a poetics of uncertainty: A Conversation with Leslie Sainz on Sonnets, the Divine Feminine, and Cultural Inheritance

Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023), winner of the 2024 Audre Lorde Award and a current finalist for the Vermont Book Award. The daughter of Cuban exiles, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received fellowships, scholarships, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, the Miami Writers Institute, the Adroit Journal, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. Originally from Miami, she lives in Vermont and works as the managing editor of New England Review.

On October 11, 2023, Leslie Sainz joined The Interlochen Review editors Xime Silva and Rowen Erickson, along with Creative Writing senior Sophie Bernik, for a conversation about her début collection, Have You Been Long Enough at Table. 

Xime Silva: Thinking about poems like, “Ño,” “Sunday, Wounded,” and “Climate Feedback,” I'm wondering if you could speak on the role that white space plays in creating/enhancing the atmosphere, moment and rhythm of your pieces.

Leslie Sainz: The relationship between form and content is really inseparable. I often say that Have You Been Long Enough At Table is a book that explores codependency—between nations, between family systems—and I think I've come to understand the relationship between form and content to be a codependent one as well. Which is to say, I think in my poetics, content tends to be the narcissist that's controlling, and demanding a lot of form and then form functions as a caretaker to that. In a poem like “Ño,” which is fairly tight, I'm interested in replicating the claustrophobia and  fear of traveling across dangerous waters in a makeshift raft like Los Balseros did for the reader. There's that caesura that appears after the word gone but before the word lungwet, and to me, that's a space of elegy. But it's also sort of a pause in relation to the image that follows and the idea that water in the lungs would replicate violent silence. 

“Sunday, Wounded” is very much a protest poem honoring the Ladies in White. [In] the movements of that poem, I was interested in mirroring the movements that a march might take. Not necessarily this linear walking down the street kind of movement, but turning across streets. The Ladies in White are considered a dissident group on the island and they are essentially just trying to bring awareness to their brothers, fathers, cousins, uncles who have been falsely imprisoned.  When they march on Sundays after mass they are followed, so I was interested in having the words themselves constantly checking behind them. That's why you have certain indentations and an almost snake-like pattern. There's a quickening that has to happen there, and an awareness. 

“Climate Feedback” was such a strange poem for me to write, because of the rhyme, because of taking from something like “The Star Spangled Banner” and bastardizing it to a degree.  But really I think of it as a poem that's in communication with “Malacón / Miami” at the end of the collection, a poem that acknowledges the climate crisis while also touching on the difficulty around leaving the island. The movements of it I consider to be pretty aquatic and the spacing between it feels like another gesture towards silence, the pause of someone thinking how they can continue to react to the dangers that the water is going to pose. 

RE: Space and spacing is a central part of how your work conveys itself to the reader. How do you think caesuras impact your work and the way you read it versus the way you intend someone else to read it and its contents? An example I liked was “Gusano.” What do these gaps give to your work? And what are the limitations of giving yourself a form like this? 

LS: My writing practice in general feels very bodily. The way I generate work is pretty slow going. I will bang my head against the wall for several hours in one session, so if I have line one down, I will be saying out loud line one over and over and over again until line two comes. In some ways it's an access point towards memorization, but there's also a lot of suffering that happens when I'm trying to get something down. I think in some ways my use of caesura is meant to break up the vocal patterns that I'm enacting when I'm writing, because that's not always necessarily how the poem is meant to be experienced or live in the body. I think of it as that tool that bridges the gap between the early stages of generation and the mood I'm trying to essentially evoke. What a caesura signals to a reader is fracturing in a lot of ways. “Gusano” specifically traces my family's unique immigration narrative, in which there is a lot of fracturing. That felt like a really organic fit both visually and conceptually.

SB: Your work often feels very purposefully ungrounded, as though a piece isn't tethered to its subject but rather hovering above it. For instance the opening piece, “Ño,” or even in “Massive Activity,”  which certainly takes this to the extreme. I was wondering what you see this ungroundedness serving in terms of establishing voice and tension in poetry. 

