An interview with Isaac Pickell about his new chapbook, A thread in the thick rigging of night, available now from Dead Mall Press.

On October 13 of this year, we released a new chapbook by poet Isaac Pickell. It is twenty five pages long with a soft blue cover and black end paper, and you can order a copy here. About the poems beneath that cover, I had this to say:

A thread in the thick rigging of night moves through moral and political labyrinths. It follows the thread of individual personhood into the vast tangle of its historical and material determinations, addressing labor, race, law, war, genocide, and individual survival. This collection moves us from “another quiet little Sunday” and mundane realities of wage work, to the facts of the Middle Passage & Manifest Destiny, to capitalist imperialism, and to US support for genocide in Palestine—and then back again to the individual who feels these realities shadowing his daily life. And yes, struggling under such weight can unmoor you, shredding all certainties. Still, these poems move with such guidance, clarity, and rigor, that they help create the first-person plural that they long for—and they welcome you in.

Recently, Isaac and I discussed the book via email, and you can read the conversation below, as well as find two sample poems and author bio.

Plus, mark your calendar for an online reading with Isaac and DMP author Giulia Bencivenga on Wednesday, November 13th, at 8pm EST (5pm PST). More info to come!

Dead Mall Press: Hey, Isaac! Thanks for agreeing to this interview. For those who may be unfamiliar with your work, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your writing? 

Isaac Pickell: It’s hard to answer this question without leaning on the Official Bio, but I’ll do my best to avoid the boiler plate—I suppose I have to ask myself who I am and how I poem beyond the authorized copy. Identity is probably a good place to start, because it often plays an outsized role in the way I engage with and write about the world. While I grew up looking more-or-less like an average white kid, with (tightly curled but still) blonde hair and blue eyes, I was taught from a relatively young age the importance of recognizing, respecting, and internalizing the difference that defined my descent and the fortune of being born into a privileged skin.

Despite my Black mother and Jewish father, I don’t look particularly Black or Jewish, and this contrast between identity and appearance has shaped my performance of self, on and off the page. While of course my lived incongruity has helped guide the subject matters I write about and the angles from which I approach them, it’s also changed the style and tenor of my poetry. For one thing, I’ve always felt comfortable shouting, because I know I can always choose to disappear. But all the way on the other hand, I’m occasionally beset by a certain caution, or reserve, shrinking my poems lest I speak out of turn about something my bright, bright skin could never really know. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about these parallel patterns, but people seem to appreciate the combination of diffidence and directness.

I’m also a teacher, or adjunct university instructor to be precise, and have been teaching for the past ten years. I absolutely love teaching: it offers the opportunity to share and shape, sure, but also the chance to discover and grow together. I think the experience has changed the way I approach an audience. While I aspire toward practicing that mutual discovery and growth in my writing, working together with the reader, I know that sometimes I lean into traditional teacher mode and get a little didactic. This tends to happen when I really believe in something and can’t imagine giving the reader an out, letting them finish the poem without understanding exactly how I feel about a given issue.

In other words, I tend to wear my politics on my sleeve, or maybe somewhere more obvious than a sleeve: even in the classroom, I’m flagrantly open about my views (which I really shouldn’t do without tenure) about racial justice and economic justice and gender justice, about Palestinian liberation and decolonization, about my hopes for a global society instead of our maze of nationalisms, about my core political philosophy that you should care about other people. Perhaps needless to say, the same is true in my poetry: I rarely shy away from threading a political concern up through metaphor and into the realm of the explicit.

DMP: So how did this new chapbook, A thread in the thick rigging of night, come about? What was the process of writing it like? And can you tell us a bit about the title?

IP: Honestly, this chapbook came to life while I was busy trying to write other things, and for that it’s all the better. I’ve been working on a couple capital-p Projects to varying degrees of success, each with its own sort of preestablished constellation of themes that I aim at whenever I sit down to write. As I’d guess a few people reading this already know, I engage in a daily poetry practice where I try to draft something new or radically revise something old every day. For better or worse, compelling myself to write with or without the shock of inspiration means my aim often proves crooked, and I end up writing about something that misses every guiding star.

Most of these project-less poems are orphans—I always seem to have a lot of work sloshing around my hard drive in search of a place to go. But, for an extended spell in the middle of 2023, I kept coming back to writing about labor, both my own and that which I saw around me. I approached it with all appropriate distress for the current state of affairs, but never entirely severed the strands that tethered me, however tenuously, to a belief that this sorry situation would not be our destiny.

One of those labor poems tried to embody my orientation toward the issue by following a tabby cat, a working cat, as it slinked its way through the Detroit night between the barred shadows and surfaces of milk crates and sewer grates and busted parking lot gates (yes, there was some rhyme). The poem offered a touch of color under the streetlight, a thread of ginger hope within the bands of monochrome darkness, and so made sense under the title “A thread in the thick rigging of night,” a lonely filament amidst dim and suffocating ropes.

That title proved to be better than the rest of the poem and outlived it, and as more themes made their way into the chapbook later in the year, the name kept fitting. A thread still follows that tabby through the gloom, keeping an eye out for hope.

