#WhatsYourStory Featuring Natalie Giarratano

​Originally from small-town Southeast Texas, Natalie Giarratano earned her MFA & Ph.D. in creative writing from Western Michigan University. She is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, February 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Sakura Review, Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, Best New Poets, and TYPO, among others. A multi-genre editor, she lives near the foothills of Northern Colorado with her partner, their daughter, and old-man pup.

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Maybe it was the poet in me who would cry at slow songs as a child because the music seemed sad (no matter what the lyrics might convey). Maybe the writer began in between Ramona and Beezus in a Beverly Cleary book or lost within the ornate descriptions of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. As a child, I read whatever I could get my hands on. And the worlds I created in my head were so much less bleak than the one created by my narcissistic father who could knock down his four daughters with a few stunting words. But I loved words. I wanted them to work for me, not against me. Writing stories and later on poetry became ways to reclaim and repurpose language.
 
I had mostly been encouraged by teachers to keep reading and writing, and even though we didn’t have a lot of money, my mom made sure I could buy a book from the Scholastic Book catalogue every now and then. And, of course, libraries were my refuge (and also where I consumed the books of which my Catholic parents would not approve). However, when my writing turned the least bit negative or dark, there were talks with my parents about me being “suicidal” or needing therapy. But I’m still here lurking in the darkness, trying to make my own kind of light and music along the way.
 
A first-generation college student, I stumbled my way through undergrad and into graduate studies and found myself accepted into an MFA program (in poetry) at Western Michigan University. I thought I was a fraud, though, and even told one of my MFA mentors, Bill Olsen, as much during my first conference with him. He told me that I was talented but in need of a “poet ego”—to feel confident enough as a writer that my work could keep progressing and reaching uncomfortable places, which meant I would go on to write an entire book about my upbringing in a rural southeast Texas. That conversation changed everything. My poems became richer and more complex, and I found my voice. I still consider Bill and his partner, poet Nancy Eimers, my poetry parents and went on to study with them again for a Ph.D.
 
Mostly written as part of my MFA thesis, my first book won the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry in 2013 and was published by a tiny university press—Briery Creek Press—later that same year. If you’re a poet, you know that contests and open reading periods are what you have to work with, and I had entered the book into 30 – 40 of these contests over a four-year period before Leaving Clean won. A warts-and-all autobiographical collection, the publication of Leaving Clean has made for some awkward conversations with real people who show up in the book.
 
My second collection of poetry, Big Thicket Blues, was just released this past February and is an extremely altered version of my doctoral dissertation. I think I went on to add about ten new poems (in addition to cutting an 8-page poem) and shifted the poems around. In addition, I added 15 bracketed vignettes throughout the book, which sort of act as commentary on and connector of the other poems in the book, hopefully adding to the overall music. I sent this book out to 25 or so contests and open reading periods over a three-year period before it was selected by Sundress Publications in October of 2015. Each year that it did not get published, I reconfigured it. I was not so married to these poems or the book that I was afraid of what I might lose or what they might become with the changes, which was very different from the way I felt about my first book.
 
This second collection was influenced by Lynda Hull, Yusef Komunyakaa, CD Wright, Jake Adam York, and Tyehimba Jess, among others. CD Wright, whose work shifted my own in a sort of docu-poetry direction, in the vein of Muriel Rukeyser, passed away in her sleep at the age of 67 in January of 2016. While I had been to a couple of her readings at past writer conferences, I hadn’t met her. That is, until I was wandering the AWP book fair in Chicago, and my friend pointed her out to me. There she was at the Octopus Books table with no one else around, sitting behind copies of 40 Watts. With hands shaking, I bought the small book and had her sign it. I totally forgot that I had another of her books, Rising, Falling, Hovering, in my bag at that moment, as I had been working on an essay about hers and Komunyakaa’s long poems. I wish I had been able to express to her how much her work has meant to me instead of trying to babble smartly about her poetry. 

Big Thicket Blues

​Big Thicket Blues is a collection of poems that try to hear new song from a broken record: being a voice and not just a body, being complicit in bigotry but evolving, being a picker of wounds, being godless and American, being uncomfortable being.
 
Consider yourself warned: this intricately carved, seamlessly patchworked foray into a boiling machinery of heritage, sin and deliverance may haunt itself into your dreams. Big Thicket Blues is so crammed with music, so lucid and tangled, so lifted into sky past bramble and past the tinnitus of our ordinary pains that it delivers us into a brilliance all its own. Make sure you know how to listen to what could kill or cure you before you bring down the needle on Giarratano’s indelible groove—and remember: don’t trust anyone who cannot allow music /to suck them deep, the way I’ve always wanted some god to /suck me into that kind of epic darkness....  
Website: http://www.nataliegiarratano.com/

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Where to Buy Big Thicket Blues

Amazon

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