LS: I think a lot of that comes from how I was able to access this information to begin with. In the early stages of the manuscript,  I was really dedicated to documenting the story of my parents and how they got here, what they escaped. Eventually that evolved to capturing the ways in which I think they have reenacted the violence they escaped within their family. As I conducted the initial interviews with them, around their childhood and their relation to Cuba as folks who were born there but left the island when they were quite young, at the start of the revolution, I found that over time their stories started to change a bit. I think some of that was the fallibility of memory itself. Some of it was maybe their own intimidation about it entering a public record of sorts. I think that sense of ungroundedness  came as a result of not ever necessarily landing on a point of certainty around their narratives, or even my understanding of how I relate to them and how I've related to them over time. 

You mentioned the poem “Massive Activity,”  which references the covert CIA Operations Northwoods and Mongoose. I learned about that through recently declassified documents. The very nature of encountering something that was at one point heavily redacted to me, the spirit of engaging with that and creating an intertextual relationship with it, I never felt certain that I was getting the full story. The more I learned about those operations, the more distrusting I was of  literally any source on either side of relations between Cuba and the U.S., between how I have viewed my own childhood,  versus my parents and how they view my own upbringing. So a lot of it comes from a sense of uncertainty. I would go so far to argue that I'm really interested in a poetics of uncertainty, which to me is not necessarily just about curiosity, but about a sort of steadfast investigation that prioritizes nuance. 

RE: How does hybrid work continue to influence you and what part did it play in shaping poems for your recent collection, specifically in your poems, “Conjugate / Demonstrate,”  which is a contrapuntal, and also interacts with pronouns, and “Massive Activity,” which includes a form of blackout poetry. 

 LS: I never necessarily considered those poems to be existing in a sort of hybrid format. There are certainly formal choices in them that invite a multiplicity of meaning, especially in the contrapuntal, where you are invited to dissect it at many different angles, and through many different starting points. Part of this poetics of uncertainty that I'm trying to work out for myself is holding space for the contradictory to exist. I'm very interested in how contradiction can work in a strictly formal sense, and  I think the contrapuntal does that. There's a way in which you can utilize the form to negate some of the other interpretations of it, or even to abandon them altogether. I'm interested in that kind of tension. In “Massive Activity,” where there's these sections that have titles that were taken specifically from declassified documents, especially with that ending, I was thinking about the way a crown of sonnets ends, where you're piecing together individual lines from what precedes it to form one complete thing. Repetition, as it exists in the hybrid form and in that poem, felt like an interesting way to push back against the state, because my understanding of how the state communicates with its people, especially through propaganda, is not always necessarily through repetition. But through reinvention, the idea that if this is the main point, how many different angles can we capture someone into, regurgitating the same exact bit of information. Playing with the ways in which what gets left off can actually make the original sentiment more horrifying, or more tense, was a really interesting exercise for me. 

 SB: We all noticed how in your work you often destabilize and deconstruct language. I was curious specifically about the way this allows you to play with language and idioms' relationship with imagery, for instance, lines like, “The house black and whites,” or, “I say thank you in a language I use to cover my eyes before speaking.” If possible, could you explain the thought process behind your deconstruction of the bridge between language and imagery in order to create more emotionally compelling images? 

LS: To me there's a lot of intuitive work behind that. Trying to apply conscious thinking to something I did somewhat subconsciously is an exercise that I am just now learning to practice as a debut poet. In “Notice to Appear,” the idea of “The house black and whites,”  that's one where I was really interested in the ways syntax can generate a sense of fear or terror.  There's something about taking an idiom and turning it on its head or putting it in a construction that feels almost uncomfortable—the idea of the house representing something else, it's not necessarily the house, it's the inhabitants, or maybe it's the systems of housing. That kind of deconstruction is really about simulating discomfort, taking something that maybe we encounter in our everyday lives that we don't necessarily think that much about and finding a way to put it in a strange construction that makes you question how language serves us. Because idioms are based in advice, a means of trying to relate to someone else's circumstance, trying to guide them in some way. For them to instead appear menacing goes back to this idea of taking the idea of a healthy family system and excavating what's underneath it. To me that interplay felt very central.  

