Tag Archives: poetics of emplacement

Recalling shores

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Karen Hilberg, whose poems “Grim” and “Now, soft” appear in SRPR 46.1, speaks to the nature of place without memory, and the disjointed nature of poetry as apt for parsing the body in its various places.

I am good at starting over somewhere new; I’ve had to do it more times than I’d like. My last move was from Mexico to Chicago. I didn’t know a single person in the city and I was still grieving the loss of my home in Mexico, but I set about accepting as familiar all the strangeness of the new city: the light pollution, the six-cornered intersections, my too-hot radiator that I couldn’t turn down. My second winter, just as it had begun to feel like home, I lost my short-term memory from a head injury. Suddenly, everything was unfamiliar again. 

I would look up from my book to a strange room and not remember how I came to be there. Looking out the window told me nothing of what city I was in. My long-term memories were undamaged, stored in a different part of my brain, and they came to fill in the present moment. In the grocery store I froze at the cash register, unable to remember if I was in Mexico or the US. In the shower my shaky legs and painful head placed me back in Kansas after a car accident at 17, but when I stepped out of the shower, my face in the mirror looked wrong. I was staying in a friend’s spare bedroom, while they cared for me during my recovery. At night, the airplanes flying in low towards O’Hare woke me to confusion—I had no long-term memory of living somewhere you could hear planes. I panicked at the thought of sleeping in a strange place, but I was scared to put my feet to the floor. In the darkness, I felt like my bed was floating in a void. If I could be any place I’ve ever been, it felt like being nowhere at all.

Without memory, even my body—a home I had taken for granted—became a foreign place. My sense of being in my own body felt incidental and as temporary as my presence in a room. The appearance of my own hands would surprise me. I could move my body at my command, but my limbs felt impossibly distant, a wilderness away. 

My ability to write had also been affected by the head injury and my doctors told me that if I didn’t work at it, I could lose that ability permanently. The disjointed lines I wrote made better poems than prose. They told a narrative of everything that had ever happened to me, happening to me now all at once, and all the places I have ever been being here right now.

My confusion told a truth: place is not meaningful as the generic location of the events of our lives, but as the intimate memory of the person we were when we were there. There’s no way to access one without the other. When I write about the grass hills of Kansas, the dust in Mexico, or how Lake Michigan changes color every day, I am talking about the girl I was while hiking those hills, how the layer of dust that covered everything in Mexico felt like a tactile reminder of how far I was from home, and how I resented trading my ocean view in Mexico for Lake Michigan’s poor imitation.

I have been in Chicago for over a decade now, the longest I have ever lived anywhere. But I am starting over here a second time. I know I can lose a place without ever leaving it. I can be lost in my own bed. I know I can be a stranger in my own body. And the roots I put down are never stronger than the fragile touch of neuron synapse.

 

 

 

Karen Hilberg studied writing and translation at Knox College. She left a teaching career with Chicago Public Schools after a traumatic brain injury. Her ability to both speak and write were profoundly affected, and her writing and translation came from her years struggling to regain language. Her translations have been published in the Massachusetts Review and her poetry in the Spoon River Poetry Review.

 

 

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A Widow’s Walk

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Cindy King, whose poem “Capacitor (Be Mine)” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, speaks to the social image of the widow and how poetry might serve as a site of its interrogation.

Widows, widowers, those who’ve lost their partners—they exist in the borderlands, the margins: seen and unseen, heard but not, both dead and very much alive. “Capacitor (Be Mine)” was born of this place—on the edge, at the fringe, between sanity and madness, coherence and chaos. In a larger sense, the poem attempts to grapple with and potentially subvert stereotypes and received ideas about widowhood, and by extension sexuality and romantic love. By calling attention to these misconceptions through the appropriation of their accompanying clichés and tropes, I wish to continue exploring the consequences of being removed—sometimes suddenly, violently—from the context of what is for most of us a major part of our identity: our life partners, in both the literal and figurative sense, our home.

In probing the socially-constructed concept of “widow” as it is shaped and reinforced in the popular imagination through mainstream media, of particular interest to me is the trope of husbandless women: sexually starved, and as a consequence, presumably licentious, undoubtedly perverse. Despite some movement towards the acceptance of expressions of women’s sexual appetites, there remains a degree of taboo, particularly as it applies to those who have lost their partners. Short of throwing themselves on the proverbial funeral pyre, what constitutes acceptable behavior for widowed women involves eternal faithfulness, loyalty, and consequently, lifelong celibacy. To carry the black parasol, to forever wear the shawl, the expectation is to quietly, solitarily settle into tragedy, to take on “widow” as one’s new mantle. Real or imagined, to whatever extent, there exists a stigma surrounding widows’ outward expression of happiness or pleasure—particularly as it comes from remarriage, dating, or sexual encounter. 