DMP: Your full-length collection, It’s not over once you figure it out, was released in 2023 with Black Ocean. Do you see them in conversation in any way? And how would you describe that conversation if it exists?

IP: It’s not over is much older writing, with poems dating as far back as 2017, though much of the work was written during the peak of the pandemic. A lot has changed over the intervening years, not least of all myself and my writing. One thing that highlights my full-length collection is an instinct to try to contend with the whole world in nearly every poem and splay out a theory-of-the-case for every subject. Everything felt so damn connected, enmeshed as we were together in these connected global calamities, that writing small poems felt dishonest, or unjust. Even the collection’s more atmospheric or aesthetic pieces set out to be rapt by every beauty, to uncover every ugliness. But I feel smaller now, and at peace with that, and my poems feel smaller, too; today, I’m more capable of writing with a magnifying glass rather than a telescope.

Of course, a lot hasn’t changed since 2017, and I’m still mulling and milling many of the same subjects, still trying to wrap my head around them, and still sharing my best efforts as poetry. To that end, there are a couple wide-ranging poems in this chapbook that try to tackle big swaths of our imbricated world over the course of just a page or two. So that reflex isn’t entirely gone, and people who’ve read my full-length will hear some echoes. But echoes aren’t quite a conversation, are they. What’s closer to a dialogue between the two works is how the poems in A thread often feel like real-world applications of the theoretical treatises I was writing back then. I really hope that conversation resonates for people who have read It’s not over, that they’re able to watch me process its big, big ideas through the molecular realities in which we actually live.  

DMP: Who are some of the poets whose work has been important to you? What do you think they have given your own work?

IP: I always think of this question as existing in three possible registers. First, it can be an opportunity to call out some classic or contemporary greats who have a sterling approval rating across the poetry community to show that you, the poet, understand the way of the [poetry] world and, you know, have read what needs to be read to legitimate your craft as having an appropriate lineage. For me, that list probably starts with Danez Smith, who’s given me the permission structure and the language to be deadly serious and buoyant at the same time. Then there’s Detroit’s own Tyehimba Jess, whose absolute magic tricks remind me a poem can never be too ambitious. And how about Dawn Lundy Martin, who helps me bring tenderness to the cutting edge of the knife, or Natalie Diaz, who’s always willing to all-the-way drown in a metaphor.

Next comes a chance to shout out some slightly lesser-known poets you’ve read recently to show your work has some color and freshness and surprise. Here’s where I get to mention Kevin Latimer’s joyful renditions of dreadful things and the way his work makes me believe again in the cudgel of repetition, or Basie Allen’s insistence on using the page as a controlled canvas where words can twist and sway. I’d also like to cite Inger Christensen, who’s old and gone but new to me, and proves that nothing’s a non-sequitur so long as you weave the right threads.

Finally, you can use the question towards what is, at least for me, it’s most honest ends: by talking about your friends. It’s said that poetry is a conversation, right? Well, as much as I’d love to be, I’m not in any dialogue with Danez, though I did meet them once at AWP and tried my very best (and failed) not to act like a fan. But I am in conversation with my poetry friends and their work, and I think it gives my writing more than any great book by a stranger ever could. So: thanks to Joe Hall for helping me never compromise when it comes to politics and Danika Stegeman for helping me never compromise when it comes to loveliness, thanks to Mya Matteo Alexice and Stephanie Cawley for always writing with enough gall to make me believe in my own moxie, and a special thanks to Vincent Perrone, who always seems to be right where I need him to be and reminds me that narrative isn’t dead.

DMP: 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?

IP: The book says a lot about a lot of things, commenting on Palestine, on labor and race, on silence and speech. From all of that, I hope readers take away a deeper connection to these issues and orientations through the work’s lyric pieces and a new commitment to them through my more polemic poems. At the very least, maybe by the time they finish the book they’ll have some useful messaging on some important subjects, and will feel like they have a new comrade in me—please, if you finish the book and want to continue the conversations it’s having, do reach out at isaacpickell@gmail.com.

But I really appreciate your rephrase about energy and vision. I try to ask my students similar questions, urging them to move beyond analyzing what a text says to uncover what it does, how it leaves a reader strained or changed or galvanized, how it can infuse a reader with new sight. Unfortunately, I’m struggling to answer that question about my own work without feeling boastful. Energy, vision…

I want the world of its readers to harness the energy of buoyancy and burden bouncing off each other under the canopy of the same hot air balloon. From the spark of that collision, I want the world of its readers to look a little more absurd than it did before, because the cruelty of our present is nothing if not absurd. From the muddle of that absurdity, I want readers to see that it’s possible to topple a clown, even ones that are so entrenched it’s hard to catch a glimpse around them to the other side. From that glimpse, I want readers to recognize that what it will take to take them down is caring about other people, because reader, I think that’s what it takes.

Two sample poems from A thread in the thick rigging of night:

Author Bio:

Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet, PhD candidate, and adjunct instructor in Detroit. A Cave Canem Fellow, Isaac is a graduate of Miami University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. He is the author of two previous works of poetry, the full-length collection It’s not over once you figure it out (Black Ocean, 2023) and the chapbook everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). You can find him at isaacpickell.com.