What was the first poem you wrote for this pamphlet? How did it set the tone for the rest?

Interestingly, I'm not sure I can remember. It may have been 'On surrender'. A chunk of these poems were written in the beginning phases of my writing journey, where I became preoccupied with ideas of desire and control, and I think this poem does set out those themes quite neatly. I think that the word 'surrender' is key to the poem and to the pamphlet as a whole. Surrender in this context is a conscious act, and one that requires consideration of what is at stake, and for whom. In a submissive situation, we might think that the power resides with the dominant person, but you could argue that the person who is choosing to submit is really in control, because that submission can be withdrawn at any moment and the whole thing falls apart. 

Which poem in the collection was the hardest to write, and why?

It was 'Mare Crisium', because I kept messing around with the form. I'm still not sure I've got it right, but that's part of the process of learning. It felt like it wanted to be quite deliberately abstract and even a little jarring. Whether it is entirely successful or not is less interesting than the experiment with trying to get there. That might sound quite self-indulgent, but for the reader, I would hope for a feeling of provisionality to come through and to leave questions with them, rather than certainties. 

The title of the pamphlet, and some of the poems come from French and Latin. What made you choose these? 

I am quite a fan of borrowing words from other languages and often it's simply because I like how they sound, or they provide a meaning that doesn't quite carry over into English. While I was bringing this set of poems together, I had the words soi-meme, soi-lui and soi-disant in my head as a trio of concepts I wanted to explore. Soi-meme (by and of oneself) and soi-lui (himself) play into the ideas of the interrelation of self and other, whereas soi-disant (self-styled) was me thinking about the confidence and even arrogance of a certain kind of person I was drawn to when I was younger, and where that comes from. The Latin words are a combination of the Latin names for lunar seas ('Mare Crisium' and 'Mare Tranquilitatis') and then 'Sanguis' is the Latin word for blood. 

There's a sense of touch and intimacy throughout these poems. Does that come naturally, or was it a conscious choice? 

I think this is a set of poems dealing with ideas of touch and intimacy, so it's probably more pronounced than usual, but touch is important in my poems more generally. To state the obvious, we experience the world, and particularly others we are intimate with, through touch. I was partly wanting to explore those spaces where thought and language break down, give way to touch. Like in 'Soi-disant' where I say "Approaching the event horizon, my words shut down". We can abstractify and conceptualise desire as much as we like (and I am good at that!), but at some point, touch takes over. 

What’s a line or idea from the collection that you hope readers don’t miss?

It's the last lines from the last poem in the book, 'How to unfold yourself':

That joy is in the un- of things.

unbecoming, unlearning, unfastening, un-

done. You know this, don't you?

I was hoping to end on a provocation, of sorts. 

Do you find writing poetry helps you make sense of the past, or does it blur it further?

This is a really interesting question. This set of poems does relate to the past, but a wise poet I know (Jenevieve Caryln) tells me that poems exist mostly in the eternal present. The moment we put them out there into the world, they take on a life of their own which is quite distinct to the events, thoughts, ideas we might have intended for them when we wrote them. This collection has an intimate, confessional feel but it's not a series of diary entries, and doesn't represent a linear narrative timeline. So in that sense, I'm not sure if it's trying to make sense of the past, or blur it. Perhaps it's trying to find new truths from it, by putting different pieces of it together in different and interesting ways. 

You use line breaks in a number of different ways. How do you choose where to break a line?  

I find this very hard to put into words because it's a thing that operates at an intuitive level. The poem itself chooses where it needs the line breaks to be and my job is to keep trying things until it 'feels' right. 

How do you like to write? 

With as much curiosity and sense of play and openness as possible. 

What do you do when a poem won’t behave? 

Give it a stern talking to. Ignore it for a bit. Take it out for a run or a walk somewhere, or to a cafe. Copy it onto a new page and start messing around with it to see if a change of form shifts things. Cut out the last two lines. If all else fails, just leave it. If there is something good in it, it'll eventually come out, even if it's just a couple of words or an idea that end up being part of something else.