XS: The sonnets in the collection are named after Santería's spirits. What about the form of the sonnet do you think lends itself to the exploration of spirituality and identity? And what about myth interests you as a literary device? 

LS: I'll start with the second question. Myth and food were really important cultural touch points for me. I've never been to Cuba—there are a lot of reasons for that, some that I hope change over time. Naturally, attempting to write about the history of a country that resides in your DNA but that you've never been to is fraught with difficulty. The most important thing to me was never attempting to speak for anyone who's still on the island. I think ethically that would have been a failure. But my understanding of how I connect to my culture does come from myth. And in some ways those myths are really familial—even my parents’ memories of Cuba feel like myth in a lot of ways, because there's so much distance and memory is fallible and subject to our politics, our values, our egos. When they would talk about the island, it did feel like a mythical place, especially because the way it looks now is not the way it looked at the time that they were there. In a larger sense, the stories of the Orichas are coming from the Yoruban tradition because Santería is very much an Afro-Cuban religion. It's a diasporic religion. And thanks to colonialism, there are a lot of other kinds of elements that have gotten tacked on, namely Catholicism and the synchronization of the Orichas with certain saints so practitioners were safe to continue practicing this religion under colonial rule. Those are the conditions under which certain myths and certain stories get passed along generationally. So being able to connect with that, to speak with family members who have their own relationships to the Orichas and their own ways of worshiping them, felt like the safest way for me to inhabit a world that exists in full color on the island. 

And as far as the sonnets go, I've been thinking about the sonnet as sort of a beautiful box with beautiful wrapping and beautiful ribbon, but there's a human kidney inside. It’s this tidy container. There are folks who are butchering with good reason that tidiness—I think of Diane Seuss and frank: sonnets and even Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.  There are a lot of really interesting contemporary takes on the sonnet, but to me there's something about the formal constraint of the fourteen lines, the necessary rhetorical turn in the volta that has to appear, and the storied history of the form itself.  I was interested in looking at it as not necessarily a vessel for the heart's desires, but rather a vessel for the heart's blood and the way it pumps. I think the sonnet is akin to prayer. The way that I understand prayer feels tied to those constraints of the form. It's relatively short and then something has to change, not necessarily as an epiphany, but if I'm talking to a spirit or god, I'll reach a point eventually where maybe I feel silly in whatever I'm asking or whatever I'm attempting to communicate and I will change course shortly before I decide, okay, I think I'm done with this thing. In a lot of ways, that's how I think about the sonnet. It felt like an organic space to put those questions and ancestral longing and spiritual activity as a means of activating blood, both ancestrally, and also through devotion.  

 SB: I noticed that throughout your collection you used the word fractured and I noticed that the self is fractured within many of the pieces. For instance, in “Sonnet for Eleguá,”  where the speaker says, “I should like to reposition myself, please. All of me this time.” Or in “Glassware” when the speaker recognizes this fracture in their father saying, “My father lives/with my mother and, some days, himself.” When within a piece, the self is split, how do you intend for or expect the reader to fill in the blanks between the self's fractured pieces? What work do you believe is done by the space left between a character's different versions of themself?