The poem’s rapid shifts and its frequent lack of smooth transition reflect a particular viewpoint, the way those who have lost must often process memory and experience—through the selective and severed thinking required to suppress triggering landmines. Survival necessitates living in the moment, that liminal space without past or future. It is in this space that the poem alludes to the performance of romantic relationships on social media platforms, performances that include not only high points, but also the low. With the shift to “workers at fulfillment centers,” I hope to reveal how our preoccupation with romance and the pursuit of romantic relationships serves to obfuscate things such as the exploitation of human capital. The beginning of the poem’s final stanza serves as a comment on how often the value of simply being in a relationship supersedes the quality of the relationship itself. Here the poem also confronts the social expectation and pressure to be “coupled” in our culture, exposing how ironically it leads to alienation from others—and ultimately ourselves. 

I engage with received language at various points in the poem, and particularly with those words we often encounter at the end of fairytales—especially those that end in marriage: “…and they lived happily ever after.” These words, as they are referenced in the penultimate stanza and echoed as the poem’s last lines, represent a breakdown of this trope, an interrogation and dismantling of the construct. That from a young age we are steeped and situated in this language serves to inform and solidify our expectations of romantic love and relationships as adults. Again, the last lines appropriate the “love mythology” of our childhood in the image of Cupid’s arrow, but here it appears in our own hands. While we have agency to aim and throw it (however desperately, without a bow) at our potential lover, all attempts are futile. That in fact, the prospect of finding—or retaining—the proverbial “soulmate” for an imagined ever after constitutes nothing more than an illusion. 

Cindy King’s most recent publications include poems in The Sun, Callaloo, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, African American Review, American Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. You can hear her online on American Weekend, a production of National Public Radio, at weekendamerica.publicradio.org, rhinopoetry.org, and at cortlandreview.com. Her work has also been chosen by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to appear on NPR’s The Slowdown https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2020/05/08/379-february-my-love-is-in-another-state.Her book-length collection of poems, Zoonotic, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions. Her chapbook, Easy Street, was released by Dancing Girl Press in March 2021.
 
Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at DSU and faculty advisor of The Southern Quill. She also enjoys serving on the artistic board for the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, California and screen scripts for their Living Room Series.

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Emplacement as a Way to New Territory

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John Morrison, whose poem “Fourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, traces emplacement away from territory and into strange linkages.

I hope none of what I write ever comes back to jinx me, as I write this piece about a ghost poem and emplacement. 

Do you ever consider your poetic lineage? It’s kind of a poet’s parlor game, to trace the mother and father poets who have raised you in your art. In fact, you can find in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Robin Blaser, a fun but potentially profound exercise Spicer came across in a Robert Duncan workshop, a worksheet designed as a grammar school-style mimeographed questionnaire. Blaser refers to a key item in the questionnaire as the “tree or constellation of poetry” where, in either a hierarchical or a spiral fashion, you identify your influences, poetic and otherwise. There is no room on the constellation worksheet for “place.” Yet, the poems of my parental poets—most notably Richard Hugo and James Wright—fed on the bread and butter of place, which, honestly, was a continuation of wrenching American poetry away from an elevated diction and demeanor. 

Just so you know, I grew up outside in the hills of Northern California, and though I schooled in the deep South and settled in the Pacific Northwest, those hills and the oak savannah are my home—and often my dream—landscape. 

The truth is, I can write “place poems” all day long. The formula is coded right into my hand. What’s compelling about the poetics of emplacement is how it asserts place as foreground but only as a point of departure for the imagination: a grounding, so we are free to imagine and invent. The challenge of place poetry, and often a challenge place poetry can fail, is to reach beyond representation. If the poem remains simply about place without that place arriving at metaphorical significance, the poem will remain only flatly two-dimensional. When place becomes metaphor, however, the poet and reader arrive in new territory, a psychic dimension. 

For me, this is what T.S. Eliot meant by the objective correlative, and is what Rilke writes about when traveling east into the plains of Russia, how the outer landscape became the inner landscape. (Don’t make me find that passage—I did not make it up!)

