Zoe Tuck
This is a vial of dirt from my grandparents’ land. My family had to sell their house, but one of my uncles filled these containers with dirt from their land for all of us.
What do you feel is your best piece of work?
I don’t know if it’s my best, but I feel proud of Notes on Female Visionary Poetry: Trans Women Poets Writing Themselves into Existence, published in Ayin’s “Towards a Visionary Poetics: A Female Gaze,” curated by Yosefa Raz and Shoshana Olidort.
What music have you been listening to lately?
For the past few years, I have been swallowed up by 90s and early 00s pop nostalgia (I was in a Blink182 cover band for a hot second—we also covered Ginuwine’s Pony and set Emily Dickinson poems to music), but I’m trying to dip a toe back into the current moment. I love Beast Nest’s albums “Taste of India” and “Sicko” and Nina Keith’s MARANASATI 19111.
Who is the last character you related to and why?
I have this weird thing for a micro-genre involving characters who are tasked with retrieving mystical objects that are causing problems in the world and storing them in a safe place. In order of ascending campiness: Warehouse 13, The Librarians, and Relic Hunters. Studio execs, please greenlight another project like this!
Have you ever failed at something you care about?
Yes! I feel like the only way to improve at things that you care about is to keep failing. There’s a reason why, “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” is one of Samuel Beckett’s most famous quotes.
How much vitamin D do you take?
It’s summer, so I’m getting it topically when I go for a run!
Last gift you received?
I love the ongoing gift exchange of living in the small press poetry world. My friend James Loop sent me his chapbook “THE THERE POEMS” and Claire DeVoogd’s “PURGATORY”. I love poetry, friends, chapbooks, and getting things in the mail.
Favourite photo?
There’s this picture of my mom carrying me on her back when I was a little kid that I have a soft spot for. I was kind of a mama’s girl.
Best season?
Summer! I like unambiguous heat.
What drives you?
I want to give my gift.
Best outfit?
Currently, my jean overall shorts with my little brown shirt and sandals. I feel like it shows off my attributes, if you know what I’m saying.
Do you like to write in the morning or at night?
Late morning. The night is reserved for rumination!
What do you consider to be your first rejection?
I don’t think I remember at this point, but in Submittable, the earliest one is a batch of poems I sent to FENCE on my birthday in 2011. I think I felt emboldened by being published in Troubling the Line, but I was still new enough at sending out work that I let the FENCE rejection discourage me.
Where is the best place?
Aside from my lover’s arms, my favorite place is Glen Canyon Park in San Francisco, CA. You enter through a more classic city park, then you are on a dusty trail with steep hillsides rising above. The grasses are fragrant, as are the (yes, I know, invasive) eucalyptus trees. You pass through a portal of foliage into a riparian area around Islais creek. There’s a great outcropping of franciscan chert, and when grad school was making me sick in 2019, I lay on these rocks in the sun and I felt like the canyon was healing me.
What’s an example of a good ending?
I love a classic fairy tale ending (“…and they lived happily ever after” or “…and the king was punished for his wickedness”), but I think some of my favorite endings are ones that leave me discomfited. I am grateful for books like Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series and Charlie Jane Anders’s The City in the Middle of the Night that confront readers with radical otherness, such that at the beginning you think, “I don’t have any xenophobia” but at by the end the authors have surfaced your biases and confronted you with them. Daylighting these feelings is the first step to changing them.
Latest book you’ve read or favourite book ever?
Latest book is Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which I’m currently teaching, and therefore re-reading. A strong candidate for favorite book is Joanne M. Harris’s Honeycomb. I think fantasy and other mythopoeic writing, at their best, can hold deep spiritual truths. As soon as I read Honeycomb, it became one of my holy books.
Anything you’d like to promote?
My poetry book Bedroom Vowel is coming out on June 9th! And if you are in NYC, the book release will be at Unnameable Books on June 9th at 7pm, and my fellow readers will be Emily Bark Brown and imogen xtian smith.
Photo credit: Emily Hunerwadel
Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of Bedroom Vowel (BUNNY Presse, 2023) and Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014), in addition to the chapbooks The Book of Bella (Doublecross Press), bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel's Peach Woman, and Vape Cloud of Unknowing (Belladonna* Collaborative). With Britt Billmeyer-Finn, she is the co-host of The But Also house reading series and she co-edits Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Bark Brown.