LS: I see it as sort of tracing the primary speakers, the evolution of the primary speakers' politics. I grew up in a very conservative home, a strict Fox News household. I was just back staying with my parents and Fox News was on the TV the whole time. As I was thinking about how to approach their stories and the ways they intersect with my own, it reached a point where I realized there's an opportunity here to capture that sort of indoctrination and watch it repel off of the primary speaker over time. So in the first section, there are more sort of conservative takes of Cuba, namely the stories that Cuban Americans and Cuban exiles tend to repeat as a means of explaining why the embargo should still be in effect, or why we should have assassinated Castro.“Glassware,” specifically, felt like a poem in which the speaker starts to recognize the distance, but knows that safety still resides in the home still. Over time, especially when you reach the third section,  a poem like “Self-Determination Theory,” that fracturing takes on a different form, where it's observational without the returning dedication to the parents or seeing the parents through the lens of having always gotten it right. I hope that's something that a reader can pick up on. 

I am interested in polyvocality and there are a number of poems that use persona in the collection, too, and I see those as being siblings in a lot of ways. Part of that was bridging the gap and trying to imagine a self that existed on the island or at least participated in some of the traditions that would have taken place. As far as how I would like a reader to approach that fracturing, I don't know that I want them to fill it with anything. I think it's much more uncomfortable to sit with something jagged, an incomplete portrait. That feels more in line with my own understanding of how I moved through those different phases of my life and how my politics developed,  the careful un-learning that is the hum underneath the entire collection. I'm content with what's missing.  

RE: You often use your poems to look at beauty and femininity—and their opposites—in your work. There’s a type of servitude that your work explores in girlhood. “Mal de Ojo” displays a lot of what it’s like to be a woman and the tension in that. Where or when did this influence begin in your work and how do you tackle it in a way that feels true to you and not overused?

LS:  A lot of it was born out of frustration and need. Most of the collections by Cuban American poets that I encountered early on in my formation as a poet were written by men. In fact, I had a lot of difficulty finding other contemporary Cuban American women poets. A lot of this collection was birthed out of the frustrations of not having seen the stories of Cuban women and Cuban American women being told. There are poems in the collection like the poem about La Milagrosa, which also deals with mythmaking, and the one about Elena Milagro Hoyos. Cuban women on the island are some of the most vocal around the human rights abuses that occur in the country. And though machismo is rampant in Cuban culture and a lot of Latin American cultures, and certainly even in my own household, when I think of Brazillians I think of the matriarchal figures, and to me that’s more powerful than the puffing out of the chest and the yelling or aggression that can come from the perpetuations of machismo. 

I think of “Mal de Ojo” as a pretty layered poem despite its size. There's the discussion of envy, there’s the myth of the Evil Eye, how the spell can jump from generations. I was [also] interested in vocalizing queer desire. So not necessarily just functioning as, “I’m walking down the street,  I see another woman, I feel envy maybe for her appearance or what I’m fantasizing about her life,” but rather, “I’m following her and there’s a sort of complication around desire, and not knowing where to place it, and also the urge to repress it even though the body is sort of physically pursuing it in a way.”

I’m not sure what it would look like if it was overused. I consider myself to be a poet of restraint. I’m always looking for precision in my writing; I like what’s left unsaid. To me, that’s more interesting. But it did feel important to me across the collection to have these containers of pure feminine energy. In a lot of ways that also touches back to the sonnets, especially thinking about “Sonnet for Yemayá” and “Sonnet for Ochún,” not necessarily in my invocation of them but in what they represent: the divine feminine and motherhood and fertility and having that energy radiate and thread to other works, whether it's addressing the myths surrounding real life women or the ways in which women can gather and group together and capitalize on their power.

SB: Throughout your collection, you seem to come back to this theme of what I would describe as “learned helplessness.” Your characters seem frequently forced into positions of helplessness or surrender, and in turn often meditate on how that sensation of helplessness is replayed in their lives after. For instance, “Attachment Theory,” in which the speaker asks, “What am I trying to prove? I hate the ocean. I doubt my instincts.” I was curious as to how you approach the task of interrogating this helplessness.  In an American culture where Cuban people and similarly marginalized communities are almost exclusively cast as victims or villains by western media, how do you peel that perspective back in order to write about this disenfranchisement without disenfranchising your characters in the process?