By the calendar, my mother passed away a while ago, but for me, it all just happened—that morning, that noontime, how she let go and how we shared our loss just after. In my poem, “Fourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost,” place and imagination collide, like banging together two rocks for sparks. In many ways my mother’s death cast me into a childhood loneliness again. I am, let’s say, twelve, and it’s like I’ve run away from home, again, for all of two hours and no one even notices. That’s good and invisible! The poem/game includes the cruelty of children and the inviolable, arbitrary rules that shunt us away from each other. For me, this is true in the game and in the truth of my mother’s disappearance. Margaret Mary Weber was a gem. You would have liked her.

To find a writing trance and surprise myself, I anchor in what I know. The creek mentioned in the poem? Wild Horse Creek, and I can take you there if development and climate disruption haven’t ripped out the cottonwoods and dried the springs up on Twin Sisters. The dog? Bucky. I can introduce you, or could have. Spiders? I know where they stretch webs from oak to oak. See? This really is sounding like a two-hour runaway.

The poems I’m writing right now begin with place and as quickly as possible slip away from the known on the way to metaphor, which is often just another word for “mystery” to me. It strikes me that my current poems are about exploring a new, personal mythology. No, I’m not sure what that means. In the case of “Fourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost,” the slipping from the known is for forever. Though virtually every line has a concrete place trigger, I’m pretty sure the reader would neither know nor care so I don’t either, which means the allegiance of the composition shifts quickly from the “facts.” If I’m lucky, music and surprise and resonance will be enough to carry the poem. This is the promise of “emplacement”: those concrete borders or boundaries given by place that all of us have are just the markers we pass on the way to new possibilities and discoveries. And that’s fun. And if I have the chance to grieve for my mother for the extent of a poem, that counts as meaningful, too. 

 

 

 

John Morrison’s second book of poetry Monkey Island was recently published by redbat books. His first book, Heaven of the Moment, published by Cloudbank books, was one of five finalists for the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Rhino, and elsewhere. He teaches as an Associate Fellow for the Attic Institute and is an associate editor for the fabulist journal of literature, Phantom Drift.

 

 

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“thick hair sticking / to his cheeks like slugs leaving home.”

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Paula Harris, whose poem “the devil is sitting in my living room crying” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, talks heartbreak and the devil sitting on your couch.

I was sitting on the couch at my best friend’s. I was staying the night, sleeping on his couch. Mike didn’t like the term best friend because he used to have a counsellor who had been through a messy divorce and the counsellor said it was too childish, to call someone your best friend, so I always called Mike my closest friend, but really… best friend. He was the person I relied on. It was late afternoon on a Sunday and we talked again about the messy breakup Mike was going through from a very short relationship, and we talked about random stuff, and at some point I cried because depression is like that. When I stopped crying, Mike made some comment about how me crying on his couch wasn’t what he’d been expecting for his day and I semi-laughed and said Well, better than having the devil on your couch and then we both looked at each other with wide eyes for a long time—like, what would it be like if the devil was on your couch? What would the devil get up to?

The next day on my two-hour drive home I kept thinking about that, the devil on your couch, and then in my head the devil was on my couch crying. The whole idea of a heartbroken devil looking for comfort, needing some time to heal, took over my head. I mean, why should the devil be immune to heartbreak? How would the devil cope with heartbreak? Would it be something ethereal, something that lasts for a mere moment, or something more mortal?

When I got home, as soon as I walked in the door I sat down and wrote the entire poem.

Looking back now, I see that I wrote a poem where the devil gets to experience heartbreak in a way that I’ve never gotten to. I guess it’s a slightly over-the-top imagining of dealing with heartbreak in a way I would’ve liked to—comfort food, a bath, crying. And someone there to quietly offer support. My heartbreaks have been met by the people around me shrugging.

And the ending—has the devil made a good or bad decision? Who knows. Do we ever know if something was a good or a bad decision until enough time has passed? And how do we know if enough time is actually enough?

A few weeks after I wrote the poem, Mike and I had a massive fight. I messaged him about something and he took it completely the wrong way, and then every time I replied I think you’ve misinterpreted what I said, he’d get angrier and I’d get more depressed and then I ended up suicidal and then he got angry at me for being suicidal and so I got more suicidal and he got angrier at me for that. It was devastating.

I now have a lot of regrets about ever being friends with Mike, but damn, I got a lot of great poems from all those Sundays we spent sitting on his couch, talking about random stuff. I hope the devil is sitting on his couch. I hope someone in that room is crying.

