tler poem in there, if for no other reason than that it is extremely ridiculous & maybe brings some levity to what is otherwise a book full of infinite grief & infinite rage. Appropriate feelings for the world we live in, but they make for an intense 30+ pages. Plus I am like 70% a Very Serious Person & ~30% an absolute clown goober ditz. There had to be at least one ditzy poem in there.
DMP: More broadly, who are some of the poets whose work has been important to you? What do you think they have given your own work?
sr: This is probably trite, but honestly a lot of the writing that’s been important to me comes from friends. It’s important to me to read my friends & people I’m in community with, whether they’re “poets” or “writers” or not. The tangibility, the proximity, the three-dimensionality, the life that comes from reading things written by people I can hear or touch—these things make a big difference to me. & it isn’t just about the writing—that knowing or loving the writer gives life to the writing—it’s also that knowing & reading the writing of loved ones gives life to me. It’s that getting to know them & parts of myself through their writing & their ways of meeting the world gives life & dynamism to our relationships with each other & everything else, to what’s possible between & among & beyond us.
Outside of / in addition to that: Diane di Prima has made it possible for me not to turn away from poetry. Ross Gay has helped me try harder to search for what makes life among the ruins. My dear friend Wendy Trevino has been incredibly important to me—as a poet, yes, & also as a friend & comrade, & for the ways those things are not separable for her or for me. & to be very clear, I don’t mean that in the “poetry is revolutionary” sorta way. On the contrary: what I mean is that being interested not only in what poetry can do but in attending to what poetry cannot do has been absolutely critical, both to my ability to continue to write & to my ability to continue to do things outside of writing, alone & with other people.
DMP: Lastly, what do you hope that readers take away from reading this book? What kind of energy and/or vision do you hope it puts into the world of its readers?
sr: Part of what I hope for in sharing writing is that this sharing will function as invitation. Into what & where will depend on who’s reading, which is part of what’s cool. At the same time, it’s important to me that any invitation I make is clear in where it will not go; that it both finds & alienates certain people. If I bother to share things I have written, then if those things are not pissing off the right (wrong) people, I am absolutely failing at something & I have not done my job.
On that note—I hope that people are provoked! Into any of infinite forms of movement, as long as those movements, however magnificent or minute, are away from recuperation & toward liberation. I hope people take away at least as many questions as they came in with, tho perhaps different ones, & also maybe more questions than “answers.”
To get specific for a second: there are kind of a bunch of poems in there about how much condemning of Hamas (& what Hamas is often metonymic for) the people in Palestine do *not* do. Ultimately, I don’t think I write to convince people of things, but I do hope that every time someone publicly says like, “no but I condemn your mom” or “hmmm looks like resistance isn’t futile actually,” another liberal gets (their screams) sucked into a void.
I also hope, so much, that people come away from reading this book with their critical lenses & sensibilities sharpened, or at least not dulled. I just believe that staying curious & critical—being a hater with a lover’s streak, basically—is gonna take “us” in generative directions. Conviction—& steadfastness—can be deeply mobilizing & useful; certainty can be a drag. I’m recruiting! Join the ranks of curious lovers motivated by hate! Of critical haters galvanized by love! It’s miserable! We need you! Come on!
stevie redwood is a disabled toisanese jewish neuroinsurgent introvert homotrash littledreamer bigmouth bitch living & dying in frisco. they’re unimpressed by scene queers, artifice, & pacifism. they’re fond of shittalk, porchsitting, leaflitter, & riffraff. they dream a different end of the world