LS: That’s a really delicate balance. I think there are poems in the collection that are specifically addressing systematic violence against Cuban and Cuban American folks that is being perpetuated by the state. That sort of helplessness touches everything. It relates to my understanding of my own upbringing as someone who was frequently stripped of their power and autonomy, so cataloging that,  attempting to capture that in some way, felt stabilizing. With a lot of other unknowns, knowing confidently that I can authentically capture what it felt like to not be given the space to understand the world under my own perspective and to instead be forced into certain ways of seeing. I think it’s kind of radical to say that and to acknowledge that. 

As far as the context that you provided around how Latinx folks are portrayed in the media in general, I’m interested in a vulnerability rooted in the individual taking charge of their own narratives. So not necessarily this helplessness that’s portrayed on TV, when you see folks attempting to immigrate to this country, or politicians’ dehumanizing rhetoric around this population. Instead, recognizing that even on a domestic level—I don’t mean domestic in terms of the state, but within the home or even within one’s own relationship to themself—brown folks deserve the space to be as complicated as they are on the page. Some of that is recognizing the ways in which even in much smaller systems, they struggle to know who they are, to break generational curses. To me there’s something stable about representing the full breadth of humanity in these characters, and part of that is allowing them space to share their fear, whether it’s coming from larger looming figures or from the painful revolutions of attempting to understand what they want for themselves. 

XS:  The political and the domestic is often referenced in your work, using the authority of a capitalized mother and father and more kitchen or homely settings for your poems. In contrast there is a theme of political instability and harshness in many of your poems, such as “Sacrificial Meal” and its beginning, “The recipe calls for I can of evaporated milk, /I can of condensed milk, and ½ cup of whole milk. /The forecast calls for guayaberas and setting your country ablaze./ I am all out of sugar.” How do these two very important topics filter their way in your work through your interests and past?

LS: The political and the domestic are inseparable to me. The domestic is political. I think everything is political. Even in those lines, I think there are a lot of other political and social threads that one can extract from them. Thinking about the recipe, that is a nod to tres leches, there is a cultural recipe being made. If you’re not familiar, guayaberas are like a kind of traditional shirt that Cuban men wear, although Tommy Bahama makes them now. In a lot of ways, it’s a style that has become appropriated in the States. The watering down of a traditional item feels very political to me. The forecast itself, I immediately think of the climate crisis—setting your country ablaze is in conversation with the idea that we are literally on a floating rock that is getting warmer and warmer and warmer. And we live in a country that’s not committed to doing anything about it. Even in that excerpt, there are a lot of intersections between the political and the domestic. I could probably do the same kind of extractions with any excerpt from the book. 

XS: I’m thinking about your notion of translation, and the specific words or phrases or dialogue you choose not to translate. How do you go about creating that space of not knowing, and how do you hope it impacts people’s experience of your work?  

LS: I put a lot of trust in my reader, which is to say I really enjoy displacing them. I know a lot of folks are going to come to this text not having a strong foundational history of Cuba-U.S. relations or of Cuban culture and I’m okay with that. I had to decide for myself early on that I was comfortable sitting in that unknowability and producing that unknowability for others. Of course readers can look up words in a dictionary or do their own research. I think the average reader wouldn’t. That’s okay for me. 

As far as the use of Spanish in the collection, I’m never going to compromise sound to transition between languages. Sound is something that guides me very heavily and I touched on that a little bit when I described my writing process—I have to hear it in the air in order to channel what comes next. I’m never going to drop in Spanish as a sort of dog whistle to a certain readership, it has to feel earned. A lot of the Spanish in the collection is dialogue from other people. That was very intentional because I’m not fluent in Spanish. My parents only spoke Spanish in the home when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying. So it was always weaponized against us, which is something that I’m still trying to reconcile for myself as I continue to establish a relationship to the language. I’m conversational with it but I’m also shy to speak it, I think because of those early connections to it. To me it would’ve been disingenuous to have a collection that had more Spanish than what is currently on the page. It doesn’t belong to me in that capacity. 

