POWER IN BEING PREY
An interview with Ellen Boyette about her new book, Local Virgin of Impression, available now from Dead Mall Press.
On September 19th, Dead Mall released Ellen Boyette’s first full-length collection of poems, Local Virgin of Impression. It’s already shipping, and my thanks to those who’ve already picked up a copy. Now, we’re happy to announce that we will be donating 25% of each sale to Youth Outright, an organization near Ellen’s hometown that offers support and resources for queer and trans youth (ages 11-24). So pick up a copy of a great book of poems, and help support a great cause.
Recently, Ellen and I discussed the book via email, and you can read the conversation below, as well as find a sample poem and author bio. I hope you find our conversation as enjoyable and insightful as I did.
Dead Mall Press: Hey, Ellen! Thanks for agreeing to this interview. For those who may be unfamiliar with you and your work, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your path as a writer?
Ellen Boyette: Hello! Yes, I would love to. I am a poet and essayist and recent divorcee of doctoral studies. I have kept a diary nearly every day of my life since age five, and currently every day of my life lives under my bed in large airtight containers. I had kind of a protracted childhood, and by childhood I mean perceived helplessness, because I grew up in an evangelical cult of sorts, got out, and then studied poetry formally until I was 30 without any kind of plan. I mention this because I think a lot of my work lives in a weird space of frailty and rage. Like knowing how you’re supposed to say a prayer but refusing to do so correctly.
DMP: This new book has such an evocative title: Local Virgin of Impression. I know the virgin concept comes (at least in part) from a passage in the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins (which shows up as a kind of epigraph on the back cover). But can you tell us a bit about how you arrived at this title?
EB: The title itself is taken from a line in Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star and mashed with those late night ads for phone sex in the 90s and early 2000s (up this late? young babe next door dying to whisper, call 1-800....). Lispector’s line reads, “When you pay attention spontaneously, and virgin of impressions, when you pay attention the face says almost everything.” Hume’s writing on ‘impression’ has also been useful to me in understanding what this title could mean.
Virginity is obviously nothing, but here I grappled with it really earnestly and seriously. I see it as the “not-thing” awaiting to be undone. And once it is, then you’re just everybody else. Virginity, for a young girl, is the saddest but most remarkable gift: it’s the only afforded opportunity to be special, really special. It’s the only kind of power in being prey. But, both in holding it tight and giving it away, the virgin feels defective. The virgin grieves purity AND experience, grieves the having and the not. The virgin’s power is the virgin’s punishment.
In terms of art, virginity, to me, is the poem inside your head, and the “loss” of it is the poem you put on the page. Both freedoms and both bindings. It’s funny to think of the poem not as a creation, but a loss or the thing to be taken from the mind.
DMP: In 2024, Secret Restaurant Press released a collection of yours called Nitrous or My Velvet Knife (another amazing title!). How do you see these two collections in relationship? What binds them and what presses them apart?
EB: Thank you! I think it’s weird that poems have titles, but I love that books have titles (even if it’s out of searchable necessity). I try to name my books what they would name themselves, so it’s a little bit of poor telepathy. Poem titles I mostly just have fun with them.
There are just a couple poems that overlap between Nitrous and Local Virgin. I think of Nitrous in some ways as more playful and carnivalesque than Local Virgin— the voice of Nitrous is sort of Local Virgin’s “truest” hallucination.
To me, Local Virgin feels seriously like it is incubating and percolating its speech, trying to understand the way it speaks as it moves through itself—hence the incessant corrections and redactions.
If the poem is a way for a person to make something really complicated more transmittable in a concentrated way, then I would say most of the poems in this book aren’t poems. Also, many of the poems are just full pages of prose blocks. And like… of course that doesn’t mean they are poems. But, unlike Nitrous or My Velvet Knife, the poems in this book are more piercing and precise in their focus as well as more defiant on the page in terms of “what does a poem look like”.
DMP: Speaking of what poems look like, I always like to ask what is one of your favorite poems in the book and why? How do you see it relating to the rest of the book?
EB: I’ll talk for a moment about the prose poem, “Whoso Lists”. It is, in my own opaque and surreal way, the most obviously incriminating poem I have ever written against a real person living in this world. I was genuinely terrified while writing it, afraid that it would ever exist in the world and hurt the way I was hurt. But it feels like the most power I’ve ever had to have it in my first book. I have no interest in explaining an essentially private trauma, but the poem directly confronts (in its small container) what the book tiptoes around: virginity as a concept in patriarchal language is always “taken” or “lost”—not “given” or “set free”.
To be a virgin of impression then, is, to me, a scary premonition: the inevitability of having the ‘force and vivacity of my perception’ violently ripped from me. (I agree with Hume’s definition of impression).
The most confident line in this whole book lives in that poem. It says, “Take it all, I’ll keep imagination.” When everything else has the potential to be stripped from me, I dare you to do it—I will always have imagination. And that’s enough, it’s more than enough. I am grateful.
DMP: So who are some of the poets whose work has been important to you? What do you think they have given your own work?
EB: I read some of the poems from this book at a literary festival in my hometown of Asheville, NC and my mom (a high school English teacher) heard me read for the first time in over a decade. Afterwards, she said, “You still sound like Plath to me, I’m glad you haven’t lost that.” It was a huge compliment, though I don’t know how true it is now. Plath was fundamental for me as a young girl, until at a summer program I was shown both Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen– which was absolutely pivotal for me. It totally opened my eyes and ears.
In undergrad I was kind of pigeonholed into studying the mid 20th century formalists until I transferred schools, but much of that cadence is weirdly underneath my distinctly not-that style (to quote the poet Sara Nicholson: “me I think in iambs, and you, your face, it has to burn”).
But the poets that have been crucial to me have been Robyn Schiff, Joyelle McSweeney, Thalia Field, Jessica Laser, Bhanu Kapil, Hart Crane, Robert Creeley, Will Alexander, Asiya Wadud, and Aase Berg. Oh wait—and that one recording of Jorie Graham reading “Underneath (13).” I think I cried the first time I heard that, I had never heard of Jorie Graham at all before that moment. It felt like a moment of permission to depart from my current mode. All of these poets have really given me permission to do something else, something I didn’t know I was “allowed” to do.
DMP: Lastly, I’d like to ask about what you hope readers take away from reading this book—or, what kind of energy and/or vision do you hope it puts into the world of its readers?
EB: I have no hope at all for what readers take from it! The writing of the poems is what I live for. I just let them move through me—they are “me” but they aren’t “mine”. Maybe readers will know me in a way they couldn’t before—both strangers and those most intimate. And for writers reading it, I would love someday for my work to give others permission to try something they thought wasn’t “allowed” in a poem. You don’t need permission, none of us do. But it has been useful to me at every stage of my writing life.
Ellen Boyette is a poet and essayist whose work is interested in the occult, the internet, and objects real or imagined. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of two chapbooks, NITROUS OR MY VELVET KNIFE (Secret Restaurant Press, 2024) and CUFFING SEASON (The Creative Writing Department, 2023). Her work can be found in Poetry Daily, poets.org, The Columbia Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Bennington Review, Prelude, and elsewhere.