 

 

 

Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps in a lot, because that’s what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including The Sun, Hobart, Passages North, New Ohio Review and Aotearotica. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. website: www.paulaharris.co.nz | Twitter: @paulaoffkilter | Instagram: @paulaharris_poet | Facebook: @paulaharrispoet

 

 

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Neither Here Nor There

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Bruce Robinson, whose poem “Medication on a Forbidding Morning” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, engages a poetics of emplacement to question the borders between built environments and the natural world.

A recent trip cross country (almost, not quite) made me aware that, while flying, I was never quite sure where here was, until I got there.  I was happy enough with my place, inside a metal tube, but really I was neither here nor in a past, or future, there. I was not quite at point Nemo, that “spot” in the Pacific considered the pelagic point of inaccessibility, but effectively (and more or less securely) displaced from land.

Our place is uncertain, always transitory although we may not realize it. We are place-shifters more than shape-shifters, at once content with what surrounds us and curious about what doesn’t. And why do we take refuge in the comfortable recognition of place, when even, with or without our notice, this place, this world, yes, everything, is constantly changing? Except for the song of the cardinal, confident enough in its song not to change it, at least not for our ears.

I want to say that I’m not too interested in place; place appears to be interested in me, imposes itself upon me, I’m in place, I can’t escape it, even when my velocity assures me that I have. We’re here, after all, aren’t we? So the question we may want to ask is: how will we begin to recognize that which we tend to ignore, which we have to ignore if we must make our way to, say, the grocery store?  How will we begin to use our eyes, ears, etc., to reach our newfound land? I’ve been reminding myself for years (unsuccessfully) to read Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) and I feel as though now I’m paying the price for having left that book on the shelf.

The nineteenth-century ukiyo-e, or more specifically meisho-e—woodblock prints of the moons and mountains that so obsessed certain Japanese artists—capture this push and pull between here and there, perceived place and implied place, and between the transitory and the relatively permanent. Even the magnetic north’s a moving target.

If I think or write about a tramway, a streetcar, well: It’s in Marseille. It’s on tracks. People are blocking it. Or is it? Perhaps it’s only a construct in a poem I’m writing, a memory from a film I’ve seen and love. Perhaps this instability is more inescapable in fiction or in film, and perhaps part of the challenge of the poem is to work against the insistence of place, to use place as the flight deck of the page, an echo of Melville’s demand for “Vesuvius’s crater for an ink stand.”

Before I forget: my poem in SRPR, “Medication…,” was devised well before I first listened to Junior Gong’s song of the same name. You could say that my poem is about a built environment, except that it’s open to the natural world. Where’s the division, the separation? Where’s a recognizable border?  I don’t want to impose too political a stance on this, but perhaps the lens through which we perceive any current place on a planet in difficulty—this planet, for instance—is a display of our own complicity in the evanescence of place.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Pangyrus, Maintenant, Seventh Quarry, Rattle, Main Street Rag, Evening Street Review, and Toho Journal. This is his second appearance in SRPR.

 

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Practicing Detours

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Michelle Gil-Montero, whose original poetry and whose translations of María Negroni’s work appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, turns on translation, traces, and solidarity.

Like many poets, I’m taken by the turn, in its many forms, as the kernel of a poem’s uncertainty. Lately, as my writing practice increasingly involves shifts from translating to editing, printing, and teaching, then back to my own poems, I’ve even started to identify a deeper necessity in my habit of turning from one thing to another, and to think about how these deviations inscribe themselves in my poems. Detour as practice, and as turn. 

A poetics of emplacement need not be stuck in one spot, not even in one spot at a time; it can occupy a here-there, imbue an essential foreignness. Growing up in a bilingual family of immigrants, and living now in a bilingual/immigrant household, I have always recognized a foreignness in myself, an unsettled quality of abiding in two places at once, two languages and cultures, not quite belonging in either. Translation taps this feeling, and so does writing poetry. Both practices allow me to reimagine my feeling-foreign not as a problematic split but as a poetic necessity, a dimension of solitude and possibility. 

I keep turning to the work of Martiniquean writer and thinker Édouard Glissant, an indispensable guide to this thinking. For Glissant, writing is “the practice of detour”; by necessity, it tears away, deviates, to return. The separation is inevitable; even the most stringently mimetic writing cannot avoid “overstepping” its subject matter, venturing somewhere else. Glissant’s writings allow me to conceptualize my own detours in relation to my foreign-feeling. For Glissant, the writer, as apprentice to the world, should be both “solitary and solidary,” that is, should “live adventurously in the thinking of wandering” and “grow up completely in the thinking of…place,”[1] a formulation that resonates for me both for its translation ethics and its poetics of place.  