Part of that untranslatability is because that’s also how I encountered it. I think of the poem “Bodied, Or Day 1 of 9,” when the father says “Bicho malo nunca muere,” which is something that my dad says all the time and I know what that means and how it’s usually evoked in our family.  I’m interested in the idea that there’s a choice that happens when you encounter something that you don’t understand: do I pursue the knowledge of this thing, do I attempt to access it, or do I not? There’s work that context clues can do to ease that discomfort of feeling displaced, but ultimately I think I’m really committed to asking the reader to do more work, not less. 

SB: You mentioned earlier that you interviewed your parents in the process of making this collection. I’m curious about how interviewing your parents and speaking to them about your experience impacted not just the way you wrote the collection, but the way you edited it after. 

LS: I don’t really consider myself to be a narrative poet. There are lyric narrative poems in the collection, but in terms of what I like to read and what I love writing, I love more associative work, more elliptical work. I knew that when I sat down with my parents individually and asked them questions about their immigration stories. I chose to write a collection of poetry—I had to remind myself during the writing process that I wasn’t writing a history textbook, or someone else’s memoir, or even my own. Rooting myself in what I believe poetry can and can’t do gave me the creative freedom to decide what elements felt most necessary and what didn’t need to be there at all. 

I think about a poem like “Gusano,” that’s more specifically trying to lay out the movement of my parents post-revolution, and balancing those narrative elements with a prioritization of syntax and sound. There are details that simply cannot change, but I think the manipulation of time in a poem is what actually gives me a certain kind of authority over how to package the narrative. If I have fact A on the page, what are the textures of that fact? How am I using craft to make that fact feel undeniable, how am I using time to zoom into certain details surrounding this, and zoom out? From there, playing with lyric and construction to ultimately create a mood that’s in service of that, but also that humanizes those details. A lot of the facts of their movements feel kind of unremarkable, I think, if I just list them out. It’s a harrowing story in which they incurred a lot of childhood trauma, but that's not information that needs to be apparent to the reader of this collection. For me, it’s really about an image of my mother as a child learning to take her first steps and knowing that’s into the arms of a nun and not her own parents—how do I support the weight of that fact and do so in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative but is interested in building the world that literally created those conditions? 

SB: When writing about anything broadly perceived as a ‘political issue’ from a personal perspective, I think writers are often quick to limit the subject range or dampen the emotions of their work out of a fear that they might come across as preachy or repetitive. I’m wondering if this has ever been a concern of yours and, if so, how have you attempted to free yourself from it in order to craft more authentic work wherein the speaker doesn’t diminish their experiences for the sake of the audience’s comfort?

LS: I’m lucky, to a degree. Writing this collection, I never felt like I was preaching to any kind of choir. Cuban history and the history around how the U.S. has interacted with and economically stripped Cuba isn’t really taught in this country.  Because the politics of the collection evolve, it felt more risky than preachy to me. I was nervous that the collection could appear as though it’s playing multiple sides, but I don’t consider it that way. The number one thing to me was prioritizing nuance, because the relationship between these countries and even the relationships between folks who are still on the island and folks who are here is very troubled. It was important to me to recognize that for the human rights abuses on the island, there are just as many here that have been perpetuated domestically and also abroad. If anything, it felt more scary to lay all of that bare. 

I’m concerned that the contemporary American writer is often writing to or for an audience of a similar education level and of similar politics, which then produces that effect of preaching. I’m really interested in the ways that poetry can persuade. There’s certainly a binary when it comes to folks talking about relations between Cuba and the United States. I was interested in breaking that apart and looking at either side and recognizing that there has to be more here, because it is reductive to demonize either side as the sole arbiter of the pain that exists in these places. That posed a very specific challenge in some ways. When I think of the work that I want to write next, it does not fall along those lines. I’m eager to take a step back and see how this work and its risks in not necessarily taking a side, how that gets perceived and talked about as the book continues to live.