The poems in this issue of SRPR, both mine and the ones that I translated from Exilium by María Negroni, are adventures in the thinking of wandering. Negroni meditates on exile in a faint, meandering way that recalls Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s statement that “exile has no form but leaves a trace.” The poems never refer to historical-autobiographical experiences of exile—though they might have, as Negroni does elsewhere. Instead, the poems attest to the stubbornness of the residue of these experiences. I mean, could these poems be read in Argentina without calling to mind the last dictatorship, even though they make no explicit mention of it? It’s as if there’s a slight gap between the language and its place in the world—which makes the poems feel foreign, estranged. Translating these poems felt like watching poetic language form in real time, as its strange, twisting gestures (to quote a few lines) “force their entry/slowly/into the rhythm of/the world.” Present and absent, here and there, language enters the world as foreign, and only by detours. 

In brief departures from those translations, I wrote the poems that appear in this issue. They occupy a here-there that is both Pittsburgh and Buenos Aires, as well as the not-Pittsburgh and not-Buenos Aires that I inhabited after two shocking experiences (a mass shooting and a post-partum illness). Both events, with their unreal, dislocating effects, were a form of separation—to quote a Negroni poem, they “foreignized everything.” In these poems, again, narrative situation hangs back but hovers in proximity. And again, what is legible is the trace that they leave in the real, and the shape of my wandering there, a circuitous wayfinding via sound, through punning and word-to-word slippages. 

I want to keep thinking about the solidarity half of Glissant’s formula: “to grow up completely in the thinking of place.” From my perch in translation, I can begin to imagine a place-based poetics that abandons the illusion of rootedness and fixed identities, one that is willing to let go of attachments to the world to return all the more fully to it, one that turns in opposite directions at once, toward and away.          

[1]Édouard Glissant, The Baton Rouge Interviews, with Alexandre Leupin, Translated by Kate M. Cooper (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 26, 27, 59, 60.

Michelle Gil-Montero has several book translations, most recently Edinburgh Notebook by Valerie Mejer Caso (Action Books). Berlin Interlude and Exilium, both by María Negroni, are forthcoming from Black Square Editions and Ugly Duckling Presse, respectively. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Howard Foundation, as well as a Fulbright US Scholar’s Grant to Argentina and a PEN/Heim Translation Prize. She is the author of the poetry books Attached Houses (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Object Permanence (Ornithopter Press), and her work has appeared in jubilat, North American Review, Seedings, Conjunctions, and other publications. At Saint Vincent College, she directs the Minor in Literary Translation and is the founding editor of the small press poetry publisher, Eulalia Books (eulaliabooks.com). 

 

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Poetics of Emplacement – Map 2

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Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

As Kirstin Hotelling Zona (SRPR Editor) writes, “A poetics of emplacement is interested in borders and thus borderlands: beings and ways of being that are often overlooked.” A poetics of emplacement looks—looks over, looks beyond knowing and into the generative realm of wonder. Knowing becomes a beginning, a starting point, not the destination. The destination, rather, is rupture. I am totally on board with not knowing. I mean, how cool is it to have permission to write my way into rupture rather than out of it, avoiding messy-ness at all costs?! When I need to light a fire under my intellect, to override that insatiable addiction to knowledge, I turn to Rumi, Jelaluddin Balkhi. His poetry emplaces me squarely in temporality, in permeability, calling us (human beings) to house the guests of our emotions, regardless of their actions in and through our beings, to “Welcome and entertain them all!/Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,/who violently sweep your house/empty of its furniture” (from “The Guest House”). We mustn’t stop at emotion, though. A poetics of emplacement beckons us to welcome the violence of emotionality, not to indulge in suffering, but quite the opposite: to love. To be sure, “The door there/is devastation.//Birds make great sky-circles/of their freedom./How do they learn it?//They fall, and falling,/they’re given wings” (from “On Children Running Through”). We might say that a poetics of emplacement is not only “interested in” that which is overlooked, it is also the road there, the looking beyond itself, the surrender to being “filled with you [love]./Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul” (from “We Three”).

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Emily Johnston's PicEmily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students’ literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR).